The Firstborn: A Reflection on Fatherhood

By Laurie Lee

An intimate and lyrical consideration of what it means to be a father

This moment of meeting seemed to be a birth-time for both of us; her first and my second life. Nothing, I knew, would be the same again . . .

Full of warmth and candor, this essay composed on the occasion of his daughter’s birth is one of Laurie Lee’s most delightful and inspiring works. From the moment Jessy is born, “purple and dented like a bruised plum,” to the first time his kiss quiets her cries, Lee describes the joys and responsibilities of new fatherhood with a poet’s precision and boundless capacity for wonder.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Jun 10, 2014
• ISBN: 9781497641365

Laurie Lee

Laurie Lee (1914–1997) was an English memoirist, poet, and painter. Raised in the village of Slad in the Cotswolds, Lee walked to London at the age of nineteen and from there traveled on foot through Spain. In the winter of 1937 he returned to Spain, crossing the Pyrenees in the middle of a snowstorm and joining the International Brigade in the fight against fascism. In his autobiographical trilogy—the bestselling Cider with Rosie (1959), As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969), and A Moment of War (1991)—Lee vividly recounts his childhood and early journeys. His other acclaimed works include four volumes of poetry and the travel memoir A Rose for Winter (1955).

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The Firstborn

A Reflection on Fatherhood

Laurie Lee

To Jessy’s Mother

I

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. Then the nurse lifted her up and she came suddenly alive, her bent legs kicking crabwise, and her first living gesture was a thin wringing of the hands accompanied by a far-out Hebridean lament.

This moment of meeting seemed to be a birth-time for both of us; her first and my second life. Nothing, I knew, would be the same again, and I think I was reasonably shaken. I peered intently at her, looking