You could drink it, draw with it, froth it with soap, swim beetles across it, or fly it in bubbles in the air. And it broke and ran and shone on the tiled floor, or quivered in a jug, or weighted your clothes with cold. 'You could pump it in pure blue gulps out of the ground you could swing on the pump handle and it came out sparkling like liquid sky. Witness his lively one-sentence description of a dead cat: '.the crowded, rotting, silent-roaring city of a cat's grub-captured carcass.' His descriptions are compelling and thorough, the unfiltered vision of a delighted child growing up amid continuous sensory assault. Lee was a poet whose deft passage into prose carried with it much of the rhythm and accuracy of the poet's language. I spent many a pleasant day playing the child's game of replacement: my own history with this shiny new borrowed one.

How wonderful it was to find, in Laurie Lee's recounting of his English boyhood, a story related in such mellifluous detail, the characters lushly painted against a multi-hued Cotswoldian afternoon, a loving account of poor people living simply and well, doing each other no great harm, taking care of their own in a sort of muddled congenial order. 'Cider with Rosie' fell into my lap sometime late in my malevolent teenage years, and contained in it was the discovery of a warm spot of flowered sunlight: this was a tale of growing up like no other I had come across, and I savored each word. Childhood memory can be likened to a repository seemingly without bottom, roiling with fragrant impressions and bitterly pungent aftertastes, the store of which, bidden or not, one must peer into every so often.

Cider with rosie story