Granny Trill and Granny Wallon are the family’s neighbours – and Laurie Lee certainly conjures them up as having slightly spooky, witch-like characteristics – Granny Wallon distilling fine wines from the wild growth of the surrounding fields and hedges – cowslips, dandelions, elderflower and more.

Some of the people we meet in ‘Cider With Rosie’ seem larger than life. But I would say, that one takes away a rather sunny, if realistic, snapshot on the whole, of childhood in the Cotswold village. Some of them are harrowing to say the least. There are plenty of disturbing stories of village incidents, criminal activities, death, poverty and decay. It is not an entirely bucolic evocation of a perfect childhood. One by one the people, places and incidents of his childhood are recounted but in a way, that immerses us in the landscape- to witness the peculiar activities of the elderly old ladies who are their close neighbours (Granny Trill and Granny Wallon), to hear and feel the rush of rain, clap of thunder of a great storm that practically submerges their low lying cottage, and to breathe in and taste the heady flavour of cider from the bounty of apples from the valley. The prose is packed with descriptors that really bring to life every sensory detail. There is a quite mesmerising description of Lee being handed down from the cart that brought them to their crumbling Cotswold cottage, and him standing in the grass in a field in front of his house – grass so tall in the month of June that it towered over his head – ‘each blade tattooed with tiger-skins of sunlight’.Įach recapitulation is so vivid that it really set’s the reader’s imagination ablaze with heady imagery.

Lee was at the time just a small boy of three. The book starts in the wake of the First World War. Laurie Lee’s wonderful evocation of his childhood, in a small Cotswold village in ‘Cider With Rosie’ was a memorable recent read.

Cider by rosie