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

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AC: While you were walking, how did you record your thoughts? Notebook, dictaphone, photos? Did you keep a daily journal? The grave in Slad of Laurie Lee, one of England's best-loved writers. Photo credit: Joe Wainwright Photography Wishart family of artists". www.binsted.org. Archived from the original on 5 June 2019 . Retrieved 5 June 2019. Lee is also an observer of people. The first few chapters involve his walk to London and his experiences there. It is 1934 and there is still a depression. Lee recalls men who:

The identity of the daughter became public in 1997, after further biographical research into Lee’s life. Yasmin was called the author’s “love child” in media coverage of yet another fascinating chapter in the tale of the talented Garman family. Lorna’s elder sister was Kathleen Garman, who became the second wife of the sculptor Jacob Epstein, whose art collection the New Art Gallery Walsall was built to house. What is more, Epstein and Kathleen’s daughter, Kitty, later became the first wife of Lucian Freud, after she was introduced to him by Lorna once their own affair had ended. Stranger still, Laurie Lee would go on to marry another of Lorna’s nieces. AC: Did you ever find your own opinions and experiences of Spain conflicting with the course or content of the book? The books were first published thirty some years after the recounting of events. One hears a tone of nostalgia in the telling. I definitely advise listening to an audio version spoken by the author. The result is then transformed into pure art.

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. The "War" chapter brings some more physical happenings aside from Lee's (mostly) aimless wanderings. This is one of two books I inherited from my mum's parents, the other being Anna Karenina. I remember going up to my grandpa's house after he died and reading this, by an open fire, drinking Stones Ginger Wine the night of his funeral. I must have been about 16-17, and me and my brother were the only people in the house as our parents stayed with my aunt. This book is about that; a young man sets out on a journey at a time when travel for its own sake was extremely rare for the vast majority of people, when leaving the county or even the village was something that some never achieved. A winter sunrise over the Stroud valley in winter from Swifts Hill Nature Reserve. Photograph: Peter Llewellyn/Getty Images

Of the highs, well literally climbing up and over the Guadarrama mountains north of Madrid - breathing in the rarified air as you crest a peak and see the capital sprawled out below you takes some beating. Right at the end of the journey, I finally met Lee’s widow and daughter, who were thrilled to hear of my journey, and who told me that if their father were standing by their side at that moment, he would bestow his blessing upon me. Powell, Tom (15 June 2014). "When Laurie Lee walked out". The Olive Press. Archived from the original on 18 April 2019 . Retrieved 2 September 2020. Lee left the Central School at 15 to become an errand boy at a Chartered Accountants in Stroud. In 1931, he first found the Whiteway Colony, two miles from Slad, a colony founded by Tolstoyan anarchists. This gave him his first smattering of politicisation and was where he met the composer Benjamin Frankel and the "Cleo" who appears in As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. [3] In 1933 he met Sophia Rogers, an "exotically pretty girl with dark curly hair" who had moved to Slad from Buenos Aires, an influence on Lee who said later in life that he only went to Spain because "a girl in Slad from Buenos Aires taught me a few words of Spanish." [4] 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: There is so much that is special about Swift’s Hill. It’s home to a host of rare chalk plants, including no fewer than 14 different species of orchid. There is archaeological evidence of continuous settlement on the hill dating from the stone age: that sense of continuity was as important to Laurie as the inordinate beauty of the natural landscape.

Lee's first love was always poetry, though he was only moderately successful as a poet. Lee's poems had appeared in the Gloucester Citizen and the Birmingham Post, and in October 1934 his poem 'Life' won a prize from, and publication in, the Sunday Referee, a national paper. [7] [15] Another poem was published in Cyril Connolly's Horizon magazine in 1940 and his first volume of poems, The Sun My Monument, was published in 1944. This was followed by The Bloom of Candles (1947) and My Many-coated Man (1955). Several poems written in the early 1940s reflect the atmosphere of the war, but also capture the beauty of the English countryside. The poem "Twelfth Night" from My Many-coated Man was set for unaccompanied mixed choir by American composer Samuel Barber in 1968. Grove, Valerie (18 December 2019). "Laurie Lee's rural myths". New Statesman. Archived from the original on 22 January 2020 . Retrieved 2 September 2020. 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. Laurie Lee died of bowel cancer at home in Slad on 13 May 1997, at the age of 82. He is buried in the local churchyard. [7] Works [ edit ] Books [ edit ]

On the outbreak of the Second World War Lee attempted to join the British Army but because of his poor health he was rejected and instead he worked as a sound technician for the General Post Office film unit (1939–40), then as a scriptwriter with the Crown Film Unit (1941–3) and the Ministry of Information publications division (1944–6). I'm recommending the book for its strong writing quality, more than the "action" itself. I was left puzzling that he relates conversations with locals, presumably in Spanish, where I was left with a bit of suspension-of-disbelief that he would be chatting away so soon. 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. AC: How did the journey, and the process of writing the book, affect you as a person? Do you think you’ve changed, and if so, in what way (for better or worse)? 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!Lee, on the other hand, comes across as a bit of a fibber. He crosses the snowbound Pyrenees in the middle of winter on his own without hiking gear. He is immediately arrested on suspicion of being a spy and kept in a dungeon for two weeks without food. He is threatened with execution. Then he is released and joins the International Brigades and bonks a beautiful woman within minutes of meeting her. Then he is sent to Madrid to play the violin on the radio because he is such a great musician. Then he is sent to the front again and takes part in the fighting for Teruel where he kills Nationalist soldiers. Then he is threatened with execution again but escapes to bonk a beautiful woman again. He is always vague with details. His memoir was written 53 years after his departure from Spain. This has got to be one of the most evocative memoirs ever written; it certainly tops all the other road-trip/travelers tales I’ve read. As befits an award winning poet, Lee’s prose has a concise, 3-D image-making eloquence that drops the reader into the center of a scene, in the breathing presence of a character, or into the tactile truth of a landscape. I stopped to take a look. It was now so cold that my toes and fingers were beginning to feel numb and I could see my breath clearly. It was this intense, bone-chilling, winter weather that inspired some of Laurie’s early poetry, especially for a poem commissioned by the BBC in the early 1940s, in the depths of a freezing cold winter of war. Christmas Landscape begins: Fifteen-odd years later, it's still as vivid and vibrant as I remember it. If anything it's got better, in that my understanding of the Spanish Civil War has (marginally) improved, and his early days in Putney now have a new resonance due to our six year residency there since the last time I read it.