Cider With Rosie by Laurie Lee

Author: Laurie Lee

Title: Cider With Rosie

Publisher: Vintage Classics

Published: 1959

Pages: 232

Genre: Autobiography 

     At all times wonderfully evocative and poignant, Cider With Rosie is a charming memoir of Laurie Lee's childhood in a remote Cotswold village, a world that is tangibly real and yet reminiscent of a now distant past. In this idyllic pastoral setting, unencumbered by the callous father who so quickly abandoned his family responsibilities, Laurie's adoring mother becomes the center of his world as she struggles to raise a growing family against the backdrop of the Great War. The sophisticated adult author's retrospective commentary on events is endearingly juxtaposed with that of the innocent, spotty youth, permanently prone to tears and self-absorption.

     Sometimes I think we forget just how quickly time passes. Even at the point of Lee writing this book the world it describes was for the most part long gone. It's funny how in the space of a lifetime the world can change so much to the point we can't really see it for what it was anymore. But I think there are small wisps that survive. Rights of passage that still even today remain even if the dance to do them have changed over the years. I grew up in a small village far from what you might call a city. A hundred years or so back and my life would have been indistinguishable from that of Lee's. But I can still see myself as a child doing some of the very same things. Maybe living in a small village in England hasn't changed all that much. Boredom reigned supreme and kids were left to find their own fun. I can however see that for many a modern reader this world has become as alien to them as the thought of traveling into space was for Lee's generation. 

     As we traverse the author's early childhood we get to peek back into what I guess we see now as a more innocent time. Lee's whole life, contained within a few square miles of the Cotswold. I suppose we forget with news on tap twenty-four-seven what it must once have been like. Your whole world is as far as you can see and little more than that. What it does is bring a much more innocent view of the world. Maybe this is in part the way we were also supposed to grow up. Instead of being bombarded by people and horrors from far-off lands, we are meant to focus on the very things we can touch with our bare hands. But this is to some extent like trying to put the wine back in the bottle once we have drunk it. As I said before, even when Lee wrote this book the world had moved on. But for me, I think it gives us a small window into the past. We may even be seeing it through rose-tinted glasses but there is nothing wrong with that. Whereas Lee's book once reminded people of their own childhoods he now offers a small amount of escapism to lives lived in a global onslaught. 

     When you find yourself meandering through this book it feels like you are floating down a lazy stream on a hot summer's day. The author is in no hurry to really get anywhere each story only following on from the next by means of the passing of time. It is in part a much greater way of giving us an overview of life in a flash of light. We never really get to dig too deep into just how physically breaking life was back then. People seemed far more excepting of their station in life. And whilst of course parents as far back as time can go have wanted their children to do better than them, at the point in which these events took place that was not so much of an option. So there is no great push of life's stresses upon them. They are allowed to be children and learn from life by simply doing. Either way, the author's childhood is laid out before us. He shows the reader those events that made the biggest lasting impact. From wayward uncles to summer first loves we are treated to a landscape devoid of every little bump. And whilst for the greater part, it can feel like we are visiting a dream. Whose ages are lined by the softest of cotton we are at times brought back to some of the more jarring aspects of rural life. It is hard to not only escape just how little support there was back then from a higher level. but that you were not granted to make it out of your childhood. Maybe they were simply more excepting that life was a little more temporary than we now like to care for. 

     For me at least this was a beautiful little escape from all that seem to be going on in the world at the moment. But also knowing of Lee's life after these events I can't but help think of the similarities with current events. Maybe as humans, we are stuck in an ever-reaping hundred-year cycle. But that I feel is for another day. When it comes to Cider With Rosie what I was given was a peek behind the curtains of an England that us to be. And whilst I am sure the on its original publication the adults that read it were whisked back to their childhoods. For a modern reader, it has become a sort of escape back to the world pre phones and the internet to a time when at first blush seems a little more innocent and safer despite what the truth may tell us. But just sometimes it is enuff to give our brains a break let them be tricked if only for a little while.