Laurie Lee - Early Life and Works

Early Life and Works

Having been born in Stroud, 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 Reg did not return to the family. Lee and his brothers grew up loving their mother's family, the Lights, and intensely disliking the Lee side. At twelve, Laurie went to the Central Boys' School in Stroud. In his notebook for 1928, when he was fourteen 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 fifteen 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 Leo Tolstoyan Anarchists. It gave him his first smattering of politicization 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." At twenty he worked as an office clerk and a builder's labourer, and lived in London for a year before leaving for Santa Eulària des Riu in the island of Ibiza in the summer of 1935. Walking more often than not, he eked out a living by playing his violin. His first encounter with Spain is the subject of As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969).

After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936 Lee was picked up by a British destroyer from Gibraltar, collecting marooned British subjects on the southern Spanish coast. During this period, he met a woman who supported him financially. He started to study for an art degree but returned to Spain in 1937 as an International Brigade volunteer. His service in the Brigade was cut short by his epilepsy. These experiences were recounted in A Moment of War (1991), an austere memoir of his time as a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War. According to many biographical sources, Lee fought in the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) in the Republican army against Franco's Nationalists. After his death there were claims that Lee's involvement in the war was a fantasy; the claims were dismissed as "ludicrous" by his widow.

Before devoting himself entirely to writing in 1951, Lee worked as a journalist and as a scriptwriter. During World War II he made documentary films for the GPO Film Unit (1939–40) and the Crown Film Unit (1941–43). From 1944 to 1946 he worked as the Publications Editor for the Ministry of Information. In 1950 Lee married Catherine Francesca Polge, whose father was Provençal and whose mother was one of The Garman Sisters; they had one daughter, Jessie. From 1950 to 1951 he was caption-writer-in-chief for the Festival of Britain, for which service he was awarded the decoration of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1952.

Cider with Rosie continues to be one of the UK's most popular books, and is sometimes used as a set English literature text for schoolchildren. It captured images of village life from a bygone era of innocence and simplicity. Lee said it took him two years and was written three times. With the proceeds Lee was able to buy a cottage in Slad, the village of his childhood.