Cider With Rosie

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For me, his sumptuous imagery and poetic prose ( and the fact that this was an autobiographical memoir, which reads like fiction) drew a comparison with Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals. Rediscovering Laurie Lee's beautiful wordplay made me initially think that his prose was wasted on a boy who could clearly imagine a clean-shaven Tarzan swinging from vines through the jungle.

This is not merely a biography or description of a special time and place (the Cotswolds the years after the First World War), it is prose poetry. We readers find in it great fecundity: trees ‘writhed with power, threw off veils of green dust, rose towering into the air, branched into a thousand shaded alleys, became a city for owls and squirrels’. But it is not only Lee’s coming of age, it is also that of the village, as the rural backwater changes rapidly, losing many of its traditional village ways and gaining things such as motor vehicles.

From the outset I was treated to compelling and deeply descriptive writing, which caused me to travel to that Cotswold village, where Lee was raised. From one window, the view dips down into a valley, and you can see a path that leads into Stroud, where Lee was born in 1914.

Reading the verdant descriptions in this book is like biting into the largest, juiciest piece of fruit you've ever eaten. From the other, the churchyard, where he is buried beneath the words ‘He lies in the valley he loved’, is just visible. In contrast, the long hot summer days are spent outdoors in the fields, followed by games of "Whistle-or-'Oller-Or-We-shall-not-foller" at night. The teachers were very different to those today, harsher and often brutal, they had little scope for tolerance, demanding only obedience. As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning is probably my favourite book of the three however all are excellent.Before I started reading this book, I was warned that it is extremely boring, or as my colleague put it '200 pages of absolutely nothing going on, that it's a complete waste of paper and time as well. In the evenings the whole family sits around the big kitchen table, the girls gossiping and sewing as the boys do their homework and the eldest son, Harold, who is working as a lathe handler, mends his bicycle. It's a lovely portrait of childhood innocence and growing up, after reading it I got a desperate urge to visit the Cotswolds.

It is fortunate that Laurie Lee happened to be there to experience it and possessed the ability to document it with the vision of a poet before it disappeared. Laurie Lee draws contrasts vividly - then and now, summer and winter, quiet and bustle, presence and absence. Self-reflective, the village is a world within itself for Lee, and as a result impressions an indelible mark.

This glimpse of a time long past, of a place that he loved and made him the man he was to become when he walked away at the age of 19. 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. Cider With Rosie' is a tale of the author's early life growing up within a large family, without a real father figure influence,in a Cotswold village in and around the 1920s and is told from the standpoint of a child.