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

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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. 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.

As I walked out one midsummer morning : Lee, Laurie : Free

The books were first published thirty some years after the recounting of events. One hears a tone of nostalgia in the telling. I definitely advise listening to an audio version spoken by the author. The result is then transformed into pure art. 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?" Over the course of a year he makes his way steadily east, with plenty of diversions. Lee meets up with various people who he finds something in common with, settling for a week or two, or moving on within days. He stays as long as he takes joy from being in a place, or with certain people, but happily moves on once that is over. He shares a lot of his year, but remains fairly discrete about his love life, happily sharing the details of other people though! The Spain that Lee describes is a poor, almost destitute country at this time, politically ripe for resolution as the rich and well separated from the poor. 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. 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.”

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In 2016, I reread As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969), and I am delighted to report it is every bit as good as I had remembered. Laurie Lee was a teenager when he set out on that midsummer morning in 1934. But he waited 35 years before finally publishing an account of the long walk which took him through Spain in the run-up to the Civil War. This long gap of time gives the book its mood of intense nostalgia, with its sensuous descriptions of a vanished world. I loved reading this memoir and at times slowed down to make the enjoyment last longer.

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee - Waterstones

I think that is partly due to the fact that I first read it at 21 and I'm sure that like like most people my desire to experience new things without a safety net is strongest around that age. For there are, broadly speaking, two intertwined histories of British long-distance walking. One involves the wilful wanderer: those like Lee and Leigh Fermor who set out to relish the romance of the open road, and often subsequently to write about it. The other is a shadow history – harder to see because its participants left little trace – of those who had no choice but to walk, and who barely held life together as they “padded it” down the paths. The unhappy population of Britain’s roads boomed in the years before Lee left Slad. Many of the men who survived the first world war had returned to find no settled employment and no home. Life on foot was the only option available to them, and in the two decades after 1918, plumes of smoke rose from copses and spinneys as the woods of England filled with these shaken-out casualties of war – men who slept out and lived rough, begging as they went and working where they could. Their numbers grew further when the economic crash of the 1930s left millions jobless across Europe and America.The chapters are mostly broken into singular elements of Lee's journey: "London Road", "London", "Into Spain", "Zamora-Toro", "Valladolid", Segovia-Madrid", "Toledo", "To the Sea", "East to Málaga", "Almuñécar", "War" and the "Epilogue". The driving force of the novel is simply the language itself and the slow, but the promise (by the blurb), of the ending at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. That continues in the last book of the trilogy, A Moment of War.

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

Around a year after he left the village of Slad, he sets foot on Spanish soil for the first time and he sets off to explore the country. Wandering from place to place, he joins some German musicians in Vigo before moving onto Toledo where he stays with a poet from South Africa called Roy Campbell. Following a loose plan of walking around the coast of Spain takes him to Andalusia, Málaga and a brief sojourn into the British territory of Gibraltar. He finds work in a hotel over the winter and in the evenings joins the locals in a bar talking with them about the current political turmoil. Early in 1936 the Socialists win the election and the simmering tensions boil over into acts of revolt and then into open warfare. A British destroyer arrives to collect British subjects from coastal towns and villages and Lee says goodbye to Spain. 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 descriptions of the people he meets and the places he visits are compelling, putting across both the beauty of the Spanish towns and countryside and the extreme poverty of many of those living there, who invite him into their homes to share what little they have. The tastes, smells and most of all the relentless sun are all vivid and memorable, with his lifelong love for Spain informing every paragraph. 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: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. 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.

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

The title of the book is the first line of the Gloucestershire folk song " The Banks of Sweet Primroses". [1] Critical responses [ edit ] 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". This is the second novel. Where the first book recorded Lee's childhood in the Cotswolds, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning follows Lee as a twenty-year-old man leaving home to go to, eventually, Spain, stopping by London and Portsmouth and along the south coast en route.In the mid-1930s, the nineteen year-old Lee sets out on foot from his Gloucestershire home, with a tin of biscuits and a violin, on his way to London via a hundred mile detour to the coast “as I’d never yet seen the sea.” Two years later he is fortuitously “rescued” off the coast of southern Spain by the Royal Navy trawling the Spanish beaches for stray Brits marooned between the warring factions of the Spanish Civil War. Lee’s narrative of what happens in between these events provides priceless images of life as experienced by a penniless wanderer in depression-era Britain and pre-modern Spain. 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. There, under the mulberry trees, where some thin grass grew, I sat watching the slow green flow of the water. The shade from the trees lay on my hands and legs like pieces of cool wet velvet, and all sounds ceased, save for the piercing stutter of the cicadas which seemed to be nailing the heat to the ground.”