Summer

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. Lee's joyful and stirring writing captures the very essence of England's golden season.

Selected from the book Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee. VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS.

LITTLE BOOKS. Also in the Vintage Minis series: Liberty by Virginia Woolf; Eating by Nigella Lawson; Swimming by Roger Deakin; and, Drinking by John Cheever.

Laurie Lee was born in Stroud, Gloucestershire, in 1914, and was educated at Slad villageschool and Stroud Central School. At the age on nineteen he walked to London and then travelled on foot through Spain, as described in his book As 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) and A 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) and Packet Poems (1960) as well as The 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, and Two Women (1983). Laurie Lee died in May 1997. In its obituary the Guardian wrote, 'He has a nightingale inside him, a capacity for sensuous, lyrical precisions'.