He makes the mistake of bragging in the pub about all the money he has made. Take the famous passage in Cider With Rosie involving the murder of a villager who goes to New Zealand and returns, years later, a wealthy man. Let’s compare his spoken and written accounts of the same incident. Would Lee have approved of such a philistine project? The finished product – billed, presumptuously, as a Penguin Classic – is the equivalent of an author’s turn at a literary festival, a thin, uneven, chatty version of a prose work of infinitely greater subtlety and richness. A couple of years ago, David Parker, who made the obscure HTV documentary, found his recordings of Lee in a mis-labelled box and presented them to Penguin, who have now published a transcription in a very thin book of barely 100 pages. He was taken to various different locations around Slad – the village pond, the church, the pub – where he talked about incidents from his childhood that he had first covered, at greater length, some 35 years before in Cider With Rosie. In 1994, his 80th year, he recorded a documentary for HTV. Journalists and telly people loved interviewing him: he spoke with a lovely Gloucestershire burr, and well-rounded sentences rolled from his mouth. ‘Can you tell me where Laurie Lee’s buried?’īy now, he had become a valued part of the heritage industry, an author as famous as his books. One day, when Lee was getting on for 80 years old, a group of schoolchildren approached him outside the village pub.
Consequently, coachloads of fifth-formers were regularly bussed to the Gloucestershire village of Slad, where it is set. Cider With Rosie was to become an O-level set text.
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