Biographer Valerie Grove was the speaker at June meeting, making a welcome return to the Society. This time her subject was the writer Laurie Lee and she recalled some aspects of his life, drawing on her two biographies, ‘The Well-loved Stranger’ and ‘The Life and Loves of Laurie Lee’.
Valerie suggested that memoirs might be a more appropriate description of his famed autobiographical trilogy – ‘Cider with Rosie’, ‘As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning’ and ‘A Moment of War’.
After sketching in his humble background growing up in the Gloucestershire village of Slad, Valerie went on to describe his subsequent journeyings to London and Spain and his final emergence as a writer and poet.
In later years he returned to his Gloucestershire roots, bought a cottage and spent the rest of his life in Slad until his death in 1997.