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

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At 12, Lee went to the Central Boys' School in Stroud. In his notebook for 1928, when he was 14, he listed "Concert and Dance Appointments", for at this time he was in demand to play his violin at dances. [2] 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. Like many precocious writers, Lee never really grew up artistically. Valerie Grove makes the interesting point that by 1947 several publishers had already commissioned the entire prose output of Laurie Lee's creative life. When Cider With Rosie was eventually published, to astounding success in 1960, it was an autobiography notable for the fact that it stopped when its hero was 23, the year he left his native Gloucestershire. Laurie Lee was then 45. He would write nothing to match it ever again. In his prime he was known as a poet who had written a book, but in the end he would be known simply as a prose writer who had formerly written poems. 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:

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.” An archive recording of Lee's voice was used for the narration of the Carlton Television film Cider with Rosie (1998), which was first broadcast after his death. The screenplay was written by his friend John Mortimer. [19]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).

a b Grove, Valerie (30 May 2014). "Fiercely unconventional and rampantly seductive: Lorna Wishart, the muse who made Laurie Lee". New Statesman. Archived from the original on 31 May 2017 . Retrieved 2 May 2017. 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. He works in clear, precise statements slowly building the panorama and action, so that you can see, feel and hear what he sees and feels; stark, vivid, pictures of scenes, events and people, a country destroyed by war. Lee's writing is so honest and skilled that I read this book for his writing, and only later realized there was an understated narrative.

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Lee, on the other hand, comes across as a bit of a fibber. He crosses the snowbound Pyrenees in the middle of winter on his own without hiking gear. He is immediately arrested on suspicion of being a spy and kept in a dungeon for two weeks without food. He is threatened with execution. Then he is released and joins the International Brigades and bonks a beautiful woman within minutes of meeting her. Then he is sent to Madrid to play the violin on the radio because he is such a great musician. Then he is sent to the front again and takes part in the fighting for Teruel where he kills Nationalist soldiers. Then he is threatened with execution again but escapes to bonk a beautiful woman again. He is always vague with details. His memoir was written 53 years after his departure from Spain.

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. He had two epileptic fits in Figueras, which he attributes to the increased excitement of being in Spain and of his journey over the mountains.

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He seems to be a fairly good violinist and artist. At present he is assisting in the cultural work at Tarazona. Laurie Lee reading 'Cider with Rosie' complete and unabridged. ISIS audio books 1988. 7 disc set 7 h 55 min