Musings

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29152, 12 March 1960, Page 3

Musings

Cider With Rosie. By Laurie Lee. Hogarth Press. 281 pp.

Books as original as this one are uncommon- Mr Lee is well known for his recent poetry collected in “The Bloom of Candles” and “My Many Coated Man.” Cider With Rosie,” however, is the fruit of the poet’s protracted musings over his own childhood and adolescent yeaps. Regarded dispassionately, the story is meagre enough. Mr Lee was the second youngest of a family of eight. They were brought up by their mother, a careless, impulsive, agreeable woman with limited powers of organisation and efficiency. Nevertheless, it was a happy’childhood that the author spent in and out of a tumbledown- cottage in a surprisingly remote Cotswold valley. The First World War was in its last stages when the story opens. “My life began on the carrier’s cart which brought me up the long slow hills to the village and dropped me in the high grass and lost mb.” The cottage stood in a half-acre of garden on a steep bank above a lake; a cottage with three floors and a cellar and a treasure in the walls, with a pump and apple trees, syringa and strawberries, rooks in the chimneys, frogs in the cellar, mushrooms on the ceiling, and all for three and sixpence a week.” The pattern of life which developed in the years that followed is best described in the author’s own words: “Radiating from that house, with its crumbling walls, its thumps and shadows, its fancied foxes under the floor, I moved along paths that lengthened > inch by inch with my mounting strength of days. From stone tp stone in the trackless yard I sent forth my acorn shell of senses, moving through unfathomable oceans like a South Sea savage island—hopping across the Racine. Antennae of eyes and nose and grubbing fingers captured a new tuft of grass, a fem, a slug, the skull of a bird, a grotto of bright snails.” Events etched themselves on this childhood vision with apocalyptic sharpness. ‘Then the schoolhouse chimney caught on fire. A fountain of sparks shot high into the night, writhing and sweeping on the wing, falling and dancirig along the road. The chimney hissed like a firework, great rockets of flame came gushing forth, emptying the tray house, so that I expected to see chairs and tables, knives and forks, radiant and burning, follow-” Slowly and effortlessly, as days and ponths slipped by, this fresh young sensibility received the impression of an incredibly rich experience. This included personalities as striking and diverse as his mother, the man from New Zealand, who was i found frozen to death, Granny Wallow, and Uncle Ray, and, of course, Jo and Bet, and the inimitable Rosie hersplf, "with her tartan frock and cheap glass necklace, and her bare legs brown with hay dust.” Mr Lee’s world ds one that, outside his own imagination, can never exist again. As Marcel Proust remarked, “One’s real life is elsewhere, not in life so-palled, nor yet in what we think of as the after-life, but in some dimension outside life,” in the depths that lie below and about the conscious mind. Time is found to have given a lustre to this recovered experience, and Mr Lee’s sentences add their own harmony to a most attractive book.