Despite his autobigraphical writings, despite his gregarious appearances on the London literary scene and in the village pub where he was always available to fans, Laurie Lee was a secretive man.;Millions of readers feel they know him from the lyrical account of his Gloucestershire boyhood, immortalized in "Cider with Rosie". They also know that he walked out one midsummer morning in 1934 and wandered through Spain, playing the fiddle before being caught up in the Spanish Civil War. When he returned home, he spent almost the rest of his life writing about these youthful adventures.;He was a poet, a playwright and a broadcaster, his books became classics, and he was devoted to two women: his wife and his daughter, "the firstborn". Publicly, he fostered the Laurie Lee legend.;But behind his locked study door, in the letters and diaries he left, lay the revealing clues to his private pain and passion: the girls he left behind, the woman who took him to Spain, the woman he came back to...