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Cider With Rosie

(The Autobiographical Trilogy #1)

Laurie Lee

3.93 · Rating details · 10,233 ratings · 845 reviews

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 c ...more

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Paperback, Vintage Classics, 231 pages

Published May 28th 2002 by Vintage (first published 1959)

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Mar 31, 2016 Kevin Ansbro rated it it was amazing

Recommends it for: Lovers of Gerald Durrell, who've not read anything by Laurie Lee.

Shelves: family-dynamics, coming-of-age, misogyny, favourites, quintessentially-english, human-imagery, heartwarming, racism

There was a reassuring prevalence of Penguin books, resplendent in orange cummerbunds, as I rummaged through a squished cardboard box in my attic.
Then, delightfully, I spied a book that triggered a wave of nostalgia:
"Cider With Bloody Rosie," I gasped (um, mine wasn't a version with 'bloody' in the title, just so you know).
"Well, I never! Cider With Bloody Rosie." (You see, I repeated the word 'bloody' yet again, such was my cock-a-hoopedness).

Gosh! I had previously read this a gazillion years ...more

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Nov 13, 2011 Vanessa Wu rated it liked it

I asked my boyfriend if he had ever been physically aroused by a work of fiction while reading on a bus or train.

"Oh, many a time," he said.

"Really? Did you get an erection?"

"Yes, of course. Isn't that what you meant? It doesn't happen so much now," he said.

"Because you are cynical and you've seen it all before?"

"Partly that," he concurred. "But also because my blood is more sluggish and I have lost the vigour of youth."

"When was the last time you got an erection while reading in a public place? ...more

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Jun 08, 2016 Fabian rated it really liked it

When you are transported directly into the childhood of the writer, you know this is a good biography. When you smell the very air, when you feel that what the characters are smiling about is a scene of intense everyday hilarity, and when you want to visit THERE* (for just a second, just for the sake of both reader and writer, just for the sake of experience), well, then you know you are dealing with a superlative type of novel, which weaves truth with literature at an almost mythical level.

*Br ...more

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Jun 29, 2018 Steven Godin rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: memoir-autobiography, great-britain, non-fiction

Ah...the good old days as a little nipper - rolling around in hay, tickling girls and getting kicked in the shins, licking jam off a spoon and declaring war on a swarm of wasps, trying to catch tiny fish in the local stream with a hair net, and getting tipsy on my father's homebrewed ale before getting a right good rollicking. Reading Cider with Rosie bought back so many memories of my own childhood, I almost forgot about Laurie Lee's. Filled with elaborate metaphors that conjure up wonderful im Ah...the good old days as a little nipper - rolling around in hay, tickling girls and getting kicked in the shins, licking jam off a spoon and declaring war on a swarm of wasps, trying to catch tiny fish in the local stream with a hair net, and getting tipsy on my father's homebrewed ale before getting a right good rollicking. Reading Cider with Rosie bought back so many memories of my own childhood, I almost forgot about Laurie Lee's. Filled with elaborate metaphors that conjure up wonderful images of life in the English Gloucestershire countryside post WW1, Lee uses a poetical descriptive prose in describing his early life just as huge change and upheaval took place in society. He offers us his intimate sharing of the people, events, and places that helped shape his days.

Evoking nostalgia plays heavy throughout, that was easy for me to relate to as his home village wasn't a million miles away from where I grew up, and I felt a connection with the areas he describes. There were some nods to the writing of Welshman Dylan Thomas, and although the memoir was pleasant, with some poignant moments, I just found Lee's basis a little too sweet and sickly for my liking, like being covered in honey and having a big soppy Labrador lick it off.
For some reason I read this after "As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning", which is the follow up to this. For me, that was a far superior read, looking at time he spent crossing Spain one year with little in the way of possessions.

Cider With Rosie, considering he wrote this in his fifties, clearly shows he had a good mind, as at times you feel it's Laurie the child doing the writing, the youth and enlightenment to life's sharp realities brings a mixture of emotions, and truly showcases a by-gone era that captured the heart and soul of growing up in this specific period in time. A decent read (but he has written better), that was let down by the most pointless introduction, featuring too many quotes from the yet read book, and the print wasn't great either. Looked like a photocopy of a photocopy. ...more

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Oct 23, 2016 Chrissie rated it really liked it

Shelves: poetry, life-stages, 2016-read, bio, audible-uk, england

This is not merely a biography or description of a special time and place (the Cotswolds the years after the First World War), it is prose poetry. It is the lyrical fashion in which it is written that is its outstanding element. The story unfolds not chronologically but rather by theme. There is a chapter on summer and winter. A chapter on festivals. A chapter on school. A chapter on sexual awakening. A chapter entitled "The Kitchen" which is the center of a home, and here we hear of his family, This is not merely a biography or description of a special time and place (the Cotswolds the years after the First World War), it is prose poetry. It is the lyrical fashion in which it is written that is its outstanding element. The story unfolds not chronologically but rather by theme. There is a chapter on summer and winter. A chapter on festivals. A chapter on school. A chapter on sexual awakening. A chapter entitled "The Kitchen" which is the center of a home, and here we hear of his family, his mother and father and half-sisters, half-brothers and brothers. His father departed at the age of three. His mother waited for years and years and years for his father's return. She waited and waited, raising the kids from both his marriages, until his father's death made clear he was never to return. Laurie Lee's mother and his half-sisters shaped what was to be “his home". The essence of "home" is not just described but felt. His mother's essence is not just described but felt too. You leave the memoir knowing well not just Laurie Lee but his mother and his sisters too. You leave the memoir feeling the passage of the old Cotswolds into the new. Horses replaced by cars, songs and tales by candlelight in the evening to the wireless. Life in the village to life out there in the beyond. The girls married and gone. The absence of pigs. Laurie Lee draws contrasts vividly - then and now, summer and winter, quiet and bustle, presence and absence.

Laurie Lee narrates this, his own book. His voice quavers, but it is full of emotion. I went from disliking it in the beginning to thinking it was perfect by the book's end. In the middle I disassociated myself from what I was hearing by repeating the magnificent lines in my head. Then my need to do this suddenly stopped; I began to love the narration.

The book covers only his childhood and teens. It is the first of a trilogy which covers the later years of his life. See this: https://www.goodreads.com/series/1802...

If you love lyrical writing, read this book. ...more

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Sep 21, 2008 Milica rated it it was amazing

Before I started reading this book, I was warned that it is extremely boring, or as my colleague put it '200 pages of absolutely nothing going on, that it's a complete waste of paper and time as well.
But after I'd read a few pages, I quickly realized that I was enjoying the book immensely. I love the way he describes simple, everyday things, feelings, smells in a way that instantly makes you feel nostalgic about your childhood, that makes you wish to go out of town and settle in the countryside. ...more

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Jul 05, 2017 Duane rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: audio-books, reviewed-books, 2017-book-challenge, english-calssics, rated-books, guardian-1000, memoir, biographies

I enjoyed this little book, so to say I was somewhat disappointed sounds disingenuous, but I honestly thought this would be a 5 star read. All the ingredients were there; classic, set in The Cotswolds area of England in the early twentieth century, the musings of an adult about his childhood days "when life was slow and oh so mellow" kind of thing. But my imagination just didn't take flight to that place I wanted to go. Parts of it were good, I especially liked the chapter on the grannies, only ...more

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Sep 30, 2020 Emily B rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: audiobooks-listened-to

I listened to the BBC dramatisation which was great. It’s only a few hours long and really engaging

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Jul 26, 2017 Sara rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, memoir, world-war-1

3.5-stars Rounded Up.

Cider With Rosie is a memoir of Laurie Lee’s life in the Cotswolds immediately following World War I, and reminded me of A. J. Cronin’s The Green Years, being told by a young boy of a poor family. I thought this book was quite lovely in places and a bit bogged down in others. It had marvelous potential that it dropped just short of reaching.

There is a story about two “grannies” who live next door to the Lee family, rivals and grudging enemies, their story made me think of tw ...more

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Jun 06, 2012 Jennifer rated it really liked it

Recommends it for: fans of "A Month in the Country"

Shelves: 1001-bymr, lapl

If anything, I would buy this book for the sole purpose of flipping it randomly to any page to be confronted by Laurie Lee's unforgettable mastery of descriptive detail. He belongs to a talented class of writers, which includes John Muir, who have the ability to capture nature in writing and speak to the reader in an inclusive and intimate manner. Everything in this autobiography is written with such a full, fresh, and loving fondness making it impossible not to like the obscure village of Slad, ...more

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Aug 26, 2012 Ellie rated it liked it

Ok, his prose is great. We all agree on that. He almost gives the reader synesthesia from his descriptions. It's excellent.

HOWEVER. I was sickened by some of the things I've read both in the book and surrounding it. I have searched through many other reviews, and all I've really found is "this book is so great because" or "Laurie Lee is the best author because he captures England at it's finest" blah blah blah. He kind of does, but then again, it's nauseatingly rose-tinted, and you can basicall Ok, his prose is great. We all agree on that. He almost gives the reader synesthesia from his descriptions. It's excellent.

HOWEVER. I was sickened by some of the things I've read both in the book and surrounding it. I have searched through many other reviews, and all I've really found is "this book is so great because" or "Laurie Lee is the best author because he captures England at it's finest" blah blah blah. He kind of does, but then again, it's nauseatingly rose-tinted, and you can basically HEAR him saying "I can't believe how appalling the youth of today is [etc], I remember, back in my day, we would never..." etc etc snooze boring etc.

Not only is Mr Lee somewhat racist, he is also sexist. And no, I don't care if that's what they did at the time, that doesn't make it ok. It also doesn't mean it's the perfect wonderful England to look back on where everyone wants to live, because I wouldn't want to live in a country where it's ok to call a woman of (I imagine) African origin both "a Negress" and to describe her thus: " Mrs Moore was a jolly, eye-bulging, voodoo-like creature who took charge of us with primitive casualness."

He subsequent treatment of women is pretty awful too, from describing when he had to go and sleep in his own bed, away from his mother as "my first lesson in the gentle, merciless rejection of women." Because, of course, we are all the same, we all reject men and we're all cold and evil and have no feelings. Not only that, he also sleeps around frequently, from the age of ELEVEN(!), and writes, extremely casually no less, about a rape that he and his friends planned one time. Not that it actually occurs. But that's not the point. The intention was there to rape a Christian girl, probably because she is extremely innocent, and his descriptions of said girl aren't especially flattering.

All of this, coupled with the aged look of "back in the day, things were wonderful, our family had pride in itself and we made a name for ourselves in the village, everyone knew the name we bore" blah blah blah - all of that, makes for a pretty sour ending to what I thought was going to be a quaint look at country life in the early 20th century. Maybe it is. Maybe Mr Lee is adding in these unsavory parts to show how everything wasn't perfect. But I doubt it. I would like to know why he is hailed as such a hero, when I believe Thomas Hardy gives a much better impression of rural life and with spectacles that have not been near a rose bush in a thousand years. ...more

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Nov 05, 2018 Nigeyb rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

A beautifully written eulogy for a magical childhood and a lost world. Cider With Rosie is unquestionably a five star read.

I think this is my third read and so, of course, I knew already that Cider With Rosie was wonderful but I had forgotten just how wonderful. It's simply a perfect book: an elegiac, beautifully written, poignant, melancholic, and, above all, life reaffirming. One of the most beautifully written books I know of (right up there with A Month in the Country and The Remains of the ...more

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Jul 22, 2018 Book rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: memoir-biography, great-britain

I was looking forward to reading this memoir, the first in a three-part series. I was especially looking forward to it since this part of the series was based in one of my favorite places in England – the Cotswolds. Unfortunately, this book was so dry and boring. I didn’t care for the writing style. Towards the end, I really didn’t like how he and his friends tried to rape a mentally handicapped girl. Granted, they were young, but that was so disturbing. They weren’t successful. What bothered me ...more

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May 20, 2016 Connie G rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: classic, england, autobiography-memoir

When Laurie Lee was three years old his family moved to a small Cotswold village. The family of eight had been abandoned by Laurie's father although he still sent them money. His mother was loving, but a bit flighty. The book is an account of village life, where the people lived close to the land, during the decade after World War I. His mother cooked over a wood fire, and water was hand pumped. The children attended a two room schoolhouse. The family enjoyed the simple things in life, but life ...more

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Jun 14, 2008 Cecily rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: classics, biog-and-autobiog

A quintessential coming of age story. It tells of Laurie Lee’s childhood in Gloucestershire, just after WW1. But it is not only Lee’s coming of age, it is also that of the village, as the rural backwater changes rapidly, losing many of its traditional village ways and gaining things such as motor vehicles.

The first time I read it, I was quite young and slightly confused as it was the first book I read that was not really chronological, but instead told the story grouped by overlapping themes, su ...more

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Oct 03, 2009 Smiley rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: autobiography

I inexplicably felt relieved to finish reading this wonderful book since it has long challenged me since around those late 1960's in my college years in Bangkok (there were only six state universities then). Our English teacher, Mr Tony Kidd, was teaching us a foundation English course (I can't recall exactly if I was in year 1 or 2) and one morning at weekends I asked him for one or two English books (not simplified ones) so that I could improve my reading skills and he kindly recommended this I inexplicably felt relieved to finish reading this wonderful book since it has long challenged me since around those late 1960's in my college years in Bangkok (there were only six state universities then). Our English teacher, Mr Tony Kidd, was teaching us a foundation English course (I can't recall exactly if I was in year 1 or 2) and one morning at weekends I asked him for one or two English books (not simplified ones) so that I could improve my reading skills and he kindly recommended this title and To Kill a Mockingbird (Popular Library 1962) by Harper Lee. I willingly bought its reasonably-priced new copy and tried reading its first story but, surprisingly, I couldn't proceed beyond that; the best I could do was that whenever I tried to read a few pages, my eventual slumber crept in so I put it back on the shelf.

One of such looming hardships that impeded my ongoing reading toward fluency with accurate understanding was that, I recall, his ways of writing dialogues by abbreviating them as spoken English with its grammar unfamiliar to me; however, looking at the bright side, I thought it was how he tried to transliterate them to be as close as those spoken in rural England, for example:

''Oo did it?' I yelled.
'Nobody, silly. Your eyes got bunged up, that's all.' (p. 17)

'Please, miss, I got to stay 'ome tomorrow, to 'elp with the washing - the pigs - me dad's sick.'
'I dunno, miss; you never learned us that.'
'I 'ad me book stole, miss. Carry Burdock pinched it.'
'Please, miss, I got a gurt' eadache.' (p. 56)

'Let's go an''élp Farmer Wells,' said a fat boy.
'You can - I ain't,' said a thin one.
'If you don''t, I'll give you thee a clip in the yer'ole.'
'Gurt great bully.'
'I ain't.'
'You be.' (p. 139)

As a guide, we can read its synopsis by visiting this site: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cider_w.... First published in 1959, this 13-story memoir describes the author's early life after World War I in a remote Cotswold village called Slad, Gloucestershire in England. His family was large totaling eight people; his Mother Annie (née Light), his eldest brother Jack, himself, his younger brother Tony, and his half-brother Harold (the first-born Reggie lived with his grandmother) and three half-sisters Marjorie, Dorothy, and Phyllis from their widower father. Please note the capital M as we can see in this memorable writing when he always mentions her fondly (rarely found in other memoirs I read), for example: "... , because Mother had said so." (p. 19), "..., my Mother disappeared to visit my father." (p. 20), "Our Mother returned from far away with excited tales of its madness, ..." (p. 25), etc.

To continue . . . ...more

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Aug 28, 2020 Tatiana rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Loved it. This book was such a joy and pleasure to read. It is a collection of Laury Lee's memories of his childhood spent in a remote village during the time after the end of the first world war. This is a very heart-warming book told with so much understanding ad love for the place and people who lived there. There isn't any plot or one connected story to the book, so don't go into it expecting that. Treat it as a collection of short stories about different aspects of the rural life of the tim ...more

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Jul 21, 2013 Peter rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

"Never to be forgotten, that first long secret drink of golden fire,juice of these 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 agin........."

Firstly let me admit that I'm a fan of history and not just battles, Kings, Queens, dates etc but socila history as well. This is a book of a slice social history.We see a life set around the family kitchen, early school years,family and friends but in p "Never to be forgotten, that first long secret drink of golden fire,juice of these 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 agin........."

Firstly let me admit that I'm a fan of history and not just battles, Kings, Queens, dates etc but socila history as well. This is a book of a slice social history.We see a life set around the family kitchen, early school years,family and friends but in particular the various seasons of nature.

'Cider With Rosie' is a tale of the author's early life growing up within a large family, without a real father figure influence,in a Cotswold village in and around the 1920s and is told from the standpoint of a child. However, in many respects it is a tale told in a series of short stories as it concentrates on differing elements of a simple and insular village life before the arrival of the motor car. Now I personally loved the chapter about the 'Grannies in the Wainscot' in particlar. Two old ladies, so differing in their characters who despite living as neighbours never once spoke to one another yet whose lives were regulated by each others very presence. It is not a story told with any real angst or through rose tinted glasses it is just told as it was, plainly and matter of factly just as is the rest of the book. We see a life set around the family kitchen, early school years,family and friends but in particular the various seasons.

Laurie Lee was a poet and a screen-writer as well as a novelist and this shines through in his choice of language. It starts when the author is but a toddler recalling some of his earliest memories. Here his world is large, scary, cosy and baffling, a world dominated by females and the language reflects this. Lee's real skill is that as the child grows so does his vocabulary as in normal life but never does the child's voice leave it. The language is always beautiful and so suggestive it takes you in and wraps about you like a blanket.

In many ways it is a book of nostalgia, a book of a by-gone time but it is also an illustration of writing about what you know. It is seen by many as a modern classic and rightly so IMHO.

...more

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Jun 02, 2013 Bionic Jean rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: classics, auto-and-biography, read-authors-i-l

Beautifully told and evocative autobiography of a world now lost to us. Unparalleled.

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Jun 29, 2016 Irene rated it really liked it

This is a highly atmospheric lyrically written memoire of a childhood in rural England in the 1920s. One of seven children raised by a slightly eccentric mother in relative poverty, this could have been a story of physical and psychic deprivation. Rather, the author leaves the reader nostalgic for a simpler, more contented time.

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Feb 05, 2017 Paul rated it really liked it

Shelves: books-read-2017

It is 1917 and Laurie Lee and his family have just arrived in the village of Slad in Gloucestershire for the first time. Their new home is nestled deep in the valley, warmed by open fires and water is got from a pump outside the back door. It is two families that have come together, the elder children are from the first marriage; his father re-married when their mother died, and had a second family before going off to war. Even though his father is not there, it is a happy childhood. The war rea It is 1917 and Laurie Lee and his family have just arrived in the village of Slad in Gloucestershire for the first time. Their new home is nestled deep in the valley, warmed by open fires and water is got from a pump outside the back door. It is two families that have come together, the elder children are from the first marriage; his father re-married when their mother died, and had a second family before going off to war. Even though his father is not there, it is a happy childhood. The war reaches its end and the village celebrates; the family lives in hope of seeing their father again now it has ended. It was not to be.

Soon he was old enough to attend school. It was split into two classes, infants and Big Ones, separated by a partition. It was here that he was brought together with all the characters of the village and started to forge friendships that would remain with him. The teachers were very different to those today, harsher and often brutal, they had little scope for tolerance, demanding only obedience. Life in a rural community was as much about the daily life and way that the seasons slowed moved on slowly. Singing carols around the village at Christmas starting with the squire, skating on the frozen pond, to the balmy days of summer spent playing games in the fields.

Its roots clutched the slope like a giant hand, holding the hill in place. Its trunk writhed with power, threw off veils of green dust, rose towering into the air, branched into a thousand shaded alleys, became a city for owls and squirrels. I had thought such trees to be as old as the earth, I never dreamed that a man could make them.

Lee is such a lyrical author, writing about this tiny piece of England that was forever changed after the First World War. It is not shown through rose tinted glasses; this was tough at times, death was a frequent occurrence in his family and with neighbours and other villagers. The hard work was tempered by simple pleasures. This glimpse of a time long past, of a place that he loved and made him the man he was to become when he walked away at the age of 19. Thoughly enjoyable book that is really too short. ...more

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Dec 09, 2010 Emily May rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: memoirs-or-bios, classics

This is not a fast-paced adventure book but it does create a beautiful picture of quiet country lanes, honeysuckle on the breeze and both the wonders and tragedies of living so far out in a world controlled solely by the forces of nature.
It's a lovely portrait of childhood innocence and growing up, after reading it I got a desperate urge to visit the Cotswolds. The world of childhood is a very small bubble and this takes that alongside the equally small world in which this novel is set and it cr ...more

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Mar 03, 2017 Laurie rated it liked it

Shelves: non-fiction, 2017, biography-memoir

3.5 stars - I thought I would adore this memoir, and parts of it were enthralling. But some chapters I skimmed through because they bored me. I can't pinpoint what made those particular parts less interesting to me, but it was a small enough issue that I will read the second book of the trilogy at some point. I liked Laurie and his tales better once he got a little older, so the second half of the book was best for me. I loved his description of starting school since it so accurately showed the ...more

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Jun 18, 2020 Rebecca rated it really liked it

Shelves: anglophiles-delight, family-memoirs, obscure-classics, get-free-bookshop, 20-books-of-summer-2020, reviewed-for-blog

(3.5) Lee’s quaint family memoir is set in the years immediately after World War I. He was born in 1914 and his childhood unfolded in Stroud, Gloucestershire and nearby village Slad. I started reading Cider with Rosie in April 2019 when we stopped in Stroud for a night on the way back from a holiday in Devon. I got through the first 100 pages quickly, with the voice reminding me slightly of Gerald Durrell’s in his autobiographical trilogy, but then set the book aside for over a year before picki (3.5) Lee’s quaint family memoir is set in the years immediately after World War I. He was born in 1914 and his childhood unfolded in Stroud, Gloucestershire and nearby village Slad. I started reading Cider with Rosie in April 2019 when we stopped in Stroud for a night on the way back from a holiday in Devon. I got through the first 100 pages quickly, with the voice reminding me slightly of Gerald Durrell’s in his autobiographical trilogy, but then set the book aside for over a year before picking it back up for this summer’s food- and drink-themed reading. Taking such a long break wasn’t a major problem because the book’s vignettes are thematically arranged, so there was no plot as such to lose track of.

Lee was part of his father’s second brood, born out of the widower’s remarriage to his housekeeper. His father left his new family after just a few years, and for the next three decades Lee’s mother dutifully waited for a return that never came. Lee was a sickly child, doted on by his older half-sisters. He was surrounded by a large wider family of brothers, eccentric war-veteran uncles and duelling grandmothers who lived one upstairs and one downstairs in a sort of granny annex attached to their untidy, rambling 17th-century stone house. The book depicts a village on the cusp of modernization: everything was still done with wagons and horses, but that was soon to change.

It’s a nostalgic, evocative look at a country childhood. Lee captures a bygone era, portraying himself as similarly on the precipice of losing innocence. The title comes from a late moment when Rosie Burdock tempts the adolescent Lee with alcoholic cider and kisses underneath a hay wagon. This penultimate chapter on the lust of the flesh takes an alarming turn as he describes the village boys’ planned gang rape of a religious 16-year-old, Lizzy. Lee was among the boys who followed her into the woods one Sunday after church. Luckily, they lost their nerve and nothing happened, but Lee’s blasé recounting felt out of keeping and somehow more dated than the rest of his material. It left a sourness I couldn’t get over.

Quintessentially English but not as purely delightful as I expected, this was still a book I valued for its characterization and its description of golden moments in memory.

Some favorite passages:

“Summer, June summer, with the green back on earth and the whole world unlocked and seething – like winter, it came suddenly and one knew it in bed, almost before waking up; with cuckoos and pigeons hollowing the woods since daylight and the chipping of tits in the pear-blossom.”

“Myself, my family, my generation, were born in a world of silence; a world of hard work and necessary patience, of backs bent to the ground, hands massaging the crops, of waiting on weather and growth; of villages like ships in the empty landscapes and the long walking distances between them; … [The horse’s] eight miles an hour was the limit of our movements, as it had been since the days of the Romans. That eight miles an hour was life and death, the size of our world, our prison.”

Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck, with a bonus list of 10 more childhood memoirs I’ve read. ...more

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Mar 18, 2017 Eleanor rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2017-books, book-club, biography-memoir

I read this book a great many years ago and remembered it with affection. I found it to be just as delightful the second time around. Lee's writing is lyrical and reminiscent of Dylan Thomas in many places. He recalls a way of life in his Cotswold village which has gone forever, and a family of full and half siblings revolving around their loving, disorganised mother.

Very beautiful, and now of course I want to read his other books again. ...more

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Apr 16, 2012 Ellinor rated it really liked it

Shelves: the-ultimate-teen-book-guide, 1001-books-2006, guardian1000, 1001-books, 1001-books-core-list, netgalley, biography-memoir, guardian1000_familyandself

Cider with Rosie is a childhood/youth memoir by Laurie Lee. Lee grew up in a small village in Gloucestershire around the time of the end of the Great War. He was born into a family with many children and was raised by his mother and older sisters (his father stayed in London after the war and did not return).
What sets Cider with Rosie apart from other (childhood) memoirs is the way it is structured: instead of using a chronological order, Laurie Lee groups his memories into thematic chapters. Th ...more

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Feb 03, 2015 Claire rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: memoir, classic

A somewhat nostalgic memoir of childhood in a Cotswold village, remembered from when the author is about 3 years old, surrounded by sisters and siblings, the father having long abandoned the family and leaving his housekeeper who became his wife to raise the children of his first marriage and the four he gave her.

Rather than a tale of struggle and poverty, in Laurie Lee's hands, it comes across as a bundle of memories and anecdotes that celebrate village life, sibling love, old lady madness and ...more

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Mar 19, 2018 Cheryl marked it as sony-or-android

Shelves: more-wi

Not sure how it got on my list last week, but today I'm prioritizing it because Michael Perry, in one of his WSJ columns, mentioned that he loved hearing his wife read it aloud to him, even though he doesn't like being read to (which he does admit is ironic in several ways). ...more

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Apr 04, 2016 Beth Bonini rated it it was amazing

Shelves: memoir, classic, classics-that-i-m-just-now-reading, mothers

This memoir is more poetry than prose at times, and I think you need to be in the right mood for its lush charms. I've started it several times over the years and it didn't quite 'take' -- and then, suddenly it was just the right book and I was completely entranced by it. If you read to know how another person's experience feels, this is a wonderful book. If you are emotionally drawn to the English countryside, if you hanker after reminiscences from a by-gone era, then this is absolutely the rig This memoir is more poetry than prose at times, and I think you need to be in the right mood for its lush charms. I've started it several times over the years and it didn't quite 'take' -- and then, suddenly it was just the right book and I was completely entranced by it. If you read to know how another person's experience feels, this is a wonderful book. If you are emotionally drawn to the English countryside, if you hanker after reminiscences from a by-gone era, then this is absolutely the right book for you. Perhaps it is a sepia-toned portrait, made larger than life by a vivid imagination -- but whatever, it felt like a living, breathing sort of story to me.

The book opens with a startling, memorable image: "I was set down from the carrier's cart at the age of three; and there with a sense of bewilderment and terror my life in the village began." Laurie Lee and his sprawling family moved to the tiny village of Slad, Gloucestershire just before the end of the first World War. They lived -- 8 children, and one fanciful and haphazard mother -- in an old stone house which regularly flooded. The father is absent; gone to live in London, and work as a civil servant. He had married beneath him in social class, (indeed he married his housekeeper, Lee's mother), and then he casts off two families -- the children of his first marriage, and the children (of which Laurie Lee was the middle of three sons) of his second.

As Lee tells us, many times and in a variety of ways, it was the end of the era. The world of agriculture, the horse, the finely drawn lines of class - but with everyone attending church together, and living and dying together - was entirely unchanged from previous centuries. But then the war came, and then the motor car, and the old ways splintered and crumbled.

This is a book of superbly quotable passages; Lee's exuberant use of language and descriptive powers beg to be read aloud, reread and underlined. As soon as I read it, I wanted to read it again -- just to write down all of the bits which moved and amused me. Let me give you an example of a paragraph which reads like a poem:

"Myself, my family, my generation were born in a world of silence; a world of hard work and necessary patience, of backs bent to the ground, hands massaging the crops, of waiting on weather and growth; of villages like ships in the empty landscapes and the long walking distances between them; of white narrow roads, rutted by hooves and cartwheels, innocent of oil or petrol, down which people passed rarely, and almost never for pleasure, and the horse was the fastest thing moving."

The book follows a somewhat chronological progression, beginning with his first memories and early school days and then ending with his older sisters being courted and the family gradually breaking up. I liked all of it, but the chapters which particularly engrossed and intrigued me were: Grannies in the Wainscot, Mother, Winter and Summer and The Uncles. Lee is peerless when writing about the natural world, but he does an exceptional character portrait as well.

As I was reading this book, I also read a recently published Folio which combines Lee's artwork and his only daughter's reminiscences of him. In addition to being a writer, he was also an accomplished musician, painter and photographer. How this genius of a man sprouted from his particular origins is one of life's mysteries . . .
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Sep 15, 2011 Bethany rated it liked it · review of another edition

I'm sure many of you goodreaders experience this, but whilst reading a book I'm mentally giving it stars before I'm done. (It's a reflex now, sadly.) While I was reading Cider With Rosie, my mental star level fluctuated between 3 and 5 stars, and I thought I would end up giving it 4; but as I am thinking about it now, about 5 hours after finishing, I don't feel compelled to give it much more than 3.

It took a while for me to get into the book. As with most books of this type, there's no cohesive ...more

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About Laurie Lee

Laurie Lee

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Laurence Edward Alan "Laurie" Lee, MBE, was an English poet, novelist, and screenwriter. His most famous work was an autobiographical trilogy which consisted of Cider with Rosie (1959), As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969) and A Moment of War (1991). While the first volume famously recounts his childhood in the idyllic Slad Valley, the second deals with his leaving home for London and his ...more

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Quotes from Cider with Rosie:...

“Bees blew like cake-crumbs through the golden air, white butterflies like sugared wafers, and when it wasn't raining a diamond dust took over which veiled and yet magnified all things” — 47 likes

“She was too honest, too natural for this frightened man; too remote from his tidy laws. She was, after all, a country girl; disordered, hysterical, loving. She was muddled and mischievous as a chimney-jackdaw, she made her nest of rags and jewels, was happy in the sunlight, squawked loudly at danger, pried and was insatiably curious, forgot when to eat or ate all day, and sang when sunsets were red.” — 16 likes

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