Laurie Lee

Laurence Edward Alan Lee was born on 26 June 1914 in Stroud, Gloucestershire, the son of Reginald Lee, a civil servant who left the family, and Annie Emily Light. In 1917 his mother took the children to a cottage in the village of Slad, in the valley below the Cotswold edge, and he grew up there among a crowd of brothers and sisters, in the village he would later turn into one of the best-known places in English prose. He went to the village school and then the Central Boys' School in Stroud, played the violin at dances, and at fifteen became an errand boy at a firm of accountants. One summer morning in 1934, aged nineteen, he set out on foot for London with a violin and little else. A year later he sailed to Spain, walked across it from Vigo to the southern coast, and played for his supper at inns and in village squares; he was working at a hotel in Almuñécar when the Civil War began in July 1936, and a British destroyer took him off in August. In December 1937 he crossed the Pyrenees on foot and joined the International Brigades, though he was sent to headquarters rather than the front and left Spain in February 1938. During the Second World War he wrote scripts for the GPO and Crown Film Units and edited publications for the Ministry of Information. His first poems, The Sun My Monument (1944), The Bloom of Candles (1947) and My Many-Coated Man (1955), made his name as a lyric poet. He married Katherine Polge in 1950, wrote the captions for the Festival of Britain the following year, and was appointed MBE in 1952. In 1959 Cider with Rosie, his memoir of boyhood in Slad, made him famous and brought him a cottage there. As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning followed in 1969, and A Moment of War, the last of the three, in 1991. He died of cancer at his cottage in Slad on 13 May 1997, aged eighty-two, and is buried in the churchyard there.

In December 1937 Lee went back to a war he had watched begin from a hotel in Almuñécar. Turned down by the recruiters, he paid his own fare and walked over the Pyrenees on 5 December. Ten days later he reached Albacete. A report soon judged him too frail for the front, and he spent the winter at headquarters.