World Book Day
An annual appreciation
To commemorate World Book Day, and also as a parent’s lament that our children, once avid readers, now seem incapable of holding a book let alone reading one, we’ve decided to institute an annual appreciation of Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie.
We’ve chosen this book for four reasons. Firstly, most obviously and least importantly, it’s got “cider” in the title, although cider itself is almost entirely absent from the narrative. Secondly, it’s about Gloucestershire, the county where we find our home, and about a part of Gloucestershire, the Slad Valley, that is strikingly beautiful, that is home to a truly lovely pub, The Woolpack, that sells our cider from time to time, and close to where we get some of our apples. Thirdly, and most importantly, it’s a beautiful book, lyrical and poetic, that immerses the reader into childhood and life. It’s captivating. The final reason is, of course, that we love it … and to assuage parental anxiety we need to remind ourselves that we successfully - but regrettably - avoided Dickens, Brontë and Austen in our youth and first read Cider with Rosie in our forties. There is always hope.
So, here are three extracts, taken from parts of the book chosen entirely at random. One doesn’t have to read too far or for too long before coming across another captivating thought or evocative description.
“Living down there was like living in a bean-pod; one could see nothing but the bed one lay in. Our horizon of woods was the limit of our world. For weeks on end the trees moved in the wind with a dry roaring that seemed a natural utterance of the landscape. In winter they ringed us with frozen spikes, and in summer they oozed over the lips of the hills like layers of thick green lava. Mornings, they steamed with mist or sunshine, and almost every evening threw streamers above us, reflecting sunsets we were too hidden to see.”
“Then the schoolhouse chimney caught fire. A fountain of sparks shot high into the night, writhing and sweeping on the wind, falling and dancing along the road. The chimney hissed like a firework, great rockets of flame came gushing forth, emptying the tiny house, so that I expected to see chairs and tables, knives and forks, radiant and burning, to follow. The moss-tiles smouldered with sulphurous soot, yellow jets of smoke belched from cracks in the chimney. We stood in the rain and watched it entranced, as if the sight had been saved for this day. As if the house had been saved, together with a year’s bad litter, to be sent up in flames and rejoicing.”
Laurie Lee's factual accuracy has been questioned, but that surely is missing the point; the book was never intended to be a diary, it’s a “recollection” of his childhood, written when he was in his early forties. To question the facts is to miss the poetry (although it does seem that the schoolhouse did catch fire on Armistice Day).
“The murder and the drowning were long ago, but to me they still loom large; the sharp death-taste, tooth-edge of violence, the yielding to the water of that despairing beauty, the indignant blood in the snow. They occurred at a time when the village was the world and its happenings all I knew. 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. This cave that we inhabited looked backwards through chambers that led to our ghostly beginnings; and had not, as yet, been tidied up, or scrubbed clean by electric light, or suburbanized by a Victorian church, or papered by cinema screens.”