By Laurie Lee
A memoir of a Lee's boyhood in a rural village in western England in the 1920s.
The book starts with his earliest memories of his sisters and his mother and his brothers and remarks upon the absence of his father, who was never part of his boyhood life. The stories first appeared in various magazines and newspapers over several years.
It was a large family with his mother taking care of her husband's children from his first marriage plus the ones she had with him, some eight to nine kids all together. The husband was absent, apparently the marriage did not work out and he moved on. But the mother never got over his desertion, hoping that someday he would come back to her. As for child support, he was, according to the author, not a fount of generosity. In fact, there is no interaction in the stories between Laurie and his father. Anyway, they lived in poverty, not helped by the mother's lack of focus.
Laurie clearly enjoyed his time growing up in this small village. His descriptions are a captivating story of the time just before emerging technologies like motor vehicles changed life for people in most western countries. In his village, the horse was still the choice for travel and candles and lanterns provided the lighting, wood and coal for cooking and warmth. Water was still pumped by hand and indoor toilets were rare.
But it was not a life of untouched innocence. He tells the story of a local man who moved to another country but returned home full of money and full of himself. He made the mistake of bragging about it and sneering at the locals while getting drunk in a pub. He was attacked when he left the pub, beaten and robbed by a gang of men from the pub. They beat him unconscious and left him in the snow where his body was found the next day. But the village closed around the killers and no man was ever brought to justice for the murder.
In other story, he tells of a man who had the misfortune to come across the body of a woman who killed herself. And then, a short time later, the same fellow saw a man die in a wagon crash. To the villagers, the fellow became a pariah, for some superstitious reason. As the author tells it:
[He] was avoided after that. We crossed roads when we saw him coming. No one would speak to him or look him in the eyes, and he wasn't allowed to deliver milk any more.
Laurie goes on to explain:
They [the murder and suicide] 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 vaguely ancestral. ...
It was something we just had time to inherit, to inherit and dimly know—the blood and beliefs of generations who had been in this valley since the Stone Age. ... But arriving, as I did, at the end of that age, I caught whiffs of something as old as the glaciers. ... There was also a frank and unfearful attitude to death, and an acceptance of violence as a kind of ritual which no one excused or pardoned.
He goes on to talk about this attitude to violence and sexuality later in the book:
We knew ourselves to be as corrupt as any other community of our size—as any London street, for instance. But there was no talebearing then or ringing up 999; transgressors were dealt with by local opinion, by silence, lampoons or nicknames. What we were spared from seeing—because the village protected itself —were the crime of our flesh written cold in a charge sheet, the shady arrest, the police-court autopsy, the headline of the magistrate's homilies. ...
Our village was clearly no pagan paradise, neither were we conscious of showing tolerance. ... We certainly committed our share of statutory crime. Man-slaughter, arson, robbery, rape cropped up regularly throughout the years. Quiet incest flourished were the roads were bad; some found their comfort in beasts; and there were the usual friendships between men and boys who walked through the fields like lovers. ... The village neither approved nor disapproved, but neither did it complain to authority.
So this is a memoir of another time not so long ago, but it is not afraid to show its lumps and bumps and the nastiness. According to Wikipedia, it is a very popular read in Britain:
The success of the autobiographical novel Cider with Rosie in 1959 allowed Lee to become a full-time independent writer. It continues to be one of the UK's most popular books, and is often used as a set English literature text for schoolchildren. The work depicts the hardships, pleasures and simplicity of rural life in the time of Lee's youth; readers continue to find the author's portrayal of his early life vivid and evocative.
I enjoyed the stories too. A really captivating look back at the time between the two world wars, of life for ordinary folks in ordinary communities.
