Laurie Lee’s classic memoir Cider with Rosie established him as one of England’s best-loved writers, selling more than six million copies worldwide and winning new admirers with a fresh dramatisation last week. He wrote some of the most popular nature and travel books in the English language. Now, 18 years after his death, eight unseen essays uncovered after his daughter stumbled across them in the British Library are to be published for the first time.
Jessy Lee told the Observer: “It’s like being given a great gift from the grave. They really are the most wonderful essays, so rich. It was like a Pandora’s box. I realised there are some incredible bits of writing here that I don’t remember seeing before.”
The new essays – hailed by his agent as “works of genius” – will be among a collection of 32, titled Village Christmas: And Other Notes on the English Year, to be published by Penguin Classics on 5 November. The collection brings to life the landscapes and traditions of Lee’s home in Gloucestershire, from centuries-old May Day rituals and carol-singing on Christmas Eve, to his battle in old age to save his beloved Slad valley from developers.
Norah Perkins, Lee’s literary agent at Curtis Brown, said: “The quality of the essays is impeccable. They are in turn profound, funny, wistful, fierce, thoughtful, and always beautifully written, beautifully observed. The essays in Village Christmas confirm Laurie’s ability to show what is sublime within what is humble.”
The new essays – some handwritten, others typed – include evocative rural titles like “A Cold Christmas Walk in the Country”, “Harvest Festival” and “The Shining Severn”.
Perkins said they confirm his genius: “He brings to them his deep knowledge and love of the land he is from, writing intimately and beautifully about childhood and memory, landscape and change, and the great magnetic pull of home.”
They were among Lee’s archive acquired by the nation in 2003, but it had taken his daughter years to “summon up the courage” to sift through the papers.
Her initial visit had been “difficult” emotionally, she said: “To see everything neatly catalogued was a strange thought. The first thing that hit me when I got in was the musty smell of dad’s study. It was there – preserved. I had to fight the tears considerably … The thing that was so emotional for me was that, having started to read more of dad’s work, I missed him even more. I wanted to talk to him and say, ‘Dad, you’re a genius’.”
She recalled the excitement of wading through the material and “finding bits of prose that I’d never seen before”.
The essays include one called “Chelsea Towards the End of the Last War”, in which he wrote of the London borough as “seedy, calm and semi‑rustic”, when “Chromium, Coca‑Cola and cannabis had not yet touched Kings Road”: “After sundown there were no lights in streets or houses and the primeval darkness came back to London, a darkness which cleared the sky of its raw, neon‑flecked glow and returned the sight of stars and the moon to the city. Flower‑seeds blew in and thrived on the bombsites and owls sang in the midnight blue. It was a time of strange peace that the war had given.”
Lee remains best known for Cider with Rosie, about his childhood in the village of Slad, near Stroud, at the end of the first world war – a poetic portrait of innocence and rural life in a changing world, which was published in 1959. An acclaimed new BBC adaptation was screened last weekend, described by one critic as “lyrical, languid and poetic”.
Lee went to Spain in the mid-1930s, joining the International Brigade in the civil war. His trilogy of memoirs includes As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning – in which he walked to London, making a living as a labourer and playing the violin, before heading for Spain, armed only with the Spanish phrase for “Will you please give me a glass of water?” There were also poetry collections, including The Sun My Monument.
But he was also a troubled genius. His daughter, a former psychotherapist who lives in London and Slad, said that “he lived within a veil of insecurity because of his epilepsy”: “He struggled, mostly with his health. He was a perfectionist … very self-effacing. He didn’t think his work was as good as it is.”
She described him as “very private”: “He kept his workspace very much to himself. He wouldn’t shoo me away. I used to love stealing little moments there. As a child he would surprise me with a lovely titbit or sweetie. But I knew that I was not to disturb him for too long.”
Until the archive was acquired by the British Library, the papers had remained untouched in his study. Why the “new” essays were unpublished is unclear. His daughter worries about how Lee would have felt about their publication now: “I hope I’ve done the right thing. But he did leave them all behind.”
Extract from Laurie Lee’s Harvest Festival
Last weekend, while on a visit from London, I struck gold in the Stroud valley. For chance, and the coincidence of time and weather, conspired together to show me the district at its autumn best. The sloping fields and crested beechwoods were bathed in a rich sunlight more radiant than the airs of Greece: apples and pears dropped like gifts into my hands, and the clear stone cottages shone like temples upon their hills and hollows.
Never had I seen a landscape more tender, more inexhaustible in its variety, more jewel-like in its reflections of sky, leaf, stone and water. Since leaving the district, more than 20 years ago, I have travelled through some 40 countries, but I know now that the green crumpled valleys around Stroud are unique in their beauty of contour, intimacy, pastoral charm, and in the shining light that fills them.
My visit fell at a perfect time, and for two days I walked through the honey-coloured valleys, contrasting their September glories with my earlier recollections of them. And in spite of my incurable leaning towards nostalgic excess, the district had never seemed more beautiful than it did now, glowing with the ripeness of yet another harvest.
Then on the third day, which was Sunday morning, I suddenly heard hymn-singing from a church. As a boy, living in Slad village, harvest festival had always seemed to me to be the crown of the year, an occasion of richness and thanksgiving, when one felt closer to the mystery and benevolence of the earth than at any other time. So on this glittering, chrysanthemum-scented morning, I went eagerly in to the church, seeking the ancient magic I remembered. The decorations had been made with care and taste, but were somewhat restrained in quantity. A dozen tomatoes were arranged across the altar, and in front of it stood a loaf of bread and two handfuls of short-strawed wheat. In a corner lay a bunch of carrots, three onions, and a pot of homemade jam. Elsewhere were jars of Michaelmas daisies, strings of red creepers, and a marrow. But perhaps the richest harvest of all was the congregation. Everybody from the valley was there, from shuffling greybeards to tottering babes. Farmers sat square in their hairy tweeds. Young cowmen choked in their tight cravats. There were mothers and maidens, dads and boys, spinsters, bachelors and cranky hermits – but all had come to give thanks for harvest, and almost all had some claim on the land. And as we sat in our pews, waiting for the service to begin, our eyes sought proudly the gifts we had brought, the pick of our year’s husbandry: and a mysterious excitement, as old as man’s sojourn on the earth, began to well up within us.
That was how it was. It is not so any more. But the ghosts of those old hymns sing through us still, though the bill of our gratitude must now be expressed in things other than wheaten sheaves. Meanwhile, the grassy combes and wooded crests of the Stroud valleys do not change, nor their rioting flowers, placid silences, nor the purple distances seen from their hills. And in spite of all the power and richness of modern life, it is here I most wish to be, where the landscape offers its endless festivals to the eye and to the spirit, perpetual harvests.
Extracted from Village Christmas: And Other Notes on the English Year, by Laurie Lee, published by Penguin Classics on 5 November
