Gazing at the bucolic countryside
surrounding the village of Slad, roughly midway between Bath and Cheltenham, it
is hard to imagine how Laurie Lee could have torn himself away when he
"walked out one midsummer morning" to embark on his epic walk through
Spain. In fact, although he was very
attached to the village of his birth, he
did feel its limitations, and as well as his foreign escapades, in later life
he made regular trips up to London,
while maintaining a home and family in Slad.
That said, he found plenty of material from his early life in the
village for his best-known work Cider With Rosie, an account of his
Gloucestershire childhood with all its ups and downs, from jolly japes at the
local school to the loss of a sibling, who died "suddenly, silently,
without complaint", not to mention his friendship with the Rosie of the
title, who was complicit in Laurie's initiation into cider. Cider With Rosie was followed by two more memoirs:
As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, covering the walk through Spain, and A Moment Of War, about his return to Spain to fight
for the Republican cause.
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| The former village school. |
Cider With Rosie is full of delightfully
graphic descriptions of Slad and the surrounding countryside.
Right in the first chapter he manages to
convey not only the sights, but also the sounds and smells of the land outside
the family home, Rosebank.
Lee has just arrived at
the cottage for the first time at three years old, and he describes the sight
of the grass which "towered above me and all around me, each blade
tattooed with tiger-skins of sunlight"; the sound of "grasshoppers
that chirped and chattered and leapt through the air like monkeys"; and
the smell of "the ground, rank with sharp odours of roots and nettles".
The village itself is "a scattering of
some twenty or thirty houses", while the roofs of the houses in the
sunshine would sparkle "like crystallized honey".
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| Rosebank, the house where Lee spent his childhood. |
Slad Valley is an idyllic green fold of countryside set among the rolling hills
of the southern Cotswolds. The village
has just one pub, The Woolpack, which is just across the road from where Laurie
Lee and his wife Kathy used to live. Lee
was a regular visitor to the pub, which gets a mention in Cider With Rosie, and
which makes the most of its associations with the writer with pictures on the
wall and even a beer produced by the local Uley Brewery named after him. The village church, where Lee used to sing in
the choir, is also by the roadside. The
school he attended is also still there, although it is no longer a school,
having been converted to a house. The
village is ranged over one side of the valley, and in the lower part is a small
lake next to which is Rosebank, which the Lee family rented for princely sum of three and sixpence a week. The Slad Valley
has repeatedly been threatened with housing development. Laurie Lee helped to fend off one such
development during his lifetime, but more recently there has been another
attempt to develop the area. Happily for
this beautiful corner of the Cotswolds it was reported just the other day that
the plan for a housing estate in the valley is likely to be rejected.
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| Holy Trinity church. |
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| The Woodpack. |
A short distance from Slad is the town of Stroud, where Laurie Lee started attending the Central School when he reached twelve, and where
he later worked as an office boy for a firm of chartered accountants. Stroud is a hilly market town with a range of
independent shops; it prides itself on its commitment to all things organic,
and was in at the start of the Organic food movement. It also has a thriving artistic community;
Jasper Conran once referred to the town as the Covent
Garden of the Cotswolds.
During the industrial revolution the town's economy centred on textiles,
and at one point there were 150 mills in the surrounding valleys. Many of the former mills, although no longer
serving their original purpose, have been taken over by small businesses.
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| Laurie Lee's gravestone. The inscription reads "He lies in the valley he loved". He died in 1997. |
Map of the area.
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