Laurie Lee believed in writing at a distance from his subject. He wrote Cider with Rosie, his memoir of his childhood in the Gloucestershire village of Slad, in a back attic in London; he recalled his wanderings in Spain in a top-floor room in Stroud. In his last recorded radio interview, made available by BBC Radio Gloucestershire again to mark the centenary of his birth, he explains why. He also talks of the “naive innocent idiocies” that took him into Spain on the eve of the Civil War.