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

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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. 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. 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. As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning is the moving follow-up to Laurie Lee's acclaimed Cider with Rosie Leaving behind the village he immortalised in Cider With Rosie, the 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 - Penguin Books UK As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning - Penguin Books UK

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. I'm recommending the book for its strong writing quality, more than the "action" itself. I was left puzzling that he relates conversations with locals, presumably in Spanish, where I was left with a bit of suspension-of-disbelief that he would be chatting away so soon. 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:This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. He gathered these details as he walked, and he could not have done so had he not opened himself to the kinds of encounter and perception that travel on foot makes possible. Walking, Lee notes early on, refines awareness: it compels you to “tread” a landscape “slowly”, to “smell its different soils”. The car passenger, by contrast, “races at gutter height, seeing less than a dog in a ditch”. Lee, like Leigh Fermor, believed in walking not only as a means of motion but also as a means of knowing – and this unforgettable book is proof of the truth of that belief.

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

went on their way like somnambulists, walking alone and seldom speaking to each other. There seemed to be more of them inland than on the coast – maybe the police had seen to that. They were like a broken army walking away from a war, cheeks sunken, eyes dead with fatigue. Some carried bags of tools, or shabby cardboard suitcases; some wore the ghosts of city suits; some, when they stopped to rest, carefully removed their shoes and polished them vaguely with handfuls of grass. Among them were carpenters, clerks, engineers from the Midlands; many had been on the road for months, walking up and down the country in a maze of jobless refusals, the treadmill of the mid-30s. I hate being lied to. If a book is sold as fiction, that’s fine; but this was supposed to be a travel memoir and it turned out to be a fabulist’s yarn (to put it nicely). 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?" 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. 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.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. 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. Find sources: "As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning"– news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR ( July 2015) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) The English chapters of As I Walked Out, indeed, constitute an important record of the culture of vagrancy in the interwar years. Within a few days of setting out, Lee can categorise the other foot-folk he meets: there are a few recreational walkers, there are long-term professional tramps (“the brotherhood”, identifiable because they “brewed tea by the roadside, took it easy, and studied their feet”) and there is a third type, “trudging northwards in a sombre procession”, being “that host of unemployed who wandered aimlessly about England at that time.” These men:

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