Cider With Rosie

BBC · Laurie Lee

Dec 2004 · BBC Digital Audio · Narrated by Full Cast, Niamh Cusack, and Tim McInnerny

About this audiobook

A BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation of Laurie Lee's lyrical autobiography of his childhood in a secluded Cotswold valley. Recorded on location at Westley Farm and the Woolpack Inn in Gloucestershire, Cider with Rosie stars Tim McInnerny as the narrator and Niamh Cusack as Mother. Halcyon days of flower-filled meadows, home-made wines, enthralling stories, and church outings were the essence of his childhood. But there was a harsher side too, leaving the security of his mother's bed, a death close to home, and days at the village school marred by a sadistic teacher, were all part of growing up. As was Rosie. And after his encounter with her under the haywain, Laurie Lee was "never the same again".

About the author

Laurie Lee was born in Stroud, Gloucestershire, in 1914, and was educated at Slad village school and Stroud Central School. At the age on nineteen he walked to London and then travelled on foot through Spain, as described in his book As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. In 1950 he married Catherine Polge and they had one daughter. Cider With Rosie (1959) has sold over six million copies worldwide, and was followed by two other volumes of autobiography: As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969) and A Moment of War (1991). Laurie Lee also published four collections of poems, The Sun My Monument (1944), The Bloom of Candles (1947), My Many-Coated Man (1955) and Packet Poems (1960) as well as The Voyage of Magellan (1948), a verse play for radio, A Rose for Winter (1955), which records his travels in Andalusia, The Firstborn (1964), I Can't Stay Long (1975), a collection of his writing, and Two Women (1983). Laurie Lee died in May 1997. In its obituary the Guardian wrote, 'He has a nightingale inside him, a capacity for sensuous, lyrical precisions'.