Laurie Lee is one of my favourite Authors, and this book demonstrates to a certain extent why. As a writer, I am expected to describe in such a way as to convey to readers the reality. I succeed, although not half as well as Laurie Lee with his work. It was Laurie Lee that gave me the phrase that I use when teaching writing about painting a picture with words, and In Cider with Rosie, he excells in the art.
It is hard to believe that time has passed so quickly. Laurie Lee was born in 1914 and died in 1997. Cider with Rosie is autobiographical and tells of the authors years growing up and was published in 1959, when I was seven years old, and when I look through the way that he describes life in Rural Gloucester, I sometimes feel I am glimpsing little snatches from my own life and many readers of my age must feel the same, as his words bring that life alive and his descriptive ability nurtures the reader through parts of his life that others may have described as harsh reality. However, Laurie does not do this.
His mother brought up the family on her own, and against a backdrop of poverty, a richness of depth and explanation comes into Laurie Lee's work. It is like brushstrokes on a canvas, as adjective after adjective paint pictures of people, of how they lived, thought, co-existed, and discovered life in Rural England in the earlier part of the last century.
Each person in his book becomes a character in their own right. No-one lacks importance, and each of these individuals makes the story whole and complete.
What is the most astounding about this book is that it is based on memory but a memory that is finely tuned to detail. My memory is certainly not as colourful as Laurie Lee's and I admire his ability to colour the canvas with every possible shade and hue, making his work more than just black and white. I don't know another way to explain this, but one of the biggest gifts that Laurie Lee gives us with this book is capturing a time and a place and making it become real.
It is fascinating to watch Laurie Lee develop as a child, and to see the world in which he lived brought to life from a boy's point of view. These were hard times, times when a woman alone would have found the heartbreak of bringing up a family hard enough, though Laurie describes his life as positive, even though they lived in overcrowded accommodation, and his mother was not just bringing up one family, but in fact also the children of her second husband, who worked away. He describes a time in life when it was not at all unusual for children to die. These were hard and harsh times, and it is difficult to imagine a life without motor vehicles, but instead with horses and carts, but here Lee's work comes into its own because as a writer, his ability to describe and bring to life past events is astounding.
Let me give you a small example of his descriptive ability. Imagine you are a child, so small to the world, so fragile as to have thoughts such as these.
"The June grass, amongst which I stood, was taller than I was, and I wept. I had never been so close to grass before. It towered above me and all around me, each blade tattooed with tiger-skins of sunlight. It was knife-edged, dark, and a wicked green, thick as a forest and alive with grasshoppers that chirped and chattered and leapt though the air like monkeys."
I wish that my memory of youth was a clear as Laurie Lee's obviously was when he wrote this book, adding colour, texture and form to the mystery of growing up, and the surroundings in which his childhood passed, culminating in first romance with the mysterious Rosie.
This is a book well worth reading for the craftsmanship of words. For me, Laurie Lee was a legend in his own time. His popularity soared and it is sad that schools use this book in literature examinations because in a way, text books tend to alienate readers away from the classics that they are force fed as children.
This is a book to read through an adults eyes without those kind of perceptions, and when read openly and because you want to take a glimpse into part of England's past, it becomes a delight.
It is the story of life, a story of a small country kitchen filled with noises, and people who learned how to live in harmony with each other, each leaving space for the other to develop their own character and personality. I admire greatly the way in which the writer has brought his life to the reader, as if in painting form, and has coloured the readers life with a joyful revival of his youth, rather than a sad rendition of being poor which is the course that many other writers have taken, and have failed in miserably.
He describes his whole household as being "each like separate notes on a scale", and the balance with which he writes his story is amazing.
If you have read this at school, forget the misconceptions that this is a school project. Read it again, and see why Laurie Lee is upheld as such a good writer. See it from an adult's viewpoint and enjoy.
At less than £10 from Amazon, this is yet another classic to add to your bookshelf.
