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

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Towards the end of the book, near the end of 1935, Lee finds himself in Castillo, on the Mediterranean coast and becomes aware of a split in the people, and trouble brewing. While not expecting a civil war, there are definite indicators of problems, and there are violent clashes in the adjacent town of Altofaro, and regular visits from naval ships.

Lee described the atmosphere in Almuñécar from that point on as ‘uneasy’ with the village split in two. He also noted an increased carnality in the sexual relations between the villagers, which not only contrasted with the impending sense of peril, but was, in Lee’s opinion, triggered by it.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.

The descriptions of the people he meets and the places he visits are compelling, putting across both the beauty of the Spanish towns and countryside and the extreme poverty of many of those living there, who invite him into their homes to share what little they have. The tastes, smells and most of all the relentless sun are all vivid and memorable, with his lifelong love for Spain informing every paragraph.

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I must say I don't believe that he was quite as politically naive as he claims, but generally he communicates very clearly what it would have been like to experience the countryside and people without the preconceptions of a student of Spain's culture. He lived rough, and was able to see what life was like at dirt level. The chapters are mostly broken into singular elements of Lee's journey: "London Road", "London", "Into Spain", "Zamora-Toro", "Valladolid", Segovia-Madrid", "Toledo", "To the Sea", "East to Málaga", "Almuñécar", "War" and the "Epilogue". The driving force of the novel is simply the language itself and the slow, but the promise (by the blurb), of the ending at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. That continues in the last book of the trilogy, A Moment of War. In As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, Lee writes of his stay in Almuñécar, a Spanish fishing village which he calls "Castillo". In 1988 the citizens of Almuñécar erected a statue in Lee's honour. [13] Lee than took a boat to northern Spain, and traversed western Spain during the heat of the summer. Although the people in many of the villages where he stopped were poor, most of them were very kind to the young Englishman. Modern times had not arrived in the small Spanish villages, and the people had close ties to the land and the sea.

Another thing about the Spanish – they never seem to get drunk. The only intoxicated people I saw in Spain were one or two Britons.In As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, the second of the trilogy, Laurie Lee leaves his home in Gloucestershire, travels by foot as a young man of nineteen, to London, via Southampton. It's 1934. He supports himself by means of his fiddle and temporary jobs. He travels on to Spain, where the Civil War is about to erupt. These travels last two years. The Spanish, throughout the twentieth century, had a habit of assuming or at least affecting to assume, that anyone foreign looking was ‘frances’. Laurie Lee noticed it when he was presented to the landlady Dona Maria: Its worth noting one more point too, that in Laurie Lee’s account of the civil war, Franco’s troops were often referred to to as ‘Moorish’. I am assuming that the troops were actually Spanish but that they were stationed in Morocco. Nevertheless Lee cites his friend at the time Manolo, who saw an equivalence between the Moors driven by Spain by the Catholic Kings and the Moorish soldiers that Franco had used to invade Spain: