To a Former Life
Ma. LEE grew up in a small Cotswold village which remained remarkably self-sufficient, mor- ally and socially, until late in the Twenties; and though the village was soon to 'break, dissolve, and scatter,' nevertheless when Mr. Lee looks back on his childhood he is able to feel that he witnessed 'the end of a thousand years' life.' The world which Mr. Lee remembers was one of 'hard work and necessary patience, of backs bent to the ground, hands massaging the crops, of waiting on weather and growth; of villages like ships in the empty distance and the long walking distances between them, of white narrow roads, rutted by hooves and cartwheels, innocent of oil and petrol.' Thus, though Mr. Lee writes of nothing which he did not himself know or experience as a child, Cider with Rosie is a memoir which is more than personal in intention : it is, too, a memorial to a vanished way of life.
Much of the book is given to a description of the author's immediate family : kindly brothers and sisters; huge uncles and aunts; above all, the author's mother, to whom the best chapter in the book is devoted. There are neighbours, too, and glimpses of the local squire; there are local ghosts, schoolteachers, madwomen; there are village out- ings and celebrations—all of them described in a style that would, one must say, be far more suc- cessful if it were less anxious to make its effects. So many of Mr. Lee's reminiscences are of charm and interest that one feels he should have had more trust in their power to speak for themselves; instead, again and again, they are over-decorated and over-elaborated. One cannot help feeling, indeed, that Mr. Lee's book is a memorial of a kind different from the one he intended it to be : the fact that Mr. Lee, who grew up in a village as remote and isolated as the one he describes, and was educated in the village school, should yet write a prose so mannered, willed, and metropolitan— this fact is in itself a sign of how dead is the old order he has tried to evoke.
DAN JACOBSON
Previous page
