Cider with Rosie

Cider with Rosie is a 1959 book by Laurie Lee (published in the U.S. 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 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.[1]

Cider with Rosie was dramatized for television by the BBC in 1970 and again in 1998 by Carlton Television for ITV. It was adapted for BBC Radio 4 in 2010.

It has also been adapted for the stage by James Roose-Evans at the Theatre Royal Bury St Edmunds,

Contents

Plot summary

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

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 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.'

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 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.
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.
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 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.
... - 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 their motorbikes. It is also the end of his rural idyll and emergence into a larger, more looming 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.

Source

References

  1. ^ Once Upon a Time in a Village, BBC documentary broadcast on January 4, 2007

External links