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The Autobiographical Trilogy #2
Un beau matin d'été: Sur les chemins d'Espagne 1935-1936
Un beau jour de l'été 1935, un gamin chômeur issu de la campagne anglaise profonde quitte son village, un violon sous le bras, et prend la route de l'Espagne, un pays dont il ne sait rien. Un pays, surtout, qui vit encore pour l'essentiel à l'heure d'une sorte de moyen âge immémorial.
Notre jeune marcheur va parcourir en un an un peu plus de mille kilomètres à pied, de Vigo jusqu'à l'Andalousie. Chaque étape - il n'a pas un sou en poche - l'entraîne un peu plus loin sur le chemin de la pauvreté absolue... et de la fraternité qui en est l'incompréhensible corollaire. Et il finit par se prendre d'amour pour ce peuple qui, du haut de sa misère, l'accueille avec une si touchante générosité, et l'invite bientôt à partager sa révolte.
Né en 1914 dans le Gloucestershire, Laurence Edward Alan « Laurie » Lee aura très tôt le goût des voyages. À dix-neuf, il quitte son petit village afin de tenter sa chance à Londres. Pour tout bagage : son violon, dont il joue dans les auberges pour gagner sa vie. Au bout de quelques mois, tourmenté par le désir d’aller plus loin, il s’embarque sur le premier bateau venu, qui l’emmène jusqu’au port espagnol de Vigo. Commence alors une aventure dont il n’a rien prévu : la découverte d’un pays, l’Espagne, qui vit encore en plein Moyen Âge, l’explosion de la guerre civile, la guerre mondiale, à l’issue de laquelle il décide d’écrire. L’enfant au violon, marcheur infatigable, devient ainsi le chroniqueur de sa propre expérience. Parmi quelques récits et recueils de poèmes, c’est surtout son autobiographie en trois volumes – Rosie ou le goût du cidre, Un beau matin d’été et Instants de guerre – qui le fait connaître du grand public. Ces récits, considérés en Angleterre comme des classiques, ont été traduits dans de nombreuses langues. Laurie Lee est mort le 13 mai 1997.
215 pages, Kindle Edition
First published December 12, 1969
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About the author
Laurie Lee
84 books281 followersLaurence Edward Alan "Laurie" Lee, MBE, was an English poet, novelist, and screenwriter. His most famous work was an autobiographical trilogy which consisted of Cider with Rosie (1959), As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969) and A Moment of War (1991). While the first volume famously recounts his childhood in the idyllic Slad Valley, the second deals with his leaving home for London and his first visit to Spain in 1934, and the third with his return in December 1937 to join the Republican International Brigade.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 771 reviews
January 15, 2026
Goodbye childhood… Farewell home…
He is heading for London… And like a medieval pilgrim he goes on foot… A romantic streak of youth… Everything he sees is new to him… He earns money by busking… He plays his fiddle…
In London he works on a building site pushing a wheelbarrow… After spending the winter there he, goaded by wanderlust, sails for Spain…
Another land… Strange impressions… Dusty roads… Intolerable summer heat… Villages and towns… An aura of deprivation… Religious awe… At last he reaches the capital…
He keeps travelling south… On reaching the coast he continues to hike along the shore east… Cádiz, Tarifa, Algeciras, Gibraltar, Malaga… And he decides to spend winter in Almuñécar… Unrest… Anarchists dream of anarchy…
History never asks us which way it should go.
It was 1934. I was nineteen years old, still soft at the edges, but with a confident belief in good fortune. I carried a small rolled-up tent, a violin in a blanket, a change of clothes, a tin of treacle biscuits, and some cheese. I was excited, vainglorious, knowing I had far to go; but not, as yet, how far.
He is heading for London… And like a medieval pilgrim he goes on foot… A romantic streak of youth… Everything he sees is new to him… He earns money by busking… He plays his fiddle…
It was not a good thing, for instance, to let the hat fill up with money – the sight could discourage the patron; nor was it wise to empty it completely, which could also confuse him, giving him no hint as to where to drop his money.
In London he works on a building site pushing a wheelbarrow… After spending the winter there he, goaded by wanderlust, sails for Spain…
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.
Another land… Strange impressions… Dusty roads… Intolerable summer heat… Villages and towns… An aura of deprivation… Religious awe… At last he reaches the capital…
Madrid struck me at first as being all tram-bells and wire, false marble and dilapidation. Counting London, it was only the second major city I’d seen, and I slipped into it as into the jaws of a lion. It had a lion’s breath, too; something fetid and spicy, mixed with straw and the decayed juices of meat. The Gran Via itself had a lion’s roar, though inflated, like a circus animal’s – wide, self-conscious, and somewhat seedy, and lined with buildings like broken teeth.
He keeps travelling south… On reaching the coast he continues to hike along the shore east… Cádiz, Tarifa, Algeciras, Gibraltar, Malaga… And he decides to spend winter in Almuñécar… Unrest… Anarchists dream of anarchy…
The peasants and fishermen stood all day in the plaza, talking more openly now, but tense. The result of the election had given them power, but it was still too hot to grasp. The news, in fact, was not victory for anyone but a declaration of war.
History never asks us which way it should go.
March 22, 2020
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.
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.
Fifteen-odd years later, it's still as vivid and vibrant as I remember it. If anything it's got better, in that my understanding of the Spanish Civil War has (marginally) improved, and his early days in Putney now have a new resonance due to our six year residency there since the last time I read it.
Limpid, clear, empathetic prose, an amusing story and an easy to like (real life) hero, exploring a world that existed only a generation ago but has completely disappeared, and one which subsequent literary heroes fought to maintain, this is a journey that really has stood the test of time. I'm delighted to discover it remains one of my favourite books...
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.
Fifteen-odd years later, it's still as vivid and vibrant as I remember it. If anything it's got better, in that my understanding of the Spanish Civil War has (marginally) improved, and his early days in Putney now have a new resonance due to our six year residency there since the last time I read it.
Limpid, clear, empathetic prose, an amusing story and an easy to like (real life) hero, exploring a world that existed only a generation ago but has completely disappeared, and one which subsequent literary heroes fought to maintain, this is a journey that really has stood the test of time. I'm delighted to discover it remains one of my favourite books...
May 28, 2021
A fascinating and poetic account of the author's travels through Spain in the months before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Lee's descriptions of people and places were frequently brilliant, but it loses a star for his disturbingly blasé attitude towards the violence, cruelty and paedophilia he witnessed throughout his journey.
March 4, 2023
This is the follow on to Cider with Rosie. It follows Lee as he leaves. It charts his leaving the Gloucestershire valley where he was brought up. He spends some time living in London working on a building site and then goes to Spain. He knows virtually no Spanish at first. He learns the language as he walks around Spain with his fiddle, earning money by playing music. Lee can certainly write and his descriptions of the climate, pastoral settings and landscape are stunning.
“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.”
“Green oaks like rocks lay scattered among the cornfields, with peasants chest-deep in the wheat. It was the peak of harvest, and figures of extraordinary brilliance were spread across the field like butterflies, working alone or in clusters, and dressed to the pitch of the light.”
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.”
Lee walked pretty much everywhere in Britain and in Spain, mainly on back roads and there are lots of descriptions of small, poor Spanish villages. Another impression is of the generosity of the people. Lee also describes the food he eats along the way, most of it he shared with those who let him sleep in various parts of their homes in exchange for some music. The tone becomes bleak towards the end when Lee charts the start of the civil war. He leaves Spain at that point but returns shortly afterwards to fight with the International Brigade against the fascists.
What to make of it. I loved Cider with Rosie. Does this compare with Patrick Leigh Fermor? Well no. Lee is a young man and certainly isn’t chaste, but there were some issues, particularly in relation to women. There was an instance where Lee describes an incident when a drunken father attempts to rape his daughter: Lee steps in to protect him from the mother!
How about this description of a girl:
“black-eyed Patsy, a sexily confident child of eight”
Really? And following on:
“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.”
No excuse for that. It reminded me of Jimmy Saville and his camper van. Shame because much of it was pretty good.
“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.”
“Green oaks like rocks lay scattered among the cornfields, with peasants chest-deep in the wheat. It was the peak of harvest, and figures of extraordinary brilliance were spread across the field like butterflies, working alone or in clusters, and dressed to the pitch of the light.”
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.”
Lee walked pretty much everywhere in Britain and in Spain, mainly on back roads and there are lots of descriptions of small, poor Spanish villages. Another impression is of the generosity of the people. Lee also describes the food he eats along the way, most of it he shared with those who let him sleep in various parts of their homes in exchange for some music. The tone becomes bleak towards the end when Lee charts the start of the civil war. He leaves Spain at that point but returns shortly afterwards to fight with the International Brigade against the fascists.
What to make of it. I loved Cider with Rosie. Does this compare with Patrick Leigh Fermor? Well no. Lee is a young man and certainly isn’t chaste, but there were some issues, particularly in relation to women. There was an instance where Lee describes an incident when a drunken father attempts to rape his daughter: Lee steps in to protect him from the mother!
How about this description of a girl:
“black-eyed Patsy, a sexily confident child of eight”
Really? And following on:
“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.”
No excuse for that. It reminded me of Jimmy Saville and his camper van. Shame because much of it was pretty good.
September 19, 2018
Laurie Lee fought on the commie-scum side in the Spanish Civil War, but doesn’t seem to have been much of a ideological commie. One chapter describes his encounter with the right-wing poet Roy Campbell, with whom he seems to have gotten along rather well.
The final chapter, ‘War’, is more vivid than Orwell’s ‘Homage to Catalonia’, and the whole book is loaded with great descriptive passages of 1930s Spain, like this:
‘Occasionally a day turned unhealthy, when idleness and ennui led to an outburst of mirthless riot. Then the village idiot would be seized, and strapped to a chair, and tormented until he screamed. Wine would be poured on his head, or a man would hold him by the ears while another spread his face with mustard. After a session of this everyone looked flushed and relaxed. Even the Civil Guard would come in to watch.’
The final chapter, ‘War’, is more vivid than Orwell’s ‘Homage to Catalonia’, and the whole book is loaded with great descriptive passages of 1930s Spain, like this:
‘Occasionally a day turned unhealthy, when idleness and ennui led to an outburst of mirthless riot. Then the village idiot would be seized, and strapped to a chair, and tormented until he screamed. Wine would be poured on his head, or a man would hold him by the ears while another spread his face with mustard. After a session of this everyone looked flushed and relaxed. Even the Civil Guard would come in to watch.’
January 16, 2023
A few spoilers below if you are sensitive to those in biographies.
Lee's second autobiography picks up after his first, in 1934, when as a wide eyed 19 year old, he packs up his violin and a tent and with a big breakfast under his belt heads off for London. Having never seen the sea, he decides that via Southampton is the way to go.
Busking his way he makes various discoveries about life and the world on this exposure beyond his Gloucestershire village, and in London establishes himself in a job and a hostel. Some months after this he gets itchy feet, packs up and head for Spain.
For the next few months, being in Spain without any Spanish language is more challenging, but he adapts to being referred to as a Frenchman (nobody considers an Englishman would travel as he does, destitute (almost) and alone), and picks up tidbits of Spanish. He also perfects the local requirements for busking - checking if he needs a permit, making sure the coins don't pile too high in his hat, playing the right tunes.
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.
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.
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.
Lee is of course a poet, and his writing is very good. He weaves detail into his writing without bogging down the story, and keeps momentum and interest in every page. This was equally as enjoyable as Cider with Rosie
4 stars
------
Others in the three part Autobiography
Cider With Rosie
Lee's second autobiography picks up after his first, in 1934, when as a wide eyed 19 year old, he packs up his violin and a tent and with a big breakfast under his belt heads off for London. Having never seen the sea, he decides that via Southampton is the way to go.
Busking his way he makes various discoveries about life and the world on this exposure beyond his Gloucestershire village, and in London establishes himself in a job and a hostel. Some months after this he gets itchy feet, packs up and head for Spain.
For the next few months, being in Spain without any Spanish language is more challenging, but he adapts to being referred to as a Frenchman (nobody considers an Englishman would travel as he does, destitute (almost) and alone), and picks up tidbits of Spanish. He also perfects the local requirements for busking - checking if he needs a permit, making sure the coins don't pile too high in his hat, playing the right tunes.
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.
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.
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.
Lee is of course a poet, and his writing is very good. He weaves detail into his writing without bogging down the story, and keeps momentum and interest in every page. This was equally as enjoyable as Cider with Rosie
4 stars
------
Others in the three part Autobiography
Cider With Rosie
September 28, 2024
I had read ‘Cider with Rosie’ many moons ago. But I had no idea it was part of an autobiographical trilogy and that my Dad had this book - #2 - in his collection.
This tells the story of Laurie Lee leaving his Gloucester home in 1934 at the age of 19. Meandering his way across the English countryside with nothing more than a bag and a violin before reaching Southampton and then departing for Spain. Choosing Spain as he knew one sentence of the language.
His daily trudges to obtain food, money and shelter are a delight to read. Each chapter starts with a simple sketch of people or scenery. He encounters many strange sights on his journey through Spain. The penultimate chapter has the Spanish Civil starting. In the final epilogue Laurie returns home only to travel back through France and into Spain. Where the final book in the trilogy will have him fighting in the International Brigade. After reading Anthony Beevor’s ‘The Battle for Spain’ last year this should be a good complementary read.
This tells the story of Laurie Lee leaving his Gloucester home in 1934 at the age of 19. Meandering his way across the English countryside with nothing more than a bag and a violin before reaching Southampton and then departing for Spain. Choosing Spain as he knew one sentence of the language.
His daily trudges to obtain food, money and shelter are a delight to read. Each chapter starts with a simple sketch of people or scenery. He encounters many strange sights on his journey through Spain. The penultimate chapter has the Spanish Civil starting. In the final epilogue Laurie returns home only to travel back through France and into Spain. Where the final book in the trilogy will have him fighting in the International Brigade. After reading Anthony Beevor’s ‘The Battle for Spain’ last year this should be a good complementary read.
December 18, 2017
I’d already read Laurie Lee's autobiographical trilogy….
- Cider With Rosie (1959) (published in the U.S. as The Edge of Day (1960))
- As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969)
- A Moment of War (1991)
… around 2006, and loved each book. Just magnificent.
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'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.
Laurie Lee’s poetic sensibilities are to the fore, and each page stunningly renders beautiful details of his day-to-day life: the landscape, the people he encounters, the smells, the food, the adventures, his feelings... If ever a book was written to give you wanderlust it is this one. That he is describing a lost world, on the cusp of modernity, makes it even more magical.
He leaves Spain on the brink of Civil War and, as he relates at this book’s conclusion, feels fraudulent for having left the country. He now feels personally invested in the struggle of Spain's poor and disenfranchised and, at end of this book, he arrives back in Spain to fight. What happens next is related in the third book in this marvellous trilogy - A Moment of War (1991) - and, if you haven’t read them, or even if you have, then you should read them/read them again at the earliest opportunity.
- Cider With Rosie (1959) (published in the U.S. as The Edge of Day (1960))
- As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969)
- A Moment of War (1991)
… around 2006, and loved each book. Just magnificent.
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'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.
Laurie Lee’s poetic sensibilities are to the fore, and each page stunningly renders beautiful details of his day-to-day life: the landscape, the people he encounters, the smells, the food, the adventures, his feelings... If ever a book was written to give you wanderlust it is this one. That he is describing a lost world, on the cusp of modernity, makes it even more magical.
He leaves Spain on the brink of Civil War and, as he relates at this book’s conclusion, feels fraudulent for having left the country. He now feels personally invested in the struggle of Spain's poor and disenfranchised and, at end of this book, he arrives back in Spain to fight. What happens next is related in the third book in this marvellous trilogy - A Moment of War (1991) - and, if you haven’t read them, or even if you have, then you should read them/read them again at the earliest opportunity.
May 15, 2018
Wonderful read, Lee's language is both lyrical and poetic, providing a rich evocation of time and place. This part a coming-of-age narrative as well, the still naive Lee of the epilogue is nonetheless grown and filled-out by his experiences. Travelling to Spain, Lee portrays a hard country a world away from the Spain of today. poverty is rife, the stage is prepped and set for the for the full drama of the political crises that were unfolding. Yet Lee is beguiled by the country, it's people and customs, its voice, it's music. It filled me with the joy of escapism, and having been living in the west country most of my life, I am familiar with the landscapes that feature in Lee's other work, although not with the Spanish mainland which I have only visited once briefly. However, so vivid are his descriptions that it feels as though one is watching a travelogue film rather than reading a book. Some of the scenes he describes are frankly horrific and yet, he observes, remarks, and leaves without, in most cases, changing anything. There a strong element of adventure, where he often sleeps under the stars, and it must have taken a great deal of courage to head off into the unknown with little money or knowledge of the country. A Superbly written book.
March 24, 2026
I read Cider with Rosie in my first year at secondary school so there has been a big gap until I got around to the next instalment of Lee’s autobiography. I’m a fairly eclectic reader but two genres that I avoid are travel writing and (auto)biographies – I think the only autobiography I have read is Peter Mandelson’s…I’ll get my coat. This book combines both so it wasn’t something I was going to ever pick up through free will, but I was gifted it along with tickets to see a live reading from Lee’s trilogy accompanied by music. I don’t know if it was the flamenco guitars or the gorgeous voice of Anton Lesser but after hearing extracts I had to read Lee’s journey through Spain.
In 1934 a nineteen year old Lee sets out from his small Gloucestershire village to London. It is the small details that tell you just how much the world has changed in a little under a century, he has never left his county, never seen the sea and so decides to make for the capital by way of Southampton.
Leaving home with no money he busks with his violin. The violin proves invaluable on his travels as it is often the means by which he gets lodging for the night, either by busking during the day or by receiving a bed in exchange for playing for host. In London he finds a job ferrying wheelbarrows of cement around a building site. Reading this I was struck by how young people today are vilified for having no, for want of a better word, gumption, yet there is absolutely no way anyone could do this today where you need a licence to busk, no lodging would be cheap enough to afford through busking anyway and you’d need to have completed a course to be a labourer. Bureaucracy has killed the spirit of adventure.
After a few months in London he moves on and chooses Spain because he has one sentence of Spanish and the bulk of the book is taken up with his journey through the country which as he describes it is unrecognisable to the nation it is today. The people in the villages are mostly dirt-poor yet he never has difficulty finding a household willing to feed him or offer him a place to stay for the night. In some cases their lives are no better than those of medieval peasants, bringing their animals in to sleep among the family and the uncomfortable scenes of women offering their daughters as prostitutes or brothels worked by girls in their early teens. Whatever their situation Lee is always treated with humanity and kindness, even when his own idiocy gets him in trouble, he nearly dies in two extremes of weather – walking across an arid plain on a summer afternoon without a hat and limited water and crossing a mountain in a storm in late Autumn. In return Lee describes every person he meets with a nobility and respectful poetry that captures their spirit rather than their situation,
”At the end of the day, the doors and windows admitted all the creatures of the family: father, son, daughter, cousin, the donkey, the pig, the hen, even the harvest mouse and the nesting swallow, bedded together at the fall of darkness.”
The incredible thing about Lee is his ability to walk, he covers around 20 miles a day and transverses the country north to south, from Vigo to Algeciras and throughout he refers to himself as a tramp rather than a traveller which I think makes clear his intention to wander rather than to visit.
Lee picks up on a general feeling of unrest across the country which manifests in Almunecar with his realisation that civil war is around the corner. He becomes embroiled in the movement quickly, delivering messages (chosen because he is known to locals as the man who walks). When fighting starts in earnest he and another Brit are picked up by a British Navy Destroyer and the locals are amazed that it has been deployed to save a couple of tramps.
The book finishes with him back in Stroud deciding to go back and fight, again not something I imagine the youth would do for their own country today let alone a foreign civil war.
It is a beautiful read, fully capturing the people and the landscape he encounters on his travels. The writing is pure, simple but Lee is the master of knowing when less is more, when to leave something hanging in the air for the reader to fill in, for knowing when to respectfully end his descriptions. A good example is this which is typical of the subtle humour Lee employs throughout,
After rising at half four in the morning… “Breakfast was a wedge of dry bread and a bowl of soup-thick coffee floating with fatty gibs of goat’s milk. By the time I’d swallowed it, it was six o’clock and all the village was on the move.”
Wonderful stuff!
In 1934 a nineteen year old Lee sets out from his small Gloucestershire village to London. It is the small details that tell you just how much the world has changed in a little under a century, he has never left his county, never seen the sea and so decides to make for the capital by way of Southampton.
Leaving home with no money he busks with his violin. The violin proves invaluable on his travels as it is often the means by which he gets lodging for the night, either by busking during the day or by receiving a bed in exchange for playing for host. In London he finds a job ferrying wheelbarrows of cement around a building site. Reading this I was struck by how young people today are vilified for having no, for want of a better word, gumption, yet there is absolutely no way anyone could do this today where you need a licence to busk, no lodging would be cheap enough to afford through busking anyway and you’d need to have completed a course to be a labourer. Bureaucracy has killed the spirit of adventure.
After a few months in London he moves on and chooses Spain because he has one sentence of Spanish and the bulk of the book is taken up with his journey through the country which as he describes it is unrecognisable to the nation it is today. The people in the villages are mostly dirt-poor yet he never has difficulty finding a household willing to feed him or offer him a place to stay for the night. In some cases their lives are no better than those of medieval peasants, bringing their animals in to sleep among the family and the uncomfortable scenes of women offering their daughters as prostitutes or brothels worked by girls in their early teens. Whatever their situation Lee is always treated with humanity and kindness, even when his own idiocy gets him in trouble, he nearly dies in two extremes of weather – walking across an arid plain on a summer afternoon without a hat and limited water and crossing a mountain in a storm in late Autumn. In return Lee describes every person he meets with a nobility and respectful poetry that captures their spirit rather than their situation,
”At the end of the day, the doors and windows admitted all the creatures of the family: father, son, daughter, cousin, the donkey, the pig, the hen, even the harvest mouse and the nesting swallow, bedded together at the fall of darkness.”
The incredible thing about Lee is his ability to walk, he covers around 20 miles a day and transverses the country north to south, from Vigo to Algeciras and throughout he refers to himself as a tramp rather than a traveller which I think makes clear his intention to wander rather than to visit.
Lee picks up on a general feeling of unrest across the country which manifests in Almunecar with his realisation that civil war is around the corner. He becomes embroiled in the movement quickly, delivering messages (chosen because he is known to locals as the man who walks). When fighting starts in earnest he and another Brit are picked up by a British Navy Destroyer and the locals are amazed that it has been deployed to save a couple of tramps.
The book finishes with him back in Stroud deciding to go back and fight, again not something I imagine the youth would do for their own country today let alone a foreign civil war.
It is a beautiful read, fully capturing the people and the landscape he encounters on his travels. The writing is pure, simple but Lee is the master of knowing when less is more, when to leave something hanging in the air for the reader to fill in, for knowing when to respectfully end his descriptions. A good example is this which is typical of the subtle humour Lee employs throughout,
After rising at half four in the morning… “Breakfast was a wedge of dry bread and a bowl of soup-thick coffee floating with fatty gibs of goat’s milk. By the time I’d swallowed it, it was six o’clock and all the village was on the move.”
Wonderful stuff!
June 17, 2016
In 1934 Laurie Lee left his Cotswold home to walk south to see the ocean, then headed up to London. The nineteen-year-old played the violin on street corners for tips, and also depended on the kindness of strangers. A professional tramp who did a yearly circuit around England taught him some of the tricks of survival on the road. Since this was during the years of economic depression, there were also many men on the road looking for work. He worked as a laborer on a construction site and lived in a rooming house for most of his time in London. Lee possessed a youthful energy, and enjoyed socializing with new acquaintances.
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.
The first signs of the Spanish Civil War were appearing when Lee was working at a hotel on the coast. He bonded with young people who were also impoverished--laborers and fisherman who were hoping for a better life when a leftist government came into power in 1936. War broke out between Franco's Fascist rebels and the Republican left. A British destroyer traveled down the Spanish coast picking up British subjects, including Lee, bringing them to safety. When Lee returns to England, he felt that he should help his Republican friends back in Spain. The epilogue is an exciting account of crossing the Pyrenees to reach the Spanish border.
Lee is also a poet, and his writing has a beautiful lyrical quality. He fell in love with the beauty of Spain and its passionate people. His two years on the road were an intense coming of age experience for Laurie Lee.
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.
The first signs of the Spanish Civil War were appearing when Lee was working at a hotel on the coast. He bonded with young people who were also impoverished--laborers and fisherman who were hoping for a better life when a leftist government came into power in 1936. War broke out between Franco's Fascist rebels and the Republican left. A British destroyer traveled down the Spanish coast picking up British subjects, including Lee, bringing them to safety. When Lee returns to England, he felt that he should help his Republican friends back in Spain. The epilogue is an exciting account of crossing the Pyrenees to reach the Spanish border.
Lee is also a poet, and his writing has a beautiful lyrical quality. He fell in love with the beauty of Spain and its passionate people. His two years on the road were an intense coming of age experience for Laurie Lee.
January 18, 2012
This is possibly my favourite book, I re-read it every 3-4 years and will continue to do so.
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.
This book is about that; a young man sets out on a journey at a time when travel for its own sake was extremely rare for the vast majority of people, when leaving the county or even the village was something that some never achieved.
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.
The Spain he travels to is ancient and incredibly exotic although the people he meets are familiar in many ways.
I love this book, it's about travel, fear, change but above all life.
Very strongly reccommended!
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.
This book is about that; a young man sets out on a journey at a time when travel for its own sake was extremely rare for the vast majority of people, when leaving the county or even the village was something that some never achieved.
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.
The Spain he travels to is ancient and incredibly exotic although the people he meets are familiar in many ways.
I love this book, it's about travel, fear, change but above all life.
Very strongly reccommended!
March 8, 2023
“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.”
Not as well known as 'Cider With Rosie' this book is the second in Laurie Lee's autobiographical trilogy. Its 1934 and without of a job 19-year-old Lee leaves his Gloucestershire hometown to tramp to London. In the capital he works for a year as a labourer on a building site but when that job nears completion he sets his sights on Europe: “a place of casual frontiers, few questions and almost no travellers”. He chose Spain because he knew a single Spanish phrase “‘will you please give me a glass of water?’” and so begins probably the best travelogue I've ever read.
Initially Lee lands on Spanish soil in Vigo from where he walks and busks east to Valladolid, south to Cadiz via Madrid and Seville, before turning left along the Andalusian coast to eventually arrive at Castillo. Along the way the reader are shown aspects of Spain that they would rather not see on a package holiday: bedbugs, blisters, wolves and fearful heat — “the brass-taloned lion which licks the afternoon ground ready to consume anyone not wise enough to take cover”, alongside things that you would want to experience: bright-whitewashed towns and the pine-cool foothills of the Sierras where he “slipped off the heat like a sweat-soaked shirt”. Along the way he meets bootblacks, peasants, innkeepers, drovers, priests, soldiers, fellow buskers, limbless beggars and of course a variety of women. Lee arrives as a callow and naïve 20-year-old but gradually comes to realise that the country is on the brink of Civil War and on account the writing slowly grows darker as the story progresses.
What raises this above the level of an ordinary travelogue is Lee's unique and deceptively simple yet poetic language, virtually every other page seemed to contain a beautiful turn of phrase: “Stepping in from the torrid street, you met a band of cool air like fruit-peel pressed to your brow.” But it would also only fair to remember that this book wasn’t published until 1969 so some 30+ years after the actual events took place. No doubt some of the conversations and events are re-imagined recollections and there is also an element of rose-tinted glasses about it. All the same its a beautiful piece of writing that although dated shouts out to be read.
Not as well known as 'Cider With Rosie' this book is the second in Laurie Lee's autobiographical trilogy. Its 1934 and without of a job 19-year-old Lee leaves his Gloucestershire hometown to tramp to London. In the capital he works for a year as a labourer on a building site but when that job nears completion he sets his sights on Europe: “a place of casual frontiers, few questions and almost no travellers”. He chose Spain because he knew a single Spanish phrase “‘will you please give me a glass of water?’” and so begins probably the best travelogue I've ever read.
Initially Lee lands on Spanish soil in Vigo from where he walks and busks east to Valladolid, south to Cadiz via Madrid and Seville, before turning left along the Andalusian coast to eventually arrive at Castillo. Along the way the reader are shown aspects of Spain that they would rather not see on a package holiday: bedbugs, blisters, wolves and fearful heat — “the brass-taloned lion which licks the afternoon ground ready to consume anyone not wise enough to take cover”, alongside things that you would want to experience: bright-whitewashed towns and the pine-cool foothills of the Sierras where he “slipped off the heat like a sweat-soaked shirt”. Along the way he meets bootblacks, peasants, innkeepers, drovers, priests, soldiers, fellow buskers, limbless beggars and of course a variety of women. Lee arrives as a callow and naïve 20-year-old but gradually comes to realise that the country is on the brink of Civil War and on account the writing slowly grows darker as the story progresses.
What raises this above the level of an ordinary travelogue is Lee's unique and deceptively simple yet poetic language, virtually every other page seemed to contain a beautiful turn of phrase: “Stepping in from the torrid street, you met a band of cool air like fruit-peel pressed to your brow.” But it would also only fair to remember that this book wasn’t published until 1969 so some 30+ years after the actual events took place. No doubt some of the conversations and events are re-imagined recollections and there is also an element of rose-tinted glasses about it. All the same its a beautiful piece of writing that although dated shouts out to be read.
December 6, 2022
I always like to know if it is important to read books in a particular order. Here, it is advisable to read Cider with Rosie first, then As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning second, then A Moment of War third. These three make up Laurie Lee’s Autobiographical Trilogy. A Rose for Winter follows. In it Laurie Lee returns to Spain, after the Civil War.
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.
What makes the book special, and in that which it excels, is Lee´s ability to capture the ambiance of time and place. It reads as prose poetry! If you have not already tested Lee’s writing, you must! These are the reasons why Lee’s books are to be read.
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.
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.
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!
***********************
*Down in the Valley: A Writer's Landscape 3 stars
*Cider with Rosie 4 stars
*As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning 4 stars
*A Moment of War 4 stars
*A Rose for Winter TBR
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.
What makes the book special, and in that which it excels, is Lee´s ability to capture the ambiance of time and place. It reads as prose poetry! If you have not already tested Lee’s writing, you must! These are the reasons why Lee’s books are to be read.
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.
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.
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!
***********************
*Down in the Valley: A Writer's Landscape 3 stars
*Cider with Rosie 4 stars
*As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning 4 stars
*A Moment of War 4 stars
*A Rose for Winter TBR
July 21, 2020
Oh, how Laurie Lee could write. Nearly every sentence is worthy of underlining. He captures a place and its people beautifully. This is the second in the autobiographical trilogy that starts with Cider with Rosie, and here he walks from Gloucestershire to the south coast, then up to London, before travelling to Spain, and walking down over the mountains to the sea. His descriptions of the Spanish landscape and peasants in the 1930s just before war breaks out are vivid and evocative. Wonderful stuff.
July 2, 2021
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).
Just as Patrick Leigh Fermor did (but with less ambition), Laurie Lee set out from his home village in the late 1930s on an extended solo walking trip, his goal first the southern coast of England, then London, then Spain. Lee spent a year earning a pittance as a hod carrier in London, then took ship for the Bay of Biscay with a knapsack, a tent, and a violin. The bulk of the book purportedly describes his year traversing Spain.
At first Lee appears to be a congenial narrator. He has a vivid and original way with simile, which began by pleasing but wore out its welcome after a few chapters. I enjoyed passages like “The plain ended here in a series of geological convulsions that had thrown up gigantic shelves of rock, raw red in colour and the size of islands, rising abruptly to several hundred feet. Perched on the sharpest of these, and scattered along its crumbling edge, Toro looked like dried blood on a rusty sword.” But I came to dread the appearance of the word like, introducing as it inevitably did yet another stretch to capture an outré image.
And then the pervasive misogyny began to be hard to ignore. I try to be tolerant of the mores of another age, but it was noticeable that men were consistently described as humans and women and girls as objects. When we got to the place where Lee comes back to his lodging to find his hostess screaming and crying that her drunken husband has gone after her daughter, and Lee promptly offers succor to . . . the drunken husband, my disgust was starting to get in the way of my goodwill. Lee depicts himself as moving penniless through the landscape, earning his keep by playing his violin, but I read afterward in an article about him that a woman (unacknowledged) paid his way—so these cringey moments were no accident. Over and over he presented himself as graciously accepting the advances of sexy young women, only to move on the next day. He came off in the end as a slacker trying to be a romantic man’s man in the Hemingway mold. If you find Hemingway romantic, this book might be for you.
Finally, it dawned on me about a third of the way through that he was letting his fondness for the macabre overtake his veracity. One example: as Lee is busking for his lodging, “One night, I remember, a gentleman in a grey frock-coat came down from his room to listen, and stood close behind me, nodding and smiling to the music and sticking long silver pins through his throat. Another night as I played, an old clock in the courtyard suddenly shuddered and struck fourteen.” Neither claim is remotely credible, the pins nor the clock, and the first even less so when juxtaposed against the second. Street people, all of them treated as expendables, fare especially poorly in his lust for shocking moments. When he meets up with an expat South African poet full of braggadocio who constantly invents heroic scenarios in which he supposedly starred, we see where he got the idea.
I wish I could have believed his depiction of Spain on the brink of war with Generalissimo Franco’s fascists. That would have been a book to read. I would go on to the next book in his series (in which he takes part in the fighting) if only I could take it as real. But Lee forfeited that privilege.
Just as Patrick Leigh Fermor did (but with less ambition), Laurie Lee set out from his home village in the late 1930s on an extended solo walking trip, his goal first the southern coast of England, then London, then Spain. Lee spent a year earning a pittance as a hod carrier in London, then took ship for the Bay of Biscay with a knapsack, a tent, and a violin. The bulk of the book purportedly describes his year traversing Spain.
At first Lee appears to be a congenial narrator. He has a vivid and original way with simile, which began by pleasing but wore out its welcome after a few chapters. I enjoyed passages like “The plain ended here in a series of geological convulsions that had thrown up gigantic shelves of rock, raw red in colour and the size of islands, rising abruptly to several hundred feet. Perched on the sharpest of these, and scattered along its crumbling edge, Toro looked like dried blood on a rusty sword.” But I came to dread the appearance of the word like, introducing as it inevitably did yet another stretch to capture an outré image.
And then the pervasive misogyny began to be hard to ignore. I try to be tolerant of the mores of another age, but it was noticeable that men were consistently described as humans and women and girls as objects. When we got to the place where Lee comes back to his lodging to find his hostess screaming and crying that her drunken husband has gone after her daughter, and Lee promptly offers succor to . . . the drunken husband, my disgust was starting to get in the way of my goodwill. Lee depicts himself as moving penniless through the landscape, earning his keep by playing his violin, but I read afterward in an article about him that a woman (unacknowledged) paid his way—so these cringey moments were no accident. Over and over he presented himself as graciously accepting the advances of sexy young women, only to move on the next day. He came off in the end as a slacker trying to be a romantic man’s man in the Hemingway mold. If you find Hemingway romantic, this book might be for you.
Finally, it dawned on me about a third of the way through that he was letting his fondness for the macabre overtake his veracity. One example: as Lee is busking for his lodging, “One night, I remember, a gentleman in a grey frock-coat came down from his room to listen, and stood close behind me, nodding and smiling to the music and sticking long silver pins through his throat. Another night as I played, an old clock in the courtyard suddenly shuddered and struck fourteen.” Neither claim is remotely credible, the pins nor the clock, and the first even less so when juxtaposed against the second. Street people, all of them treated as expendables, fare especially poorly in his lust for shocking moments. When he meets up with an expat South African poet full of braggadocio who constantly invents heroic scenarios in which he supposedly starred, we see where he got the idea.
I wish I could have believed his depiction of Spain on the brink of war with Generalissimo Franco’s fascists. That would have been a book to read. I would go on to the next book in his series (in which he takes part in the fighting) if only I could take it as real. But Lee forfeited that privilege.
June 30, 2021
I suppose this could be referred to as the sequel to Cider with Rosie. This book is superb as it's equal measures of memoir, travel book, and historical reference. Laurie Lee leaves the Cotswolds, heads to London, and then determines to head further afield, arriving in Vigo in Galicia before taking a year to walk through pre-Civil War Spain to the southern coast at Almunecar where he becomes trapped at the beginning of the war. He's taken from the beach by a Royal Navy warship and arrrives back in the UK soon afterwards. It's not long though before he's heading over The Pyrennes to enlist with the forces fighting the Fascist Franco.
March 21, 2021
[28th book of 2021. Artist for this review is Spanish painter Eliseo Meifrén Roig.]
4.5. 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.
As with Cider with Rosie, this is extraordinarily well-written. It felt as if every other line needed reading again for the pure beauty and rhythm of it. I'm slightly gutted I am borrowing this from the library, knowing I couldn't underline all the best lines and paragraphs in it. It's almost impossible to choose sections to quote as there are so many. Lee meets a whole host of interesting and strange characters on his journey and certainly sees a lot of the world, travelling almost entirely with just his violin, playing around England (and then Spain), to make his money. Despite this seemingly precarious situation, Lee never seems dangerously lacking in food and though several times he says, in his matter-of-fact way, that he almost died from this or that, mostly due to weather, his unprepared journeying never strays too close to doom. I saw an article a little while ago titled, rather pathetically, "What If Laurie Lee's Books Aren't True?"—it discussed the age-old debate of validity when concerning "true stories". I saw a similar thing surrounding British writer Bruce Chatwin; there seemed to be a similar stirring about his work, and several things came out about the "lies" in his novels. One anecdote recalled a young girl in one of Chatwin's books sitting about all the time and reading Tolstoy, someone who had been on the journey with Chatwin came out and said it wasn't true at all, and the girl actually read "trashy" novels all day. I'm with Chatwin though, Tolstoy is considerably more romantic.
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.
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.
The "War" chapter brings some more physical happenings aside from Lee's (mostly) aimless wanderings.
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.
This only just falls short of five-stars because I wanted it to be slightly more introspective; typical of English writers of the period, there is a certain reserve to the whole novel. Even when bodies appear in the streets and destroyers begin firing from the coastlines, Lee never appears particularly afraid or cautious, the narrative moves on with its gentle, matter-of-fact manner. However, on the whole, this is a brilliant read and superior to Cider with Rosie.
4.5. 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.
As with Cider with Rosie, this is extraordinarily well-written. It felt as if every other line needed reading again for the pure beauty and rhythm of it. I'm slightly gutted I am borrowing this from the library, knowing I couldn't underline all the best lines and paragraphs in it. It's almost impossible to choose sections to quote as there are so many. Lee meets a whole host of interesting and strange characters on his journey and certainly sees a lot of the world, travelling almost entirely with just his violin, playing around England (and then Spain), to make his money. Despite this seemingly precarious situation, Lee never seems dangerously lacking in food and though several times he says, in his matter-of-fact way, that he almost died from this or that, mostly due to weather, his unprepared journeying never strays too close to doom. I saw an article a little while ago titled, rather pathetically, "What If Laurie Lee's Books Aren't True?"—it discussed the age-old debate of validity when concerning "true stories". I saw a similar thing surrounding British writer Bruce Chatwin; there seemed to be a similar stirring about his work, and several things came out about the "lies" in his novels. One anecdote recalled a young girl in one of Chatwin's books sitting about all the time and reading Tolstoy, someone who had been on the journey with Chatwin came out and said it wasn't true at all, and the girl actually read "trashy" novels all day. I'm with Chatwin though, Tolstoy is considerably more romantic.
He said his name was Alf, but one couldn't be sure, as he called me Alf, and everyone else. 'Couple of Alfs just got jugged in this town last year,' he'd say. 'Hookin' the shops—you know, with fish-hooks.' Or: 'An Alf I knew used to do twenty-mile a day. One of the looniest Alfs on the road. Said he got round it quicker. And so he did. But folks got sick of his face.'
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.
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.
[...] the cool depths of the Cathedral, clean and bare, full of wide and curving spaces, and the huge stained-glass windows hanging like hazed chrysanthemums in the amber distances of its height. Also the small black pigs running in and out of shop doorways—often apparently the only customers; and the storks roosting gravely on the chimney-pots, gazing across the valley like bony Arabs.
For the first time I was learning how much easier it was to leave than stay behind and love.
The "War" chapter brings some more physical happenings aside from Lee's (mostly) aimless wanderings.
Once again the village crowded on to the beach to watch. The evening was hazy and peacock-coloured; delicate hues ran slowly over the sea and sky and melted together like oil. The destroyers lay low on the horizon, slender as floating leaves, insubstantial as the air around them.
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.
This only just falls short of five-stars because I wanted it to be slightly more introspective; typical of English writers of the period, there is a certain reserve to the whole novel. Even when bodies appear in the streets and destroyers begin firing from the coastlines, Lee never appears particularly afraid or cautious, the narrative moves on with its gentle, matter-of-fact manner. However, on the whole, this is a brilliant read and superior to Cider with Rosie.
October 13, 2022
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.
Lee begins by leaving his home in Stroud and heading to the south coast where he makes money as a violin busker. He eventually makes his way to London where he works on a building site. But the book really begins when he arrives in Spain, starting at Vigo, moving on to Zamora, Valladolid, Madrid, Toledo, Malaga, Gibraltar, and ending in Almuñécar. He details the people and landscapes of each new place as well as his various encounters with brothels and drinking establishments. Again, he makes a living by playing his violin or simply relying on the kindness of strangers often sleeping rough or making do with whatever comes his way. The book then ends with the beginnings of the civil war.
The real treat of the book, however, is the writing. He has such an amazing turn of phrase and describes things in a manner that produces genuinely provocative images in your mind. Each sentence is beautifully crafted and offers a glorious flow of exquisite prose. Not to mention some very funny (and very British) interpretations. Such as his encounter with a mother pimping her own daughter.
"Then one of them beckoned me indoors and offered me her giant daughter, who lay sprawled on a huge brass bed. The sight of the girl and the bed, packed into that tiny room, was like some familiar 'Alice' nightmare. I could only smile and stutter, clutching the doorpost and pretending not to understand. 'Love!' cried the mother, shaking the bed till it rattled, while the girl bounced slowly like a basking whale. I complimented the woman and made some excuse, saying that it was too early in the day."
Lee begins by leaving his home in Stroud and heading to the south coast where he makes money as a violin busker. He eventually makes his way to London where he works on a building site. But the book really begins when he arrives in Spain, starting at Vigo, moving on to Zamora, Valladolid, Madrid, Toledo, Malaga, Gibraltar, and ending in Almuñécar. He details the people and landscapes of each new place as well as his various encounters with brothels and drinking establishments. Again, he makes a living by playing his violin or simply relying on the kindness of strangers often sleeping rough or making do with whatever comes his way. The book then ends with the beginnings of the civil war.
The real treat of the book, however, is the writing. He has such an amazing turn of phrase and describes things in a manner that produces genuinely provocative images in your mind. Each sentence is beautifully crafted and offers a glorious flow of exquisite prose. Not to mention some very funny (and very British) interpretations. Such as his encounter with a mother pimping her own daughter.
"Then one of them beckoned me indoors and offered me her giant daughter, who lay sprawled on a huge brass bed. The sight of the girl and the bed, packed into that tiny room, was like some familiar 'Alice' nightmare. I could only smile and stutter, clutching the doorpost and pretending not to understand. 'Love!' cried the mother, shaking the bed till it rattled, while the girl bounced slowly like a basking whale. I complimented the woman and made some excuse, saying that it was too early in the day."
December 25, 2012
This has got to be one of the most evocative memoirs ever written; it certainly tops all the other road-trip/travelers tales I’ve read. As befits an award winning poet, Lee’s prose has a concise, 3-D image-making eloquence that drops the reader into the center of a scene, in the breathing presence of a character, or into the tactile truth of a landscape.
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.
Few histories of an era or place can conjure its emotional and physical resonance quite so well as a living memory. In his description of life on the road to London, Lee is able to capture the essence of the failure of capitalism during the Thirties (our current failure being but an echo of it’s father).
Spoiler Alert...quotations from the book:
Lee finds himself among the “host of unemployed who wandered aimlessly about England at that time...They were like a broken army walking away from war, cheeks sunken, eyes dead with fatigue. Some carried bags of tools or broken cardboard suitcases; some wore the ghosts of city suits...walking up and down the country in a maze of jobless refusals..” Among them are professional tramps, like Alf, who taught him the ways of the road. “He wore a deerstalker hat, so sodden and shredded it looked like a helping of breakfast food...a tramp to his bones, always wrapping and unwrapping himself, and picking over his bits and pieces...never passing a bit of grass that looked good for a shakedown nor a cottage that seemed ripe for charity.”
Soon after he parts from Alf on the outskirts of Ascot, the other half of society rolls into view: “I wasn’t surprised when one of the Daimlers pulled up and an arm beckoned me from the window...”Want a pheasant my man?” asked a voice from inside. “We just knocked over a beauty a hundred yards back.” A quarter of an hour later I arrived at Ascot. It was race week...little grooms and jockeys dodging among the long glossy legs of thoroughbreds; and the pedigree owners dipping their long cool necks into baskets of pate and gull’s eggs...Alf and the tattered lines of the workless were far away in another country...”
Plus ça change, eh?
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.
Few histories of an era or place can conjure its emotional and physical resonance quite so well as a living memory. In his description of life on the road to London, Lee is able to capture the essence of the failure of capitalism during the Thirties (our current failure being but an echo of it’s father).
Spoiler Alert...quotations from the book:
Lee finds himself among the “host of unemployed who wandered aimlessly about England at that time...They were like a broken army walking away from war, cheeks sunken, eyes dead with fatigue. Some carried bags of tools or broken cardboard suitcases; some wore the ghosts of city suits...walking up and down the country in a maze of jobless refusals..” Among them are professional tramps, like Alf, who taught him the ways of the road. “He wore a deerstalker hat, so sodden and shredded it looked like a helping of breakfast food...a tramp to his bones, always wrapping and unwrapping himself, and picking over his bits and pieces...never passing a bit of grass that looked good for a shakedown nor a cottage that seemed ripe for charity.”
Soon after he parts from Alf on the outskirts of Ascot, the other half of society rolls into view: “I wasn’t surprised when one of the Daimlers pulled up and an arm beckoned me from the window...”Want a pheasant my man?” asked a voice from inside. “We just knocked over a beauty a hundred yards back.” A quarter of an hour later I arrived at Ascot. It was race week...little grooms and jockeys dodging among the long glossy legs of thoroughbreds; and the pedigree owners dipping their long cool necks into baskets of pate and gull’s eggs...Alf and the tattered lines of the workless were far away in another country...”
Plus ça change, eh?
July 14, 2017
The year is 1934 and the 19 year old Laurie Lee is about to leave his Gloucestershire home, to walk to London. His mother feeds him his last breakfast, standing just behind him with a hand on his shoulder. Few words are spoken, but it is an emotionally charged goodbye. As he walks up the hill out of the village he glances back and waves, before walking away from the only place he has ever known. First though, he wants to see the sea, so heads towards Southampton through the English countryside just as summer is beginning. He scratched a living out by busking with his violin, before heading east along the coast and then North to London where he was to reunite with daughter of an American anarchist, Cleo. He gets a job as a labourer on a building site which enables him to stay in London and rent a room. As the building work reaches completion, he starts to consider where to go next, Europe beckons and he chooses Spain purely because he knows a single phrase in the language. A ticket is bought and the next stage of his journey begins.
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.
Lee is a happy, go lucky, young man who is prepared to venture into a world that is utterly strange to everything that he has ever known. His naivety means that he sees everything with a fresh pair of eyes and by travelling light, it means that he can move on whenever it suits. Lee writes with an innocence and eloquence that brings alive the pre-civil war Spain. For me though the book had echoes of the great travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor another young man who forged his way all across Europe in the 1930’s too. Was well worth reading.
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.
Lee is a happy, go lucky, young man who is prepared to venture into a world that is utterly strange to everything that he has ever known. His naivety means that he sees everything with a fresh pair of eyes and by travelling light, it means that he can move on whenever it suits. Lee writes with an innocence and eloquence that brings alive the pre-civil war Spain. For me though the book had echoes of the great travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor another young man who forged his way all across Europe in the 1930’s too. Was well worth reading.
August 12, 2012
Beautifully written book about Laurie Lee's experiences as a nineteen-year-old walking through Spain just before, and as, the Civil War started. As much poetry as prose. Part of the effect is that he spends all but the last few pages describing rural (and even urban) Spain in 1934 as still living in medieval times, a state of serfdom, ignorance, poverty, disease, and filth that he observed but did not question. Suddenly the rise of the republican movement is an awakening for him as well as a connection for the reader with what the day to day life was like that gave rise to it.
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.
The language is truly beautiful--this will repay rereading. The Norton edition I read (1985) is bountifully illustrated with color and black and white paintings and drawings of Spain from centuries of famous artists
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.
The language is truly beautiful--this will repay rereading. The Norton edition I read (1985) is bountifully illustrated with color and black and white paintings and drawings of Spain from centuries of famous artists
June 12, 2016
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.
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.
At times, his account is a little hard to believe - for instance, could he really have lived just on handfuls of dates for days on end, as he claims? I'm also envious of his speed in learning foreign languages, since he seems to jump from knowing almost no Spanish to being able to argue over politics and bargain with strangers within a matter of pages. However, none of this really matters.
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 meets up with a couple of famous eccentric poets on his travels, firstly Philip O'Connor in London and then Roy Campbell in Spain, being welcomed into his home. The section about Campbell and his family is especially memorable and reminded me of Hemingway's accounts of the famous people he knew in A Moveable Feast, another book written many years later.
At the end, the mood darkens as Lee witnesses the start of the Civil War. A ship arrives to take him and other stranded British travellers home, but he can't forget his adopted country and decides to return to join in the fight against Franco. He has to climb through the French Pyrenees in the snow before finally getting back to Spain. I now want to go on to read about what happened next in A Moment Of War, the last volume of his autobiographical trilogy.
The Penguin I read includes line drawings by Leonard Rosoman, which are taken from the first edition, so presumably Lee would have had some input into them. I liked the drawings, which remind me of the illustrations in children's books I read during the 60s. Rosoman was an official Second World War artist and his work has a haunting quality. However, it would be nice to have an edition of As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning with photographs of the areas described as well as the drawings.
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.
At times, his account is a little hard to believe - for instance, could he really have lived just on handfuls of dates for days on end, as he claims? I'm also envious of his speed in learning foreign languages, since he seems to jump from knowing almost no Spanish to being able to argue over politics and bargain with strangers within a matter of pages. However, none of this really matters.
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 meets up with a couple of famous eccentric poets on his travels, firstly Philip O'Connor in London and then Roy Campbell in Spain, being welcomed into his home. The section about Campbell and his family is especially memorable and reminded me of Hemingway's accounts of the famous people he knew in A Moveable Feast, another book written many years later.
At the end, the mood darkens as Lee witnesses the start of the Civil War. A ship arrives to take him and other stranded British travellers home, but he can't forget his adopted country and decides to return to join in the fight against Franco. He has to climb through the French Pyrenees in the snow before finally getting back to Spain. I now want to go on to read about what happened next in A Moment Of War, the last volume of his autobiographical trilogy.
The Penguin I read includes line drawings by Leonard Rosoman, which are taken from the first edition, so presumably Lee would have had some input into them. I liked the drawings, which remind me of the illustrations in children's books I read during the 60s. Rosoman was an official Second World War artist and his work has a haunting quality. However, it would be nice to have an edition of As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning with photographs of the areas described as well as the drawings.
May 28, 2018
Beautiful prose...but I just couldn't engage. For me it just seemed very repetitive - I got off the boat and walked to this village, met some interesting people, drank a lot, played my violin to earn some cash and then walked to another village, met some interesting people, drank a lot, played my violin to earn some cash and then walked to another village, met some interesting people, drank a lot, played my violin to earn some cash and then walked to another village, met some interesting people, drank a lot, played my violin to earn some cash and then walked to another village, and then the war started and I went home to England felt guilty about leaving and returned. I know mine is a minority opinion, but it's how I feel.
September 13, 2021
In honour of International Women's Day, I'm finally shelving this trash book by a trash man. Can only give 2* on account of the fact that he called an eight-year old girl "sexy" and insinuated encroaching on another one without consent. Seriously, climbing into her window to "cuddle"? Wasn't aware that Romeo and Jimmy Savile had a love child.
August 31, 2021
Really 3.5, but rounded up as it's short enough that it never gets bogged down.
Starts out with a stopover for a while at boarding houses in London, which is something that interests me. After that, the author makes a sudden decision to head off to Spain, based on the fact that he knows one fairly useless sentence in the language. We get his take on the common Folk in a few cities and towns, where he works as a busker playing the fiddle for tips as well as food and drink. The final section sees him trapped in a village at the outset of the Spanish Civil War, where things aren't going very well; just as things look hopeless for him, a Deus ex Machina miracle sees him escaping home to Britain.
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.
A library book, or relatively cheap copy would be worth looking into if the summary sounds interesting. However, I'm not keen on trying his other work particularly.
Starts out with a stopover for a while at boarding houses in London, which is something that interests me. After that, the author makes a sudden decision to head off to Spain, based on the fact that he knows one fairly useless sentence in the language. We get his take on the common Folk in a few cities and towns, where he works as a busker playing the fiddle for tips as well as food and drink. The final section sees him trapped in a village at the outset of the Spanish Civil War, where things aren't going very well; just as things look hopeless for him, a Deus ex Machina miracle sees him escaping home to Britain.
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.
A library book, or relatively cheap copy would be worth looking into if the summary sounds interesting. However, I'm not keen on trying his other work particularly.
June 8, 2018
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.
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.
For anyone with an interest in Spain, this is a must.
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.
For anyone with an interest in Spain, this is a must.
March 30, 2022
I’ve always said that the more money you have when you travel, the less interesting the trip, which makes this book about as interesting as it gets. The guys is basically a hobo with a violin walking around Spain in 1934. I look back on my life and consider that I was roughing it when I would travel internationally without an ATM or credit card so when you ran out of money, you were out of freaking money. This account makes my early days look like a first-class seat.
July 4, 2019
This book was recommended to me by John Gimlette, one of my favorite travel writers. In 1935, an English youth named Laurie Lee walked of the village he lived and made his way on foot to London, from where he took a boat to Vigo in Galicia. As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning is the story of his wanderings through England and Spain. When, finally, he wound up in Andalusia, the Spansh Civil War broke out. He was evacuated by a British destroyer and returned to England.
I loved Lee's writing style, which is reminiscent of Patrick Leigh Fermor's in A Time of Gifts and George Orwell's in Down and Out in Paris and London. This book gives me more of a feeling of Spain than any other I have read. I will probably read the sequel, A Moment of War, in which Lee returns to Spain and its internecine war.
I loved Lee's writing style, which is reminiscent of Patrick Leigh Fermor's in A Time of Gifts and George Orwell's in Down and Out in Paris and London. This book gives me more of a feeling of Spain than any other I have read. I will probably read the sequel, A Moment of War, in which Lee returns to Spain and its internecine war.
September 9, 2012
The best of the 3 autobiographical books poet Laurie Lee wrote, this one concerns his walking tour of Spain just before the Spanish Civil War. He was penniless, young, and open to experience, and as a result, he had a wonderful time wandering from town to town playing his violin for small change, food and lodging. It worked, in that long-gone time, and the descriptions of Spain before the wars are heartbreaking because Lee is so good at bringing to life all that we've lost without sentimentalizing that time at all. Serendipity plays heavily in Lee's wanderings, and it made me keenly aware of how jam-packed my life is with work, and chores, and family and everything else -- and how little room there is in it for serendipity. At least the kind that comes from wandering with no set agenda, timetable, or to-dos.
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