This little book, 100 pages long if you include the editor’s afterword, is not a newly exhumed piece of reminiscence by Laurie Lee. It is a transcript of recordings the documentary-maker David Parker made for an affectionate televised 80th birthday tribute to Lee in 1994.
Parker filmed him, white-haired and well-upholstered, at several locations in his childhood village of Slad. The film was reshown on Lee’s death, almost three years later. It provided a visual record of Lee’s “exotically lush” corner of Gloucestershire. The tapes, lost for 20 years, were rediscovered in 2017: hence this book.
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