posted on 22 Nov 2015

Village Christmas and Other Notes On The English Year by Laurie Lee

I think that Laurie Lee is close to being thought of as that dreadful thing – a national treasure. This is largely the result of the success of Cider With Rosie which has become a sort of shorthand for childhood nostalgia and a lost, mythological, England. This is totally unfair of course. Whilst Cider is undoubtedly a great book of childhood, it is part of a much more complex body of work that doesn’t necessarily fit the ‘national treasure’ and comfortable nostalgia template. Lee was in fact a far more complex author and person – his politics were radical and his personal life was a bit of a mess if truth be told.

Publications like Village Christmas are clearly designed to play to the cuddly national treasure image. These are previously unpublished occasional pieces that were found in his posthumous papers by his daughter. They have been edited and curated into a short, 150 page collection, with the essays rather artificially groups around the seasons of the year. So you get a summer, spring, winter and autumn section although in reality most of the essays don’t have an obvious seasonal identity.

These are really ephemeral pieces that are as short as a page and a half or run to almost short story length. They are pretty much all autobiographical although the dates the pieces were written are never openly stated and so it’s only the detail that gives away the earlier stuff from the later. However, even the shortest of the pieces shows the touch of a master writer – inconsequential but sparkling little gems of decoration that give you a transitory glow or let you in on Lee’s own insecurities and gripes of modern life.

You can physically feel the sentiment Lee lavished on his descriptions of the English countryside -  whether it is to describe the depths of a winter knee-deep in snow and ice or the honey-filled colours of summer and the lazy passage of time. Most people are aware that Lee was deeply in love with his Cotswold home of Slad just outside Stroud in Gloucestershire and these short essays often return to this place as a lodestone or as a sort of moral centre of the universe. Fewer people will be aware of how much time he spent in London, in what was then a more bohemian Chelsea, and quite a few of these pieces tell us quite a bit more about his London life. I very much liked these pieces – especially the very grumpy references to the noise of overhead passenger planes that seem to have blighted his life at one point.

This book has been packaged as a Christmas stocking-filler gift and, as such, you could have a lot worse presents to unwrap on 25th December. There’s nothing here that will do damage to Lee’s reputation, quite the contrary, but it’s also not a significant addition to his oeuvre. Enjoyable but ultimately slight.

Terry Potter

November 2015