LAURIE LEE has died in the Gloucestershire village his writings made legendary. His death on Tuesday in his birthplace, Slad, near Stroud, followed abdominal surgery in March. He was 83.
"Apart from the stone walls, I am the oldest thing in the valley," he said last year. "I used to think like them I was indestructible. But two of the walls fell down recently and I suppose I shall be the next to fall."
This sense of his rootedness sold more than six million copies of his most celebrated book, Cider With Rosie, published in 1956. Lee said it was about the glory "of tickling a girl under a haystack when you're not taking love that seriously". More soberly, he said its popularity showed the modern world still yearned for a rootedness it had lost.
Lee also represented an era of brilliance and idealism that sprang from the 1930s fighting in the Spanish Civil War, writing verse plays for radio as a contemporary of Cyril Connolly, Stephen Spender and George Orwell.
His elegiac work The First born, published in 1964, was inspired by the birth of his daughter, Jessie, two years before. Ten years after Rosie was published, its sequel, As I Walked Out One Misummer Morning, appeared. In 1983 Two Women, written in homage to his wife, Cathy, was published.