You can see an official document proving he was enlisted in the Republican cause in the British Library. Fortunately, that last accusation was laid to rest by Lee’s biographer Valerie Grove and Dr Barry McLoughlin in the late 1990s. 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. “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. The greatest controversy surrounds his later volumes of autobiography. 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. Lee doesn’t pretend that everything he says is accurate. 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. 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. The Laurie Lee who we are told looked in on that pub and on the burning chimney was just four. I’m aware that not everybody enjoys Lee’s ripe-to-bursting prose, but I find passages like that hard to fault.īut I did have one nagging doubt as I first read that passage. Fire! “We stood in the rain and watched it entranced,” Lee tells us.

Cider with rosie story