Laurie Lee

Slad, a steep Cotswold village in Gloucestershire, is the entire subject of Cider with Rosie. Laurie Lee was born in Stroud in 1914 and brought up in Slad by his mother among a crowd of siblings and half-siblings, and his 1959 memoir recalls a valley still lit by oil lamps and reached on foot. The book became a fixture of British school reading and has never gone out of print. Rosie, the girl behind the haycart, was later identified as his distant cousin Rosalind Buckland. Lee walked out of Slad in 1934, went to London as a labourer, then crossed Spain on foot playing the violin for coins, an episode told in As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969). A Moment of War (1991) covers his return to Spain during the civil war and closes the trilogy. He published poetry throughout, and wrote documentary scripts for the Ministry of Information during the war. He died in Slad in 1997 and is buried in the churchyard there.