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

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The epilogue describes Lee's return to his family home in Gloucestershire and his desire to help his comrades in Spain. He finally manages to make his way through France and crosses the Pyrenees into Spain in December 1937.

A winter sunrise over the Stroud valley in winter from Swifts Hill Nature Reserve. Photograph: Peter Llewellyn/Getty Images Some of Lee’s earliest writings were inspired by Slad’s ponds and their wildlife. Photograph: Peter Llewellyn/Getty Images It was then that I began to sense for the first time something of the gaseous squalor of a country at war, an infection so deep it seemed to rot the earth, drain it of colour, life, and sound. This was not the battlefield; but acts of war had been committed here, little murders, small excesses of vengeance. The landscape was plagued, stained and mottled, and all humanity seemed to have been banished from it,

El Majuelo Botanical Gardens

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: What makes the book special, and in that which it excels, is Lee´s ability to capture the ambiance of time and place. It reads as prose poetry! If you have not already tested Lee’s writing, you must! These are the reasons why Lee’s books are to be read. He gathered these details as he walked, and he could not have done so had he not opened himself to the kinds of encounter and perception that travel on foot makes possible. Walking, Lee notes early on, refines awareness: it compels you to “tread” a landscape “slowly”, to “smell its different soils”. The car passenger, by contrast, “races at gutter height, seeing less than a dog in a ditch”. Lee, like Leigh Fermor, believed in walking not only as a means of motion but also as a means of knowing – and this unforgettable book is proof of the truth of that belief. 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. Few histories of an era or place can conjure its emotional and physical resonance quite so well as a living memory. In his description of life on the road to London, Lee is able to capture the essence of the failure of capitalism during the Thirties (our current failure being but an echo of it’s father).

went on their way like somnambulists, walking alone and seldom speaking to each other. There seemed to be more of them inland than on the coast – maybe the police had seen to that. They were like a broken army walking away from a war, cheeks sunken, eyes dead with fatigue. Some carried bags of tools, or shabby cardboard suitcases; some wore the ghosts of city suits; some, when they stopped to rest, carefully removed their shoes and polished them vaguely with handfuls of grass. 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.” 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! Over the course of a year he makes his way steadily east, with plenty of diversions. Lee meets up with various people who he finds something in common with, settling for a week or two, or moving on within days. He stays as long as he takes joy from being in a place, or with certain people, but happily moves on once that is over. He shares a lot of his year, but remains fairly discrete about his love life, happily sharing the details of other people though! The Spain that Lee describes is a poor, almost destitute country at this time, politically ripe for resolution as the rich and well separated from the poor. The writing here is “voluptuous” yet precise, and as such it is characteristic of Lee’s style, in which elaborate metaphors serve not as ornaments, but rather as the means of most closely evoking complex experience. Lee does not walk so much as levitate or hover, borne aloft by supernatural stamina, and, in mimicry of this sensation, his clauses, suspended by their commas, also bear the reader along “the way” and onwards into the unknown. If the power of Cider With Rosie derives from its dream of dwelling, the power of As I Walked Out derives from its dream of leaving. If only I could live forever in one place, and come to know it so well, you think, reading Lee’s first volume of memoir. If only I could step from my front door, walk away and just keep going, you think, reading his second. Yet one does not have to get far into the book to discover that such fantasies are prone to disruption. Lee’s first night out is “wretched”: he falls asleep in a field, a rainstorm soaks him, he wakes to find two cows “windily sighing” over him and he takes shivering refuge in a damp ditch. This miserable bivouac begins his disillusionment with the dream of life on the move. An archive recording of Lee's voice was used for the narration of the Carlton Television film Cider with Rosie (1998), which was first broadcast after his death. The screenplay was written by his friend John Mortimer. [19]

I highly recommend the book, these books and the author. I will soon be reading the following two. I am consciously avoiding a detailing of events. My words cannot match up with Lee’s!