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Violins, Dirty Shoes and Broken Biscuits: Laurie Lee as unknowing British Beatnik

By Robert Greer.

Laurie Lee is the forgotten adventurer of 20th century English literature. While he could never be categorized as one of the Beats – too dream-like in tone, too subdued, too damn English – his image heavy prose writing was at least as free flowing, his journey just as extraordinary, and the world that he captured just as extinct as the freedom of the 20th century American open road.

In 1935 at the age of 20, Lee arrived in Vigo in Northern Spain. Apart from crossing the sea, he had walked all the way from a rural idyll in Gloucestershire, and would continue walking until he hit the Mediterranean, covering a further 1200 miles on foot in the process. All he carried with him was a violin, and all he knew how to say in Spanish was ‘un vaso de agua por favor’. He arrived in the North-West of a country slowly awakening from a medieval stupor, and would leave it via the South East coast on a British Destroyer ship, having witnessed the outbreak of the Spanish civil war.

A year earlier in 1934, Laurie Lee had left the Slad valley with a tent and a box of biscuits, along with his meal-making violin. He originally walked to Southampton where he settled for a month or two, then walked on to London, where he worked on a building site and lodged with various women that he met. After nearly a year in London, still feeling unsatisfied (and now fired from his job), he decided to chance it in Spain.

His journey is captured in ‘As I walked out one Midsummer morning‘, the second of three memoirs Lee wrote during his life, bookended by ‘Drinking Cider With Rosie‘ – once a staple of the English curriculum –  and ‘A Moment of War‘.

At one point among the most celebrated writers of his day, Lee’s legacy in contemporary culture is accompanied by an eerie silence. Along with Down and Out in Paris and London, Midsummer Morning, is one of the definitive chronicles of the aimless wandering generation of Europe caught between two world wars. Each town with a real identity, and most characters displaying an at times laughably innocent vision of the world, the book portrays what feels to me at least as the last embers of an authentic European experience, before the destruction of war took place, and the subsequent white-washing of mass tourism took hold.

“I was a young man whose time coincided with the last years of peace, and so was perhaps luckier than any generation since. Europe at least was wide open, a place of casual frontiers, few questions, and almost no travellers”

Midsummer Morning is not however a one dimensional picture of nostalgia. During a ‘wretched’ first night for example, Lee goes to sleep in a field, is caught in a rainstorm, and wakes up soaked to the bone with two cows lingering over him. The opening chapters in particular resonate with sadness, and in particular the destitution and homelessness of 1930s England:

These men went on their way like somnambulists, walking alone and seldom speaking to each other. There seemed to be more of them inland than on the coast – maybe the police had seen to that. They were like a broken army walking away from a war, cheeks sunken, eyes dead with fatigue. Some carried bags of tools, or shabby cardboard suitcases; some wore the ghosts of city suits; some, when they stopped to rest, carefully removed their shoes and polished them vaguely with handfuls of grass. Among them were carpenters, clerks, engineers from the Midlands; many had been on the road for months, walking up and down the country in a maze of jobless refusals, the treadmill of the mid-30s.”

But the real joy in reading Laurie Lee lies in his descriptions of (in particular) pre-Civil war Spain, which conjure up a world almost completely alien to the modern traveller in the today world of low cost airlines and mass tourism:

“I passed through occasional cork-woods smoking with the campfires of gypsies squatting by little streams, through scented beanfields rushing with milky water and villages screened under veils of fishnets”

The language he employs can be a little flowery for some (to be expected from a reasonably well-established poet), but this, combined with a realistic depiction of the poverty that blighted much of rural (and metropolitan) Spain, coupled with his charming naivety, make for a great snapshot into a lost era. In an age when every trip we make is sourced out through trip advisor and Google Streetview, the sense of wonder Lee writes on his first sight of the town of Toro through the desert – “like dried blood on a rusty sword”- or the Roman aqueduct of Segovia – “stepping like a mammoth among the houses”, is captivating and infectious.

There is also the slightly bizarre section where Lee stays in a commune with South African poet Roy Campbell – “’Roy Campbell,’ he said ‘South African poet. Er – reasonably well known in your country'”, and the dawning of Civil war at the end of the novel, when the ready-to-fight Lee is picked up by a British warship and returned home to a girl that he can no longer relate to. He quickly returns to Spain through the Pyrenees to fight Franco.

If ‘As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning’ can be said to be a book about transitioning from youth to adulthood, the loss of naivety in Lee’s narrator can definitely be said to mirror the loss of innocence that happened all over Europe in the 1930s, as the continent headed for war. But in whether it’s down to Lee’s original naivety upon entering Spain, nowhere does this seem more pronounced after reading the book than in the Iberian Peninsula.

Discover it, read it, and enjoy it. Then pack your violin and some biscuits, and go for a long walk into the unknown.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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Robert Greer (@RobertGreer90) is a 25 year old writer living in London.

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