Early life and works Laurie Lee's childhood home, Bank Cottages (now Rosebank Cottage), in the village of Slad. 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. Lee left the Central School at 15 to become an errand boy at a Chartered Accountants in Stroud. In 1931, he first found the anarchist Whiteway Colony, two miles from Slad, founded by Tolstoy . This gave him his first smattering of politicisation and was where he met the composer Benjamin Frankel and the "Cleo" who appears in As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. In 1933 he met Sophia Rogers, an "exotically pretty girl with dark curly hair" who had moved to Slad from Buenos Aires, an influence on Lee who said later in life that he only went to Spain because "a girl in Slad from Buenos Aires taught me a few words of Spanish."
Early life and works Laurie Lee's childhood home, Bank Cottages (now Rosebank Cottage), in the village of Slad. 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 parent's marriage, Jack and Tony. His brother Jack Lee (born 1913) was to become a film director. Lee left the Central School at 15 to become an errand boy at a Chartered Accountants in Stroud. In 1931, he first found the Whiteway Colony, two miles from Slad, a colony founded by Tolstoyan anarchists . This gave him his first smattering of politicisation and was where he met the composer Benjamin Frankel and the "Cleo" who appears in As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. In 1933 he met Sophia Rogers, an "exotically pretty girl with dark curly hair" who had moved to Slad from Buenos Aires, an influence on Lee who said later in life that he only went to Spain because "a girl in Slad from Buenos Aires taught me a few words of Spanish."
R
parents'
parent's
D
anarchist
R
founded by Tolstoy
a colony founded by Tolstoyan anarchists