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Laurie Lee

June 2014 marked 100 years since the birth of Laurie Lee. The poet, journalist, and author who is best known for his sequence of autobiographical books, Cider With Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning and A Moment of War.

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Laurie Lee in 1979

About the author

Laurie Lee was born in 1914. He grew up in the village of Slad, Gloucestershire, and Cider with Rosie (published in 1959) charts his early years there.

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Aged 19 he waved goodbye to his mother, walked to London, stayed a year, then embarked on a longer journey through Spain, which is recorded in As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969).

Lee was rescued by a Royal Navy destroyer rescuing British citizens from the coast of Spain at the outbreak of hostilities of the Spanish Civil War and returned to England.

In 1937 after crossing the Pyrenees alone in a snowstorm, he made it back to Spain to seek out the Republican International Brigade and fight against Franco, but not before being imprisoned by Spanish Republicans. This period is caught in the final part of the trilogy, A Moment of War (1991).

Lyrical, evocative, droll, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning affirms Lee as a great walker-writer. Yes, he simply set out from home with a bag and a violin, thinking that a bit of busking would pay his way.

It more or less did, with the violin crumbling from over-use many months later in Malaga. But by now the joy and brightness of the open road had faded, and signs of civil war had began to impose themselves around him. He moved, as he says, from ‘a romantic haze’ to ‘a taste more bitter’.

Though he is most famous for his memoirs, Lee was a lifelong and committed poet. His first collection, The Sun My Monument, was released in 1944 and was followed by two further collections, The Bloom of Candles (1947) and My Many Coated Man (1955). All of Lee’s prose is richly infused with that poetry.

Simon Richardson, ±«Óătv Readings Unit