Cider with Rosie is a 1959 book by Laurie Lee

Laurie Lee

Laurence Edward Alan "Laurie" Lee, MBE was an English poet, novelist, and screenwriter, raised in the village of Slad, and went to Marling School, Gloucestershire. His most famous work was an autobiographical trilogy which consisted of Cider with Rosie , As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning and...

 (published in the U.S. as Edge of Day: Boyhood in the West of England, 1960). It is the first book of a trilogy

Trilogy

A trilogy is a set of three works of art that are connected, and that can be seen either as a single work or as three individual works. They are commonly found in literature, film, or video games...

 that continues with As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning is a memoir by Laurie Lee, a British poet. It is a sequel to Cider with Rosie which detailed his life in post First World War Gloucestershire...

(1969) and A Moment of War

A Moment of War

A Moment of War by author Laurie Lee is the last book of his semi-autobiographical trilogy. It covers his time as a combatant in the Spanish Civil War from 1937-38...

(1991). It has sold over six million copies worldwide.

The novel is an account of Lee's childhood in the village of Slad

Slad

Slad is a village in Gloucestershire, England, located in the Slad Valley, about from the town of Stroud.Slad is famous for being the home of Laurie Lee, who based his book Cider with Rosie on his own life in the village....

, Gloucestershire

Gloucestershire

Gloucestershire is a county in South West England. The county comprises part of the Cotswold Hills, part of the flat fertile valley of the River Severn, and the entire Forest of Dean....

, England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

, in the period soon after the First World War. It chronicles the traditional village life which disappeared with the advent of new developments, such as the coming of the motor car, and also of the experience of childhood seen from many years later. The identity of Rosie was revealed years later to be Lee's distant cousin Rosalind Buckland.

Cider with Rosie was dramatized for television by the BBC

BBC

The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...

 in 1970 and again in 1998 by Carlton Television

Carlton Television

Carlton Television was the ITV franchise holder for London and the surrounding counties including the cities of Solihull and Coventry of the West Midlands, south Suffolk, middle and east Hampshire, Oxfordshire, south Bedfordshire, south Northamptonshire, parts of Herefordshire & Worcestershire,...

 for ITV

ITV

ITV is the major commercial public service TV network in the United Kingdom. Launched in 1955 under the auspices of the Independent Television Authority to provide competition to the BBC, it is also the oldest commercial network in the UK...

. It was adapted for BBC Radio 4

BBC Radio 4

BBC Radio 4 is a British domestic radio station, operated and owned by the BBC, that broadcasts a wide variety of spoken-word programmes, including news, drama, comedy, science and history. It replaced the BBC Home Service in 1967. The station controller is currently Gwyneth Williams, and the...

 in 2010.

It has also been adapted for the stage by James Roose-Evans

James Roose-Evans

James Roose-Evans is a British theatre director, script-writer, priest and writer on experimental theatre, gesture, ritual and meditation. In 1959 he founded the Hampstead Theatre Club, in London; and in 1974 the Bleddfa Centre for creativity and spirituality, in Powys.-Biography:James...

 at the Theatre Royal Bury St Edmunds,

Plot summary

Rather than follow strict chronological order Lee uses thematic chapters as follows:

• First Light describes Laurie arriving with his mother and family at their cottage in Slad
  Slad
  Slad is a village in Gloucestershire, England, located in the Slad Valley, about from the town of Stroud.Slad is famous for being the home of Laurie Lee, who based his book Cider with Rosie on his own life in the village....
  
  , Gloucestershire
  Gloucestershire
  Gloucestershire is a county in South West England. The county comprises part of the Cotswold Hills, part of the flat fertile valley of the River Severn, and the entire Forest of Dean....
  
  , Cotswolds
  Cotswolds
  The Cotswolds are a range of hills in west-central England, sometimes called the Heart of England, an area across and long. The area has been designated as the Cotswold Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty...
  
  . The young children gorge themselves on the fruit bushes and bread as their harassed mother tries to get the cottage and their furniture into some kind of order. The house relies on a small wood-fire for the cooking and a hand pump in the scullery for its water. They are visited by a man in uniform who is sleeping out in the surrounding woods — he visits them in the mornings for food and to dry out his damp clothes. He is finally taken off by men in uniform as a deserter. The chapter ends with the villagers riotously celebrating the end of the Great War.

• First Names describes Laurie still sleeping in his mother's bed but eventually forced out of it by his younger brother, Tony, and made to sleep with the two elder boys. As he grows older, he starts to recognise the villagers as individuals — people like Cabbage-Stump Charlie, the local bruiser, Albert the Devil, a deaf mute beggar and Percy-from-Painswick, a clown and ragged dandy, who likes to seduce the girls with his soft tongue. Owing to its location, the cottage is in the path of the floods that flow into the valley and Laurie and his family have to go outside to clear the storm drain every time there is a heavy downpour, but even this sometimes fails to stop the sludge despoiling their kitchen from time to time.

• Village school

The dame teacher is called Crabby B, owing to her predilection to suddenly hit out at the boys for no apparent reason. However, she meets her match in Spadge Hopkins, a burly local farmer's boy, who leaves the classroom one day after placing her on top of one of the cupboards. She is replaced by Miss Wardley, from Birmingham, who "wore sharp glass jewellery", who is more refined and 'her reins looser but stronger.'

• The Kitchen The Lee's domestic life in the cottage. At the beginning, Laurie Lee makes a reference to his father who had abandoned them, saying that he and his brothers never knew any male authority. After working in the Army Pay Corps, he entered the Civil Service and settled in London for good. As Lee says,

Lee describes each of the family members and also their daily routine, his sisters going off to work in Stroud to the shops or looms, and the younger boys trying to avoid their mother's chores. 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 lathe handler, mends his bicycle.

• Grannies in the Wainscot describes the two old women who are the Lee's neighbours - Granny Trill and Granny Wallon - who are permanently at war with each other. Granny Wallon or 'Er-Down-Under spends her days gathering the fruits of the surrounding woods and countryside and turning them into delicious perfumed wines that slowly ferment over a year in their bottles. Granny Trill or 'Er-Up-Atop spends her days combing her hair and reading her almanacs. She lived as a young girl with her father, who was a woodsman, and still seeks her comfort in the forest. The two old women arrange everything so they never meet - they shop on different days, use different paths down the bank to their houses and continuously rap on their floors and ceilings. One day Granny Trill is taken ill and quickly fades away and is soon followed by Granny Wallon who loses her will to live.

• Public Death, Private Murder describes the murder of a New Zealander, a local villager made good who returns to the village one year to visit his family, boasting about his wealth and flaunting his money in the local pub. Being the last to leave, he makes his drunken way home and is set upon by some local youths and is found frozen to death the next morning. The police try to find his attackers but are met by a wall of silence and the case is never closed.

• Mother is Lee's tribute to his mother, Annie (née Light). 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 for the Gentry, working as a maid in various large houses. Having left this to then work for her grandfather in his pub, The Plough, a small Sheepscombe inn, she then answered an ad - Widower (four children) Seeks Housekeeper - which is how she met Lee's father. After four happy years together and three more children, he upped sticks and abandoned them. Lee's description is very affectionate - he describes his mother as having a love for everything and an extraordinary ability with plants, being able to grow anything anywhere. As he says,

• Winter and Summer describes the two seasons affecting the village and its inhabitants. One particularly cold winter, the village boys go foraging with old cocoa-tins stuffed with burning rags to keep their mittenless-hands warm. The week before Christmas the Church Choir goes carol singing which involves a five mile tramp through the deep snow. However, calls at the Squire's house and the doctors, the merchants, the farmers and mayors soon fills their wooden box with coins as they light their way home with candles in jam jars. The long hot summers are spent outdoors in the fields and games at night of 'Whistle-or-'Oller-Or-We-shall-not-foller!'.

• Sick Boy Lee recounts the various illnesses he suffers as a young boy, some which bring him to the brink of death. He also writes about the death of his four year sister Frances, his mother's only biological daughter, who died unexpectedly when Lee was an infant.

• The Uncles is a vivid description of his mother's brothers - Uncle Charlie, Ray, Sid and Tom. All of them fought as cavalrymen in the Great War and settle back on the land. Uncle Ray is perhaps the liveliest, having emigrated to Canada on the transcontinental railway, the Canadian Pacific. He blows himself up with dynamite whilst working in the Rockies and is revived by a Tamworth schoolteacher, Lee's Aunt Elsie.

• Outings and Festivals A chapter devoted to the annual village jaunts and events. Peace Day in 1919 is a colourful affair, the procession ending up at the Squire's house where he and his elderly mother make speeches. The family also makes the four mile hike to Sheepscombe to visit their grandfather and Uncle Charlie and his family. There is also a village outing on charabancs to Weston-super-Mare - 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. There is also the Parochial Church Tea and Annual Entertainment to which Laurie and his brother Jack gain free admittance for helping with the arrangements. They finally get to gorge themselves on the food laid out on the trestle-tables in the schoolhouse and Laurie plays his fiddle accompanied by Eileen on the piano to raucous applause.

• First Bite at the Apple describes the growth of the boys into young adolescents and the first pangs of love. Lee states that 'quiet incest flourished where the roads were bad' but states that the village neither approved nor disapproved but neither did it complain to authority. This is the time when Laurie is seduced by Rosie Burdock underneath a hay wagon after drinking cider from a flagon:

There is also a plan among half a dozen of the boys to rape Lizzy Berkeley, a fat adolescent sixteen-year-old who writes religious messages on trees in the wood on the way back from church. They wait for her one Sunday morning in Brith Wood but, when Bill and Boney confront her, she slaps them twice and they lose courage, allowing her to run away down the hill. Lee says that Rosie eventually married a soldier, Jo, his young first love, grew fat with a Painswick baker and lusty Bet, another of his sweethearts, went to breed in Australia.

• Last Days describes the gradual break up of the village community with the appearance of the motor car and bike. The death of the Squire is almost in parallel with the death of the church's influence over its younger parishioners and the old people just dropped away:

Lee's own family breaks up as the girls are courted by young men arriving on their motorbikes. It is also the end of his rural idyll and emergence into a larger, more looming world.

This is also the time when Laurie Lee experiences the first stirrings of poetry welling up inside him.

Source

• Cider With Rosie, Laurie Lee, Penguin Books, 1959, ISBN 0 14 00 1682 1
• Cider With Rosie, Laurie Lee, The Hogarth Press, 1959