LAST WEEK’S SOLUTIONS

and drowned quietly away in the reeds. I gazed at the lily roots coiled deep down, at the spongy weeds around them. That’s where she lay, a green foot under, still and all night by herself, looking up through the water as though through a window…’

It’s a wonderfully haunting description.Butthesameincident in the new book is desperately bare – in fact, more like a synopsis. There is no description of Miss Flynn, and young Laurie’s visit to the pond comes out like this: ‘I do remember thinking – I was about eight at the time – that’s where Miss Flynn came down in the night, lay down in the pond and pulled the water over her head, and drowned.’

This is a sort of speed-reader’s version of the original, shorn of colour, mystery and drama, it’s only glimpse of beauty – the phrase ‘pulled the water over her head’ – a repeat from the original.

Or, again, there is a gothic passage in Cider With Rosie in which Laurie Lee describes his childhood jaunts to a spooky tumbledown cottage in which a hangman had killed himself, having hanged his own son in error.

In this new book, he tells the story very briefly, and says: ‘And I can remember going there, not insensible to the mystery of it all, you know what kids are like, they like a bit of drama.’

Now compare that wordy blather with the evocative precision of this, from the original: ‘… Since when no one had lived in Hangman’s House, which crumbled in Deadcombe Bottom, where we played, and chewed apples, and swung from that hook, and kicked the damp walls to pieces…’

In Down In The Valley, Lee explains, ‘I wrote very slowly, and still do, but it was something that I was able to do deliberately because I wouldn’t read a book written in a style which included lines like “the garden was a blaze of colour”.’ This is, of course, an argument for the sustained concentration of the written word against the haphazard ramblings of recorded speech. Were Laurie Lee still alive, it seems to me very doubtful that he would have sanctioned this book. In fact, with his reverence for the written word, he might not have classified it as a book at all, let alone a ‘classic’.

It consists largely of tales from Cider With Rosie, inadequately retold. I imagine they worked perfectly well in the original TV documentary, spoken in Lee’s rich autumnal tones, set against backdrops of the beautiful countryside around Slad. But they are pretty pointless without these adornments, their only possible purpose being to drive readers back to the original.

In the occasional aside, Laurie Lee bemoans various unpleasant facets of modern life: the closure of public libraries, the ditching of the King James Bible, the way children are no longer encouraged to run free in the countryside. ‘The kids don’t come out any more,’ he says. ‘They are watching bloody Neighbours on television I suspect. Now they are all locked up in their little rooms on computers… To me, the disappearing voices of children is one of the great impoverishments of country life. They are fading in their electronic prisons…’ And so say all of us, but isn’t this book another example of our slippery slide away from knowledge and beauty, and into a kind of endless chat show?

Were Laurie Lee still alive, it seems… doubtful he would have sanctioned this book