Lee, Laurie - Michael Ramsbotham (review date 7 November 1959)

Michael Ramsbotham (review date 7 November 1959)

SOURCE: "A Gloucestershire Lad," in New Statesman, Vol. LVIII, No. 1495, November 7, 1959, pp. 634-35.

[In the following review, Ramsbotham offers a highly laudatory account of Cider with Rosie.]

A few years before the first World War a grocer's assistant in Stroud inserted the following advertisement in a local paper: 'Widower (4 children) Seeks Housekeeper'. It was seen by Annie Light, a romantic countrywoman of thirty, who had spent her youth either toiling for her father and five brothers or slaving below-stairs in the manors of the gentry. She took the post, fell in love with her employer, married him, and gave him four more children—one girl (who died) and three boys. Laurie Lee was the youngest child but one.

The father of these two families, a handsome and prudent go-getter ('a natural fixer,' says his son), had always dreamed of a tidy life in the Civil Service, and when...

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