ADAM Horovitz reviews a collection of long-forgotten writings by Laurie Lee, which have been published in a new Christmas book, Village Christmas and Other Notes on the English Year.

HAVING spent much of the last couple of years enmeshed in the myths and memories of Slad, and in considering Laurie Lee’s influence on the village, the valley and wider environs of Stroud, you might expect me to be keen to look to different pastures, further fields.

But if that’s the case, you have reckoned without Village Christmas and Other Notes on the English Year, a new book of Laurie’s essays, some of which have never been published before, and which his daughter Jessy found in the British Library’s archive of her father’s work, the smell of which apparently instantly evoked memories of his study when she opened it.

It’s an exquisite, indulgent, wry and delightful collection, offering new angles on Laurie’s life in the village and beyond, one which marches steadily through the seasons with a keen eye for the way things change and the ways they attempt to stay the same.

“The bit [of England] I know best,” he writes in the opening essay, Notes on England, “is local and enduring, has little history and almost no official heroes.”

Village Christmas extends beyond Slad, however.

Some of the most fascinating essays in the book delve deep into the minute details of one subject (I loved the tiny essay The Magic of Water particularly) or reach out into Chelsea, covering the span of time that Laurie spent there, in his second home.

His descriptions of the shift of the part of London he knew best, from village-within-the-city to fashionable vanguard of swinging London and beyond are fascinating and full of delicious detail - Dylan Thomas emerging like a mole from his flat, for example. This in itself could have made for a book in its own right, but Laurie compresses 50 years of change into a couple of thousand words with the economy of a poet and with a steady, unsparing wit.

Anyone who knows and loves Cider with Rosie could not fail to be drawn in by the alluring new nuggets of information about valley and village life in the time between the wars that make up the larger part of this book, but the more journalistic - though still beautiful, and often surprising - style of prose employed by some of these essays should captivate even the most poetry-phobic of readers.

Think of this, then, is a gateway drug of a book, a hook by which to draw you deeper into, and open up the paths in the brain to, the more meditative, lyrical aspects of Laurie’s oeuvre.

A book of essays might be considered ephemeral, but Laurie keeps things local and enduring even when he travels beyond the valley, and might almost now be in line to be considered an official hero of Slad. Though I suspect he’d quietly, gleefully rebel at the idea… Available at Stroud Bookshop, on Stroud High Street.