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

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Anyway, maybe it was the age thing, being hyper-sensitive because of the funeral, it being a windy, stormy night, or the ginger wine, but I read the whole thing in a night. Instantly it became one of my favourite books, and I read it loads leading up to, and at, college. Few histories of an era or place can conjure its emotional and physical resonance quite so well as a living memory. In his description of life on the road to London, Lee is able to capture the essence of the failure of capitalism during the Thirties (our current failure being but an echo of it’s father).

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She’d pay another brief visit before going to bed. ‘Ma says anything else you want?’ Squirming, coy, a strip of striped pyjamas, Miss Sweater Girl of ten years later – already she knew how to stand, how to snuggle against the doorpost, how to frame her flannel-dressed limbs in the lamplight.” Lee would walk first to London, and then south through Spain, passing en route through a country on the edge of civil war. Several decades later, he would publish a book recounting his wanderings through that shadowed land, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969), which has become a classic, celebrated for its evocation of a since-shattered world, and for the lushness of its language. The epilogue describes Lee's return to his family home in Gloucestershire and his desire to help his comrades in Spain. He finally manages to make his way through France and crosses the Pyrenees into Spain in December 1937. Much like Sebald's 'Rings of Saturn' there is something of a creative and fictional current running through 'As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning.' I'm starting to think that travel writers are in possession of the most beautiful language.

Otherwise all I remember of those first days from Vigo is a deliriously sharpening hunger, an appetite so keen it seemed almost a pity to satisfy it, so voluptuous it was. In As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, the second of the trilogy, Laurie Lee leaves his home in Gloucestershire, travels by foot as a young man of nineteen, to London, via Southampton. It's 1934. He supports himself by means of his fiddle and temporary jobs. He travels on to Spain, where the Civil War is about to erupt. These travels last two years. 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. The writing here is “voluptuous” yet precise, and as such it is characteristic of Lee’s style, in which elaborate metaphors serve not as ornaments, but rather as the means of most closely evoking complex experience. Lee does not walk so much as levitate or hover, borne aloft by supernatural stamina, and, in mimicry of this sensation, his clauses, suspended by their commas, also bear the reader along “the way” and onwards into the unknown. If the power of Cider With Rosie derives from its dream of dwelling, the power of As I Walked Out derives from its dream of leaving. If only I could live forever in one place, and come to know it so well, you think, reading Lee’s first volume of memoir. If only I could step from my front door, walk away and just keep going, you think, reading his second. Yet one does not have to get far into the book to discover that such fantasies are prone to disruption. Lee’s first night out is “wretched”: he falls asleep in a field, a rainstorm soaks him, he wakes to find two cows “windily sighing” over him and he takes shivering refuge in a damp ditch. This miserable bivouac begins his disillusionment with the dream of life on the move. The prose captures the existence of ordinary villagers, those having little, those struggling to survive. Why the Spanish rise up and seek to improve their lot is perceived as a given. The description of flora ad fauna grabs at one’s senses. The book can be read for either its history and for its nature writing.

An appreciation of Laurie Lee’s ‘As I Walked Out One

Actually, Lee went on two separate walks. First of all he left the Cotswolds village of Cider With Rosie fame to walk to London, receiving much-needed advice from an experienced tramp on the way. 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 the end of September Lee reaches the sea. Then he comes to the Sierra Morena mountains. He decides to turn west and follow the Guadalquivir, adding several months to his journey, and taking him to the sea in a roundabout way. He turns eastwards, heading along the bare coastal shelf of Andalusia. He hears talk of war in Abyssinia. He arrives at Tarifa, making another stop over in Algeciras.

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

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.” In 1934 the world is still recovering from the horror of the 1st world war but already preparing for the 2nd, the turmoil that will engulf Europe is under way and the main players already in position. This was less than 60 years before I read this book but in many ways it could have been centuries.Lee is also an observer of people. The first few chapters involve his walk to London and his experiences there. It is 1934 and there is still a depression. Lee recalls men who:

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning - Media Centre - BBC

Laurie Lee's childhood, so beautifully and evocatively related in Cider With Rosie is over and Laurie Lee is now a young man. Rather than hang around in Slad, Gloucestershire, the Cotswold village where he’d spent his entire life, in 1934 he set out to find out what else the world had to offer. Never having seen the sea, he walked to Southampton, and then walked onto London to meet his girlfriend and work as a labourer for a year before going onto Spain where he walked the length of the country. For the most part he leads an itinerant existence busking as a fiddle player to generate money to eat and drink. The "War" chapter brings some more physical happenings aside from Lee's (mostly) aimless wanderings. Fifteen-odd years later, it's still as vivid and vibrant as I remember it. If anything it's got better, in that my understanding of the Spanish Civil War has (marginally) improved, and his early days in Putney now have a new resonance due to our six year residency there since the last time I read it. This book is about that; a young man sets out on a journey at a time when travel for its own sake was extremely rare for the vast majority of people, when leaving the county or even the village was something that some never achieved.What makes the book special, and in that which it excels, is Lee´s ability to capture the ambiance of time and place. It reads as prose poetry! If you have not already tested Lee’s writing, you must! These are the reasons why Lee’s books are to be read. By the second day I’d finished my bread and dates, but I found a few wild grapes and ate them green, and also the remains of a patch of beans. He falls in love with Spain, its people and their dreams of a fairer society. He and another Briton are 'rescued' from the Civil War and although he leaves, it is no surprise that he decides to return and join the International Brigade. This book ends as he crosses the Pyrenees and enters Spain again. His wartime experiences inform the next book, "A Moment of War". Cleo's father finds him a job as a labourer and he rents a room, but has to move on as the room is taken over by a prostitute. He lives in London for almost a year as a member of a gang of wheelbarrow pushers. 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?"