Cider with Rosie

I was barely 16 when I read Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee. It was not an ‘O’ level text and made a change from the historical, romantic fiction I was devouring at the time. Although I couldn’t articulate it then, it marked a time when I started to love words, not just those I had gleaned from Shakespeare but poetry of all kinds including glimpses of Sassoon and Owen I had studied the year before. Our set examination texts seemed a dreary selection from A Book of Narrative Verse; I was ripe for something different, modern, accessable. I found it in Laurie Lee’s sensual descriptions of his country childhood:
‘snowclouds of elder blossom banked in the sky…’
‘Bees blew like cake-crumbs through the golden air, white butterflies like sugared wafers…’
‘…a motionless day of summer, creamy hazy and amber-coloured, with the beech trees standing in heavy sunlight as though clogged with wild honey.’
In the author’s words, as he was set down from the carrier’s cart in the opening chapter, ‘I was lost and did not expect to be found again.’
I searched libraries for Laurie Lee’s poetry and drank in lines like ‘There is a pike in the Lake/ Whose blue teeth eat the midnight stars’ or ‘Slow moves the acid breath of noon/ over the copper-coated hill…’
And so it began, a real love of literature, studying it in greater depth and a lifetime of reading – everything, anything; an insatiable appetite for words from Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell's lyrics to Chekhov's plays and Flaubert’s novels.
Dylan Thomas wrote: ‘I should say I wanted to write poetry in the beginning because I had fallen in love with words’. Although I can hear Alan Bennett’s mocking voice in The History Boys it is still true that reading took me into other lands of magic casements and withering sedge. The words themselves seemed to sustain me, still do, and I favour novels by writers who are also poets. When I read Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels recently I wept at the sheer beauty of lines she had written.
When Laurie Lee wrote, at the end of Cider with Rosie,’ the poems I made which I never remembered were the first and last of that time’ I knew one day I would be a writer – there was music inside me that had to come out.
After years of writing school reports and schemes of work I have finally found time for stories and poems to tumble out from somewhere deep within and I would encourage anyone else with a similar yearning to do the same. Never have I felt more alive, more elated than when I am writing.
The love of reading has never wained and I am grateful to the Reading Circle at the local library for the opportunities to discuss fiction. Once a month kindred spirits meet in my sitting room to share our love of reading poetry and great pleasure is had by all listening to John Clare’s descriptions of birds, Yeats’ Ireland or Philip Larkin’s ‘Cut Grass’.
A few years ago my husband and I spent a weekend in Laurie Lee’s village, Slad, in Gloucestershire, walking the footpaths to soak up the spirit of the place. On the journey there we listened to a tape of the author reading Cider with Rosie again, savouring those harsh scenes of country life through the seasons but hauntingly beautifully in description.
It was good to go back to where it all started for me. Fired with youthful enthusiasm I almost felt I too could have walked out one midsummer morning and found my life all over again.
‘In my end is my beginning,’ as Eliot once wrote.