Every child in the valley crowding there, remained till he was fourteen years old, then was presented to the working field or factory, with nothing in his head more burdensome than a few mnemonics, a jumbled list of wars, and a dreamy image of the world's geography. There was one dame teacher, and perhaps a young girl assistant. It was a small stone barn divided by a wooden partition into two rooms – The Infants and The Big Ones. The village school at that time provided all the instruction we were likely to ask for. Because of its location, the cottage is in the path of the floods that flow into the valley, and Laurie and his family have to go outside to clear the storm drain every time there is a heavy downpour, though even this sometimes fails to stop the sludge despoiling their kitchen. As he grows older, he starts to recognise the villagers as individuals: Cabbage-Stump Charlie, the local bruiser Albert the Devil, a deaf mute beggar and Percy-from-Painswick, a clown and ragged dandy who likes to seduce the girls with his soft tongue.

First Names describes Laurie still sleeping in his mother's bed until he is forced out of it by his younger brother, Tony, and made to sleep with the two elder boys.

The chapter ends with the villagers riotously celebrating the end of the Great War. He is finally taken off by men in uniform as a deserter. They are visited by a man in uniform who is sleeping out in the surrounding woods – he visits them in the mornings for food and to dry out his damp clothes. The house relies on a small wood-fire for the cooking and a hand pump in the scullery for its water. The children gorge themselves on berries and bread as their harassed mother tries to get the cottage and the furniture into some kind of order. First Light describes Laurie arriving with his mother and the rest of the family at a cottage in the Cotswolds village of Slad, Gloucestershire.

Rather than follow strict chronological order, Lee divided the book into thematic chapters, as follows: The identity of Rosie was revealed years later to be Lee's distant cousin Rosalind Buckland. It chronicles the traditional village life which disappeared with the advent of new developments, such as the coming of the motor car, and relates the experiences of childhood seen from many years later. The novel is an account of Lee's childhood in the village of Slad, Gloucestershire, England, in the period soon after the First World War.

It has sold over six million copies worldwide. It is the first book of a trilogy that continues with As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969) and A Moment of War (1991). Cider with Rosie is a 1959 book by Laurie Lee (published in the US as Edge of Day: Boyhood in the West of England, 1960).

Cider With Rosie by Laurie Lee