First Edition. Hardcover. Illustrated by Leonard Rosoman. 252pp. Previous owner's name/date on f.e.p., light spine crease, V.g. in price-clipped dustwrapper just slightly sunned on spine. 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. 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. Jonathan Keeble stars as Laurie Lee in the celebrated journey from his Cotswold home in Slad to the South of Spain in the mid 1930s.

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee - Goodreads

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. 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.” 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.

Last on

The English chapters of As I Walked Out, indeed, constitute an important record of the culture of vagrancy in the interwar years. Within a few days of setting out, Lee can categorise the other foot-folk he meets: there are a few recreational walkers, there are long-term professional tramps (“the brotherhood”, identifiable because they “brewed tea by the roadside, took it easy, and studied their feet”) and there is a third type, “trudging northwards in a sombre procession”, being “that host of unemployed who wandered aimlessly about England at that time.” These men:

Laurie Lee Robert MacFarlane: in the footsteps of Laurie Lee

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. urn:lcp:asiwalkedoutonem00leel:epub:2688f7a9-a038-4ca5-b5a8-6ad0bfcd42b4 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier asiwalkedoutonem00leel Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t3b00412s Lccn 76086542 Ocr ABBYY FineReader 8.0 Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.16 Openlibrary_edition He falls in love with Spain, its people and their dreams of a fairer society. He and another Briton are 'rescued' from the Civil War and although he leaves, it is no surprise that he decides to return and join the International Brigade. This book ends as he crosses the Pyrenees and enters Spain again. His wartime experiences inform the next book, "A Moment of War". 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: 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.

Broadcasts

I lay on my belly, the warm earth against me, and forgot the cold dew and the wolves of the night. 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. Months later, he becomes embroiled in the wave of events which were to become the Spanish Civil War. By the second day I’d finished my bread and dates, but I found a few wild grapes and ate them green, and also the remains of a patch of beans. 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. As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning is the moving follow-up to Laurie Lee's acclaimed Cider with Rosie

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee - Waterstones

It is a sad and brilliant paragraph, compassionate in its noticing – especially the “vague” polishing of shoes by men who had once been in jobs where shininess of shoe mattered – and respectful of these brigades of broken men who walked the landscape, but who often fall out of the headier accounts of life on the path. 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. 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. This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.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.

As I walked out one midsummer morning : Lee, Laurie : Free

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. 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. In February 1936 the Socialists win the election and the Popular Front begins. In the spring the villagers burn down the church, but then change their minds. In the middle of May there is a strike and the peasants come in from the countryside to lend their support, as the village splits between Fascists and Communists. I 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.Cleo's father finds him a job as a labourer and he rents a room, but has to move on as the room is taken over by a prostitute. He lives in London for almost a year as a member of a gang of wheelbarrow pushers. Once the building nears completion he knows that his time is up and decides to go to Spain because he knows the Spanish for "Will you please give me a glass of water?"