AS
I WALKED OUT
ONE MIDSUMMER MORNING -
LAURIE LEE
You can tell a book is going to be good when it immediately evokes
memories, thoughts and feelings from the well of your being, and As
I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee is one such
book.
Just a few pages in and I'm reminded of setting off for the
Stonehenge Free Festival one sunny morning and at the bottom of my
street bumping into a school friend who was on his way to his
apprenticeship at the local factory. "Where are you going?"
he asked me as he eyed-up my rucksack and sleeping bag. "I'm
going to the Stonehenge festival," I told him. And the look he
gave me was one of incredulity and envy, as if to ask 'How is such a
thing possible?'
I'm reminded of when I was but a boy at school and my first
experience of a riot. The police had for some reason invaded the
council estate where I lived and were having bricks thrown at them by
local youth. I was in amongst the crowds watching the goings-on when
a large brick arced through the air and landed full-square onto the
windscreen of a police riot van, causing it to cave-in with an
almighty bang and smash into a thousand cubes of glass. The crowds
roared their approval and I suddenly thought - my god, this isn't
vandalism, or a criminal act, or anything bad in the slightest, my
god - this is an act of freedom.
I'm reminded of J18 in the City of London years later - pre-Seattle -
and devastating the Square Mile, smashing the banks around the Stock
Exchange and raining bottles and bricks down upon the police. Knowing
that day we were finally free of trying to win arguments or of
spreading any message and even of the whole idea of 'protest'. This
time round we were simply on the attack and destroying what we hated.
We were on a whole new road... to freedom.
I'm reminded of when as a teenager and living as a traveller on
Crete, sleeping on beaches and on mountains, and one day talking to a
Greek boy who said "I want to be like you, Johnny. I want to be
free."
From his village in the Cotswolds via Southampton, Laurie Lee walks
to London where he acquires a job on a building site. This, for a boy
with limited experience of life beyond the confines of family and
village is an adventure in itself but he doesn't stop there. When the
job comes to an end he decides on a whim to hot-foot it over to
Spain, choosing to go there of all places in the world because he
knows the Spanish phrase for 'Will you please give me a glass of
water'.
All very well, you might think but what's so interesting about a
story like this? Well, it's the fact that it's based on his own life,
the fact that it's beautifully written but above all, it's the fact
that it all takes place in the Spain of 1935, one year before the
outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.
There's a hint of what's to come when Lee first arrives in London and
the only address he knows is that of an old girlfriend from his
village whose father lectures him on the theory of anarchy and the
necessity for political and personal freedom. Apparently, the father
is a Left-wing agitator who'd recently fled from America having been
involved in 'some political trouble'. Unfortunately it's not
made clear who this might have been in real life.
On arriving in Spain, Lee spends a year traversing the country on
foot, encountering Spanish peasantry, fellow foreign travellers,
ex-pats, vagabonds, madmen, angels, beggars and idiot savants, as
well as witnessing stunning beauty and horrific poverty. It's the
poverty and inequality, however, that in the scheme of things turns
out to be the most important, as Lee explains:
'Until now, I'd accepted this country without question, as though
visiting a half-crazed family. I'd seen the fat bug-eyed rich gazing
glassily from their clubs, men scrabbling for scraps in the market,
dainty upper-class virgins riding to church in carriages,
beggar-women giving birth in doorways. Naive and uncritical, I'd
thought it part of the scene, not asking whether it was right or
wrong. But it was in Seville, on the bridge, watching the river at
midnight, that I got the first hint of coming trouble. A young sailor
approached me with a 'Hallo, Johnny', and asked for a cigarette. He
spoke the kind of English he'd learnt on a Cardiff coal boat,
spitting it out as though it hurt his tongue. 'I don't know who you
are,' he said 'But if you want to see blood, stick around - you're
going to see plenty'.
It's not clear whose blood the sailor is referring to and it's only
later on in the book that the subject is returned to when Lee is
working at a hotel and he gets to talking to his Spanish waiter
friend:
'He talked about the world to come - a world without church or
government or army, where each man alone would be his private
government. It was a simple, one-syllable view of life, as black and
white as childhood, and as Manola talked, the fishermen listened,
bobbing their heads up and down like corks. Their fathers had never
heard or known such promises. Centuries of darkness stood behind
them. Now it was January 1936, and these things were suddenly
thinkable, possible, even within their reach.
But first, said Manola, there must be death and dissolution; much
had to be destroyed and cleared away. Felipe, the chef, who liked
food and girls, was the pacifier, preaching love and reason. No guns,
he said; they dishonoured the flesh; and no destruction, which
dishonoured the mind. Everyone knew, all the same, that there were
now guns in the village which hadn't been there before.'
As the book ends, the Civil War begins in earnest only for Lee to be
whisked back to England by a Royal Navy destroyer sent out from
Gibraltar to pick up any British subjects who might be marooned on
the coast. The Spanish villagers whom Lee has been living with all
urge him to go with the ship, viewing it as the King of England
himself sending for Lee and that he was the most fortunate of men for
this.
On board the ship, Lee sees a German airship passing over in the sky
above, a swastika black on its gleaming hull. Back in England,
looking at the Civil War from the outside in he begins to understand
the scale and the implications of the war, with Germany and Italy
lining up to militarily support Franco and the Spanish Fascists
whilst England and France busied themselves by advocating appeasement
and non-intervention. The Spanish anarchists and their fellow
citizens that Lee had come to know so well during his travels were
being hung out to dry by the democratic powers and left at the mercy
of the Fascist powers.
For Lee there is only one thing to do, and that is to return to Spain
to join the International Brigades. And there the book ends with Lee
crossing the Pyrenees and re-entering Spain - with a winter of war
before him.
The Spanish Civil War has been called "the first battlefield"
and can now be seen as a rehearsal for the Second World War where the
triumph or defeat of conflicting ideologies was at stake. It was one
of the few times in history that Anarchism and a genuine will to
freedom lived and flourished only for it to be crushed by the
superior fire-power of the supporters of Fascism.
If only that freedom had been supported and defended by Britain and
France in the same way that the Fascists were supported and defended
by Germany and Italy then the course of the world could have been
altered and the blood bath of World War Two perhaps averted.
Ultimately, the lessons of the Spanish Civil War are glaring and
relevant even to this day and age. Particularly, even, to this day
and age.
As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning is about freedom; the dream of
it, the sense of it, the quest for it, the grasping of it, the
fighting for it, and the defending of it. It's about the idea of how
life could and should always be. It's about other worlds that are not
only out there already but other worlds that are not out there but
are possible.
Laurie Lee had no other choice but to return to Spain because within
him already was a flickering spark of freedom that he fanned by him
upping sticks and walking to London but which then burst into fire by
his travels through Spain. And once that flame was lit there was no
extinguishing it.
As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning is a very beautiful and very
special book indeed.
John Serpico
