The Book Depository As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee

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The Book Depository As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee
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Description: As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning : Paperback : Penguin Books Ltd : 9780241953280 : : 15 May 2014 : The stooping figure of my mother, waist-deep in the grass and caught there like a piece of sheep's wool, was the last I saw of my country home as I left it to discover the world' Abandoning the Cotswolds village that raised him, the young Laurie Lee walks to London. There he makes a living labouring and playing the violin. The Book Depository As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee - shop the best deal online on thebookbug.co.uk

 

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Author: M. Dowden

Rating: 5

Review: Laurie Lee of course gave us one of the nation’s most loved and treasured memoirs with Cider with Rosie, but obviously he wrote much more than that. Here we are given his memoir on when he first left the rural community he grew up in, and which was the first memoir that he gave us. Summer 1934 and a nineteen year old Lee leaves home for the first time, to live in London. So, the first few chapters are of this journey, which our author does on foot. We read of those who he meets on the road, the professional gentlemen of the road as well as those who find themselves travelling up and down the country trying to find work when and as it arrives; these are mainly soldiers and the less fortunate. Then of course you also have others on the road, commercial travellers and so on. This makes for an interesting piece of writing, as nowadays most of these people have disappeared. We then read of his life in London, writing poetry, and working as a general labourer on a building site. The main text of the book though is about when he leaves London, and travels to Spain, backpacking and with his violin to help pay his way. From busking and the different and at times eccentric characters he meets, so we are taken into a Spain that has since changed greatly, and we see places from the poorer and darker side than those which you see from the package holiday experiences, and indeed when this was written that had not really started to the extent it is now. If you have read Cider with Rosie before then you will already be accustomed to Laurie Lee’s wonderful prose, and how he brings people and scenes to life, which is once again beautifully shown here. We start to feel like we are accompanying Lee on his travels, visiting locations that in nearly all places have changed greatly since this was written. We also see how the author has unknowingly to him stepped into a country that is just about to break out into civil war, which we read of more in the last couple of chapters, before Lee and another Brit are rescued as such by the Royal Navy out of Gibraltar. We finish up with an epilogue where we see the author going back to Spain to help fight in the war. Beautifully written and showing us how places have changed and indeed the landscape in some areas, so this brings to life Spain with all its problems before the civil war broke out properly. Also reading this we get the feel for a more carefree life, with Laurie only needing to worry about getting a roof over his head, somewhere to sleep and a good meal. Spain already obviously had problems before its war but one thing that we see here that has been now lost, and only recently, and from other southern European countries, is the traditional siesta as air conditioning in buildings and cars have become the norm. This has led to the changes in lifestyle, such as dancing, singing and entertainments of the night, which people cannot now do as easily as in years gone by, because they have to work all the following day, without that midday rest.

 

Author: FictionFan

Rating: 3

Review: Aged 19, Laurie Lee left his home in Gloucestershire to see something of the wider world. Travelling on foot and subsisting on the money he could earn by busking with his violin, he headed south, walking round the English coast till he arrived in London. There, he worked for a year on a building site, saving enough money so that when the job came to an end he could afford to buy a ticket on a ship to Spain. He would spend the next year tramping round Spain, earning enough to keep body and soul together from his violin, until his journey came to an abrupt end with the start of the Civil War. Returning to England and learning more about the wider ramifications of the war, he would then decide to return to Spain to fight for the Republican cause. At least this is the story he tells us in the book. The truth would appear to be somewhat different. His travels were apparently funded at least in part by a wealthy older woman, a kind of patron who believed in him as a writer and poet. Lee doesn’t mention her, but her very existence makes the idea of this naive teenager setting off to see the world rather dubious, since clearly he must already have been mixing in artistic society. We do get occasional glimpses of him staying with some of the ex-pat writers living in Spain at that time, which rather throws into doubt the truth of the hand-to-mouth existence he describes. But more than that, the references to art and history which our young rural innocent throws casually into the narrative makes it clear he was either far more educated and cultured at this stage in his life than he wants us to believe, or else, as I suspect, that he was allowing his mature personality at the time of writing to intrude itself into the mind of the youthful adventurer he is trying to show himself as. For example, he compares Spanish peasants to Goya’s paintings, leaving me wondering where he had seen these paintings. If he spent time in either London or Spain visiting art galleries, he fails to mention it, and I doubt there were many Goyas hanging on the wall of the local museum in his Gloucestershire village. These points may appear to be nit-picking, but I mention them because all the time I was reading, these and other similar oddities left me with a strong feeling that the whole story had been so embellished that it was difficult to see what was true and what was fictional – a problem when a book is presented as a memoir. It also meant that I never felt I got to know the Lee of this period – his itinerant existence, hard-drinking and living in squalid conditions alongside the local Spaniards doesn’t gel with the fact that his patron was trying to get TS Eliot interested in the poetry he was writing, since he never mentions writing poems or even a journal as he travels. I felt that older Lee (the book was published in 1969, more than thirty years later) was trying to create a character of this naive boy busking his way round Spain, rather than revealing himself as he really was. There are all kinds of serendipitous moments that simply didn’t ring true to me – like when his violin fell apart, and a complete stranger just happened to offer him another one for free. Again, this made me assume he was neither as alone or as without means as he is projecting. Some of the descriptive stuff is beautifully written, which makes the book worth reading despite these problems, (although he often stretches too far for an original simile – “a hand was raised in salute, showing among its sun-black fingers the glittering sickle like a curved sixth nail”. Huge hands, then, or a very small sickle?). The scorching heat and the changing landscape of Spain come to life in a way that the people he meets rarely do. Having recently read Hemingway, Orwell and Brennan on the Spain of this period, I’m afraid I found Lee to be quite unperceptive about the people or the political situation. He describes the poverty, often extreme, of the places he travels through, but he doesn’t show much of the contrasting wealth – the inequality that is at the root of the Civil War. He talks about the rising anti-clericalism, but in a way that left me feeling he hadn’t really understood it. In a sense, this lack of perception ties in more with the naivety I’ve questioned, and I’m sure it wouldn’t have bothered me if I hadn’t read so much recently about the causes of the war. I’ll restrict myself to a mini-rant about his attitude to women, who are all either voluptuous, if he fancies them, or buxom, if he doesn’t. (Everything is voluptuous though – the heat, the sky, exhaustion, hunger, war. It’s the most over-used word in the book and made me wish he’d packed a thesaurus.) On one occasion when a drunken father attempts to rape his young daughter, Lee steps in to protect the father from the irate mother. Just as ickily, at another point he describes a girl as “black-eyed Patsy, a sexily confident child of eight” and goes on to say of her… "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." Times change, but was it ever acceptable to write of a child so young in such explicitly sexualised terms? I was going to rate this as four stars, but honestly I’ve talked myself out of it as I’ve written this review. Like cheap wine, the aftertaste it has left feels synthetic and a little unpleasant, so despite the many beautifully written passages I can only bring myself to give it three.

 

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