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

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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. In February 1936 the Socialists win the election and the Popular Front begins. In the spring the villagers burn down the church, but then change their minds. In the middle of May there is a strike and the peasants come in from the countryside to lend their support, as the village splits between Fascists and Communists. I must say I don't believe that he was quite as politically naive as he claims, but generally he communicates very clearly what it would have been like to experience the countryside and people without the preconceptions of a student of Spain's culture. He lived rough, and was able to see what life was like at dirt level.

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning - Wikipedia

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. 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. The Spain he travels to is ancient and incredibly exotic although the people he meets are familiar in many ways. 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.”

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: 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. 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.

Laurie Lee | As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning | Into Spain Laurie Lee | As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning | Into Spain

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.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. 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. 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.