Pamela's Reviews > As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

This has got to be one of the most evocative memoirs ever written; it certainly tops all the other road-trip/travelers tales I’ve read. As befits an award winning poet, Lee’s prose has a concise, 3-D image-making eloquence that drops the reader into the center of a scene, in the breathing presence of a character, or into the tactile truth of a landscape.

In the mid-1930s, the nineteen year-old Lee sets out on foot from his Gloucestershire home, with a tin of biscuits and a violin, on his way to London via a hundred mile detour to the coast “as I’d never yet seen the sea.” Two years later he is fortuitously “rescued” off the coast of southern Spain by the Royal Navy trawling the Spanish beaches for stray Brits marooned between the warring factions of the Spanish Civil War. Lee’s narrative of what happens in between these events provides priceless images of life as experienced by a penniless wanderer in depression-era Britain and pre-modern Spain.

Few histories of an era or place can conjure its emotional and physical resonance quite so well as a living memory. In his description of life on the road to London, Lee is able to capture the essence of the failure of capitalism during the Thirties (our current failure being but an echo of it’s father).

Spoiler Alert...quotations from the book:

Lee finds himself among the “host of unemployed who wandered aimlessly about England at that time...They were like a broken army walking away from war, cheeks sunken, eyes dead with fatigue. Some carried bags of tools or broken cardboard suitcases; some wore the ghosts of city suits...walking up and down the country in a maze of jobless refusals..” Among them are professional tramps, like Alf, who taught him the ways of the road. “He wore a deerstalker hat, so sodden and shredded it looked like a helping of breakfast food...a tramp to his bones, always wrapping and unwrapping himself, and picking over his bits and pieces...never passing a bit of grass that looked good for a shakedown nor a cottage that seemed ripe for charity.”

Soon after he parts from Alf on the outskirts of Ascot, the other half of society rolls into view: “I wasn’t surprised when one of the Daimlers pulled up and an arm beckoned me from the window...”Want a pheasant my man?” asked a voice from inside. “We just knocked over a beauty a hundred yards back.” A quarter of an hour later I arrived at Ascot. It was race week...little grooms and jockeys dodging among the long glossy legs of thoroughbreds; and the pedigree owners dipping their long cool necks into baskets of pate and gull’s eggs...Alf and the tattered lines of the workless were far away in another country...”

Plus ça change, eh?