‘For the most part we stayed in our tight green valley, as snug as beans in a pod’ and the days ‘crowed and chirped and rang’.Ĭider with Rosie is a collection of vignettes about Laurie’s mother, the ‘steaming school life’, and his rivalling ancient grannies. There were outings to the choir, harvest festivals, feasts, concerts, penny-dances. Life was communally lived, vivid and intense.
They supplemented their low income by living off the land: bottling fruit and gathering wild berries keeping pigs and hens hunting rabbits, brewing flowery wines. One villager would take on the role of midwife, another laid out the dead there was a pig-sticker and a dry-stone wall builder. Most were in service to the Squire, a benevolent man who opened his garden for special occasions and his pond for fishing and skating.
Thirty or so families lived in the cottages that straggled along the road. The pouring rain would hurtle down its steep embankments so ferociously that one year the cloth mills along the bottom of the valley were washed away. It was a place of ‘long steamy silences’, interrupted by the sounds of horses’ hooves, pigeons and mowing machines. Set in a secretive, steep valley two miles from Stroud, this village was Lee’s world until he was nineteen. To a cottage that stood in a half-acre of garden on a steep bank above a lake…and all for three and sixpence a week. That was the day we came to the village, in the summer of the last year of the First World War.
There were rooks in the chimneys, frogs in the cellar, and a garden steeped in roses. It had oak beams, mushrooms on the ceilings, crumbling walls and ‘thumps and shadows’. With four stepchildren and three sons of her own (Annie’s daughter Frances died aged four), Annie Lee settled them all into the three-storey cottage. How when you first got out of West’s cart & was placed at the top of the bank and the grass was so long & high, how frightened you were & how you cried… You brought back so many things to my memory so vividly. He was at once dwarfed by the towering grass, ‘each blade tattooed with tiger-skins of sunlight’, with ‘snow-clouds of elder blossom banked in the sky’ and ‘frenzied larks, screaming, as though the sky were tearing apart.’ In the summer of 1918 Laurie Lee’s three-year old self was set down from a carrier’s cart in the tiny village of Slad in Gloucestershire.
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