Cider with Rosie The Secret Life of Books

"A tropic heat oozed up from the ground,

"rank with sharp odours of roots and nettles.

"Snow-clouds of elder-blossom banked in the sky,

"showering upon me the fumes and flakes of

"their sweet and giddy suffocation.

"For the first time in my life,

"I was out of the sight of humans.

"I was lost and I did not expect to be found again."

And I remember the first time I was lost in Cider With Rosie.

I'd been given a copy - this copy in fact -

by my best friend at university,

and I was immediately beguiled -

spellbound, even -

by its sensuous descriptions of Cotswold life,

Cotswold landscape, and the community in which Laurie Lee grew up,

but I also love the fact that he didn't hide

from the harsher realities of life here in his childhood.

'In this programme,

'I want to discover the real story behind Cider With Rosie...'

This "Poppy" was really called Rosie.

Oh, so this is Rosie?

'..see the myth-maker in action...'

He's kind of playing with the words, again and again.

To have a more dramatic effect.

'..and find out why the book was such a success.'

Laurie Lee really creates a kind of Cotswold Arcadia in his book here.

I've been writing books all my life,

certainly since the age of 14,

but as a reader, few books have ever given me

quite the thrill of this spellbinding memoir.

PAGES FLUTTER

Published in 1959, but set almost 40 years earlier,

just after the First World War,

Laurie Lee's classic takes place in the tiny Cotswold community of Slad.

'I was born just a few miles away,

'and I have a particular connection to this book.'

This is the church where my great-aunt Muriel's husband,

Uncle Cyril, was vicar of Slad from 1931,

so Laurie Lee would have sat here

and heard my great-uncle preach the word of the Lord,

and I had no idea until Cider With Rosie was published that there

was any family connection between the great writer and my family.

One of the most remarkable things about Cider With Rosie is

that for readers who indeed have

no family connection with the book,

there is still this intense

feeling of personal connection.

The book's highly stylised and impressionistic chapters

glow with nostalgic recollections of early childhood.

In the same year the book was published,

Laurie Lee returned to Slad, joined by a BBC film crew.

"The village to which our family had come was a scattering of some

"20 to 30 houses down the south-east slump of the 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 suntrap,

"whenever there happened to be any sun."

All human life tumbles riotously from the pages of Cider With Rosie -

from colourful characters like the warring grannies

and the bumbling squire,

to formative moments, like village celebrations and murderous pacts.

All contained within a curious quirk of geography - a remote valley,

for centuries, virtually cut off from a changing world.

If you get, perhaps, just an edge of what Laurie Lee felt

so passionately, this sense of extraordinary connectedness to

an ancient past which, in a way, has gone,

-and I suppose, it really has gone, now, forever, hasn't it?

-Mm-hmm.

I think he felt almost duty-bound to just record the last

vestiges of this culture, this way of life,

that had existed for... over millennia,

sealed in amber in this amazing valley.

And it's captured best of all by this quote here,

in which he says, "The village, in fact,

"was like a deep-running cave, still linked to its antic past,

"a cave whose shadows were cluttered by spirits

"and by laws still vaguely ancestral."

It's a tantalising notion, and whenever I read it,

it sends tingles down my spine.

It has a visceral power, especially in a place like here.

Laurie Lee says that it went back to the ice.

He says, you know, the valley, it's been here since the Stone Age,

and "arriving, as I did, at the end of that age,

"I caught whiffs of something as old as the glaciers."

Yeah. We are figures in this landscape,

because we are meant to be in such a landscape.

Yes, I mean it's part of the pastoral tradition,

and Laurie Lee really creates a kind of Cotswold Arcadia

in his book here,

and this is his return ticket to that place.

But the first childhood vision of this Arcadia is disconcerting,

even distressing,

as Laurie Lee recounts in the book's iconic opening lines.

"I was set down from the carrier's cart at the age of three,

"and there, with a sense of bewilderment and terror,

"my life in the village began.

"The June grass, amongst which I stood,

"was taller than I was, and I wept.

"I'd never been so close to grass before.

"It towered above me and all around me,

"each blade tattooed with tiger-skins of sunlight.

"That was the day we came to the village,

"in the summer of the last year of the First World War.

"To a cottage on a steep bank above a lake -

"a cottage with three floors and a cellar,

"and a treasure in the walls,

"with a pump and apple trees, syringa and strawberries,

"rooks in the chimneys, frogs in the cellar,

"mushrooms on the ceiling,

"and all for three and sixpence a week."

So this is it.

After 50 years of reading about it, I am, at last,

going down the steps to this house.

'Nowadays, almost a century after Laurie Lee's vividly evoked arrival,

'Hester Collins lives here with her own young family.

'She's going to show me a part of the building

'that's pretty much unchanged from Lee's time.'

Come on down. Come and see this.

-Oh, my goodness, it really is down.

-It is.

-My goodness, it's down.

-It certainly is.

Oh, heavens.

-The Lee cellar.

-Yes.

-The famous cellar.

-It is.

-How incredible.

My goodness, so...

"Strawberries and syringa,

"mushrooms in the ceiling, frogs in the cellar,

"all for three and sixpence a week."

Were there frogs in the cellar?

Seven years ago, when we bought this place, yes,

and a tree growing to the roof.

This space really brings to mind the young boy's

fear of the supernatural men who he believed lived between the walls.

In his febrile imagination,

they looked like old gods gone mouldy,

but the house wasn't only crowded with ghosts -

Laurie Lee was just one of a rowdy brood of children.

Annie Lee, Laurie's mother,

looked after eight children, was it, here?

We think it's about eight, and perhaps 11 at one time.

And you're a family of four?

We're a family of four and it's quite small, so...

And do you find that visitors come up onto the famous bank up

-there on the road?

-Yes.

Where Laurie Lee was set down in those grasses.

What are they doing?

I mean, do you think they are capturing a lost childhood?

I think they're just coming back to, perhaps, a childhood

or a memory of their grandparents -

a part of time, which we have lost in many places now.

And he knew it.

BIRDS CHIRP

Written at a time when Britain was still in the grip of

grey post-war austerity,

Cider With Rosie taps into deep roots in our national psyche.

There's a tremendous taste for

this kind of thing,

in the aftermath of the...

-the Second World War.

-Yes.

For, you know, "England's green and pleasant land", as it were.

A utopian craving,

and I think that's one way of thinking about

what Laurie Lee is doing.

Do you think it's a memoir?

Do think it's a bit of autobiography?

I would call it elegy.

It's all about the ruin of the past, and so on...

-A forgotten world.

-..and it's got elegiac notes about

things that have gone now.

It is certainly pastoral.

The opening shots are in an extremely poetic kind of prose,

and I would say that, in those kind of episodes,

he's trying to write prose poetry.

One of his great feats of literary showmanship

is set in the chapter in this very building,

where he telescopes a decade of education

into merely 20 pages of Cider With Rosie.

He paints a portrait of a Victorian school system,

mired still in a rigid, 19th-century rule book.

"We learnt nothing abstract or tenuous there,

"just simple patterns of facts and letters,

"portable tricks of calculation.

"Unhearing, unquestioning, we rocked to our chanting,

"hammering the gold nails home.

"Twice two are four.

"One God is love, one Lord is king,

"one king is George,

"one George is fifth.

"So it was, always had been, would be forever.

"We asked no questions. We didn't hear what we said,

"yet neither did we ever forget it."

At Gloucester Folk Museum,

they've recreated the school conditions

from the early days of Laurie Lee,

and despite all that rigid rote learning,

the young Laurie did show some early literary promise,

as poet and family friend Adam Horovitz recently discovered.

I've got here an essay that he wrote

for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds'

-Bird and Tree Competition.

-My goodness.

-My goodness, which would have...

-Aged 11.

-Aged 11.

-With immaculate handwriting, I see.

-Exquisite handwriting.

-What's it about?

-It's about a dabchick.

-Can you see any signs in it of his dawning talent?

-There are...

There are certainly signs towards the end

that some of the lyrical style creeps in,

amongst the slightly clunky grammar,

and the spelling and the crossings-out.

"Soon, a big black-and-white dog came along,

"and their father called in loud click-clicks,

"and with a lot of pip-pips,

"the young ones all rushed to their parents.

"Two got under their mother's wing,

"and the other three got under the father's wing,

"and they both dived, and brought them to the reeds,

"where they could hide.

"Then they grew, and they will soon be going away."

Laurie Lee was to fly the nest himself in the years to come,

at the age of 19, with dreams of being a poet.

He set out from Slad,

and his aim was to make his mark on the literary world.

Thus began a series of adventures,

crisscrossing the globe,

and culminating in the fight against Franco in 1930s Spain -

an episode that was to inspire much of his early writing.

When he came back, rather than Slad,

it was the bustle of London and its cosmopolitan, artistic society,

that he chose to call home,

and where he began a series of jobs with the BBC and the Government,

all the time maintaining a busy publishing career on the side.

This pub, on Fulham Road, was among his favourite haunts.

So, Laurie Lee would have sat here,

regaling friends and people in the pub with

stories of the Spanish Civil War,

and his travels in India and in Spain,

and if anyone had told him then that the book which would make him

immortal was a memoir of his childhood in Slad,

I really think he'd have choked on his pint.

While earlier publications by Laurie Lee hadn't made much of a mark,

Cider With Rosie became a classic overnight.

The publishers had hoped to sell 800 copies in total

but by the end of 1959,

it was selling up to 1,600 a day and winning prestigious prizes.

Mr Lee, did it cost you a great deal of time and trouble

and mental effort to write it?

Yes.

It gave me pleasure to write it.

I always wanted to write it, but it caused...

I shut myself up two years in the process of writing it.

I was down there on the edge of Fulham Road, with blinds drawn.

For two sodded years, my friends never saw me.

I wrote it three times before, erm...

Three times, I sort of carved it about and chopped it down,

and refined it and so on.

Yeah, there was a lot of sweat to it.

The difficult and laborious creation of Cider With Rosie can be

seen in the original manuscript, held at the British library.

-What you will see...

-Oh, look!

-It's on the back of something.

-Yes.

-What is this?

-These are BBC scripts.

He did work for the BBC in the '50s,

and this manuscript was written in the '50s.

-Right.

-So it could be that these were things he was working on.

It could be also, that this was just a wish to re-use paper.

Now, what's fascinating about, you know, a passage like this,

is that we can see the changes.

You can see where he wrote it up,

and I see that he writes here about this time,

just after the first war,

and he writes, "a sombre event",

and then he crosses it out, and replaces it with "violent".

Yes, he does, and then he writes again,

"A thing of mystery. A thing...

"A thing of violence, a thing of mystery."

So, he's kind of playing with the words again and again.

-To have a more dramatic effect.

-Yes.

Because he wanted, really, to punch us with his horrible image.

-Yes.

-Didn't he?

It wasn't always sweetness and light and haymaking.

-There were some very savage things that happened.

-Yes.

These painstakingly worked-over words

introduce one of the book's most chilling episodes -

the account of a brutal murder from Lee's childhood.

It's just a few days before Christmas,

and the inhabitants of Slad are drinking in their local pub,

and they are disturbed by the appearance -

the sudden appearance -

of a long-lost son of the village.

"The door blew open to a gust of snow

"and a tall man strode into the bar.

"Years ago, as a pale and bony lad,

"he'd been packed off to one of the colonies, sent by subscription,

"and the prayers of the church, as many a poor boy before him.

"Usually they went and were never heard from again,

"and their existence was soon forgotten.

"Now one of them had returned like a gilded ghost,

"successful and richly dressed,

"and he'd come back to taunt the stay-at-homes

"with his boasting talk and his money."

In the pages that follow,

Lee describes the murder of this man,

who apparently had made his fortune farming cattle in New Zealand,

and how a conspiracy of silence engulfed the village

in the months and years to follow,

but just how true to life is this retelling?

Let's go.

'Local historian Elizabeth Skinner knows where the victim was buried,

'but his gravestone in nearby Sheepscombe

'has some surprising revelations.'

And so here is the grave,

which amazes me,

because this looks to me like a War Graves Commission headstone.

Indeed it is. Albert Birt was a discharged soldier,

and soldiers were entitled to a war grave until the 31st of August 1921,

-and he died in 1919.

-Oh, really?

In no part of Cider With Rosie does Laurie Lee mentioned that

Birt was a serviceman,

but Elizabeth has some more surprises in store.

We found the report of the inquest in the Stroud Journal in 1919,

and it told us what we thought would probably be

the closest to the truth.

Albert Birt was a local man.

He'd grown up here.

But did he go to New Zealand? I mean, was he...?

We have no evidence that he ever went to New Zealand,

but at the time of the incident,

he was living in Manchester

-and working as a woodturner...

-Ah.

..and he'd come back from Manchester to visit his sister.

Now, in Cider With Rosie,

we are told that he's come back just at Christmas

-to see his parents...

-His parents.

..and of course, it's not Christmas.

It's March.

The idea of a secret,

and the idea of a community cohering tightly together to defend a secret,

is very much there, isn't it?

Do you think that was Laurie Lee's aim

in embroidering the story or poeticising the story the way he did?

It's a good image, isn't it?

That of keeping the story within the village,

and he wanted to give this kind of impression of this closed

society in this valley.

-A kind of Eden of the past...

-Yes, yes.

..where the loyalty to your neighbour outstripped

-your loyalty to almost anything else.

-Everything, everything else.

The account of the murdered ex-serviceman,

dressed up in mythic terms by Lee,

is a reminder of the impact of the Great War

on small, rural communities.

It's something that colours everything in Cider With Rosie,

including one of its most famous scenes.

"The first big festival that I can remember was Peace Day in 1919.

"It was a day of magical transformation, of tears,

"and dusty sunlight.

"I was John Bull - whoever he was -

"but I quickly surmised his importance.

"Later, I was photographed in a group by a rockery,

"surrounded by girls in butter muslin,

"by druids and eastern kings.

"I am a figure rooted in unshakeable confidence,

"oval, substantial and proud."

-Oh, my goodness.

-That's the photograph of Laurie

that's mentioned in the book.

And that must be Laurie in the middle.

That's Laurie there in the top hat, yes.

Mentioned in the book, stood next to him is Poppy.

-This is Poppy.

-Poppy?

And this is interesting.

-She looks a little minx, doesn't she?

-She does.

This is interesting if you bear in mind that one of

the early drafts of Cider With Rosie

-had it as Cider With Poppy.

-Really?

This Poppy was really called Rosie, of course.

-Oh, she was? This one was called Rosie?

-Yes, this Poppy is...

Oh, so this is Rosie? Do you think?

This is the Rosie who died very recently,

and who certainly has been proclaimed as the Rosie in the book,

though Laurie said, over many years,

that he's drawn in a number of different elements of characters,

but there is a very strong suggestion that this

Rosie or Poppy was the original.

Though there have been many women over the years who have stood up

in a sort of a Slad Valley "I'm Spartacus" moment,

saying, "I was Rosie, I was Rosie."

So there's certain traces of all of them.

But the Rosie who emerges from the pages of this book

is a fully-formed character in her own right,

one who has made as much of an impact in the memories of readers

as she did in Laurie Lee's imagination.

"The day Rosie Burdock decided to take me in hand

"was a motionless day of summer,

"creamy, hazy and amber coloured,

"with the beech trees standing in heavy sunlight,

"as though clogged with wild, wet honey."

It's harvest time in Slad,

and Rosie has got hold of a jar of cider,

which she's going to share with the young and impressionable Laurie.

"Huge and squat, the jar lay on the grass like an unexploded bomb.

"We lifted it up, unscrewed the stopper,

"and smelt the whiff of fermented apples.

"I held the jar to my mouth and rolled my eyes sideways,

"like a beast at a waterhole.

" 'Go on,' said Rosie."

Now, every word of this is steeped in sexual tension,

and we can see Laurie Lee relying on biblical motives -

notably, obviously, with the Garden of Eden -

to heighten this atmosphere of myth, of mythology,

but he subverts the tradition,

and as the young man succumbs to temptation, and drinks the cider,

it yields to him a veritable horde of heavenly delights.

"Never to be forgotten,

"that first long secret drink of golden fire,

"juice of those valleys and of that time,

"the wine of wild orchards, of russet summer,

"of plump red apples and Rosie's burning cheeks.

"Never to be forgotten, or ever tasted again."

It wasn't just Laurie who succumbed to the charms of Rosie.

This is the chapter that ensured the book's enduring popularity

for generations to come,

and with the proceeds of the book,

Lee returned to his home village of Slad and bought a cottage,

but while further books followed,

none quite caught the imagination of the public like Cider With Rosie.

The success of Cider With Rosie changed Laurie Lee's life,

finally and irrevocably,

but the popularity of his masterpiece has had a lasting effect

on the reputation of the book itself.

It's a good case, isn't it?

Of the instant classic, as it were,

that then curiously fades away.

One aspect of that, I think,

is that it got itself taken up as a school book.

It became a book that every schoolchild was supposed to read.

"Good for kids."

Kind of a fate worse than death, really.

Despite that fate, for me, there is one chapter in this book that

shows just how significant and enduring Lee's writing is.

This is the last place I've come to

on my journey through Laurie Lee country

and it's to the graveyard in Slad.

Laurie himself is buried over there.

He's been there these last 20 years -

but I haven't come to find Laurie Lee.

I've come to find someone else.

"Our mother was a buffoon, extravagant and romantic,

"and was never taken wholly seriously,

"but within her, she nourished a delicacy of taste,

"a sensibility,

"a brightness of spirit,

"which though continuously bludgeoned

"by the cruelties of her luck,

"remained uncrushed and unembittered to the end."

This is the grave of Annie Emily Lee, nee Light -

Laurie's mother -

and as you can see, it's very neglected and unkempt.

But in the chapter about her in Cider With Rosie,

which is simply called Mother,

Laurie Lee pays her one of the most profound

and powerful tributes made to any human being in all literature,

and although there are examples of events and people being

really made mythic in Cider With Rosie,

his portrait of his mother,

of Annie Lee, is completely unfeigned.

"Nothing now that I ever see that has an edge of gold around it -

"the change of a season, a jewelled bird in a bush,

"the eyes of orchids, water in the evening,

"a thistle, a picture, a poem -

"but my pleasure pays some brief duty to her.

"She tried me at times to the top of my bent,

"but I absorbed from birth, as now I know,

"the whole earth through her jaunty spirit."

Laurie Lee's recollections of childhood in the aftermath

of the Great War, but written in the shadow of another conflict,

may be more impressionistic than conventional memoirs,

but this book tells us so much about the experience of growing up

that a scrupulously literal account might not.

After the Second World War, readers were hungry for a lost Eden,

and Laurie Lee gave them just that,

painting a picture of a vanished world

which was full, certainly, of sensuous delights,

but also of savagery and cruelty,

and that picture has lasted, now,

and resonated for almost 60 years.

Long may it continue to do so.

If you want to know more about Laurie Lee's Cider With Rosie,

or any of the other books in the series, then go to...

..and follow the links to the Open University.