Laurie Lee was a poet and a screen-writer as well as a novelist and this shines through in his choice of language. It starts when the author is but a toddler recalling some of his earliest memories. Here his world is large, scary, cosy and baffling, a world dominated by females and the language reflects this. Lee's real skill is that as the child grows so does his vocabulary as in normal life but never does the child's voice leave it. The language is always beautiful and so suggestive it takes you in and wraps about you like a blanket. It was a lively telling of Lee's early life in the Slad Valley in Gloucestershire, starting in 1917. A poet, I believe, and his writing style probably takes something from that. I found his amusing and engaging in sharing his stories, but really, I look forward to the second part of this story, and to War in Spain.

In the 1960s, Lee and his wife returned to Slad to live near his childhood home, where they remained for the rest of his life, though for many years he retained a flat in Chelsea, coming to London to work during the week and returning to Slad at weekends. Lee revealed on the BBC1 Wogan show in 1985 that he was frequently asked by children visiting Slad as part of their O-Level study of Cider with Rosie "where Laurie Lee was buried", assuming that the author was dead. Life in the village was dominated by two main seasons – Winter and Summer. In chapter 8, Lee condenses a childhood of summer and winter days into an account : one typical winter day and one typical summer day. The book is organised in accord with his own early exploration of his widening world. He examines his infant sensations, his cottage, his yard, his village and Cotswold valley, then local superstitions, village education, his neighbours, public tragedies, private life-stories, his childhood games, village celebrations, sexual initiations, and the eventual changes as his childhood, his close family life, and the traditional village life pass away for ever. Chapter 1 : First Light Lee met Lorna Wishart (sister of Mary) in Cornwall in 1937, and they had an affair (Lorna was married) lasting until she left him for Lucian Freud in 1943. They had a daughter, Yasmin David, together. Wishart's husband Ernest agreed to raise the girl as his own; she later became an artist. [11] [12] [6] Man Must Move: The Story of Transport (with David Lambert, 1960); published in the US as The Wonderful World of Transportation (1960) – for childrenThis chapter is focused upon young Laurie’s childhood illnesses. His family thought he would not survive. The narrator reminds us that death was part of a family’s daily life. Soon he was old enough to attend school. It was split into two classes, infants and Big Ones, separated by a partition. It was here that he was brought together with all the characters of the village and started to forge friendships that would remain with him. The teachers were very different to those today, harsher and often brutal, they had little scope for tolerance, demanding only obedience. Life in a rural community was as much about the daily life and way that the seasons slowed moved on slowly. Singing carols around the village at Christmas starting with the squire, skating on the frozen pond, to the balmy days of summer spent playing games in the fields. In 1998, not long after the death of Laurie Lee, Carlton Television made the film Cider with Rosie for the ITV network, with a screenplay by John Mortimer and with archive recordings of Laurie Lee's voice used as narration. The film starred Juliet Stevenson and was first broadcast on 27 December 1998. [6]

Other works include A Rose for Winter, about a trip he made to Andalusia 15 years after the civil war; Two Women (1983), a story of Lee's courtship of and marriage to Kathy, daughter of Helen Garman; The Firstborn (1964), about the birth and childhood of their daughter Jessy (christened Jesse); and I Can't Stay Long (1975), a collection of occasional writing. Cider With Rosie, autobiographical novel by Laurie Lee, published in 1959. An account of the author’s blissful childhood in an isolated village, the book was as instant classic, widely read in British schools. The book nostalgically evokes the simplicity and innocence of a vanished rural world amid the swirl of technological change and was followed by two more volumes in what became an autobiographical trilogy, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969), a description of Lee’s trip to London to seek his fortune, and A Moment of War (1991), an account of his experiences in Spain during that country’s Civil War. It ends up with Laurie’s loss of innocence, following the pattern of Adam and Eve’s original sin. All the ingredients are the same : an idyllic nature, the temptation by the female, the reference to the apple, the notion of knowledge and sexuality, and the subsequent fall. Chapter 13 : Last Days In As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, Lee writes of his stay in Almuñécar, a Spanish fishing village which he calls "Castillo". In 1988 the citizens of Almuñécar erected a statue in Lee's honour. [13]It's nostalgic, it's almost someone's diary! Nostalgia meaning that it is a time that has gone forever and it's been captured so beautifully and perfectly that you don't want the book to end. You want to be Laurie's friend, you want to be Annie or Rosie, a part of that world. It's a very special book and it's hard for writers to encapsulate moments in time as Laurie did. It's rare and special, and that's why I think people love the book so much. You’ve said that Cider With Rosie is one of your favourite books, do you remember when you first read it? He emphasizes the importance of the light in the room and the necessity of a good fire. Laurie Lee’s mother’s behaviour around the fire suggests that keeping the fire alive was a question of life and death. Chapter 5 : Grannies in the Wainscot Firstly let me admit that I'm a fan of history and not just battles, Kings, Queens, dates etc but socila history as well. This is a book of a slice social history.We see a life set around the family kitchen, early school years,family and friends but in particular the various seasons of nature. That was the day we came to the village, in the summer of the last year of the First World War. To a cottage that stood in a half-acre of garden on a steep bank above a lake; a cottage with three floors and a cellar and a treasure in the walls, with a pump and apple trees, syringa and strawberries, rooks in the chimneys, frogs in the cellar, mushrooms on the ceiling, and all for three and sixpence a week.