Cider with Rosie is a 1959 book by Laurie Lee (published in the US as Edge of Day: Boyhood in the West of England, 1960). It is the first book of a trilogy that continues with As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969) and A Moment of War (1991). It has sold over six million copies worldwide. The novel is an account of Lee's childhood in the village of Slad, Gloucestershire, England, in the period soon after the First World War. It chronicles the traditional village life which disappeared with the advent of new developments, such as the coming of the motor car and relates the experiences of childhood seen from many years later. The identity of Rosie was revealed years later to be Lee's distant cousin Rosalind Buckland.

Summary

Rather than follow strict chronological order, Lee divided the book into thematic chapters, as follows: The village school at that time provided all the instruction we were likely to ask for. It was a small stone barn divided by a wooden partition into two rooms – The Infants and The Big Ones. There was one dame teacher, and perhaps a young girl assistant. Every child in the valley crowding there, remained till he was fourteen years old, then was presented to the working field or factory, with nothing in his head more burdensome than a few mnemonics, a jumbled list of wars, and a dreamy image of the world's geography. Meanwhile we lived where he had left us; a relic of his provincial youth; a sprawling, cumbersome, countrified brood too incongruous to carry with him. He sent us money and we grew up without him; and I, for one, scarcely missed him. I was perfectly content in this world of women, muddle-headed though it might be, to be bullied and tumbled through the hand-to-mouth days ... Her flowers and songs, her unshaken fidelities, her attempts at order, her relapses into squalor, her near madness, her crying for light, her almost daily weeping for her dead child-daughter, her frisks and gaieties, her fits of screams, her love of man, her hysterical rages, her justice towards each of us children – all these rode my Mother and sat on her shoulders like a roosting of ravens and doves. Never to be forgotten, that first long secret drink of golden fire, juice of those valleys and of that time, wine of wild orchards, of russet summer, of plump red apples, and Rosie's burning cheeks. Never to be forgotten, or ever tasted again... ... – white-whiskered, gaitered, booted and bonneted, ancient-tongued last of their world, who thee'd and thou'd both man and beast, called young girls 'damsels', young boys 'squires', old men 'masters', the Squire himself 'He' and who remembered the Birdlip stagecoach, Kicker Harris the old coachman... The girls were to marry; the Squire was dead; buses ran and the towns were nearer. We began to shrug off the valley and look more to the world, where pleasures were more anonymous and tasty. They were coming fast, and we were ready for them.

Adaptations

Cider with Rosie was dramatised for television by the BBC on 25 December 1971, with Country Life later commenting that Hugh Whitemore's script was "rendered into a beguiling, sunny fantasy under Claude Whatham's softly focused direction." Music was by Wilfred Josephs, and Rosemary Leach was nominated for the British Academy Television Award for Best Actress for her roles as Lee's mother and as Helen in The Mosedale Horseshoe. Also in the 1970s, the book was turned into a stage play by James Roose-Evans. It was performed in the West End and later at the Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds, and at the Phoenix Arts Theatre, Leicester, with Greta Scacchi. In 1998, not long after the death of Laurie Lee, Carlton Television made the film Cider with Rosie for the ITV network, with a screenplay by John Mortimer and with archive recordings of Laurie Lee's voice used as narration. The film starred Juliet Stevenson and was first broadcast on 27 December 1998. The book was also adapted for BBC Radio 4 in 2010. There was a second BBC Television production for BBC One, directed by Philippa Lowthorpe, with Samantha Morton as Annie Lee, Timothy Spall as the voice of Laurie Lee, and Annette Crosbie in the cast, which aired on 27 September 2015.

Allusions

A racehorse was registered with the name Cider with Rosie in 1968 and won some races in the 1970s, including the Cesarewitch of 1972.

Sources