Cider With Rosie's truth is not always of the literal variety

At the end of the first chapter of Cider With Rosie there is a memorable description of 11 November 1918 in Slad and the end-of-war celebrations. There’s a vivid image of a view through the window of the lamp-lit pub where “rose-coloured men, through rain-wet windows, seemed to bulge and break into flame. They breathed our smoke, drank fire from golden jars and I heard their great din with awe.” There’s a fight – a man rises up and crushes a glass “like a nut between his hands” – there’s some funny dialogue and then, we learn, the schoolhouse chimney caught on fire:

“A fountain of sparks shot high into the night, writhing and sweeping on the wind, falling and dancing along the road. The chimney hissed like a firework, great rockets of flame came gushing forth, emptying the tiny house, so that I expected to see chairs and tables, knives and forks, radiant and burning, follow. The moss-tiles smouldered with sulphurous soot, yellow jets of smoke belched from cracks in the chimney.”

Fire! “We stood in the rain and watched it entranced,” Lee tells us. I feel similarly captivated. I’m aware that not everybody enjoys Lee’s ripe-to-bursting prose, but I find passages like that hard to fault.

But I did have one nagging doubt as I first read that passage. The Laurie Lee who we are told looked in on that pub and on the burning chimney was just four. It’s possible, I suppose, that he might remember something as momentous as the end of the first world war, not to mention as enjoyable and strange the fire. But all those other details? Do you remember anything from when you were that age so vividly? Could you, in fact, write a whole chapter based on even earlier memories? Me neither.

Lee doesn’t pretend that everything he says is accurate. Cider With Rosie starts with the following note: “The book is a recollection of early boyhood, and some of the facts may be distorted by time.” Even so, I can understand why people grumble about his veracity. The greatest controversy surrounds his later volumes of autobiography. “Why didn’t he just catch a train?” people asked of his account of his long tramp to London and then Spain, As I Walked Out Early One Morning. More damaging still, after he published A Moment of War some questioned whether he had ever, as he claimed in that book, been a member of the International Brigades fighting on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. Fortunately, that last accusation was laid to rest by Lee’s biographer Valerie Grove and Dr Barry McLoughlin in the late 1990s. You can see an official document proving he was enlisted in the Republican cause in the British Library.

Yet while Lee has been proved right in the most important detail regarding his war service, his account of his involvement in the Spanish Civil War, written 60 years after the event, is so vivid that it often seems too good to be true. He himself readily admitted that he had lost his diaries of the time and was relying, again, on his memory.

Cider With Rosie is a similar case, written decades after the events it describes with little documentary back-up – I’m assuming Lee wasn’t keeping a diary when he was three – and reliant, as he says, on “recollection”. And if anyone wanted to transpose “recollection” for “imagination”, I’d find it hard to argue with them.

Where I would argue is over how much it matters. Sometimes, it does. He was sued for libel, for instance, for an (as the judge called it) imaginary episode about a fire in a piano factory and suggesting it was an insurance scam. In later editions, this is changed to a boiler factory and all references to “balancing the books” have been excised. More often, as Lee hoped, the make-believe harms no one and charms most.

Meanwhile, Lee may not always relate real events, but a surprising number do seem to have happened. On that night at the end of the first world war, for instance, there is documentary evidence to support Lee’s account. There are letters from his mother explaining why – as he tells in the book – she wasn’t present. Another maternal letter even seems to substantiate Lee’s account at the very start of the book of getting lost in the long grass, aged three:

“I love you for that story,” she wrote to her son. “You brought back so many things to my memory so vividly. How when you first got out of West’s cart & was placed at the top of the bank and the grass was so long & high, how frightened you were & how you cried … “

I now doubt my doubts. Although, it’s quite possible that like everyone else, Lee’s mother had fallen for his remarkable powers of persuasion and his ability to recreate a vivid reality. Even if he isn’t relating facts, he has hit a different kind of truth. The world he describes seems almost palpable. He provides a powerful impression of a place and space in English history; a child’s eye-view and a community around that child.

It is also a place we want to believe in. To dismiss that chimney fire I quoted earlier, for instance, is to lose a moment of colour and light and strange, heady joy. To dismiss the rest is to lose poetry. And I’m aware that I’m heading for wobbly, mystical territory here, so let me hand over to Reading group contributor Mythical Magpie who put it beautifully:

“I think the skill of descriptive writing lies in evoking an image so clear and deep that the reader instinctively believes the subject is not only real but has always been as the writer sees it. It’s a rare talent that Laurie Lee possessed. He immerses us completely in the mysterious journey of his ordinary childhood and all the emotional mouldering dark and sunlight contrasts it contained. It’s not idyllic. It’s heightened reality, and one of the most perfect examples of English literature ever created.”

Dylanwolf also has a good line:

“Laurie Lee’s memoir is about sensory perception rather than the cognitive process. In fact Cider With Rosie seems most like is an extended text poem and it is a glorious work for that.”

In short, it might not all have happened, but Cider With Rosie seems true as long as you’re reading it – and that’s the most important thing.

One other thing worth noting is that as far as Slad was concerned, the problem wasn’t that Lee was making things up. It was that he gave too much away:

“‘There are taboos about village life,’ Lee told an interviewer on the publication of the 25th anniversary edition of Cider With Rosie. ‘The things you say in the pub and the local jokes that can be repeated, you put them in print and they’re not forgiven. It takes a long time to get over that. It takes a long time and a lot of free drinks to allow that to be forgiven.’”

Happily he also added: “But it has been forgiven now.” That’s one thing I’d certainly like to believe … Not least because, in spite of all the controversy surrounding Lee’s life, he’s a character I can’t help liking. Next week we’ll be talking to his biographer Valerie Grove and will hear more about both the dark and light in his complicated life – but for now, I’m pleased to be able to finish this piece by bringing out more of the glow, by introducing a personal note from the Guardian’s own Justine Jordan. She had a childhood encounter with the poet which shows him at his adorable best. Over to Justine:

“As the child of a single parent in the west country in the early 80s, I spent a lot of time in the pub. One weekend my mum and I drove over to the Slad valley in Gloucestershire, and stopped in at Laurie Lee’s local, The Woolpack. ‘Does Laurie Lee still come in here?’ asked my mother. ‘That’s him at the end of the bar,’ the barman replied.

“I was awed at coming across a real-life author in the twinkly-eyed, avuncular flesh. I can’t have read Cider with Rosie at this point, as I was only eight, but that didn’t stop me inflicting my own deathless prose on him. I know this because my mother has, for more than three decades, held onto a letter to me from Lee written in spikily energetic blue felt tip, thanking me for sending him a home-made book which seems to have been strongly influenced by Asterix, or possibly Rosemary Sutcliff:

“‘Thank you very much for your wonderful book and the joyous drawings. I loved your Roman soldiers with their clothes, sandals and scatty behaviour … I loved their faces too, and their hairy legs getting out of bed – and their names …

“‘By the way, I love your name too – it’s a very rare one. Of course I remember well meeting you up in The Woolpack. I hope you’ll come again soon. Keep on with your delicious writing, and drawing too. Love from Laurie Lee.’”

There’ll always be a warm glow for me around the memory of Lee’s kindness, just as there is around his most famous book.