Laurie Lee - Poet and Author

Laurie Lee painted by Anthony Devas ARA in 1944

Poet and author Laurie Lee is one of only a handful of people of whom it can truly be said: he was a legend in his own lifetime. An immensely gentle and kind man, with a great sense of humour and a tremendous appreciation of beauty, his works are read, enjoyed and admired the world over.

Laurie Lee came to live in Slad, near Stroud, at the age of three. He went to the village school and later to Stroud Central School before leaving Gloucestershire for Europe in 1935. He came back to Slad to live with his wife Cathy in the early 1960s and remained until his death in 1997. His memories of his childhood in Slad before the arrival of the motorcar are vividly recorded in his most famous work, the autobiographical Cider with Rosie.

Part of Slad Village including the Packhorse pub

Primarily a poet, Laurie Lee published four volumes of poetry including The Sun My Monument (1944), and A Bloom of Candles (1947) before writing Cider with Rosie. Although his poetry has received critical acclaim and remains his first love, it is his prose works which have brought him the recognition of a wider audience.
As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, about his experiences in Spain before the Civil War, followed 10 years after Cider with Rosie, and his last published work, A Monument of War, considered by many to be his best book, completed the trilogy in 1991. Other works have included A Rose for Winter, about a trip he made to Andalusia 15 years after the Civil War, and numerous contributions to journals and magazines.
During the war he worked for the Ministry of Information and from 1950-51 was Caption-Writer-In-Chief and Curator of Eccentricities for the Festival of Britain. He was awarded the MBE in 1952. Laurie Lee died in 1997 aged 83.

I was set down from the carrier's cart at the age of three; and there with a sense of bewilderment and terror my life in the village began.
The June grass, amongst which I stood, was taller than I was, and I wept. I had never been so close to grass before. It towered above me and all around me, each blade tattooed with tiger-skins of sunlight. It was knife-edged, dark, and a wicked green, thick as a forest and alive with grasshoppers that chirped and chattered and leapt though the air like monkeys.
I was lost and didn't know where to move.

The Woolpack Pub Sign - Laurie Lee's local in Slad

A tropic heat oozed up from the ground, rank with sharp odours of roots and nettles. Snow-clouds of elder-blossom banked in the sky, showering upon me the fumes and flakes of their sweet and giddy suffocation. High overhead ran frenzied larks, screaming, as though the sky were tearing apart.
Cider with Rosie, 1959

'It's cider,' she said. 'You ain't to drink it though. Not much of it, any rate.' Huge and squat, the jar lay on the grass like an unexploded bomb. We lifted it up, unscrewed the stopper, and smelt the whiff of fermented apples. I held the jar to my mouth and rolled my eyes sideways, like a beast at a water-hole. 'Go on,' said Rosie. I took a deep breath ...
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 ...
Cider with Rosie, 1959