Devil Chicks



I was confronted by these charming items the other day. They are supposed to be Easter chicks for something my daughter is making. They look more like mini daemons what with all those little yellow horns.

Why does any razor need five blades?

Well I should do a proper review of Cider with Rosie so here it comes. I think listening to the tape makes this about the fifth time I have been through this book – what do you say for a listening? I didn’t read it at school like most people seem to do but instead bought it while at college as a sort of pretentious reminder that I was a country boy and not like the urban types I was thrown together with. I am not really that rural - I was born in Nottingham – but I moved to a small town when I was five and out into the country when I was 11. Cider with Rosie is about a time long before anything I have experienced though strangely the thing that made me realise that was actually a passage from As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning – the follow-up book – where Lee says that his walk from Slad to Southampton and London would no longer be possible. This was written in 1969 (the first book is from 1959 I think) because of the cutting up of the countryside to make way for the motor car. I was on the motorway as he read this out and it made me sad; we are just so far away from this time that it seems like something out of ancient history and yet there are still people alive who remember it. Slad as described seems like a place unchanged for two-thousand years; clothes may alter, but men still go off to war or for other adventures throughout history, the fields grow the same things and the social structure is maintained. For all the perceived decency in our society these days, we seem to have let some of the worst excesses of countryside vandalism go through unchanged. It is not only in the country that people get away with the damage. Look at the standard tourist shots of European towns and see skylines unchanged for centuries. They may be blighted with traffic fumes and all the low-level changes that have gone on but the bottom line of planning is restricted. Try and find anyplace other than a few Cotswold towns where those sort of rules are applied and you will fail. Primary colours, shouty shop-fronts, unthought-out traffic signs all go to make even the most bucolic-looking town of this country look like mini versions of Las Vegas.

Lee was clever in that he managed to avoid describing how comfortably the family actually were. I still don’t know whether they were poor or not. He mentions his mother’s scatty way with money (and everything else) and maybe they did struggle sometimes but the book sometimes seems like a middle-class reminiscence, a sort of delight in roughing it rather than a painful journal of hardship. When I first came to Liverpool I actually read Helen Forrester’s book – Twopence to Cross the Mersey, which, if true, describes a terrible life – the comedown of a middle-class family to a decayed existence in Liverpool slums. It may seem a bit Mills and Boon in a rough coat and why should it give me an insight? The Road to Wigan Pier also describes slum life though always with a detached air that Helen Forrester avoids through having lived that life for years.

Having said all this, Lee is not trying to make you see how bad his life was but how good. He is a poet and large sections are just extended verse, descriptions – what would have been described in my junior school as Creative writing. One piece which really sticks in my mind is a passage describing the sound of the tall trees that stood outside the house. I was lost to that white noise, the randomly waving branches, spotting the rooms of the house with light and shade. It was like teleport, an instant removal to that steep bank and the sound of nothing but the world. But he is not only good with place; he can handle character as well, filling out a whole person, doing the work of a good casting director with a few pencil strokes. All the people become real; the sisters with their otherworldly beauty become like guardian angels, walking out of the page until you fall in love with the simple goodness that they all have. No person is judged on the negative aspects of their personality – this is just simply how they are – no change can be made for better or worse- they just exist. He also covers his own faults without comment, letting you decide whether you like him or hate him for something and always finding that you can forgive him anything.

As I said, I was worried that the author is never the best person to read their own book but in this case, the already powerful prose is amplified by the author’s emotive voice, almost seeming like an off-the-cuff reminiscence than a retrospective reading of a well-loved classic. I have a tape of Sylvia Plath from a radio 3 programme she recorded in the early sixties. One part is a formal review of some new poems and read in her strange Boston accent seems weird and stilted. The other part involves what seems to be an extempore commentary about living in Britain which is delightful and real and completely unstrange. I don’t often get the feeling that Laurie Lee is reading his own book though he must be. There are even misheard words, phrases he mispronounces as if he’d never heard them out loud. It all makes the whole thing real, bum notes, bits too fast, bits too slow but not that you’d ever really notice or find that it detracts from the simple depth and feeling of the thing. Seven hours of beauty and real feeling. Buy it! Oh you can’t!