Laurie does age gradually throughout the book, so that the earlier chapters are seen through the innocent eyes of a small child and the later ones are more mature (including the famous scene drinking cider under a hay wagon with the Rosie of the title), but otherwise the book doesn’t follow strict chronological order. The book has quite an interesting structure with each chapter devoted to a different theme with titles such as ‘Village School’, ‘The Kitchen’ and ‘Mother’. However, it is still worth reading for the beauty of Lee’s descriptions and imagery and because it paints a portrait of a world that has gone and will never come back again. It’s not the most exciting book to read – it doesn’t seem that anything particularly dramatic happened to Lee in his early years and being an autobiographical work (or semi-autobiographical, as Lee admits at the start that “this is a recollection of early boyhood and some of the facts may be distorted by time”), it is not a book with a ‘story’ or a plot. I’m glad I waited until now to read this book, as I don’t think I would have appreciated it when I was younger. “They did! They said: ‘You’re Laurie Lee, ain’t you? Well, just you sit there for the present.’ I sat there all day but I never got it.

When he comes home he tells the family about his disappointing day: I had never considered reading this book until now, partly because it reminded me of being at school (we never actually read the whole book, but I remember having to study excerpts from it for English comprehension exercises) and I think that was enough to put me off! The scene that I particularly remembered was the one where Laurie’s sisters send him off for his first day at school wrapped in scarves with a hot potato in his pocket. In Cider with Rosie he writes about his family and friends, his school days and the eccentric characters who lived and worked in Slad.

Lee moved there at the age of three with his mother and siblings at the end of the First World War. Published in 1959, this first volume looks back on Lee’s childhood in the small Cotswold village of Slad in Gloucestershire. Laurie Lee was a British novelist and poet most famous for his autobiographical trilogy which begins with Cider with Rosie and continues with As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning and A Moment of War.

Cider with rosie by laurie lee