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

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His descriptions of the Spanish landscape and peasants in the 1930s just before war breaks out are vivid and evocative. 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. Our neighbours are all farmers, scratching a subsistence living from harvesting olives, wheat, sunflowers, raising pigs and horses and puppies, and labouring in the fields, they are generous with their smiles and their vegetables. The sight of the girl and the bed, packed into that tiny room, was like some familiar 'Alice' nightmare.

However, so vivid are his descriptions that it feels as though one is watching a travelogue film rather than reading a book. When Laurie Lee set out on foot from his home in the Gloucestershire village of Slad one midsummer morning in 1935 he was 19 and off to see the world with only his violin for company. This is a jewel of a book and my all time favourite, I have re-read it over and over again over many years. We had miles to go until we sleep, and I didn’t want to be that annoying one faffing around with my kit.For three or four days I followed the track through the hills, but saw only occasional signs of life – sometimes a shepherd’s hut, or a distant man walking, or a solitary boy with a flock of goats; otherwise no sound or movement except the eagles overhead and the springs gushing out of the rocks. Starts out with a stopover for a while at boarding houses in London, which is something that interests me. It is not uncommon on a country road to see a small white van parked in the shade and one man with a mattock, hoeing in a large field of weeds. Little is revealed of his crossing and Laurie is soon setting out to cross Spain, with not much more than an old violin which he uses to earn a meagre living. The Spain he travels to is ancient and incredibly exotic although the people he meets are familiar in many ways.

As someone who recently took up the violin at 48 years of age, I not only understand the courage it takes to perform in public, I viscerally feel the fear when I see your videos. 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.He has such an amazing turn of phrase and describes things in a manner that produces genuinely provocative images in your mind. It was early and still almost dark when our ship reached the harbour, and when out of the unconscious rocking of sea and sleep I was simultaneously woken and hooked to the coast of Spain by the rattling anchor going over the side.

By August 1935 he reaches Toledo, where he has a meeting with the South African poet Roy Campbell and his family, whom he comes across while playing his violin. Discover the joy of reading with us, your trusted source for affordable books that do not compromise on quality. 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. First of all he left the Cotswolds village of Cider With Rosie fame to walk to London, receiving much-needed advice from an experienced tramp on the way.In this sequel Lee leaves the security of his Cotswold village of Slad in Gloucestershire to start a new life, at the same time embarking on an epic journey on foot. Bringing their own unique and counter-balanced personalities to proceedings they ask questions such as: what is happiness? In the capital he works for a year as a labourer on a building site but when that job nears completion he sets his sights on Europe: “a place of casual frontiers, few questions and almost no travellers”.