As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee

Tuesday 13^th 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.

Our Xmas dinner

We did a sort of desert islands choice this year - with each person not needing to take the Bible if they so wished. 

Sheila

Dictionary with a magnifying glass.

Opera 101: A Complete Guide to Learning and Loving Opera by Fred Plotkin, Placido Domingo.

Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas with the Richard Burton recording.

Luxury: sun cream and a self-fluffing towel.

Chris

Tinker, Taylor, Soldier Spy by John Le Carré

Swiss Family Robinson, unabridged, by Johann Rudolf Wyss

Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust

Instead of the Bible – The Nations Favourite Poems

Luxury: bed

Jo

The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway

Half a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett
The Prophet - Kalil Gibran

Luxury: never-ending diary and supply of pencils.

Donna

First edition Geographers’ A-Z Atlas of London and Suburbs with House Numbers, produced under the direction of Phyllis Pearsall.

The Good Soldier, by Ford Maddox Ford

Maus by Arte Spiegleman

Luxury: bath with continual running hot water and equally self-fluffing towels as Sheila.

Caroline

Smile for the Camera by James Gray

My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell

The Balkan Trilogy by Olivia Manning

Luxury: iPad to view photos and compile crossword puzzles.

Bridget

To Kill and Mocking Bird by Harper Lee

Fairy Books Collection of Andrew Lang

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

Luxury: hot shower and the another self-fluffing towel

Marion

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

A book about code breaking

The Education of Hyman Kaplan by Leo Rosten

The largest possible book about plant identification/a global compendium of flora and fauna

Luxury: pair of tweezers.

Also mentioned 

Cider with Rosie - Laurie Lee

Cider with Rosie is a memoir of a childhood. We are taken on a journey from the time he and his family move to Slad, an isolated Cotswold village. We are introduced to his chaotic but loving family life, learn of the shock of school, his adventures with the opposite sex and his part in mischievous acts. He tells of growing up without a father, his relationships with his mother, sisters and friends, as he moves toward manhood. We hear of his sexual awakening with Rosie, this loss of innocence and naivety and what it was like when he finally lost the characteristics that made him the sweet boy he introduces at the start.

  In the first chapter Lee describes a three year old's  perception and misconceptions: small in relation to objects around him, for example when he got lost in the grass, on the family's arrival at their new home, "I had never been so close to grass before. It towered above me and all around me, each blade tattooed with tiger-skins of sunlight". His sense of adventure is communicated through the use of metaphors and similes. He describes things in a very simple, natural way that makes you feel you are there in his world. He uses wonderful descriptive detail and our discussion drew similarities with Dylan Thomas and Thomas Hardy.

  Whilst surrounded by a loving family, he tells of the harshness of ceasing to be the youngest child. "I grew a little tougher, a little colder, and turned my attention more to the outside world, which was now emerging visibly through the mist". Lee says he grew a little tougher, as a result of not been allowed to sleep in his mother's bed and he thought this was the end of the world. But he was growing up and soon realised that there are other things in life for him to discover: school, friends, girls and the wonderful local characters and all their history. We particularly loved the Grannies and their relationship despite never talking to each other, how different they were and how they were able to teach the boys so much about the older generation.

  We speculated if Lee's encounter with Rosie was a key theme in his childhood as he used this memory as the title. Laurie Lee has written about the coming of age of the nation as well as the boy.  The book gives a detailed account of a childhood that seemed filled full with fun, adventure and typical childhood mischief. Yet it is also about loss: loss of traditions, of innocence, of his father and the loss those who never returned from the war.

  This charming, autobiographical novel, peopled with characters we all liked drew pictures of a rural  world and upbringing, whilst long gone had elements that we recognised from our own childhoods.

An October walk in Slad

This was billed as a flat 4 mile walk.  Here are some photos taken by Donna (her copyright). Two people didn't come and two gave up and went and sat in the pub in Sheepscombe and had a laugh. It turned out to be a warm sunny day with some wind however, by 5.30 there was driving rain to drive home through.

The White Woman on a Green Bicycle - Monique Roffey

George and Sabine Harwood arrive in Trinidad in 1956 intending to stay for two years. They stay for fifty and raise their family there. Although Sabine dislikes it intensely, her husband is very much at home and this is the cause of considerable unhappiness in their marriage. Sabine makes quite an impression in the early years. A beautiful woman of French descent she makes a striking picture riding around on her green bicycle. But life on the island wears her down and she becomes argumentative and disagreeable. The story covers their life on the island, their relationship with their children and each other, and Sabine’s obsession with Eric Williams, a local politician to whom she writes hundreds of letters, all unsent, as a way of unburdening her frustrations and unhappiness. The novel starts with their later years when George is a journalist for the Trinidad Guardian writing all the upbeat, good news stories the younger journalists won’t touch. The corruption in Trinidad, where there is no justice or opportunity for the native population, is illustrated in Talbot’s vicious beating by the police at the beginning. The early chapters cover George and Sabine’s strained, tortured relationship, George’s discovery of Sabine’s letters to Williams and his unsuccessful attempt to help Talbot, the son of their maid. George’s humiliation at the hands of the police is followed by his illness and his death and Sabine’s shooting of Bobby Comacho.

   Then the story goes back to their early life, its unhappiness and complications. Sabine hates Trinidad: George loves it and becomes a wealthy landowner and minor celebrity. After the attack on his house and the devastating attack on his dogs, George agrees to leave but they miss the boat and are fated to stay. The description of the island and the complex family relationships and the language draw the reader in to the story. Musical Venus is wonderful. The story covers so many aspects of life too:race, relationships, families, expat communities, politics and religion. There is much love and hate in the book. Bobby Comacho is vile. He stands for the state of things that were supposedly going to get better post-colonialism. For Sabine he epitomised all that had gone wrong with Trinidad. Her crime is shocking but understandable. Overall a good read.

Rites of Passage - William Golding

Edmund Talbot, a rather pompous aristrocrat, narrates the story on board a British warship. He is off to be Govenor of New South Wales and is writing in a journal given to him by his godfather who, we suspect, has sent him off to the other side of the world to get rid of him. The book has a familiar Golding theme: man’s reversion to savagery when he is isolated from his usual society and its rules. Here they are out at sea: in more ways than one. Another theme running through the story is class division and the assumption of higher status which is not deserved. Talbot is quite an enigma. Initially he feels above the Reverend Colley whom he dislikes and finds amusing but then he becomes a mediator between Colley and the Captain but this is through vanity. Talbot is a gossip and unlikeable. The story starts off in a superficial, quite comic way. Colley is initially absurd, especially his behaviour in the drunken incident but then the action darkens when he dies of shame and we realise why. The characters are generally an unpleasant lot. Golding’s early C19^th  prose is convincing. The reader gets a completely different picture of Colley from his journal which has touching elements and reveals the story as it goes on. An interesting read: in small doses for some!