Cider With Rosie

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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. Having been forced to leave school early because of her mother's death and the need to look after her brothers and father, she then went into domestic service, working as a maid in large houses. There is also a village outing on charabancs to Weston-super-Mare where the women sunbathe on the beach, the men disappear down the side-streets into pubs and the children amuse themselves in the arcade on the pier, playing the penny machines.

I was especially looking forward to it since this part of the series was based in one of my favorite places in England – the Cotswolds. I must admit, I wasn't expecting much from this, but I'm thrilled to report that this was a beautiful book, and it was one that I was sad to finish. This is also the time when Laurie Lee experiences the first stirrings of poetry welling up inside him. Because as much as I marveled at this beautiful world that the author told of so wonderfully, nothing much happened.

From the other, the churchyard, where he is buried beneath the words ‘He lies in the valley he loved’, is just visible. It was performed in the West End and later at the Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds, and at the Phoenix Arts Theatre, Leicester, with Greta Scacchi. Lee describes his mother as having a love for everything and an extraordinary ability with plants, being able to grow anything anywhere. He subsequent treatment of women is pretty awful too, from describing when he had to go and sleep in his own bed, away from his mother as "my first lesson in the gentle, merciless rejection of women. His most famous work was an autobiographical trilogy which consisted of Cider with Rosie (1959), As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969) and A Moment of War (1991).

First Light describes Laurie arriving with his mother and the rest of the family at a cottage in the Cotswolds village of Slad, Gloucestershire. 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 is an account of village life, where the people lived close to the land, during the decade after World War I. Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie is a classic of English rural writing, lauded for its evocation of Gloucestershire’s Slad Valley in the early 20th century and the last days of an intensely experienced, millennium-old way of life .We see a life set around the family kitchen, early school years,family and friends but in particular the various seasons.