As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

Laurie Lee’s As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning begins with the magnificent youthful idea that the best way to arrange one’s future is to leave home with a violin, very little money, and the serene confidence that roads exist for personal transformation. Lee walks out of his Gloucestershire village and into the wider world, which at first means England on foot and then Spain, where sunshine, poverty, music, appetite, danger and history are all waiting with their sleeves rolled up.

This is travel writing from before travel became content. Nobody is optimising an itinerary, reviewing the breakfast buffet, or telling you the ten essential things to do in Seville if you hate crowds but love authenticity. Lee wanders, plays his fiddle, sleeps where he can, earns coins, meets strangers, watches landscapes unfold, and enters Spain at the moment before the Civil War tears it open. It is beautiful, yes, but not smugly beautiful. The road is dusty, the hunger is real, and romance has to share space with blisters.

Spain arrives in the book like a fevered theatre of light, poverty, pride and unease. Villages, cities, inns, fields, heat, beggars, girls, soldiers, musicians and old men fill the pages, not as tourist scenery but as encounters. Lee has the poet’s eye and the traveller’s uncertainty, which is a useful combination: enough lyricism to make the world shimmer, enough discomfort to stop the whole thing becoming a postcard with legs.

The irony, of course, is that this young man goes walking in search of life and finds himself approaching one of Europe’s great political calamities. The title sounds almost pastoral, all midsummer ease and open roads, but history is already gathering behind the hills with a rifle and a list of grievances. The innocence of the journey is part of its power. Lee does not set off to become a witness to Spain on the edge of war. He simply walks into the century at a bad angle.

For readers of memoir, travel writing, Spain, literary wandering, pre-war Europe, or books in which a person can still cross countries with a violin instead of an app, this is a small classic of movement, memory and weather. It has youth, hunger, language, roads, music, heat, girls glimpsed and gone, and the strange old glamour of not knowing exactly where one will sleep. Modern travel may offer booking confirmations; Laurie Lee offers uncertainty, which is much better literature and much worse logistics.

Good copy, as sold by Crappy Old Books. A decent Penguin survivor, ready to be slipped into a pocket, rucksack, glovebox or romantic delusion about walking somewhere meaningful with inadequate planning. A book for anyone who suspects the road was more interesting before it started asking for card details.

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