Cider with Rosie

Summary

• First Light describes Laurie arriving with his mother and the rest of the family at a cottage in the Cotswolds village of Slad, Gloucestershire. The children gorge themselves on berries and bread as their harassed mother tries to get the cottage and the furniture into some kind of order. The house relies on a small wood-fire for the cooking and a hand pump in the scullery for its water. They are visited by a man in uniform who is sleeping out in the surrounding woods – he visits them in the mornings for food and to dry out his damp clothes. He is finally taken off by men in uniform as a deserter. The chapter ends with the villagers riotously celebrating the end of the Great War.
• First Names describes Laurie still sleeping in his mother's bed until he is forced out of it by his younger brother, Tony, and made to sleep with the two elder boys. As he grows older, he starts to recognise the villagers as individuals: Cabbage-Stump Charlie, the local bruiser; Albert the Devil, a deaf mute beggar; and Percy-from-Painswick, a clown and ragged dandy who likes to seduce the girls with his soft tongue. Owing to its location, the cottage is in the path of the floods that flow into the valley, and Laurie and his family have to go outside to clear the storm drain every time there is a heavy downpour, though even this sometimes fails to stop the sludge despoiling their kitchen.
• Village School
• The Kitchen This chapter describes the Lees' domestic life. At the beginning Lee makes a reference to his father, who had abandoned them, saying that he and his brothers never knew any male authority. After working in the Army Pay Corps their father entered the Civil Service and settled in London for good. As Lee says,
• Grannies in the Wainscot describes the two old women who were the Lees' neighbours, Granny Trill and Granny Wallon, who were permanently at war with each other. Granny Wallon, or 'Er-Down-Under, spends her days gathering the fruits of the surrounding countryside and turning them into wines that, over the course of a year, slowly ferment in their bottles. Granny Trill, or 'Er-Up-Atop, spends her days combing her hair and reading her almanacs. As a young girl she had lived with her father, a woodsman, and she still seeks comfort in the forest. The two old women arrange everything so that they never meet, shopping on different days, using different paths down the bank to their homes, and continuously rapping on their floors and ceilings. One day Granny Trill is taken ill and quickly fades away. She is soon followed by Granny Wallon, who loses her will to live.
• Public Death, Private Murder describes the murder of a villager made good who returns from New Zealand to visit his family, boasts about his wealth and flaunts it in the local pub. The police try to find his attackers but are met by a wall of silence, and the case is never closed.
• Mother is Lee's tribute to his mother, Annie. Having been forced to leave school early because of her mother's death, and the need to look after her brothers and father, she then went into domestic service, working as a maid in various large houses. Having left to work for her father in his pub, The Plough, she then answered an advertisement, "Widower Seeks Housekeeper" and met the man who became Lee's father. After four happy years together, and three more children, he abandoned them. Lee describes his mother as having a love for everything and an extraordinary ability with plants, being able to grow anything anywhere. As he says,
• Winter and Summer describes the two seasons affecting the village and its inhabitants. During one particularly cold winter the village boys go foraging with old cocoa-tins stuffed with burning rags to keep their mittenless hands warm. The week before Christmas the church choir goes carol-singing, which involves a five-mile tramp through deep snow. Calls at the homes of the squire, the doctor, the merchants, the farmers and the mayor soon fill their wooden box with coins as they light their way home with candles in jamjars. In contrast, the long hot summer days are spent outdoors in the fields, followed by games of "Whistle-or-'Oller-Or-We-shall-not-foller" at night.
• Sick Boy is an account of the various illnesses Lee suffered as a young boy, some of which brought him to the brink of death. He also writes about the death of his four-year-old sister Frances, who died unexpectedly when Lee was an infant.
• The Uncles is a vivid description of his mother's brothers, his uncles Charlie, Ray, Sid and Tom. All of them fought as cavalrymen in the Great War and then settled back on the land, though Ray emigrated to Canada to work on the transcontinental railway, the Canadian Pacific, before returning home.
• Outings and Festivals is devoted to the annual village jaunts and events. Peace Day in 1919 is a colourful affair, the procession ending up at the squire's house, where he and his elderly mother make speeches. The family also makes a four-mile hike to Sheepscombe to visit their grandfather and Uncle Charlie and his family. There is also a village outing on charabancs to Weston-super-Mare where the women sunbathe on the beach, the men disappear down the side-streets into pubs and the children amuse themselves in the arcade on the pier, playing the penny machines. There is also the Parochial Church Tea and Annual Entertainment, to which Laurie and his brother Jack gain free admittance for helping with the arrangements. They finally get to gorge themselves on the food laid out on the trestle-tables in the schoolhouse and Laurie plays his fiddle accompanied by Eileen on the piano to raucous applause.
• First Bite at the Apple describes the growth of the boys into young adolescents and the first pangs of love. Lee states that "quiet incest flourished where the roads were bad", and states that the village neither approved nor disapproved, but neither did it complain to authority. Lee is seduced by Rosie Burdock underneath a haywagon after drinking cider from a flagon:
• Last Days describes the gradual breaking up of the village community with the appearance of motor cars and bicycles. The death of the squire coincides with the death of the church's influence over its younger parishioners, while the old people just drop away:

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