Book Reviews - Review 431

In June 1934, the nineteen-year-old Laurie Lee left his childhood home in rural Gloucestershire to seek his fortune. He walked a meandering route towards London, without any goal in mind except to escape the stifling cosiness of the Cotswold Hills:

With him he carried his violin, which he would to use to make ends meet busking when on the move.

Once in London, he found work on a building site, and settled in the city for nearly a year. He became acquainted with members of the lower rungs of society, and participated in a strike that epitomised "the punitive, rasping air of the Thirties".

When the building project was complete, Lee felt it time to move on to Europe. He knew a few words of Spanish, so bought a one-way boat ticket to Vigo in Galicia.

The central portion of book covers Lee's slow travels through the baking hot countryside and impoverished towns and of northern and central Spain. Life for the inhabitants of these places was hard and often brutal. If Lee's upbringing had been parochial, it was nothing compared to the archaic pattern of rural Spanish life, "which could have been that of England two centuries earlier."

Lee made his way south through Madrid, Toledo (where he stayed with eccentric South African poet Roy Campbell) and Málaga, finally reaching the coastal town of Almuñécar in December 1935. Here he decided to spend the winter. He received board and lodging from a Swiss hotelier in return for doing odd jobs and performing in the bar with his violin.

At this time, Spain was in political and social turmoil. In February 1936, a left-wing coalition narrowly won the General Election, and the peasants of Almuñécar, while dimly encouraged by promises of change from the weak government, were more receptive to incitements to violence from local Republican activists. The bloody disturbances that had been erupting across Spain for several years - the foreshocks of the Spanish Civil War - reached Almuñécar during Lee's stay. Then, just as things were starting to look really dangerous, a British warship from Gibraltar pulled into the harbour, unexpectedly, to take Lee home.

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning forms a stark contrast with Lee's earlier Cider with Rosie, which described his childhood in the peaceful depths of the English countryside. The poetic description is equally rich, but the scenes it represents here are often chastening and grim. This is the account of a young man's encounter with the harshness of the wider world - but also with its excitement. Lee portrays himself as a tough and self-confident individual, never unduly upset by what he saw around him, but rather observing with the unbiased fascination of a natural journalist.

Lee paces his narrative expertly, so that only at the end does one perceive its subtle arc. He saw the first signs of troubles to come on the quiet lanes of southern England, where he passed men tramping from town to town despondently seeking work:

The sense of the weariness and tension of pre-war Europe accumulates slowly; Lee's arrival in each destination in both England and Spain adds a layer to the picture, until events accelerate in the dramatic climax in Almuñécar - as inevitable is it is, initially, unexpected. The writer's journey from peaceful Gloucestershire to disrupted southern Spain is artistically impressive as a metaphor for the journey from adolescence to manhood.

How much of Lee's account is strictly accurate I don't know. He published As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning over thirty years after the journey, without access to his diaries. He is well-known for taking liberties with fact (the real Rosie says he never drank cider with her; there is strong circumstantial evidence that he never fought in the Spanish Civil War, as he claimed elsewhere). But if the result of artistic licence is such an evocative and gripping work, one can excuse it.