The classic evocative tale of an idyllic childhood in the English countryside Cider with Rosie is a wonderfully vivid memoir of childhood in a remote Cotswold village, a village before electricity or cars, a timeless place on the verge of change. But, in my university library on the other side of the world, it was his first memoir, a remembering of childhood and the beginnings of adolescence spent in a Cotswold village, with which I fell in love. He was even sued for libel – the result of some (possibly imagined) memories about a piano factory fire.

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). They are visited by a man in uniform who is sleeping out in the surrounding woods – he visits them in the mornings for food and to dry out his damp clothes.Having been forced to leave school early because of her mother's death and the need to look after her brothers and father, she then went into domestic service, working as a maid in large houses. There is an understanding here that it is events both large and seemingly insignificant which provide the threads that will contribute to our comprehension of our world, long before we are ready or able to knit them together.

Alone she brought up the three daughters of her husband’s first marriage and four children of her own.Of the land: potatoes are dipped and stripped clean from their coats of mud and glutinous beans are torn from their nests of wool. Difficult times like these balance other parts of the story that probably present an idealized view of his childhood. Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie is a classic of English rural writing, lauded for its evocation of Gloucestershire’s Slad Valley in the early 20th century and the last days of an intensely experienced, millennium-old way of life . Because of its location, the cottage is in the path of the floods that flow into the valley, and Laurie and his family have to go outside to clear the storm drain every time there is a heavy downpour, though even this sometimes fails to stop the sludge despoiling their kitchen. We are blessed that Laurie Lee was on hand, at the tail end of the old era, to chronicle it so memorably.

The teachers were very different to those today, harsher and often brutal, they had little scope for tolerance, demanding only obedience. 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.First, I was disturbed by his story about how he and his friends used to drown pigeons for fun, and then finally, how he and his friends decided to rape a (possibly) mentally handicapped girl.

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. Lee’s recorded memories of those early years are abundant, so rich in detail and so specific that it is impossible not to wonder at the truth of his story; there are parts of the book that read as a sort of self-mythologizing folk tale. Cider with Rosie is a wonderfully vivid memoir of childhood in a remote Cotswold village, a village before electricity or cars, a timeless place on the verge of change.Having left to work for her father in his pub, The Plough, she then answered an advertisement, "Widower (four children) Seeks Housekeeper" and met the man who became Lee's father.