People like Laurie Lee

Laurence Edward Alan "Laurie" Lee, MBE (26 June 1914 – 13 May 1997) was an English poet, novelist and screenwriter, who was brought up in the small village of Slad in Gloucestershire.

His most notable work is the autobiographical trilogy Cider with Rosie (1959), As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969), and A Moment of War (1991). The first volume recounts his childhood in the Slad Valley. The second deals with his leaving home for London and his first visit to Spain in 1935, and the third with his return to Spain in December 1937 to join the Republican International Brigades.

Having been born in Stroud, Gloucestershire on 26 June 1914, Laurie Lee moved with his family to the village of Slad in 1917, the move with which Cider with Rosie opens. After fighting in the First World War with the Royal West Kent Regiment, Lee's father, Reginald Joseph Lee, did not return to the family. Lee and his brothers grew up loving the Lights, the family of their mother (Annie Emily Light), and intensely disliking their Lee relations. His sister, Frances Nemariah Joan Lee, died in 1915 aged three when Lawrence Lee was a toddler. He had older siblings from his father's first marriage: Dorothy, Harold, Reggie, Phyllis, and Marjorie, and two brothers from his parents' marriage, Jack and Tony. His brother Jack Lee (born 1913) was to become a film director.