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

Product Information

The sequel to Laurie Lee's famous memoir 'Cider with Rosie,' a lovely second impression complete with the original unclipped dust wrapper.

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning - Penguin Books UK As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning - Penguin Books UK

This small book is such a delight to read, it is at the same time a glimpse into ancient Spain [albeit 1934] and a door opening onto Spanish culture today. What makes the book special, and in that which it excels, is Lee´s ability to capture the ambiance of time and place. I look back on my life and consider that I was roughing it when I would travel internationally without an ATM or credit card so when you ran out of money, you were out of freaking money.His descriptions of the Spanish landscape and peasants in the 1930s just before war breaks out are vivid and evocative. Still a little off balance I looked about me, saw obscure dark eyes and incomprehensible faces, crumbling walls scribbled with mysterious graffiti, an armed policeman sitting on the Town Hall steps, and a photograph of Marx in a barber’s window. He scratched a living out by busking with his violin, before heading east along the coast and then North to London where he was to reunite with daughter of an American anarchist, Cleo. Even when living on a handful of figs, Lee found luxury in that slowness, in a world explored step by step. Extra gets ready to welcome Midsummer with a special 60-minute adaptation of novelist Laurie Lee's celebrated journey from his Cotswold home in Slad to Spain in the mid-1930s.

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee - Waterstones

By the second day I’d finished my bread and dates, but I found a few wild grapes and ate them green, and also the remains of a patch of beans. Manolo is the leader of a group of fishermen and labourers, and they discuss the expected revolution. Once the building nears completion he knows that his time is up and decides to go to Spain because he knows the Spanish for "Will you please give me a glass of water? 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”.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.

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee, First As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee, First

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. The thing that stays with me after reading it is the hospitality from everyone he meets along the road, people who have little share that little with him. 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. To become a subscriber to Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly Magazine, please visit our subscriptions page. He is warmly welcomed by the Spaniards he meets and enjoys a generous hospitality even from the poorest villagers he encounters along the way.The Spain he travels to is ancient and incredibly exotic although the people he meets are familiar in many ways. The title of the book is the first line of the Gloucestershire folk song " The Banks of Sweet Primroses". I’ve always said that the more money you have when you travel, the less interesting the trip, which makes this book about as interesting as it gets. 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 details the people and landscapes of each new place as well as his various encounters with brothels and drinking establishments.

Laurie Lee - As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning - BBC Laurie Lee - As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning - BBC

After his new line of work, acting as a guide to British tourists, is curtailed by local guides, he meets a young German who gives him a violin.I felt it was for this I had come; to wake at dawn on a hillside and look out on a world for which I had no words, to start at the beginning, speechless and without plan, in a place that still had no memories for me. Leaving behind the village he immortalised in Cider With Rosie, 19-year-old Laurie sets out on the open road with a vague idea of reaching London and the American girlfriend who awaits him there. For those with the means and inclination, flights had become effortless in the years before the pandemic.