As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

Rating:
Summary: On foot, in Spain
Review: "As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning" is the story of Laurie Lee's travels (mostly on foot) from rural West Country England to London, and then through Spain in 1935-36. It's a joy to read (as was "Cider With Rosie"), and Lee recalls a world now lost due to the rise of the motor car and the arrival of the "global village": for example, I doubt that the arrival of a foreigner in a Spanish village would now be quite the event it was in 1935.

The majority of the book is devoted to Spain, and indeed this for me was the best part. It's a Spain in which Lee sees the faded glory of the past, but at the same time a backwardness reminiscent of descriptions of the Third World countries of today. Lee was no romantic - he devotes space to descriptions of the grinding poverty and social tensions he saw.

I puzzled over some parts of the book, however. Lee does not describe how he managed to pick up a working knowledge of Spanish. I suppose that youth helped (he was 20), and necessity can be the mother of education. If the dialogue was being reconstructed at some distance in time from the actual events, it might be best to consider that it was Lee's recollection of what might have been said rather than a truly accurate account.

Also, I was disappointed that while Lee followed the course of the Guadalquivir to Seville, he fails to mention the city of Cordoba. Did he visit it, or give it a miss?

In all though, a very enjoyable read.

Rating:
Summary: So Much He Loved Wandering
Review: "As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning" [1], author Laurie Lee recounted his first sojourn away from home. At age 19, our narrator-biographer, walked out of his village at Stroud, Gloucestershire, and headed toward London. As Lee himself recalled, he was 'still soft at the edges' when he said farewell to his mother (a poignant scene in the opening chapter). All he had with him that Sunday morning in June 1934 was 'a small rolled-up tent, a violin in a blanket, a change of clothes, a tin of treacle biscuits, and some cheese.'

After nearly a year of living and working in London as a cement laborer, Lee decided it was time to move on. He bought a one-way ticket and sailed to Spain. He settled for Spain because he had had an introduction to Spanish. All he could speak then, Lee admitted, was only one Spanish phrase: 'Will you please give me a glass of water?'

In July 1935, Laurie Lee landed in northwestern Spain. For many months he roamed the exotic and history-filled landscape, living off his music and the kindness of the people he came to love. From Vigo, he wandered southward through the New Castile region (Segovia, Madrid, Toledo). By December, he came to the coastal region of Andalusia (Cordova, Seville, Granada). There, Lee holed up at a Castillo hotel until the outbreak of the civil war in July 1936.

This author's second autobiographical sketch could have been subtitled "From Spain With Love." His inimitable poetic description of the Spanish landscape and its inhabitants is sensual as it is lyrical. The warmth and beauty of this passage [no pun], for example, undulates this reviewer's reveries, not of memories but of what has never been: 'When twilight came I slept where I was, on the shore or some rock-strewn headland, and woke to the copper glow of the rising sun coming slowly across the sea. Mornings were pure resurrection, which I could watch sitting up, still wrapped like a corpse in my blanket, seeing the blood-warm light soak back into the Sierras, slowing re-animating their ash-grey cheeks, and feeling the cold of the ground drain away beneath me as the sunrise reached my body.'

Lee's "As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning" and its third autobiograhy "A Moment In War" have had a farther reach than any of his other celebrated works. These writings have been adapted to music to which Charles Baudelaire could only spoke of metaphorically. In June of 2002, the Allegri String Quartet in The Salisbury Festival (UK) premiered "A Walk Into War." A musical piece which the quartet had commissioned based on the two latter biographies.

The author once wrote that autobiography is 'a celebration of life and an attempt to hoard its sensations...trophies snatched from the dark... to praise the life I'd had and so preserve it, and to live again both the good and the bad'. By all measures he had not done badly. He was and is the one modern author whose memoirs have transcended into the realms of music and visual arts ('Cider With Rosie', a 1998 film by John Mortimer).

1] Laurie Lee's autobiographical trilogy - Book 1:"Cider with Rosie" (1959); Book 2:"As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning" (1969); and Book 3: "A Moment of War" (1991).

Rating:
Summary: Memorable
Review: It's a shame that this fine book is not in print. Those going after used editions--and you should--are encouraged to look for the 1985 reprint stunningly illustrated with classic paintings of Spanish life. But back to why you want to read this: in 1934, a young, naive Englishman who had never been out of his rural neighborhood packed up his violin and went walking, first to London, a hundred miles east and then via boat to Spain where he walked from Vigo in the north down to the southern coast. I'm having trouble shelving the book: is it a straight memoir? Certainly it is very much about the writer's encounter with the world at a historically significant time and about his own growth process. Or is it a travelogue? It is a very accurate account of the unique Spanish culture and countryside. Although written more than 30 years after the actual experience, Lee's account conveys a fresh sense of wonder and discovery and resists overlaying too much foreshadowing and hindsight. His style is lyrical, vivid as the blue Spanish sky and honest. He is refreshingly free of nationalism and prejudice.