CIDER WITH ROSIE (originaal 1959; 1984 väljaanne)

The edge of day; a boyhood in the west of England

Cider with Rosie is English poet Laurie Lee's story of his childhood in a small village in the Cotswolds. It begins in June 1918 when Lee was just three years old and his family had just moved to the countryside. There are seven in the household: Lee's mother, his three older half-sisters, and his two brothers, one older and one younger. Laurie's father is away at war, but even though he survives the war, he chooses to live apart the rest of his life and rarely sees his children.

Much of Lee's memoir is devoted to painting a portrait of the English village in its primitive and self-sufficient isolation, a way of life that will come to an end before young Laurie reaches adulthood. It was 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 the electric light, or suburbanized by a Victorian church, or papered by cinema screens."

Lee also gives us his poet's impression of the natural world and the passage of the seasons. He describes winter in his valley as, not a change of seasons, but of another place. "And somehow one never remembered the journey towards it; one arrived, and winter was here. The day came suddenly when all the details were different and the village had to be rediscovered."

Except for a chronic lung disease, young Laurie's life is typical for its time and place. There is the toddler's gradual realization that he is not the center of the universe, his first reluctant days in school, playground fights, secret escapades, holidays, church festivals, family outings, weird neighbors and relatives, village crimes and scandals, and a young man's first sexual experiences.

Regarding the latter, Lee has some interesting observations. "As for us boys, it is certain that most of us, at some stage or other of our growth, would have been rounded up under current law, and quite a few shoved into reform school.... It is not crime that has increased, but its definition. The modern city, for youth, is a police trap."

Cider with Rosie is a beautifully told, simple but revealing tale of English country life in the 1920s. It shows us a way of life forever destroyed, according to the author, by the coming of the automobile, bringing Bristol and London as close as the next town, and spelling the end of the cultural, social and religious traditions that defined the village. ( )

The edge of day; a boyhood in the west of England

This is not a fast-paced adventure book but it does create a beautiful picture of quiet country lanes, honeysuckle on the breeze and both the wonders and tragedies of living so far out in a world controlled solely by the forces of nature.
It's a lovely portrait of childhood innocence and growing up, after reading it I got a desperate urge to visit the Cotswolds. The world of childhood is a very small bubble and this takes that alongside the equally small world in which this novel is set and it creates the idea of a place quite apart from the rest of the world, almost secretive.
Did you ever make a secret den in the countryside when you were a child? If so, imagine crawling into it to discover that it led to a secret world that kept to itself and the outside didn't know about... that's the feeling you get about the setting of the novel, like you've crawled into a secret world. And what's more, it's completely real. A beautiful story.
So why did it only get three stars? Because as much as I marveled at this beautiful world that the author told of so wonderfully, nothing much happened. It's a very sweet and subtle story but it could lead to boredom at times. I don't regret reading it though. ( )

Der Autor erzählt in diesem autobiographischen Buch über seine Kindheit in England auf dem Land ab 1917. Es gibt noch keinen Fortschritt, das Dorf ist abgeschieden, selbst Verbrechen werden in der Gemeinschaft abgehandelt. Der Stil des Buchs ist wunderbar, eine nahezu verzauberte Sprache schlug mich von Angang an in Bann. Das Buch lebt von der Atmosphäre und den Bildern, die es erzeugt. ( )