Writing lessons from Laurie Lee

Most English schoolchildren are made to read "Cider With Rosie" and "As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning" by Laurie Lee at some point in their gradual progress through English Literature. I remember quite enjoying the first, with its line sketches and descriptions of a boy growing up in countryside similar to my own surroundings, running free in the fields and woods, and returning home to steaming stews with his mother and sisters in a chaotic but love-filled kitchen.

A few weeks ago I hauled the children and Frodo off on another "Gloucestershire Walk" - around the Slad Valley, where Laurie Lee grew up and the setting of his book. The valley was sumptuous, overgrown, green, and hot. We met a few characters along the way: an old gardener perusing his beans, who tried to help us find a shortcut when we had only just set out, and a lady who insisted on us joining her by her pond to feed her ducks. We hiked down narrow lanes, alongside hayfields being harvested, through thick green woodlands, past honey-coloured stone Cotswold cottages. At the end of the walk, the children completely refused to allow me to look inside the church or to stop at the Wool Pack Inn, which feature in the book, insisting instead we head straight to a shop for ice lollies and cokes.

Laurie Lee's writing is so evocative and extravagant, with brilliant metaphors, and adjectives calling on all the senses; you not only see, but hear and smell the garden, the run-down cottage, the fields, the schoolroom, the valley in summer and winter, and you know and recognise the spinster teacher, the so grown-up voluptuous sisters, the two grannies who live next door, and all the others. It is really a complete read, like a satisfying, delicious meal. 

A couple of quotes to whet your appetites!

"The great beech filled at least half the sky and shook shadows all over the house. Its roots clutched the slope like a giant hand, holding the hill in place. Its trunk 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. I had thought such trees to be as old as the earth, I never dreamed that a man could make them. Yet it was Granny Trill’s dad who had planted this tree, had thrust in the seed with his finger. How old must he have been to leave such a mark? Think of Granny’s age, and add his on top, and you were back at the beginning of the world.” 

“Here I discovered water — a very different element from the green crawling scum that stank in the garden tub. 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. And it broke and ran and shone on the tiled floor, or quivered in a jug, or weighted your clothes with cold. You could drink it, draw with it, froth it with soap, swim beetles across it, or fly it in bubbles in the air. You could put your head in it, and open your eyes, and see the sides of the bucket buckle, and hear your caught breath roar, and work your mouth like a fish, and smell the lime from the ground.” 
― Laurie Lee