Book Review: Cider With Rosie

Cider With Rosie is the first of three autobiographical volumes by British poet Laurie Lee. Lee was born in 1914 in a small Cotswold village. He was one of eight children, raised by his mother after his father abandoned the family. He writes about the turning of the seasons, the small rituals of village life, school, his home and family, neighbors, first love, heinous crimes, and other events. Lee grew up on the cusp of a way of life that was dying. The book is suffused with the knowledge of that fact, making it bittersweet to read.

The writing is rich and poetic. I dog-eared many different passages, too many to include in this review. I'll give you a taste:

The village ... was like a deep-running cave still linked to its antic past, a cave whose shadows were cluttered by spirits and by laws still vaguely ancestral. This cave that we inhabited looked backwards through chambers that led to our ghostly beginnings; and had not, as yet, been tidied up, or scrubbed clean by electric light, or suburbanized by a Victorian church, or papered by cinema screens.
It was something that we just had time to inherit, to inherit and dimly know - the blood and beliefs of generations who had been in this valley since the Stone Age. That continuous contact has at last been broken, the deeper caves sealed off forever. But arriving, as I did, at the end of that age, I caught whiffs of something as old as the glaciers. There were ghosts in the stones, in the trees, and the walls, and each field and hill had several. The elder people knew about these things and would refer to them in personal terms, and there were certain landmarks about the valley - tree-clumps, corners in woods - that bore separate, antique, half-muttered names that were certainly older than Christian.

I just loved this description of two neighbor-women:

Grannie Trill and Granny Wallon were rival ancients and lived on each other's nerves, and their perpetual emnity was like mice in the walls and absorbed much of my early days. With their sickle-bent bodies, pale pink eyes, and wild wisps of hedgerow hair, they looked to me the very images of witches and they were also much alike. In all their time as such close neighbors they never exchanged a word. They communicated instead by means of boots and brooms - jumping on floors and knocking on ceilings. They referred to each other as "Er-Down-Under" and "Er-Up-Atop, the Varmint"; for each to the other was an airy nothing, a local habitation not fit to be named.

There were a few references reflecting the racism of the time that I had a hard time reading. Otherwise, I am a sucker for memoirs. I also enjoy -- somewhat perversely -- letting my imagination dwell on the time that immediately preceded the enormous changes of the twentieth century. It always seems to me that I should be able to reach out, grab it, and somehow slow it down.

I liked Cider With Rosie quite a bit. I see that it has been reissued, along with its two companions -- As I Walked Out On A Midsummer Morning and A Moment Of War -- in a single volume entitled Red Sky At Sunrise. I'm going to keep my eyes open for a used copy to buy.

It may not be for everybody, but I recommend it for sentimental old so and so's like me.

(Cross-posted at the Spring Reading Challenge)