This version of ‘Cider with Rosie’ was created for Museum in the Park, Stroud. By a group of ten, aged 14-16 in the centenary year of Laurie Lee’s birth.

Cider With Rosie

First Light:

‘The June grass, amongst which I stood, was taller than I was, and I wept. I had never been so close to grass before. It towered above me and all around me, each blade tattooed with tiger-skins of sunlight. It was knife edged, dark, and a wicked green, thick as a forest and alive with grasshoppers that chirped and chattered and leapt through the air like monkeys.’

First Names:

‘Proud in the night the beast passed by, head crowned by royal horns, his milky eyes split by strokes of moonlight, his great frame shaggy with hair. He moved with stiff and stilted strides, swinging his silvered beard, and from the tangled strength of his thighs and shoulders trailed the heavy chains he’d broken.’

Village School:

‘I arrived at school just three feet tall and fatly wrapped in scarves. The playground roared like a rodeo, and the potato (in my pocket) burned through my thigh. Old boots, ragged stockings, torn trousers and skirts, went skating and skidding around me. The rabble closed in; I was encircled; grit flew in my face like shrapnel.’

The Kitchen:

‘We lit the candles and set them about, each in its proper order: two on the mantelpiece, one on the piano, and one on a plate in the window. Each candle suspended in a ball of light, a luminous fragile glow, which swelled and contracted to the spluttering wick or leaned in the moving air…The time had come for my violin practice. I began twanging the strings with relish.’

Grannies In The Wainscot:

‘She was back in the window, winding her hair into a fragile bun. Beautiful were the motions of her shrunken hands, their movements so long rehearsed; her fingers flew and coiled and pinned, worked blind without the aid of a mirror. The result was a structure of tight perfection, a small shining ball of snow… She sat relaxed now her hair was done, put on her cracked and steel rimmed glasses, unhooked the almanac from the wall and began to read bits aloud.’

Public Death, Private Murder:

‘He’d been coming from milking; it was early, first light, and he was just passing Jones’s pond. He’d stopped for a minute to chuck a stone at a rat - he got tuppence a tail when he caught one. Down by the lily-weeds he suddenly saw something floating. It was spread out white in the water… When he went down closer, he saw, staring up at him, the white drowned face of Miss Flynn.’

Winter And Summer:

‘The kitchen morning would be full of steam, billowing from kettles and pots. The outside pump was frozen again, making a sound like broken crockery, so that the girls tore icicles from the eaves for water and we drank boiled ice in our tea.’

Sick Boy:

‘Gasping she groped her way downstairs and staggered towards the kitchen:and lo, there I was, stretched and naked on the table, yellow, just as Dorothy said. Mrs. Moore, humming gaily, was sponging my body as though preparing a chicken for dinner.’

Outings and Festivals:

‘Smirking with misery I walked to the stage. Eileen’s face was as white as a minim. She sat at the piano, placed the music crooked, I straightened it, it fell to the ground. I groped to retrieve it; we looked at one another with hatred; the audience was still as death.’

First Bite At The Apple:

‘Huge and squat, the jar lay on the grass like an unexploded bomb. We lifted it up, unscrewed the stopper, and smelt the whiff of fermented apples. I held the jar to my mouth and rolled my eyes sideways.’

Last Days:

‘It was then that I sat on my bed and stare out at the nibbling squirrels, and to make up poems from intense abstraction, hour after unmarked hour.’

“My dad planted that tree,’ she said absently, pointing out through the old cracked window. The great beech filled at least half the sky and shook shadows all over the house. It’s roots clutched the slope like a giant hand, holding the hill in place. It’s trunk writhed with power, threw off veils of green dust, rose towering into the air, branched a thousand shaded alleys, became a city for owls and squirrels.’

Artwork by:

Esme,Maisie,

Jasmine,Naomi,Willen,Sophie,Theo,Iselle,Joe,

Rudi,Henry,Emma.

Printed and Bound by Emma Evans and Iselle Maddocks.

With thanks to Museum in the Park, Stroud.

.2014.