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

Product Information

Spain is the biggest feature of the novel and Lee describes it incredibly: the heat, the setting, the people, it is all drawn beautifully. I've only been to Spain once, sadly, many years ago. I went to Barcelona and only remember standing under the Gaudí buildings, drawing the cityscapes, wandering the hot streets, and for some reason, the small fountain that sat below my hotel bedroom window. I highly recommend the book, these books and the author. I will soon be reading the following two. I am consciously avoiding a detailing of events. My words cannot match up with Lee’s! This is one of two books I inherited from my mum's parents, the other being Anna Karenina. I remember going up to my grandpa's house after he died and reading this, by an open fire, drinking Stones Ginger Wine the night of his funeral. I must have been about 16-17, and me and my brother were the only people in the house as our parents stayed with my aunt. 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.

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (Penguin Modern

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. Extra gets ready to welcome Midsummer with a special 60-minute adaptation of novelist Laurie Lee's celebrated journey from his Cotswold home in Slad to Spain in the mid-1930s. The Spain he describes is one of unrelenting heat, passion and poverty. A society where most had very little, often sleeping on floors and with their animals.It is a sad and brilliant paragraph, compassionate in its noticing – especially the “vague” polishing of shoes by men who had once been in jobs where shininess of shoe mattered – and respectful of these brigades of broken men who walked the landscape, but who often fall out of the headier accounts of life on the path. I'm interested to shortly read the final novel in the trilogy and see what Lee's description of the Civil War is; right now, when I think of it, I think of Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls and Orwell's Homage to Catalonia. Months later, he becomes embroiled in the wave of events which were to become the Spanish Civil War. 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. Leaving behind the village he immortalised in Cider With Rosie, 19-year-old Laurie sets out on the open road with a vague idea of reaching London and the American girlfriend who awaits him there.

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

I find much of the writing in this book outstanding, such perfect prose and intense imagery. I read it many years ago and have recently re-read it. Having forgotten how good it was, it was a pleasure to rediscover it. Set in the 1930s, the author leaves his family in the bucolic English Cotswolds and heads for Spain, crossing it on foot and with only his violin, busking as he goes. Lee than took a boat to northern Spain, and traversed western Spain during the heat of the summer. Although the people in many of the villages where he stopped were poor, most of them were very kind to the young Englishman. Modern times had not arrived in the small Spanish villages, and the people had close ties to the land and the sea. It is here, with an evacuation of British citizens by a British warship the narrative ends. An Epilogue describes Lee's return to England, then his immediate departure, returning to Spain, set to join the war. 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. 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.

Still a little off balance I looked about me, saw obscure dark eyes and incomprehensible faces, crumbling walls scribbled with mysterious graffiti, an armed policeman sitting on the Town Hall steps, and a photograph of Marx in a barber’s window. Nothing I knew was here, and perhaps there was a moment of panic – anyway I suddenly felt the urge to get moving. 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. The title of the book is the first line of the Gloucestershire folk song " The Banks of Sweet Primroses". [1] Critical responses [ edit ]