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

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So jaunty was Lee, so much did he bound and bounce along, that at times it is as if we are reading of a journey made by Christopher Robbin’s friend, Tigger. But is this just a function of the way Lee wrote, or of the way he wanted to remember things? Lee was extremely selective. He missed out huge chunks of his trip, but doesn’t try to sum them up even briefly. By tying the rest together he perhaps gives the misleading impression. 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.

Lee met Lorna Wishart (sister of Mary) in Cornwall in 1937, and they had an affair (Lorna was married) lasting until she left him for Lucian Freud in 1943. They had a daughter, Yasmin David, together. Wishart's husband Ernest agreed to raise the girl as his own; she later became an artist. [11] [12] [6] To travellers from England, Gibraltar is an Oriental bazaar, but coming in from Spain I found it more like Torquay – the same helmeted police, tall angular women, and a cosy smell of provincial groceries. I’d forgotten how much the atmosphere of home depended on white bread, soap and soup-squares. Man Must Move: The Story of Transport (with David Lambert, 1960); published in the US as The Wonderful World of Transportation (1960) – for children

In As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, Lee writes of his stay in Almuñécar, a Spanish fishing village which he calls "Castillo". In 1988 the citizens of Almuñécar erected a statue in Lee's honour. [13] In the rest of this article I draw out parts of Lee’s experience which resonated with my own and those of Rose MacAulay, and other interesting observations. In Spain Vigo

Lee went on to describe how ‘Councils of War’ were held, aimed at ‘the local enemy they knew’. He described notices pinned on the walls of the town calling for ‘revolution’. I remember once visiting the royal palace known as ‘La Granja’ situated some 100km north of Madrid, in the centre of Spain. It was a very hot day, there was hardly anyone there, and I seem to remember some part of it being shut, perhaps the gardens, the palace or the fountains. “Palacio Real de La Granja de San Ildefonso – Segovia” by Antonio Marín Segovia One of the most fascinating aspects of Lee’s adventures was how he literally walked into a war, the war waged by the Francist terrorists, which began with an invasion of southern Spain by elements of the Spanish army located in North Africa. There is nothing in Lee’s book or reflections to suggest that he had political views on anything in particular, and no reason to suggest that he felt a strong sense of duty to defend the values of democracy, republicanism, liberalism or the interests of the common man (as opposed to the landowners, including the Catholic church). Instead what Lee presents is a situation in which he simply became involved in the war, on the side of the Republicans, because he happened to have fallen in with a group of people, in the town of Algericas, who fought on the Republican side. This in turn was, to some extent, the inevitable end point for a traveller with little money or connection in Spain. For when a person travels through Spain, with no connection and especially with no money, he or she is likely to fall in with peasants and commoners, who are generally more available on the street and open to human discourse and interaction on the street. The rich tend, I imagine, to be more private, bunkered in their castles and mansions, and suspicious of anyone who doesn’t have an equal amount of wealth. The Seeds of the War

The unhappy population of Britain’s roads boomed in the years before Lee left Slad. Many of the men who survived the First World War had returned to find no settled employment and no home. Life on foot was the only option available to them, and in the two decades after 1918, plumes of smoke rose from copses and spinneys as the woods of England filled with these shaken-out casualties of war – men who slept out and lived rough, begging as they went and working where they could. Their numbers grew further when the economic crash of the 1930s left millions jobless across Europe and America. A Sexily Confident Child of Eight There was little in Laurie Lee’s book that saw the war coming. There was no sociological, economic or political analysis, he had not gone to Spain for that reason. Nevertheless there were perhaps snippets. In Tarifa, a young fisherman pointed out that he had no work and that the women ‘prostrated’ themselves for money. This speaks of a situation where the rich of Spain were only willing to share the wealth of the country in return for sex. Lee appeared to be equally as comfortable travelling and being alone as he was with people. He had an enviable ability to bond with strangers of different types, he was like a twentieth century Louis Theroux.