Laurie Lee belongs to a large family, due to his fathers two marriages.

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Laurie Lee belongs to a large family, due to his father’s two marriages. The first time, his father got 8 kids but only 5 survived : Marjorie, Dorothy, Phyllis, Reggie and Harold. The second time, with Laurie’s mother, he got 4 kids and just 3 survived : Laurie, Tony and Jack. There are 8 members in the family and Laurie is one of the youngest.

The 3 half-sisters

Marjorie : is the eldest. She’s a blonde Aphrodite. She’s tall, long-haired, and dreamily gentle, and her voice is low and slow. She’s quite unconscious of the rarity of herself, moving always to measures of oblivious grace and wearing her beauty like a kind of sleep. (p.61-62)

Dorothy : is a wispy imp, pretty and perilous as a firework. She is an active forager who lives on thrills, provoked adventure, and brought home gossip. She is agile as a jungle cat, quick limbed, entrancing, noisy. In repose she is also something else : a fairy-tale girl, blue as a plum, tender and sentimental. (p.62)

Phyllis : is the youngest of the three. She’s cool, quiet, tobacco-haired, fragile girl, who carries her good looks with an air of apology. She is an odd girl, an unclassified solitary, compelled to her own devices, quick to admire and slow to complain. (p.62-63)

Laurie gives us an account of his sisters’ personalities with a very detailed description. He seems to admire his sisters :

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  • “These half sisters I cherished”, p.63
  • “Generous, indulgent, warm-blooded and dotty, these girls were not hard to admire. They seemed wrapped as it were in perpetual bloom, the glamour of their grown-up teens, and expressed for us boys all that women should be in beauty, style, and artifice. For there was no doubt at all about the beauty or the naturalness with which they wore it”, p.61

Laurie’s sisters protect and rescue him :

  • “Faces of rose, familiar, living ; huge shining faces hung up like shields between me and the sky ; faces with grins and white ...

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