Matthew Ted's Reviews > As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

[28th book of 2021. Artist for this review is Spanish painter Eliseo Meifrén Roig.]

4.5. Everyone has heard the title Cider with Rosie, and even when I read it several years ago, I wasn't aware it was the first book in Laurie Lee's "Autobiographical Trilogy". This is the second novel. Where the first book recorded Lee's childhood in the Cotswolds, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning follows Lee as a twenty-year-old man leaving home to go to, eventually, Spain, stopping by London and Portsmouth and along the south coast en route.



As with Cider with Rosie, this is extraordinarily well-written. It felt as if every other line needed reading again for the pure beauty and rhythm of it. I'm slightly gutted I am borrowing this from the library, knowing I couldn't underline all the best lines and paragraphs in it. It's almost impossible to choose sections to quote as there are so many. Lee meets a whole host of interesting and strange characters on his journey and certainly sees a lot of the world, travelling almost entirely with just his violin, playing around England (and then Spain), to make his money. Despite this seemingly precarious situation, Lee never seems dangerously lacking in food and though several times he says, in his matter-of-fact way, that he almost died from this or that, mostly due to weather, his unprepared journeying never strays too close to doom. I saw an article a little while ago titled, rather pathetically, "What If Laurie Lee's Books Aren't True?"—it discussed the age-old debate of validity when concerning "true stories". I saw a similar thing surrounding British writer Bruce Chatwin; there seemed to be a similar stirring about his work, and several things came out about the "lies" in his novels. One anecdote recalled a young girl in one of Chatwin's books sitting about all the time and reading Tolstoy, someone who had been on the journey with Chatwin came out and said it wasn't true at all, and the girl actually read "trashy" novels all day. I'm with Chatwin though, Tolstoy is considerably more romantic.

He said his name was Alf, but one couldn't be sure, as he called me Alf, and everyone else. 'Couple of Alfs just got jugged in this town last year,' he'd say. 'Hookin' the shops—you know, with fish-hooks.' Or: 'An Alf I knew used to do twenty-mile a day. One of the looniest Alfs on the road. Said he got round it quicker. And so he did. But folks got sick of his face.'

The chapters are mostly broken into singular elements of Lee's journey: "London Road", "London", "Into Spain", "Zamora-Toro", "Valladolid", Segovia-Madrid", "Toledo", "To the Sea", "East to Málaga", "Almuñécar", "War" and the "Epilogue". The driving force of the novel is simply the language itself and the slow, but the promise (by the blurb), of the ending at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. That continues in the last book of the trilogy, A Moment of War.



Spain is the biggest feature of the novel and Lee describes it incredibly: the heat, the setting, the people, it is all drawn beautifully. I've only been to Spain once, sadly, many years ago. I went to Barcelona and only remember standing under the Gaudí buildings, drawing the cityscapes, wandering the hot streets, and for some reason, the small fountain that sat below my hotel bedroom window.

[...] the cool depths of the Cathedral, clean and bare, full of wide and curving spaces, and the huge stained-glass windows hanging like hazed chrysanthemums in the amber distances of its height. Also the small black pigs running in and out of shop doorways—often apparently the only customers; and the storks roosting gravely on the chimney-pots, gazing across the valley like bony Arabs.
For the first time I was learning how much easier it was to leave than stay behind and love.

The "War" chapter brings some more physical happenings aside from Lee's (mostly) aimless wanderings.

Once again the village crowded on to the beach to watch. The evening was hazy and peacock-coloured; delicate hues ran slowly over the sea and sky and melted together like oil. The destroyers lay low on the horizon, slender as floating leaves, insubstantial as the air around them.

I'm interested to shortly read the final novel in the trilogy and see what Lee's description of the Civil War is; right now, when I think of it, I think of Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls and Orwell's Homage to Catalonia.



This only just falls short of five-stars because I wanted it to be slightly more introspective; typical of English writers of the period, there is a certain reserve to the whole novel. Even when bodies appear in the streets and destroyers begin firing from the coastlines, Lee never appears particularly afraid or cautious, the narrative moves on with its gentle, matter-of-fact manner. However, on the whole, this is a brilliant read and superior to Cider with Rosie.