Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie
Laurie Lee was born in Stroud in 1914 and in 1917 the family moved to a damp and crumbling cottage in the remote Cotswold village of Slad. When the First World War was over Laurie’s father abandoned his wife and children and life was hard, but for Laurie his warm hugger-mugger home and the village with its familiar characters and unchanging round were full of wonder. He writes ecstatically of going blackberrying in summer, and skating and carol singing in icy Christmas weather when it hurt to breathe and the air was ‘like needles’. Yet he acknowledges that village life could be brutal too. Cider with Rosie is not just a rosy picture of a rural past, but a magical evocation of growing up in a lost world that still rings emotionally true.
Flora Thompson, Lark Rise
Flora Thompson wrote the much-loved trilogy that came to be known as Lark Rise to Candleford in the grim days before and during the Second World War, and perhaps it was this that made the memories of her country childhood shine so brightly. She grew up as the daughter of a builder’s labourer in a poor Oxfordshire hamlet in the last years of the nineteenth century, yet she instinctively knew how to write, and these three books are a unique record of a rural world that would soon disappear for ever. The first book sees Flora – or Laura as she called her childhood self – growing up in the hamlet of Juniper Hill, the ‘Lark Rise’ of the title. From the annual killing of the pig to the flowers in the cottage gardens, and the memories of the older residents, the life of the hamlet is recalled in magical detail, a close-up, child’s-eye view of a small, self-sufficient world.
Golden Fire
I write these words, appropriately enough, in The Woolpack – the Slad pub that once claimed Laurie Lee as its most famous patron – with a pint of cider at my elbow. From one window, the view dips...
Read moreOn Juniper Hill
Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise has always felt like home. A romantic notion, perhaps, from someone brought up in the 1970s and ’80s, rather than a century ago, as Flora was. I first read it when I...
Read more
