“We lived where he had left us a relic of his provincial youth a sprawling cumbersome, countrified brood too incongruous to carry with him and I, for one, scarcely missed him. As his father was absent, the large family – five children from his father’s first marriage and three from his second one – was brought up by his capable mother.

This may explain why Cider with Rosie became an instant bestseller when it was published in 1959, selling over six million copies in the UK alone, and continues to be read by children and adults all over the world.One of eight children, Laurie Lee was born in 1914, in Slad, Gloucestershire, then a remote corner of England. This is England on the cusp of the modern era, but it could have been anywhere. She looked smooth and precious, a thing of unplumbable mysteries, and perilous as quicksand.' This beloved classic describes a lost world, a world reflecting the innocence and wonder of childhood, and illuminating an era without electricity or telephones. I did not know what to do about her, nor did I know what not to do. She was yellow and dusty with buttercups and seemed to be purring in the gloom her hair was rich as a wild bee's nest and her eyes were full of stings. bullied and tumbled through the hand-to-mouth days, patched or dressed-up, scolded, admired, swept off my feet in sudden passions of kisses, or dumped forgotten among the unwashed pots.' Lee's memoir opens when he was just a baby younger than three years old and ends as he becomes a young man experiencing his first kiss. I was perfectly content in this world of women. 'We lived where he had left us a relic of his provincial youth a sprawling cumbersome, countrified brood too incongruous to carry with him and I, for one, scarcely missed him.

As his father was absent, the large family - five children from his father's first marriage and three from his second one - was brought up by his capable mother. One of eight children, Laurie Lee was born in 1914, in Slad, Gloucestershire, then a remote corner of England. Laurie Lee's matchless memories of his childhood, told in glittering prose and with a wonderfully wicked sense of comedy, have made Cider with Rosie one of the most famous of all autobiographies. Growing up amongst the fields and woods and characters of the place, Laurie Lee depicts a world that is both immediate and real and belongs to a now-distant past. Cider with Rosie is a wonderfully vivid memoir of childhood in a remote Cotswold village, a village before electricity and cars, a timeless place on the verge of change.

Author of cider with rosie