How do you remember the summers of your childhood? For Laurie Lee they were flower-crested, heady, endless days. Here is an evocation of summer like no other a remote valley filled with the scent of hay, jazzing wasps, blackberries plucked and gobbled, and games played until the last drop of dusk. Lees joyful and stirring writing captures the very essence of Englands golden season.

Selected from the bookCider with Rosieby Laurie Lee

VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS.

A series of short books by the worlds greatest writers on the experiences that make us human

Also in the Vintage Minis series: Libertyby Virginia Woolf Eatingby Nigella Lawson Swimmingby Roger Deakin Drinkingby John Cheever

Laurie Lee was born in Stroud, Gloucestershire, in 1914, and was educated at Slad village school and Stroud Central School. At the age on nineteen he walked to London and then travelled on foot through Spain, as described in his bookAs I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. In 1950 he married Catherine Polge and they had one daughter.Cider With Rosie(1959) has sold over six million copies worldwide, and was followed by two other volumes of autobiography:As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning(1969) andA Moment of War(1991). Laurie Lee also published four collections of poems,The Sun My Monument(1944),The Bloom of Candles(1947),My Many-Coated Man(1955) andPacket Poems(1960) as well asThe Voyage of Magellan(1948), a verse play for radio,A Rose for Winter(1955), which records his travels in Andalusia,The Firstborn(1964),I Can't Stay Long(1975), a collection of his writing, andTwo Women(1983). Laurie Lee died in May 1997. In its obituary theGuardianwrote, 'He has a nightingale inside him, a capacity for sensuous, lyrical precisions'.