Cider with Rosie
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First edition
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| Author | Laurie Lee |
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| Cover artist | John Stanton Ward[1] |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English (UK) |
| Published | 1959 (Hogarth Press) |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 284 |
| Followed by | As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning |
Cider with Rosie is a 1959 book by Laurie Lee (published in the US as Edge of Day: Boyhood in the West of England, 1960). It is the first book of a trilogy that continues with As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969) and A Moment of War (1991). It has sold over six million copies worldwide.
The novel is an account of Lee's childhood in the village of Slad, Gloucestershire, England, 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 relates the experiences of childhood seen from many years later. The identity of Rosie was revealed years later to be Lee's distant cousin Rosalind Buckland.[2][3][4]
Cider with Rosie was dramatised for television by the BBC on 25 December 1971 and again on 27 December 1998 by Carlton Television for ITV. It was adapted for BBC Radio 4 in 2010. It was again adapted by BBC Television for BBC One on 27 September 2015.
It has also been adapted for the stage by James Roose-Evans at the Theatre Royal Bury St Edmunds.
Contents
[hide]Summary[edit]
Rather than follow strict chronological order, Lee divided the book into thematic chapters, as follows:
- First Light describes Laurie arriving with his mother and the rest of the family at a cottage in the Cotswolds village of Slad, Gloucestershire. The children gorge themselves on berries and bread as their harassed mother tries to get the cottage and the 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 until he is 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 – 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, though even this sometimes fails to stop the sludge despoiling their kitchen from time to time.
- Village School
| “ | The village school at that time provided all the instruction we were likely to ask for. It was a small stone barn divided by a wooden partition into two rooms – The Infants and The Big Ones. There was one dame teacher, and perhaps a young girl assistant. Every child in the valley crowding there, remained till he was fourteen years old, then was presented to the working field or factory, with nothing in his head more burdensome than a few mnemonics, a jumbled list of wars, and a dreamy image of the world's geography. | ” |
The dame teacher is called Crabby B, owing to her predilection for suddenly hitting 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" and imposes discipline that is "looser but stronger".
- The Kitchen This chapter describes the Lees' domestic life. At the beginning 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 their father entered the Civil Service and settled in London for good. As Lee says,
| “ | Meanwhile we lived where he had left us; a relic of his provincial youth; a sprawling, cumbersome, countrified brood too incongruous to carry with him. He sent us money and we grew up without him; and I, for one, scarcely missed him. I was perfectly content in this world of women, muddle-headed though it might be, to be bullied and tumbled through the hand-to-mouth days ... | ” |
- Lee describes each member of the family and their daily routine, his sisters going off to work in shops or at looms in Stroud, 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 a lathe handler, mends his bicycle.
- Grannies in the Wainscot describes the two old women who were the Lees' neighbours, Granny Trill and Granny Wallon, who were permanently at war with each other. Granny Wallon or 'Er-Down-Under spends her days gathering the fruits of the surrounding countryside and turning them into 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. As a young girl she had lived with her father, a woodsman, and she still seeks comfort in the forest. The two old women arrange everything so that they never meet, shopping on different days, using different paths down the bank to their homes, and continuously rapping on their floors and ceilings. One day Granny Trill is taken ill and quickly fades away. She is soon followed by Granny Wallon, who loses her will to live.
- Public Death, Private Murder describes the murder of a villager made good who returns from New Zealand to visit his family, boasts about his wealth and flaunts it in the local pub. 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, working as a maid in various large houses. Having left to work for her father in his pub, The Plough, she then answered an advertisement, "Widower (four children) Seeks Housekeeper" and met the man who became Lee's father. After four happy years together, and three more children, he abandoned them. Lee describes his mother as having a love for everything and an extraordinary ability with plants, being able to grow anything anywhere. As he says,
| “ | Her flowers and songs, her unshaken fidelities, her attempts at order, her relapses into squalor, her near madness, her crying for light, her almost daily weeping for her dead child-daughter, her frisks and gaieties, her fits of screams, her love of man, her hysterical rages, her justice towards each of us children – all these rode my Mother and sat on her shoulders like a roosting of ravens and doves. | ” |
- Winter and Summer describes the two seasons affecting the village and its inhabitants. During 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 deep snow. Calls at the homes of the squire, the doctor, the merchants, the farmers and the mayor soon fill their wooden box with coins as they light their way home with candles in jamjars. 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.
- Sick Boy is an account of the various illnesses Lee suffered as a young boy, some of which brought him to the brink of death. He also writes about the death of his four-year-old sister Frances, who died unexpectedly when Lee was an infant.
- The Uncles is a vivid description of his mother's brothers, his uncles Charlie, Ray, Sid and Tom. All of them fought as cavalrymen in the Great War and then settled back on the land, though Ray emigrated to Canada to work on the transcontinental railway, the Canadian Pacific, before returning home.
- Outings and Festivals is 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 a 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, 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. 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", and states that the village neither approved nor disapproved, but neither did it complain to authority. Lee is seduced by Rosie Burdock underneath a haywagon after drinking cider from a flagon:
| “ | Never to be forgotten, that first long secret drink of golden fire, juice of those valleys and of that time, wine of wild orchards, of russet summer, of plump red apples, and Rosie's burning cheeks. Never to be forgotten, or ever tasted again... | ” |
- There is also a plan among half a dozen of the boys to rape Lizzy Berkeley, a fat 16-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 accost 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, while 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 breaking up of the village community with the appearance of motor cars and bicycles. The death of the squire coincides with the death of the church's influence over its younger parishioners, while the old people just drop away:
| “ | ... – white-whiskered, gaitered, booted and bonneted, ancient-tongued last of their world, who thee'd and thou'd both man and beast, called young girls 'damsels', young boys 'squires', old men 'masters', the Squire himself 'He' and who remembered the Birdlip stagecoach, Kicker Harris the old coachman... | ” |
- Lee's own family breaks up as the girls are courted by young men arriving on motorcycles. This marks the end of Lee's rural idyll and his emergence into the wider world.
| “ | The girls were to marry; the Squire was dead; buses ran and the towns were nearer. We began to shrug off the valley and look more to the world, where pleasures were more anonymous and tasty. They were coming fast, and we were ready for them. | ” |
This is also the time when Laurie Lee experiences the first stirrings of poetry welling up inside him.
Sources[edit]
- Cider with Rosie, Laurie Lee, Penguin Books, 1959, ISBN 0-14-001682-1
- Cider with Rosie, Laurie Lee, The Hogarth Press, 1959
- Cider with Rosie, Laurie Lee, David R. Godine, Publisher, 2008, ISBN 978-1-56792-355-1.
References[edit]
- ^ Simon Fenwick (21 June 2007). "Obituary: John Ward". The Guardian. Retrieved 2014-05-06.
- ^ Once Upon a Time in a Village, BBC documentary broadcast on 4 January 2007
- ^ Philip Womack (17 September 2014). "Laurie Lee's Rosie: What it's like to inspire a writer's work and be immortalised on the page?". The Independent.
- ^ "'Real' Cider with Rosie dies days before 100th birthday". BBC News. 16 September 2014.
External links[edit]
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/laurie-lee-as-i-walked-out-one-midsummer-morning-9560750.html
'Kept it a secret'
Cider with Rosie was published in 1959 and was an immediate bestseller.
It was the first of an autobiographical trilogy and dealt with childhood experiences, family, the awkwardness of growing up and rural life at a time when the countryside was experiencing great change.
Speaking about her grandmother - the "real Rosie" - Rosalind Buckland's granddaughter Guila Gregory said: "She was a real character - really friendly.
"She'd remember all the things about Cider with Rosie, Slad and have lots of tales to tell. She was always cheerful.
"[To me] she was just my Nan. She was Rosie, but she kept it a secret for years. She didn't go on about it and she always maintained she never drunk cider.
"I got her a bottle of champagne for her 99th birthday last year and she said then 'oh it tastes like cider' - she gave the game away there I think."
Mrs Buckland would have been 100 on 17 September and her granddaughter said her grandmother had been looking forward to receiving a telegram from the Queen.
Laurie Lee died in 1997 at his home in Slad.
References[edit]
- ^ Simon Fenwick (21 June 2007). "Obituary: John Ward". The Guardian. Retrieved 2014-05-06.
- ^ Once Upon a Time in a Village, BBC documentary broadcast on 4 January 2007
- ^ Philip Womack (17 September 2014). "Laurie Lee's Rosie: What it's like to inspire a writer's work and be immortalised on the page?". The Independent.
- ^ "'Real' Cider with Rosie dies days before 100th birthday". BBC News. 16 September 2014.
I tramped this landscape of the heart on a perfect day of Lee's "June summer, with the green back on earth and the whole world unlocked and seething". At one point, a punishingly steep path rises sheer through the ancient beeches of Longridge Wood. Breathless at the crest, you suddenly see the open meadowlands of Slad Slope swoon away before you, bright with butterflies and carpeted in flowers. At this spot, the poetry-post gives you Lee's frankly post-coital Landscape, with its sated female body adrift in an orgasmic haze "like a covered field". Mounds, curves, thickets, hollows and declivities sprawl in the sun. To his followers, Laurie ("Lee" always sounds absurdly, officiously wrong) has always meant not just pretty Cotswold countryside but the pagan sensuality that animates the land in all his work.
In his memoir, he recalls the Slad of his 1920s childhood as "a deep-running cave still linked to its antic past", its shadows "cluttered by sprits and by laws still vaguely ancestral". Above all, as every reader if not every planning inspector knows, Laurie enchanted Slad and its valley into an intensely and archetypally female place. A textbook mother's boy, estranged from his absent father, he was first cossetted by the maternal heroism of Annie Light and his sisters in Slad, then lapped in love by one devoted, exasperated woman after another (his two daughters, Yasmin and Jessy, among them).
"I was perfectly content in this world of women", Cider tells us, in a single line that sums up a lifetime. A later friend and landlady, Virginia Cunard, told Valerie Grove for her exemplary biography (now reissued as The Life and Loves of Laurie Lee) that "the telephone never stopped ringing for Laurie. He had more people in love with him than anyone I've ever met". Novelist Rosamond Lehmann, also a friend, thought him "a dangerous person for women" precisely because he mixed seductive charm with a vagabond spirit.
In this centenary year, that lazy charisma persists. His charm in print and person has helped to safeguard a landscape "farmed and fenced by literature" – the words of poet Adam Horovitz, who grew up in Slad and evokes his own childhood, 60 years post-Rosie, in his memoir A Thousand Laurie Lees. The old mill town of Stroud does fling the odd urban ribbon up into the sacred valley – a touchy topic, as we will see. However, as you leave the last houses behind, it still feels as if someone has thrown a scenic time switch. The settings of Cider with Rosie lie plump and juicy up ahead, astonishingly intact. Its author's grave stands outside the simple late-Georgian church. It commands a ravishing view over what the inscription calls "the valley he loved". On the reverse side, his poem April Rise affirms that "If ever I saw a blessing in the air, I see it now in this still early day". Yet he never sought to romanticise a rural working-class life that carried more burdens than blessings. The adjacent headstone tells you why.
It records not only Robert Ryman but his and wife Rebecca's daughter, Emily Ann. Her dates? 2 June 1866 to 9 March 1867. Her first Slad winter killed Emily Ann. Even in the 1910s, the frail, bronchitic Laurence might well have ended his brief span as another infant statistic. When I visit, the valley does feel like "a jungly, bird-crammed, insect-hopping suntrap". He always made clear that it could also be not a pastoral paradise but a purgatory of "lashing rain", and "children dying of quite ordinary diseases like whooping cough". In one of the memoir's darkest episodes, local people conceal the identity of murderers, who had brained a braggart returnee for his pocketful of money, solely because "they belonged to the village and the village looked after them".
Once a small manor, then an alehouse, the T-shaped 17th-century cottage where the Lees lived from 1918 still nestles in its hidden dell below the road, with "its walls so thick that they kept a damp chill inside them whatever the weather". Mid-June, and a wall of roadside flowers almost conceals it from view. Here, scatty, anarchic, affectionate Annie and her brood of seven from two marriages (Laurie belonged to the second) lived "in the downstroke" of the T.
At The Woolpack, where the local boy-made-good would hold court from the early Sixties up to his death in 1997, a lunchtime customer from Sydney bears witness to the Slad lad's global cult. This Saturday, the pub will stage a cider and flamenco festival, the latter in honour of Laurie's Spanish journeys recorded in his second and third volumes of autobiography: As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, and A Moment of War. The Woolpack is now owned not by some grizzled Cotswold innkeeper but by artist Dan Chadwick: the son of sculptor Lynn Chadwick, and once a member of avant-garde starchitect Zaha Hadid's design team. Keith Allen, father of Lily, has been known to pull pints behind the bar. Adam Horovitz remembers Damien Hirst, in his pre-sobriety days, presiding over "nights of anarchy" there. With Uley Brewery real ale, you may now dine on hake, clams, samphire and salsify. Thanks to Laurie, Slad can never be a wholly ordinary village again.
In 1959, Cider with Rosie brought overwhelming mid-life acclaim to a gifted but feckless poet and screenwriter whose most conspicuous role thus far had been to compose the texts for the Festival of Britain. His offbeat humour and taste for eccentricity had made him, in effect, the Danny Boyle of 1951. Then, after years of procrastination ended by a fertile summer not in the Cotswolds but on Ibiza, Cider matured at last. A flash flood of fame made it possible to save as well as celebrate the childhood scenery that Laurie adored. In the Sixties, reinstalled in a cottage near the pub, he had bought a stretch of woodland above Slad that now bears his name to preserve it from piecemeal destruction. In 1995, his voice raised in protest helped to head off a housing development and so forestall (his words) "a self-inflicted wound that not even time will heal".
Now the wound may open again. By a curious accident of fate, the centenary month has coincided with a planning inquiry into the proposed construction of 112 new homes on Baxter's Fields, a "green wedge" of land on the fringe of Stroud that serves as a kind of curtain-raiser to the valley. The steep site is not huge, already has some fairly nondescript housing overlooking it, and stands far from Laurie's iconic village. But I can confirm the Slad Valley Action Group's argument that "the green wedge is what catches the eye", a taste or tease of lush, unspoiled terrain that the valley as a whole then amply fulfils. The campaign's closely argued challenge to the scheme maintains that, thanks to this natural finger, "green landscape appears to stretch right into the heart of Stroud".
Stroud District Council unanimously refused the housing application from the Cheshire-based greenfield specialists Gladman: a land developer "obsessed with winning consents", according to its website. "Think 14 months not 10 years", Gladman exhorts prospective clients as part of a gung-ho pitch that promises consent for developments at "minimal risk" and in "a short timescale". Gladman appealed against the initial refusal, and a public inquiry ended earlier this month. Both sides now await the inspector's verdict. During the hearings, English literature bizarrely collided with planning legislation. Gladman's lawyers argued that the exact locations in Cider with Rosie remain elusive. True, but Gladman's dismissive references to "landscapes of the mind" only show how pervasive the link between work and place can be. The best-beloved corner may not be locatable via satnav, but any nook within the desired body of this land. And few local planning disputes can have elicited – as this one has – letters of objection from Nepal, Japan, the Philippines, Australia and Mexico.
When the campaigners talk of the area being "immortalised by Laurie Lee", the stock phrase for once escapes cliché. Laurie has given this landscape a chance of survival. However lovely, some neighbouring districts in Stroud's necklace of five valleys will not enjoy that. John Marjoram – deputy mayor on Stroud town council, and one of its Green Party majority – alerts me to other housing proposals for nearby Rodborough Common and The Stanleys. "We're being bombarded by the day," he says. "We've got a massive application in Stonehouse for 1,500 homes. I've been on the planning committee for 28 years and I've never seen it so bad."
However, even David Cameron – a Cotswold MP, after all – has hinted that he would disapprove of a new estate in the valley. "I think that would give a clear indication to an inspector," says Mr Marjoram. "It's very clear that there would be absolute uproar about this if it did go ahead. Absolute uproar." In Stroud and Slad at least, the much-loved pen may still prove mightier than the developer's sword of cash. "I think that the connection with Laurie Lee will probably save this case," he concludes.
As they say in Connemara, you can't eat a landscape. All the same, you can plan to eat from controlled measures of the tourism that a fabled scene can bring. "Lose that sense of uniqueness, the beautiful views," warn the Slad Valley preservationists, "and slowly but surely we will lose the tourists – and certainly we will never see the growth in tourism that local businesses want."
In that classic motto for the conservationist, Prince Tancredi in Lampedusa's novel The Leopard says that "if we want everything to remain the same, everything must change". Smart and vigilant activism has protected and even recreated the settings of Cider with Rosie, a book that purports to record "the end of a thousand years' life" even though it portrays a globetrotting family who worked in the farthest reaches of the British Empire. They belonged to modern history, not to bucolic legend. So did the author, who kept up his flat in Elm Park Gardens, Chelsea, even as he joked and yarned in The Woolpack.
Laurie Lee was always something of a Bollinger Bumpkin. (Aptly enough, the courtyard of the pub now has a table canopy that advertises not some tea-brown local ale but Pol Roger champagne.) But Adam Horovitz applauds Dan Chadwick for his "velvet revolution" at the inn, now "the sort of pub one might imagine walking into if one were thirsty after a backward jaunt in a time machine". After all, pristine peasant life, and pristine peasant landscape, has hardly existed in England for 300 years. The Slad Valley campaigners put it neatly when they note that this rustic idyll is "characterised by land management with a generally light hand. It is by no means natural but it is certainly not regimented."
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