cider with rosie (laurie lee)

At one stage towards the end of the book, Lee states that he is describing the last gasp of a way of life which existed for a thousand years. The arrival of the motor car would destroy a social fabric which had survived more or less unchanged since the village he lived in had been founded. So there is a double nostalgia at work in the text. On the one hand for the people, family and friends of his youth. On the other for a world which exists no more, which cannot be revisited. 

Reading the book I thought a lot about my grandparents, in particular my grandfather, who was born in Suffolk and moved to the outskirts of London in the wake of the great depression. HIs upbringing was urban (in Ipswich) so there are many differences, but he too was born into a world that was conclusively lost by the time he was in his mid twenties. My grandfather loved the automobile, the joy of speed which it brought, the connectivity. One of his many jobs as a young man was to be a coach driver, where he would take groups on excursion, much as Lee describes his village’s visit to Weston-Super-Mare. The great game of these excursions, my grandfather told me, was to stop at as many pubs as possible and get the coach driver drunk. Luckily for him, my grandfather was never a great drinker. 

Lee is, one senses, more of a poet than a prose writer, something that works in his favour in what is a Proustian memoir. His evocation of place possesses a sensory feel which is intoxicating. There’s also a disarming honesty, which resists any sense of shame. Warts and all is the way. This also speaks of a rural life which possessed less romanticism, less concern for the niceties of life (killing animals, sexual encounters at an early age, causal violence). There’s a rugged shrug of the shoulders in Lee’s depiction of his teenage flings or the violence of a farmer’s fist. This was how people were and always had been. To suggest that they were failing to adhere to moral or political codes would have seemed bizarre to the villagers, who were instead adhering to a code that had been formed, as Lee puts it, over the course of a thousand years. 

The comparison with Proust is interesting. Lee is no Proust, no-one else was or shall be. Yet his invocation of a lost world is rooted in a quest to capture it in the word. Like Proust, he appears to write in an easy, fluid way, the words seem to “come naturally”. However, the efficacy of each word feels like an imperative. The wrong choice of word would conjure another memory, not the one the writer seeks to invoke. As such the writing is driven by a fierce pragmatism that leads to great beauty.