Cider with Rosie
First edition
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| Author | Laurie Lee |
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| Cover artist | John Stanton Ward |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English (UK) |
| Published | 1959 (Hogarth Press) |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 284 |
| Followed by | As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning |
Cider with Rosie is a 1959 book by Laurie Lee (published in the US as Edge of Day: Boyhood in the West of England, 1960). It is the first book of a trilogy that continues with As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969) and A Moment of War (1991). It has sold over six million copies worldwide.
The novel is an account of Lee's childhood in the village of Slad, Gloucestershire, England, in the period soon after the First World War. It chronicles the traditional village life which disappeared with the advent of new developments, such as the coming of the motor car, and relates the experiences of childhood seen from many years later. The identity of Rosie was revealed years later to be Lee's distant cousin Rosalind Buckland.
Cider with Rosie was dramatised for television by the BBC on 25 December 1971 and again on 27 December 1998 by Carlton Television for ITV. It was adapted for BBC Radio 4 in 2010. It was again adapted by BBC Television for BBC One on 27 September 2015.
It has also been adapted for the stage by James Roose-Evans at the Theatre Royal Bury St Edmunds.
Rather than follow strict chronological order, Lee divided the book into thematic chapters, as follows:
The dame teacher is called Crabby B, owing to her predilection for suddenly hitting out at the boys for no apparent reason. However, she meets her match in Spadge Hopkins, a burly local farmer's boy, who leaves the classroom one day after placing her on top of one of the cupboards. She is replaced by Miss Wardley from Birmingham, who "wore sharp glass jewellery" and imposes discipline that is "looser but stronger".
This is also the time when Laurie Lee experiences the first stirrings of poetry welling up inside him.
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Wikipedia