As regular followers of this blog may already know, I often read memoirs, not a few of which have been British (see all of James Herriot or Goodbye to All That). Laurie Lee was born in middle of the Great War, deep in green England, and begins his memoirs by warning readers that some of what he recalls may have been obscured by the fog of young memories. Quickly I understood his meaning, as I often felt I was reading a lot of pretty words, as opposed to a lucid story.
As I was reading, felt more like a collection of anecdotes centered around the dotty and colorful characters who peopled Lee's childhood than a work that captured the zeitgeist of rural, post-war England. Only after reflecting that this was the same time period captured by Edmund Love did I realize that in describing these individuals, Lee was reproducing the time and place - and how very, very different they are from Love's midwestern memories. Lee was not kidding when he wrote that his generation saw, "the end of a thousand years' life."Coincidentally, where Lee ends is nearly where Herriot begins. Between them, a reader is privy to some half-century of life in rural England.
Cider with Rosie ends rather abruptly, with Lee an adolescent on the cusp of leaving home, an adventures he remembers in As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, a continuation of Cider with Rosie, which, at this time, I do not anticipate reading.
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