Fans of Lee’s books often visit on a pilgrimage of sorts, to see for themselves the village they already know so well, thanks to Cider with Rosie (1959). There are murals, exhibitions and regular poetry readings and music nights. To walk around this area is to walk in his footsteps – there is a Laurie Lee Wood and the Laurie Lee Wild Way, lined with his writings printed on Perspex plaques.
Laurie Lee is inextricably linked to the Five Valleys, this small pocket of the Cotswolds in the West of England. It feels, as it often does in The Woolpack, as if the connections with the past, those generations before me who called this place home, are tangible ones, worn into the dark, musty, cider-soaked fabric of the place. The cider I am drinking is, inevitably, pressed from local apples: ‘golden fire, wine of wild orchids and of that valley and that time and of Rosie’s burning cheeks’. From the other, the churchyard, where he is buried beneath the words ‘He lies in the valley he loved’, is just visible. From one window, the view dips down into a valley, and you can see a path that leads into Stroud, where Lee was born in 1914. I write these words, appropriately enough, in The Woolpack – the Slad pub that once claimed Laurie Lee as its most famous patron – with a pint of cider at my elbow. I belonged to that generation which saw, by chance, the end of a thousand years’ life.
The last days of my childhood were also the last days of the village.
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