Cider With Rosie

Laurie Lee

1959 • 210 pages

Ratings16

Average rating3.8

This international-bestselling memoir of childhood in post–World War I rural England is one of the most “remarkable” portraits of youth in all literature (The New York Times). Three years old and wrapped in a Union Jack to protect him from the sun, Laurie Lee arrived in the village of Slad in the final summer of the First World War. The cottage his mother had rented for three and sixpence a week had neither running water nor electricity, but it was surrounded by a lovely half-acre garden and, most importantly, it was big enough for the seven children in her care. It was here, in a verdant valley tucked into the rolling hills of the Cotswolds, that Laurie Lee learned to look at life with a painter’s eye and a poet’s heart—qualities of vision that, decades later, would make him one of England’s most cherished authors. In this vivid recollection of a magical time and place, water falls from the scullery pump “sparkling like liquid sky.” Autumn is more than a season—it is a land eternally aflame, like Moses’s burning bush. Every midnight, on a forlorn stretch of heath, a phantom carriage reenacts its final, wild ride. And, best of all, the first secret sip of cider, “juice of those valleys and of that time,” leads to a boy’s first kiss, “so dry and shy, it was like two leaves colliding in air.” An instant classic when it was first published in 1959, Cider with Rosie is one of the most endearing and evocative portraits of youth in all of literature. The first installment in an autobiographical trilogy that includes As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning and A Moment of War, it is also a heartfelt and lyrical ode to England, and to a way of life that may belong to the past, but will never be forgotten.

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Series

Featured Series

3 primary books

#1 in The Autobiographical Trilogy

The Autobiographical Trilogy is a 3-book series with 3 released primary works first released in 1959 with contributions by Laurie Lee.

Popular Reviews

Reviews with the most likes.

Deb Nance

Laurie Lee grew up in a rural part of England during the
time just after the Great War. His father abandoned his mother with
eight children to raise. Lee was almost always hungry and cold. But
life never seemed hard; somehow it seemed joyous and delightful.

I was especially taken with the chapter about the devilments children
and young people got into during Lee's time. Back in Lee's day, as
today, terrible things happened. But somehow the village and its
people just seemed to deal with them, not making them into events of
enormous evil as we seem to do today.

I loved reading about the day to day living of Lee during his
childhood. Everything seemed so much more alive then, with things to
taste and touch and smell. Lee revels in his life. The stories he
tells makes the time seem glorious.

January 1, 2007

Daren

I had previously read a Penguin 60 excerpt collection To War in Spain which took from Laurie Lee's As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning and A Moment of War. These are, of course, the second and third books of his autobiographical trilogy. On the strength of that, I bought book 2, and found book 1 shortly after.

Cider With Rosie tells of Lee's childhood. It is loosely linear, but organised in to thematic chapters, so pulls things out of full linear narrative to keep them together. The chapters are themed with stages of the authors childhood - first memories, the family structure, school memories, the neighbouring old women, etc, through to his experiences through puberty (cue Rosie) and his sisters getting engaged and preparing to leave the house.

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.

3.5 stars, rounded up.