As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

by Laurie Lee

I was lucky, I know, to have been setting out at that time, in a landscape not yet bulldozed for speed.

For the first time I was learning how much easier it was to leave than to stay behind and love.

The boys were going to León, where they would join some other ‘students’, while I’d chosen Valladolid, not because I knew anything about it, but because I liked the sound of its syllables.

The borders of consciousness are anxious enough, raw and desperate places; we shouldn’t be dragged across them like struggling thieves as if sleep was a felony.

From here, in the past, Segovia had been in the habit of tossing into the gorge its felons, adulterers, and heretics; thus suiting poverty and indolence by saving the price of a bullet or the extra effort of a sword-thrust.

talked about the world to come – a world without church or government or army, where each man alone would be his private government.

a Frenchman drove up in a battered Fiat with a white flag tied on the roof.

Classic

There was also a platoon of teenage girls armed with hand-grenades. Nobody joked with them.

Others may need a war, she said; but you don’t, you’ve got one here.