Cider with Rosie: A boyhood in the west of England (Time reading program special edition) - Couverture souple

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY MICHAEL MORPURGO

Summer was also the time of these: of sudden plenty, of slow hours and actions, of diamond haze and dust on the eyes; of jazzing wasps and dragonflies, haystooks and thistle-seeds, snows of white butterflies, skylark's eggs, bee-orchids, and frantic ants... All this, and the feeling that it would never end, that such days had come forever... All sights twice-brilliant and smells twice-sharp, all game-days twice as long... we used up the light to its last violet drop, and even then we couldn't go to bed.

Cider With Rosie is the best and most vital kind of memoir, rich with colourful, sensuous impressions of life in an English village after the First World War. It overflows with stories and characters made fantastical by the writer's child-perspective, and it draws the reader irresistibly into the lost land of the past. With this beautiful special edition, Vintage Classics celebrates 100 years since the birth of the author, Laurie Lee, and salutes this remarkable, surprising and well-loved classic.

Includes fascinating extra material from the Laurie Lee archive at the British Museum about the author's life and the first publication of Cider With Rosie

Laurie Lee was born in Stroud, Gloucestershire, in 1914, and was educated at Slad village school and Stroud Central School. In his teens Lee had already began to write poems. He had met two sisters who encouraged him in his writing aspirations. At the age of nineteen he walked to London and then travelled on foot through Spain, where he was trapped by the outbreak of the Civil War. He later returned by crossing the Pyrenees, as described in his book As I Walked Out one Midsummer Morning. During World War II he made documentary films for the General Post Office film unit (1939-40), and the Crown Film Unit (1941-43). From 1944 to 1946 he worked as an editor at the Ministry of Information Publications. In 1950 he married Catherine Polge and they had one daughter.

He died in May 1997.
From the Paperback edition.