In his diary, Laurie wrote: ‘Monday Sept 30, 1963, two girls, daughter & granddaughter.’ The truth was that Jessy’s arrival was not just Laurie’s second turn at fatherhood, it also came on the very same day that Yasmin gave birth to his first granddaughter.īoth new arrivals weighed 7lb 2oz. ‘He had a poet’s view of the truth,’ his biographer Valerie Grove diplomatically tells the Mail. That Jessy was in fact his second child - his true ‘firstborn’ daughter, Yasmin, was the product of an intense love affair with a married woman 24 years previously - was of seemingly small import to Lee, who welcomed Jessy into his life at the relatively late age of 49. ‘Nothing, I knew, would be the same again, and I think I was reasonably shaken . . . Then they handed her to me, stiff and howling, and I held her for the first time and kissed her, and she went still and quiet as though by instinctive guile, and I was instantly enslaved by her flattery of my powers.’ ‘This moment of meeting seemed to be a birthtime for both of us her first and my second life. ‘She was born in the autumn and was a late fall in my life, and lay purple and dented like a little bruised plum, as though she’d been lightly trodden in the grass and forgotten,’ wrote Lee, in an opening sentence curiously reminiscent of his most famous work, Cider With Rosie. Spanning just 16 pages, published in hardback and laced with beautiful photographs of mother and child, it was entitled The Firstborn.

Damaged: Jessy trained as a psychotherapist as a result of her own experiences growing upĪuthor Laurie Lee greeted his daughter Jessy’s arrival in the world with a small, but in his trademark style, lyrical essay.

Cider with rosie story