Apples

Behold the apples’ rounded worlds:
juice-green of July rain,
the black polestar of flowers,
the rindmapped with its crimson stain.

The russet, crab and cottage
redburn to the sun’s hot brass,
then drop like sweat from every
branch and bubble in the grass.

They lie as wanton as they fall,
and where they fall and break,
the stallion clamps his crunching jaws,
the starling stabs his beak.

In each plump gourd the cidery bite
of boys’ teeth tears the skin;
the waltzing wasp consumes his share,
the bent worm enters in.

I, with as easy hunger, take entire
my season’s dole;welcome the ripe,
the sweet, the sour,the hollow and
the whole.

I love the above poem by
Laurie Lee

Though many biographies say that Laurie Lee was born is Slad, his family seems to have moved there when he was three. This move affected him a lot and has been written about in great detail many many years later in Cider with Rosie "I was set down from the carrier's cart at the age of three; and there with a sense of bewilderment and terror my life in the village began. 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 though the air like monkeys. I was lost and didn't know where to move. A tropic heat oozed up from the ground, rank with sharp odours of roots and nettles. Snow-clouds of elder-blossom banked in the sky, showering upon me the fumes and flakes of their sweet and giddy suffocation. High overhead ran frenzied larks, screaming, as though the sky were tearing apart." The autobiographical Cider with Rosie which is his most famous work, contains vivid records of his memories of his childhood in Slad before the arrival of the motorcar, including his school days. Laurie Lee studied at the village school and later went to Stroud Central School. At fifteen he left school and became an errand-boy. Lee also gave lectures on the violin. When he was twenty he left Slad for London to earn his living. He then spent four years travelling in Spain and the eastern Mediterranean. There he travelled on foot, playing his fiddle to earn his keep. Later, in December 1937, he joined the International Brigades to fight in the the Spanish Civil War, but after having a medical he was declared to be "physically weak" and was sent home. His Spanish experiences resulted in the pre Civil War book As I walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969) and the book considered by some to be his best work, A Moment of War (1991), a spare, unsentimental memoir of his experience as a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War.