Laurie Lee
| Laurie Lee | |
|---|---|
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| Born | 26 June 1914 Stroud, Gloucestershire, England, United Kingdom |
| Died | 13 May 1997 (aged 82) Slad, Gloucestershire, England, United Kingdom |
| Occupation | Author, screenwriter, poet |
Laurence Edward Alan "Laurie" Lee, MBE (26 June 1914 – 13 May 1997) was an English poet, novelist and screenwriter, who was brought up in the village of Slad and went to the Central Boys' School, Stroud, Gloucestershire. His most famous work was an autobiographical trilogy which consisted of Cider with Rosie (1959), As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969) and A Moment of War (1991). The first volume recounts his childhood in the Slad Valley. The second deals with his leaving home for London and his first visit to Spain in 1935, and the third with his return to Spain in December 1937 to join the Republican International Brigades.
Having been born in Stroud on 26 June 1914, Lawrence Edward Alan Lee moved with his family to the village of Slad in 1917, the move with which Cider with Rosie opens. After fighting in the First World War with the Royal West Kent Regiment, Lee's father, Reginald Joseph Lee, did not return to the family. Lee and his brothers grew up loving their mother's (Annie Emily Light) family, the Lights, and intensely disliking the Lee side. His sister, Frances Nemariah Joan Lee died in September 1915 aged 3 when Lawrence Lee was a toddler. He had older siblings from his father's first marriage, including Dorothy, Phyllis and Marjorie. His brother Jack Lee (born 1913) was to become a film director.
At 12, Lee went to the Central Boys' School in Stroud. In his notebook for 1928, when he was 14 he listed "Concert and Dance Appointments", for at this time he was in demand to play his violin at dances.
He left the Central School at 15 to become an errand boy at a Chartered Accountants in Stroud. In 1931 he first found the Whiteway Colony, two miles from Slad, a colony founded by Tolstoyan anarchists. It gave him his first smattering of politicisation and was where he met the composer Benjamin Frankel and the "Cleo" who appears in As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. In 1933 he met Sophia Rogers, an "exotically pretty girl with dark curly hair" who had moved to Slad from Buenos Aires, an influence on Lee who said later in life that he only went to Spain because "a girl in Slad from Buenos Aires taught me a few words of Spanish."
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Wikipedia