More Cider With Rosie

A century after the author grew up there, Emily Rhodes follows Laurie Lee’s footsteps through the Cotswolds village of Slad and discovers that his spirit remains

MORE than 100 years have passed since Laurie Lee was ‘set down from the carrier’s cart at the age of three’ in the Cotswolds village that he would bring to life in his evocative memoir of childhood, Cider with Rosie, first published 60 years ago.

The book begins with a world alarmingly contracted, as young Laurie is lost in ‘the June grass… taller than I was’: ‘It was knife-edged, dark, and a wicked green, thick as a forest and alive with grasshoppers that chirped and chattered and leapt through the air like monkeys.’

He’s soon rescued by his sisters, who deposit him on the doorstep of the family’s new home. Gradually, his world expands to embrace this home, the village, the surrounding woods and other landmarks of his Cotswold valley.

Lee’s family (minus his errant father) moved to the village of Slad from nearby Stroud in 1917. At this time, the village was ‘a scattering of some twenty to thirty houses down the south-east slope of a valley. The valley was narrow, steep, and almost entirely cut off; it was also a funnel for winds, a channel for the floods and a jungly, bird-crammed, insect-hopping sun-trap whenever there happened to be any sun’.

Slad remains small, half hidden from the busy road that runs through it from Birdlip to Stroud. Rosebank, the T-shaped cottage that was Lee’s childhood home, is just off this road, down a steep bank still thick with tall grasses and wildflowers.