Tuesday 13th January 2015
To herald in the New Year we followed last year’s reading of
Cider with Rosie with Lee’s next book
As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning.
It was an appropriate antidote to the cold weather, basked in the heat haze of
the Spanish plains. The book begins where Cider
with Rosie ends. Laurie is 19 and leaving home to make his way in the
world. Pretty much penniless he walks his way to London where he works on a
building site shifting barrow loads of cement. The book is set in 1934, and
Lee’s description of London in the 30s is vivid as he trapes the streets. The £1 left in his pocket after his rent is
paid, is enough to live like a King “a tot of whiskey cost sixpence,……. suits
made to measure for fifty bob”. Becoming
unemployed he decides to take a boat to Spain and arrives in Vigo at the
beginning of the Spanish summer, and his walk begins. Youthfully underprepared
with thick boots, no hat, one sentence of Spanish, and his violin wrapped in a
blanket he steps out into the vision of Spain unfolding before him. As with Cider with Rosie we were compelled to
read out the vivid descriptions of the country; “Valladolid: a dark square city
hard as its syllables – a shut box”, towards Segovia and Madrid: “After the
shuttered town, the landscape seemed to have broken from prison and rolled free
and glittering away”, Madrid: “and I slipped into it as into the jaws of a
lion. It had a lion’s breath too; something fetid and spicy, mixed with straw
and the decayed juices of meat”. The people Lee meets are equally vivid, among
them beggars, drunken inn keepers, poets (Roy Campbell), and anarchists. Within
all the descriptions is the undercurrent of the devastating poverty in 1930’s
Spain, the lack of work, idleness and helplessness. He gives dispassionate
details, letting the reader make up their own minds about why this had happened
and whom to blame.
The walk continues as he travels from the north through the
central plains to the coast to Malaga where he spends the winter at a coastal
village, Almuñécar.
The last chapters describe the beginnings of the Spanish Civil War, and the
spontaneous organisation (and sadly the lack of it) of militia groups, their
passion and doomed optimism. In the last chapter Laurie is rescued by a British
destroyer sent out from Gibraltar, but returns some months later to fight with
the Republicans.
The book has a dark thread, the subject does not lean to
jollity, and Lee wrote it when he was in his 40s. However, he still maintained a sense of
immediacy, and we wondered if Lee had written a journal on the journey.
We found the book a distinctive record of pre-revolutionary
Spain, describing the depravations of a little changed feudal society, governed
by the aristocracy and the Church.
And how a loose grasp of communist principles, channelled
the peasants’ depravations into a cause to fight for. It made us think about
the divided population. How there was little geographic mobility, how families
staid together within their own culture, and language, and how this relative
autonomy, made them reluctant to leave and passionate to defend their homes.
We ended considering a walk in Spain.
