A passing world
In years gone by, the annual migration of kids trooping off to school dressed up as Harry Potter, Gangsta Granny or Miss Trunchball reminded us that it was World Book Day and time again to celebrate Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie. But the schools were closed so we missed it, another casualty of Covid. But given that Lee’s prose is timeless, here are this year’s three extracts, chosen at random, from this wonderfully lyrical book about childhood, innocence and discovery.
My first encounter with Uncle Ray - prospector, dynamiter, buffalo-fighter, and builder of transcontinental railways - was an occasion of memorable suddenness. One moment he was a legend at the other end of the world, the next he was in my bed. Accustomed only to the sanity bodies of my younger brothers and sisters, I awoke one morning to find snoring besides me a huge and scaly man. I touched the thick legs and knotted arms and pondered the barbs of his chin, felt the crocodile flesh of this magnificent creature, and wondered what it could be.
Earlier in the book, writing about his mother;
To the other girls in the village Mother was something of a case, yet they were curiously drawn towards her. Her strain of fantasy, her deranged sense of fun, her invention, satire, and elegance of manner, must have intrigued and perplexed them equally. One gathered that there were also quarrels at times, jealousies, name-callings, and tears. But there existed a coterie among the Quedgeley girls of which Mother was the exasperating centre. Books were passed round, excursions arranged, boys confronted with witty tongues. “Beatie Thomas, Vi Phillips - the laughs we would have. The things we did. We were terrible.”
A trip to Weston-super-Mare reminds us that although horizons are wider now there is perhaps something eternal in the behaviour of a group of school boys on an organised outing;
In our file of five charabancs, a charioted army, we swept down the thundering hills. At the speed and height of our vehicles the whole valley took on new dimensions; woods rushed beneath us, and fields and flies were devoured in a gulp of air. We were windbourne now by motion and pride, we cheered everything, beast and fowl, and taunted with heavy ironical shouts those unfortunates still working in the fields. We kept this up till we had roared through Stroud, and then we entered the stranger’s country. It was no longer so easy to impress pedestrians that we were the Annual Slad Choir Outing. So we settled down, and opened our sandwiches, and began to criticise the farming we passed through.
From Laurie lee to charles martell
Any review of Cider with Rosie inevitably mentions that the world Laurie Lee remembered - the valley, the village, the characters, the community - has now vanished although the pub, The Woolpack, remains. One could never describe Charles Martell’s pomona, Native Apples of Gloucestershire, as lyrical but it does remind us of this passing world when we consider the Gloucestershire apple varieties that are now lost, probably extinct:
Belcher’s Pearmain, Cooles’ Seedling, Dobbs’ Kernel, Holbert’s Victoria, Mobley’s Sowing, Wheeler’s Russet … and many more.
One of Gloucestershire’s apples that has, happily, survived is Phelps’ Favourite. Martell writes;
Phelps is a well known name in farming circles in Gloucestershire. There were well known father and son cidermakers, Daniel and Harold Phelps at Elm Farm, Tibberton. Many people alive now remember Harold who carried on the cidermaking tradition until his death in the 1950s. In his later years old Harold Phelps used to travel on the bus to Gloucester market with a basket of apples. For this outing he always wore a bowler hat. On one such occasion Glyn Worsnip, then a boy, was travelling in uniform to a meeting of army cadets. Harold assumed Glyn was a ‘real’ soldier and insisted on giving up his seat for him! The Phelps’ cider house was tiled out and at this time must have been unusual and would have set a very high standard. They made bottle conditioned (Champagne style) cider. The remnants of their orchards provided me with cuttings of the Foxwhelp, Spout Apple, Skyrmes Kernel (a Herefordshire variety), possibly the Styre Wilding as well as the famous Hagloe Crab - the only source material of this variety that I have come across. All these old trees are now gone.
A passing world.