Poets

Though many biographies say that Laurie Lee was born is Slad, his family seems to have moved there when he was three. This move affected him a lot and has been written about in great detail many many years later in Cider with Rosie "I was set down from the carrier's cart at the age of three; and there with a sense of bewilderment and terror my life in the village began.

The June grass, amongst which I stood, was taller than I was, and I wept. I had never been so close to grass before. It towered above me and all around me, each blade tattooed with tiger-skins of sunlight. It was knife-edged, dark, and a wicked green, thick as a forest and alive with grasshoppers that chirped and chattered and leapt though the air like monkeys. I was lost and didn't know where to move. A tropic heat oozed up from the ground, rank with sharp odours of roots and nettles. Snow-clouds of elder-blossom banked in the sky, showering upon me the fumes and flakes of their sweet and giddy suffocation. High overhead ran frenzied larks, screaming, as though the sky were tearing apart."

The autobiographical Cider with Rosie which is his most famous work, contains vivid records of his memories of his childhood in Slad before the arrival of the motorcar, including his school days. Laurie Lee studied at the village school and later went to Stroud Central School.

At fifteen he left school and became an errand-boy. Lee also gave lectures on the violin. When he was twenty he left Slad for London to ea..