You can unsubscribe from our list at any point by changing your preferences, or contacting us directly. The most memorable scenes for me are not the famous cider in the haystack but two big disappointments: when Laurie is deemed too old to sleep in his mother’s bed and then when he starts school and is told to sit in a particular place “for the present”, and is bitterly disappointed not to be given said present at the end of the day. Lee is such a lyrical author, writing about this tiny piece of England that was forever changed after the First World War.

Never to be forgotten, that first long secret drink of golden fire, juice of those valleys and of that time, wine of wild orchards, of russet summer, of plump red apples, and Rosie's burning cheeks.But it is not only Lee’s coming of age, it is also that of the village, as the rural backwater changes rapidly, losing many of its traditional village ways and gaining things such as motor vehicles.

It must have been just awful at times, but one might never know how wonderful too if not for his telling of it. His most famous work was an autobiographical trilogy which consisted of Cider with Rosie (1959), As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969) and A Moment of War (1991). Rediscovering Laurie Lee's beautiful wordplay made me initially think that his prose was wasted on a boy who could clearly imagine a clean-shaven Tarzan swinging from vines through the jungle. Grannies in the Wainscot describes the two old women who were the Lees' neighbours, Granny Trill and Granny Wallon, who were permanently at war with each other.The novel is an account of Lee's childhood in the village of Slad, Gloucestershire, England, in the period soon after the First World War.

We readers find in it great fecundity: trees ‘writhed with power, threw off veils of green dust, rose towering into the air, branched into a thousand shaded alleys, became a city for owls and squirrels’.

The cottage garden, for example, as seen through the eyes and other senses of a young child, becomes a world of its own.