As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

In 1934, at the age of nineteen, Laurie Lee walked out of his Gloucestershire village carrying a violin, a blanket and the magnificent confidence of someone who had not yet discovered package holidays. He had no money, no itinerary and only the sketchiest notion of where he was going, qualifications that would now make him either a travel influencer or the subject of a police appeal.

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning is Lee’s account of abandoning the familiar lanes of Slad, walking to London and then continuing into Spain, where he travelled largely on foot and supported himself by playing the violin. It was a wonderfully simple financial arrangement: Lee performed until people gave him money, food or sufficient encouragement to move along to the next village.

England appears first as a succession of roads, fields, lodging houses and chance encounters, observed by a young man experiencing the world without the protective mediation of TripAdvisor. London provides work on a building site, temporary companionship and an education in the ancient metropolitan tradition of earning just enough money to remain poor. Eventually Lee sails for Spain, despite speaking almost no Spanish and possessing no obvious plan beyond going south because it seemed warmer.

Spain in the 1930s is dazzling, impoverished, generous, violent and increasingly unsettled. Lee walks through landscapes of exhausting beauty, sleeps wherever circumstance permits and discovers that a violin is both a musical instrument and an early form of contactless payment. Villagers offer bread, wine and hospitality; policemen offer suspicion; the sun offers heatstroke. It is travel writing from an age when “travelling light” meant owning virtually nothing and hoping strangers were decent.

Lee writes with the sensuous precision of a poet and the selective composure of a memoirist who has had several decades to turn hunger, discomfort and danger into beautifully arranged prose. Dust becomes golden, poverty becomes picturesque and sleeping in a ditch acquires a lyrical splendour rarely reported by people currently sleeping in ditches. Nevertheless, beneath the romance is a vivid picture of a country approaching catastrophe.

The journey takes place as Spain moves towards civil war. Political tension gathers behind the music, dancing and sunlit streets until Lee’s youthful expedition begins to feel like a walk across a stage while the scenery is quietly being prepared for tragedy. By the end, the carefree wanderer has encountered a Europe in which innocence is rapidly becoming an unaffordable luxury.

This is the second volume of Laurie Lee’s autobiographical trilogy, following Cider with Rosie, although it stands perfectly well on its own. It is memoir, travel writing, social history and an extended demonstration of what could once be accomplished with sturdy shoes, a violin and an apparently inexhaustible tolerance for uncertainty. Modern travellers burdened with chargers, confirmation emails, wheeled luggage and fourteen varieties of insurance may find it mildly humiliating.

This 1985 André Deutsch edition is in Good condition. It has no dust jacket—obviously, as the scan has made no attempt to conceal. What remains is the austere black cloth binding with red lettering, looking less like a midsummer adventure and more like Laurie Lee’s confidential report to the Ministry of Melancholy. There is some visible wear and marking to the boards, but the book remains sound, presentable and entirely capable of making Spain seem more alluring than your present responsibilities.

A lyrical classic for travellers, walkers, Hispanophiles, violinists and anyone who has ever considered leaving home with no plan whatsoever, but sensibly decided to put the kettle on instead.

From Crappy Old Books, where the dust jacket may have walked out one midsummer morning, but fortunately the actual book stayed behind.

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