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

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Months later, he becomes embroiled in the wave of events which were to become the Spanish Civil War. 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.

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee, First As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee, First

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. By the end of September Lee reaches the sea. Then he comes to the Sierra Morena mountains. He decides to turn west and follow the Guadalquivir, adding several months to his journey, and taking him to the sea in a roundabout way. He turns eastwards, heading along the bare coastal shelf of Andalusia. He hears talk of war in Abyssinia. He arrives at Tarifa, making another stop over in Algeciras.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 The epilogue describes Lee's return to his family home in Gloucestershire and his desire to help his comrades in Spain. He finally manages to make his way through France and crosses the Pyrenees into Spain in December 1937.

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning - Media Centre - BBC

In the winter of 1935 Lee decides to stay in Almuñécar. He manages to get work in a hotel. Lee and his friend Manolo, the hotel's waiter, drink in the local bar alongside the other villagers. Manolo is the leader of a group of fishermen and labourers, and they discuss the expected revolution. The "War" chapter brings some more physical happenings aside from Lee's (mostly) aimless wanderings. 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.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. Nothing I knew was here, and perhaps there was a moment of panic – anyway I suddenly felt the urge to get moving. So I cut the last cord and changed my shillings for pesetas, bought some bread and fruit, left the seaport behind me and headed straight for the open country. 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.” 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.

Laurie Lee Robert MacFarlane: in the footsteps of Laurie Lee

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. 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. Otherwise all I remember of those first days from Vigo is a deliriously sharpening hunger, an appetite so keen it seemed almost a pity to satisfy it, so voluptuous it was.

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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). 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 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). Laurie Lee has written some of the best-loved travel books in the English language. Born in Stroud, Gloucestershire, in 1914, he was educated at Slad village school and Stroud Central School. At the age of nineteen he walked to London and then travelled on foot through Spain, where he was trapped by the outbreak of the Civil War. He later returned by crossing the Pyrenees, as he recounted in A Moment of War.

Laurie Lee | As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning | Into Spain Laurie Lee | As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning | Into Spain

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. 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: 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. 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".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. He gathered these details as he walked, and he could not have done so had he not opened himself to the kinds of encounter and perception that travel on foot makes possible. Walking, Lee notes early on, refines awareness: it compels you to “tread” a landscape “slowly”, to “smell its different soils”. The car passenger, by contrast, “races at gutter height, seeing less than a dog in a ditch”. Lee, like Leigh Fermor, believed in walking not only as a means of motion but also as a means of knowing – and this unforgettable book is proof of the truth of that belief. 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. For there are, broadly speaking, two intertwined histories of British long-distance walking. One involves the wilful wanderer: those like Lee and Leigh Fermor who set out to relish the romance of the open road, and often subsequently to write about it. The other is a shadow history – harder to see because its participants left little trace – of those who had no choice but to walk, and who barely held life together as they “padded it” down the paths. 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.