Book Review: Cider With Rosie

We carried cut hay from the heart of the rick, packed up tight as tobacco flake, with grass and wildflowers juicily fossilised within - a whole summer embalmed in our arms

This is the second memoir I have read this year (See Down and Out in Paris and London) and while the latter looked at the misery and unexpected joys of being ‘Down and Out’ - ‘Cider with Rosie’ explores the pure joy of childhood. Laurie Lee’s descriptive narrative evokes the pure bliss and youthful naivety of childhood. It makes one wish for simpler times - before the technological age which we currently find ourselves in, before Youtube, iPads and failing at TikTok dances. 

Deep in the Valleys of Gloucestershire, in a little village of Slad, Laurie Lee had a  rambunctious childhood, full of wilds and country fancies. You can understand why ‘Cider with Rosie’ is frequently on the reading lists for countless children around the world. It's highly evocative of an ideal childhood - of a time that can no longer be claimed back I think that is what truly resonates with readers the most. Despite the fact that the family lived in deep poverty, they were happy and that was all that mattered.

We begin at the beginning of moving to the village of Slad, we see the beginnings of youthful curiosity and a demand for independence. Laurie’s world is fiercely matriarchal having no father around to raise him, this Laurie doesn’t seem to mind and neither does his family - save his mother who ended up waiting for him to return to her. He never does. As the children and the family grow up and grow older we see the changes that happen over the course of childhood, the world starts to grow slightly darker. For example, there was the old couple who was destined for the workhouse, taken away by the well meaning, but misguided, Spinsters of Slad from their beautiful run down little cottage and its fruitful garden - away from each other and all they knew. They died within a week, in separate wards, away from each other for the first time in how ever many years.

The thing about living in a village as small and as isolated as Slad was that everyone knew each other and each others business, so it was of no surprise that, when a murder happens in the village, everyone already knows who did it. Yet being a village and a community as close knit, they never said who the killer, or this case- killers, were. They protected their own and as such the case was left unsolved. However, there were benefits of having such a close family like village and that was all the festivals and all the outings that took place within them. My personal favourite was the Choir Outing, where the boys of the village instinctively knew when to gather and go round the valley and sing hymns and carols to the locals and raise money. They weren’t exactly tuneful but they were enthusiastic and that’s what mattered. 

‘Summer and Winter’ was an astonishing bout of resilience and glowing optimism. Laurie notes that winter was always the hardest, many of the villages oldest would be the first to die- they’d perish in the freezing cold of night. Not through any fault of their own, but poverty and the freezing cold are the perfect formula for death. Summer would come and the resounding heat would bring a sleepy, dreamy touch. The light and heat is absorbed in the pages ‘of picnics high up in the crumbling quarries, of butter running like oil, of sunstroke, fever and cucumber peel stuck cool to ones burning brow’ for example.

In a heady summers day do we meet the eponymous ‘Rosie’ . The phrase ‘make hay while the sunshines’ has never been more apt for this moment ‘Creamy, hazy, and amber-coloured, with the beech trees standing in the heavy sunlight as though clogged with wild wet honey’ the subaqueous language is heavy with scent of adolescent exploration of sex and the opposite sex. The ugly underbelly of village life is then revealed, incest and rape are rife but seldom talked about. 

But everything must come to an end, and village life as Laurie knew it was fading, with buses and cars speeding through the village the world was suddenly opening up. All the old people, the figures of authority were slowly fading away as relics of a bygone era. The landmark was when the Squire died, his land and estates were separated and sold off and then the ancient doom and gloom - hell fire and fury type- Vicar also died to be replaced by someone younger and a little more forgiving. The world seems bigger, it holds larger and more mysterious aspirations and that was to where they looked.