A helping of 1920s rural bliss? Revisiting Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie
With a sideways look at the Durrell's Corfu and Bloomsbury's Charleston
I first read Cider with Rosie as a child, although in truth it’s not really a children’s book. That didn’t stop it being anthologised in my primary school textbook (the description of Laurie’s first day at school) and I also found a copy at home, in Penguin, alongside that other not-really-a-children’s-book memoir, Alison Uttley’s A Country Child. For anyone who ever thought rural England a safe and gentle place, reading both was sobering, sometimes frightening.
Still, who doesn’t long for a rural retreat, especially when the outside world is darkly threatening? Who wouldn’t lust after ‘a cottage … in a half acre of garden on a steep bank above a lake … with a pump and apple trees, syringa and strawberries, rooks in the chimney, frogs in the cellar, mushrooms on the ceiling, and all for three and sixpence a week’?
Rosie and her cider jug, prone across the cover of Lee’s memoir – a bestseller and instant classic when published in 1959 – offers all the charms of a simpler and more innocent age. Cider with Rosie takes place between the wars but its wild flowers, tumbledown cottages and almost primitive village relationships seems a world away from much of 1920s and 1930s Britain: whether the crippling unemployment of the industrial heartlands or the ribbon suburbs round London.
The first impression is of gleaming sunshine. In this respect Lee’s memoir has quite a bit in common with Gerald Durrell’s gloriously comic My Family and Other Animals (the basis for the successful TV series The Durrells) set in the then unspoilt paradise of Corfu. Both memoirs feature idiosyncratic families, living in rural semi-wildness and headed up by delightfully eccentric matriarchs – or perhaps matriarch is too grand a word for the rather fey Mothers Durrell and Lee, loved by their many offspring but too absent-minded to exert much control. While Mother Durrell collects detectives stories and recipe books, Mother Lee acquires old china; both love pootering about in their magnificently overflowing gardens. Their sons’ memoirs, published as the rationing-and-postwar-austerity 1950s drew to a close, offered an escapism that was irresistible.
If Durrell’s Corfu is a world away from drab urban England, Lee’s village of Slad is also geographically and culturally distinct. Living in a cottage on a bank, the seven Lee children are regularly awakened to tackle floodwater in the kitchen; their neighbours are ancient, widow-crones who might once have been accused of witchcraft. There is an incredible lushness of nature – lyrically described by Lee, who was a poet as well as a memoirist. True, there is deprivation, as there always was in rural areas. But the crippling unemployment that made 1920s Britain so far from roaring – the fall out from World War I and a harsh austerity policy – seems to have passed Lee by. There were dole queues and Hunger Marches elsewhere, but Slad was close to nature: its inhabitants, however poor, had gardens and the surrounding woods (one of Lee’s uncles supported his family as a forester, building a dwelling amongst the trees and foraging for food).
Yet when Lee writes that life in Slad had remained the same for ‘thousands of years’ this is not completely true. Lee’s mother regularly takes the bus to town, and one of his uncles is a bus driver. His older sisters go to the cinema and work in shops or offices – unlike his mother, who like most women of her generation, went into domestic service. (Domestic service remained the biggest employer of women well into the twentieth century.) Slad’s villagers make an annual pilgrimage by charabanc to the beach at Weston Supermare. It’s very different from the entirely horse-powered and candle-lit world of Alison Uttley’s Country Child, forty years before.
In other ways, too, the times made their mark. Most obviously, Lee’s mother is a single parent. She is not a war widow, but the war still effectively ended her marriage: her upwardly mobile husband took a clerical job in the Army Pay Corps and never came home again. While he lives in suburban Morden, Mother looks after the children, including her step children. This kind of household, headed by a woman and heavily reliant on war pensions or, in the Lee’s case, payments from an absent partner, was surely rare before the war. Lee recalls many ex-servicemen in the village, including a deserter. His own ex-army uncles included the forester, the bus driver, a publican and another who decamped to build railways in North America.
In fact, rural Britain had long been unable to support all its offspring. In one of the most shocking episodes of the book, Lee writes about how a boy sent off to “the Colonies” returned as a man to brag about his success. He made the mistake of doing so in the village pub during a snowstorm: the next morning, his corpse was discovered with its head kicked in. The villagers closed ranks and took the secret to the grave. (Lee himself abandoned Slad in 1934; his subsequent adulthood was shaped by his service in the Spanish Civil War – the subject of another memoir – and the creative opportunities provided by the Second World War.)
To Lee, looking back, his childhood must have taken on an idyllic quality. He acknowledges the bleakness (“if you survived melancholia and rotting lungs …” he remarks cheerily at one point) yet the overall picture is golden. Perhaps rural backwaters were increasingly enticing in a darkening world, particularly for artistic types. Nearer London, the Bloomsbury set (Lee himself lived in Bloomsbury for a while) had established their own rural outpost at Charleston, escaping the grimness of the First World War. There Vanessa Bell took on the role of the kindly, eccentric matriarch; her partner, Duncan Grant, was loved even while allowed to roam (although he was more present than Laurie’s father); and Maynard Keynes played at times the peripatetic son – Laurie Lee himself in young adulthood – bringing gossip from the big city, and souvenirs from foreign climes, and at others the generous benefactor. Like Slad, Charleston was indifferent to the norms and conventions of those outside: it had its own way of doing things. Both had their secrets, often sexual. In Slad, Lee documents attempted rape, incest and fumbling adolescent encounters; at Charleston, Vanessa Bell’s daughter was for many years deceived as to the true identity of her father; much later, she discovered that he’d previously been the lover of her husband.
The charm of the eccentric rural retreat continues. Cider with Rosie and The Durrells have both had TV success, Charleston is a tourist destination, with gardens and interiors preserved for the curious (minus the mountains of papers and cigarette butts). The secrets and jealousies are easily forgotten, or take on a sepia quaintness. Yet these rural oases were the products of their times.