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

Product Information

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.

I must say I don't believe that he was quite as politically naive as he claims, but generally he communicates very clearly what it would have been like to experience the countryside and people without the preconceptions of a student of Spain's culture. He lived rough, and was able to see what life was like at dirt level.Other works include A Rose for Winter, about a trip he made to Andalusia 15 years after the civil war; Two Women (1983), a story of Lee's courtship of and marriage to Kathy, daughter of Helen Garman; The Firstborn (1964), about the birth and childhood of their daughter Jessy (christened Jesse); and I Can't Stay Long (1975), a collection of occasional writing.

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. As a young man Lee, despite carrying the burden of two girl's names, decided he had to go and fight fascists in Spain. He crossed the frontier on foot from France: However, the relationship continued. Valerie Grove has pointed out: "During the war he camped in a caravan near her husband’s Sussex estate; she arrived daily in her Bentley, bringing poetic inspiration and erotic fulfilment." Lee wrote at the time, "I cannot think why lovers ever leave their beds." Lee eventually left the caravan near Cissbury Ring and took a cottage in Bognor Regis. Lorna was intensely jealous of Lee. She wrote at the time: "I'm longing for you to grow old, each new wrinkle on your face is a joy to me - I want you to grow old and repulsive so that no one will want to look at you." Early life and works [ edit ] Laurie Lee's childhood home, Bank Cottages (now Rosebank Cottage), in the village of Slad.Paul Murphy: I guess the answer to this is: yes and no. Yes, in the sense that I have been fascinated by the book it is based on and its author, and the idea of walking across Spain, since I was 17 and first read As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. No, in that the first time I seriously considered undertaking the journey as a book project was when I had to pitch an idea for a non-fiction book to my tutor on my MA Professional Writing Course at Falmouth University in February 2012. Somehow I had discovered that June 2014 would be Lee’s centenary and I thought my tutor would like the hook. She did, but cautioned me that she had doubts about whether I could do the walk/journey, write the book, and find a publisher, all in time for the centenary. She was right to be cautious, but I did manage to meet the deadline... by a week! One of the incidental pleasures of this biography is its portrait of the wartime world of books, a now-dispersed milieu that extended from Bloomsbury, Covent Garden and Soho through Fitzrovia, to Broadcasting House, by way of any number of pubs and cheap restaurants. He also worked for the BBC and that Thirties forcing-house of youthful talent, the GPO Film Unit. Here, although he saw himself as a poet, it was the melody of his documentary prose that marked him out. The audiobook I listened to is read by Stephen Thorne, not the author. Thorne’s narration is fine. It’s good. It’s easy to follow, but it doesn’t reach halfway up to the magnificence of the author’s own reading of his books. It simply does not have Laurie Lee’s superb inflection. The essence of prose poetry is lost. In addition, when you’ve got a word that is French, I think it should be pronounced as the French do. It irritated me that “la grippe” is by Thorne pronounced as the English word “gripe”, which has a very different sound and meaning! I have given the narration three stars. I had my own magical moment after writing the book, when the love of my life, the girl I should have married, found me through the book and we are together again. One day I will bring her to Granada to see the sun go down. 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.