![]() As he grows up grows up, so does his story, including the famous cider with Rosie Burdock (not her real name). The valley was no innocent place of country idylls and Laurie Lee compares their toughness to that of inner city London lads. (A good parallel may be drawn with the book of 'British Fairy Tales', as recorded by Alan Garner, captured from the same era.) Disease and hunger were no stranger, big families were common, and children often died young. The people were wild and superstitious, half Celtic and half Christian. The village was poor, self-sufficient, and still rather feudal. ![]() He lived in the beauty of a small Cotswold valley until he was twenty, his impressions also incidentally capture the final years of a deeply rural way of English life, now thoroughly gone. Like many a good literary biography, it reads quite like a novel, but records the early life of Laurie Lee who grew up in the years after the First World War. Laurie Lee left his childhood home in the Cotswolds when he was nineteen, but it remained with him throughout his life until, many years later, he returned for good. 'Cider With Rosie' by Laurie Lee (1914-1997) has been a favourite set text in English lessons in Britain since it was published in 1959. From the author of Cider With Rosie, Village Christmas is a moving, lyrical portrait of England through the changing years and seasons. ![]()
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