As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (Penguin Modern Classics)

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This long gap of time gives the book its mood of intense nostalgia, with its sensuous descriptions of a vanished world. He is warmly welcomed by the Spaniards he meets and enjoys a generous hospitality even from the poorest villagers he encounters along the way. Suddenly the rise of the republican movement is an awakening for him as well as a connection for the reader with what the day to day life was like that gave rise to it. Once the building nears completion he knows that his time is up and decides to go to Spain because he knows the Spanish for "Will you please give me a glass of water? We take pride in offering a wide selection of used books, from classics to hidden gems, ensuring there is something for every literary palate.

The fig tree is there, too, when war breaks out, when the capital is reduced to ashes and rubble, when the teenagers vanish. Lee depicts himself as moving penniless through the landscape, earning his keep by playing his violin, but I read afterward in an article about him that a woman (unacknowledged) paid his way—so these cringey moments were no accident. Laurie Lee fought on the commie-scum side in the Spanish Civil War, but doesn’t seem to have been much of a ideological commie. Then, after losing his job as a building labourer, he decided to set off on another adventure, this time to Spain, taking his battered violin so that he could earn some money as a busker. By August 1935 he reaches Toledo, where he has a meeting with the South African poet Roy Campbell and his family, whom he comes across while playing his violin.Lee's second autobiography picks up after his first, in 1934, when as a wide eyed 19 year old, he packs up his violin and a tent and with a big breakfast under his belt heads off for London. Towards the end of the book, near the end of 1935, Lee finds himself in Castillo, on the Mediterranean coast and becomes aware of a split in the people, and trouble brewing. Nothing I knew was here, and perhaps there was a moment of panic – anyway I suddenly felt the urge to get moving. One night I took shelter in a ruined castle which I found piled on top of a crag – a gaunt roofless fortress tufted with the nests of ravens and scattered with abandoned fires.

So I cut the last cord and changed my shillings for pesetas, bought some bread and fruit, left the seaport behind me and headed straight for the open country. I am more excited and more frightened about this adventure than anything I have done for many years. While not expecting a civil war, there are definite indicators of problems, and there are violent clashes in the adjacent town of Altofaro, and regular visits from naval ships. I laid the fiddle beside me, used the knapsack as a pillow, and stretched out on the bed of stones; then folded my hands, hooked my little fingers together, shut my eyes and prepared to sleep. As befits an award winning poet, Lee’s prose has a concise, 3-D image-making eloquence that drops the reader into the center of a scene, in the breathing presence of a character, or into the tactile truth of a landscape.Lee is a happy, go lucky, young man who is prepared to venture into a world that is utterly strange to everything that he has ever known. His idea was to walk through the country, earning money for food by playing his violin in bars and plazas. The people of Japan believe that everyone has an ikigai - a reason for being; the thing that gets you out of bed each morning. As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, and scroll down for a selection of transporting reading recommendations.

I felt it was for this I had come; to wake at dawn on a hillside and look out on a world for which I had no words, to start at the beginning, speechless and without plan, in a place that still had no memories for me. Not till early dawn did they finally leave me and run yelping away down the hillside, when I fell at last into a nightmare doze, feeling their hot yellow teeth in my bones.

Laurie Lee leaves the Cotswolds, heads to London, and then determines to head further afield, arriving in Vigo in Galicia before taking a year to walk through pre-Civil War Spain to the southern coast at Almunecar where he becomes trapped at the beginning of the war. The thing that stays with me after reading it is the hospitality from everyone he meets along the road, people who have little share that little with him. The Spain he travels to is ancient and incredibly exotic although the people he meets are familiar in many ways.

Our neighbours are all farmers, scratching a subsistence living from harvesting olives, wheat, sunflowers, raising pigs and horses and puppies, and labouring in the fields, they are generous with their smiles and their vegetables.

Everyone has heard the title Cider with Rosie, and even when I read it several years ago, I wasn't aware it was the first book in Laurie Lee's "Autobiographical Trilogy". With just a blanket to sleep under and his trusty violin, he spends a year crossing Spain, from Vigo in the north to the southern coast. I found a rough little hollow out of the wind, a miniature crater among the rocks, ate some bread and dates, unrolled the blanket and wrapped myself inside it. It is not uncommon on a country road to see a small white van parked in the shade and one man with a mattock, hoeing in a large field of weeds. As the building work reaches completion, he starts to consider where to go next, Europe beckons and he chooses Spain purely because he knows a single phrase in the language.