I Can't Stay Long - Laurie Lee

I CAN'T STAY LONG – LAURIE LEE

Laurie Lee walked out one midsummer morning and from his home in the Cotswolds made his way on foot to London. Based on nothing but a whim, from London he then made his way to Spain where he spent a year traipsing around the Spanish countryside armed with nothing but a violin, a pen and some paper until the encroaching Civil War forced him out. Aware of the meaning of Fascism and of what a Franco-led government would entail, he returned to Spain to take up arms with the International Brigades whereupon he entered the history books and became legend.

I Can't Stay Long is a collection of Laurie Lee's essays, short stories and travel writing chronicling various times and experiences in his life from childhood to ripe old age. They are, quite simply, a joy to read. Every one of them is a pleasure, crafted with detail yet succinct and to the point. Like Constable or Turner paintings in miniature. His evocation of the world as seen through the eyes of an eight-year old is wonderful as are his descriptions of meeting a witch in the woods, his discovery of books, and not least his discovery of sex – with an added and amusing twist at the end.

His thoughts on exile, autobiography, love, appetite, and on being a father are insightful and considered. And then there are his reports from other places, from other countries, from other worlds beyond the Cotswold village he grew up in.

I presume Lee was mostly commissioned to travel to other countries and to report back on them for publication in a newspaper or magazine? He doesn't actually say so but how else was he ending up going to places all over the world and doing nothing but writing about them? How else was he ending up in Beirut, for example, or the Cannes Film Festival, or on a Concorde test flight if it wasn't by special invite? If it was by invite then it was an inspired decision to opt for Laurie Lee rather than some newspaper hack because it meant these places and experiences were going to be witnessed through the eyes of a poet and subsequently reported on in a similar fashion. And very beautifully so.

Tuscany, Mexico, Warsaw, Spain ('an ecstacy of mirage and delirium'), Ibiza, Holland ('Atlantis in reverse'), the Caribbean, and Ireland all get the Laurie Lee treatment. Like reports from the front-line wired in from a battle-hardened Reuters war correspondent. And then there's his article on Aberfan and you might think what could possibly be said about a school full of children being wiped out by such a disaster? There are no words though Lee very sensitively finds some that manages to convey the sense of tragic sadness regarding the whole incident, none so succinctly as those he spies upon a gravestone in the village cemetery: 'God came one day to gather flowers. He came our way and gathered ours'.

Exemplifying the tragedy, Lee tells of the world-wide sympathy the disaster elicited, leading to not only a huge sum of money being donated to a disaster fund but also to an avalanche of toys being sent to the village from well-wishers from all around the world. Toys for a village no longer with children.

Laurie Lee was born in 1914 and passed away in 1997. It was his wish that when he died that he should be buried in his native village, and that is indeed where his grave can be now found. It was his way of ensuring his life would go full circle, that he would return to whence he came. Lee's was a life lived well. He came from nothing, he saw, he worked, he loved, he cried, he partook, he created. All that is left now are his books but that's more than most and in itself is more than enough.

John Serpico

A Rose For Winter - Laurie Lee

A ROSE FOR WINTER – LAURIE LEE

Fifteen years after being rudely ejected from Spain during the Civil War, Laurie Lee returns to the country that has indelibly marked him. Time and tide, however, waits for no man and the Spain to which Lee returns has now forgotten him but then could it have been any other way?

Since he was last there, of course, a number of events have taken place, not least the Second World War. Spain is now ruled by Franco though this is no longer Lee's primary concern particularly when the sights, the sounds and the smells of Spain are so intoxicating. This, then, is the focus of A Rose For Winter: The beauty and the tragedy of Spain in all its glory as seen through the eyes of an English poet.

Lee waxes lyrical and sings the praises of everything Spanish, finding beauty and eternity in even the most lowliest of beggars. On his first trip there as described in As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, he had been little more than a beggar himself, earning pesetas and food primarily from playing his violin in market squares.

When last he was there as described in A Moment Of War, it was as a youthful idealist, come to join the International Brigades in a bid to halt Franco and the rise of Fascism. This time, however, he's essentially a tourist but though it's unspoken, it's obvious he also has a few ghosts to lay to rest.

This aspect of A Rose For Winter is an interesting one, particularly as it's unspoken though clearly there between the lines. But what does it benefit a man to revisit his past? Is there ever anything there to be found? After all, if the past is a foreign country then does that not mean it is full of strangers? It would appear so, as this is exactly what Lee finds. All his friends from his previous sojourns through Spain have now long gone and even the locals still there left holding the fort are unclear as to where.

After the events of the Spanish Civil War, truth and in particular the truth about the past is unendurable and only the memory and the tricks played by memory remain. No more so is this illustrated than when Lee enquires about the poet Lorca and the circumstances surrounding his death. Every story Lee is told is different, except in its effort to prove that Lorca's killing had not been political. Regarded as a communist in the Franco-dominated city of Granada where he lived, Lorca's death, however, was clearly nothing but political.

Near the end of the book, Lee meets an ex-captain of the Republican Army who had fought against Franco during the Civil War. Whilst his comrades in their thousands had been executed, he had been thrown into jail under sentence of death but then forgotten about. Having managed to escape, he was now condemned to living as a fugitive, unable to ever return to his family.

“All we wished for,” he tells Lee “Was an honest life. A life of clean breath and happy conscience. We wished to raise ourselves a few steps from the dust only. Why were those in the high chairs so terrified? We in Spain were the first victims of that fear. Hired gunmen were sent against us, and they slaughtered the best of us. Why did none of you stop this thing? It was the beginning of evil. All the world is a prison now. And the spirit of man is polluted.”

If the killing of the poet Lorca is the guilt of Granada, Lee surmises, then the lack of help and support from the West for the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War is the living shame of the world. The consequences forever echoing down the ages.

A Rose For Winter is a lament, a paean to all that was, all that could have been and all that is left of a dream called 'Spain'. It is a hymn to life and to the living but also an elegy to death and to the dead but perhaps more so to the ghosts of the dead and to the ghost of a dream...

John Serpico

A Moment Of War - Laurie Lee

A MOMENT OF WAR – LAURIE LEE

After being unceremoniously whisked back to Britain from Spain by the Royal Navy at the start of the Civil War in the Spring of 1936, Laurie Lee made his way back in December of 1937 by crossing the Pyrenees from France. On re-entering Spanish territory, however, he was immediately arrested on suspicion of being a spy.

During his brief return to Britain, Lee had come to understand the significance of what was happening in Spain and what it meant for the world. His journey through Spain the year before had left him with a love of the Spanish people and their subsequent plight had pulled at his conscience. His intention was to join the International Brigades siding with the Republicans in their fight against Franco and the forces of Fascism. For Lee, it was the right thing to do and his intention was honourable if not in hindsight extraordinarily naïve.

A Moment Of War is Laurie Lee's memoir of his time during the Spanish Civil War when his youthful idealism informed him of a way to a better world, only for it to be crushed like the petals of a delicate flower. So naïve was Lee at that time, he had no idea there were groups in London who could aid and abet him in his journey back to Spain and to put him in contact with fellow would-be fighters. Instead, he had made the journey by himself, setting off in the middle of winter and packing such non-essential items as books and his violin.

Patently, he could have had no idea of what or who might greet him once he got to Spain. The last thing he would have imagined was to have been arrested as a spy and imprisoned in a hole in the ground, from where everything pointed to him being executed.

By some miracle and unexplained reason, Lee was released and escorted to a barracks that acted as a collecting point for volunteers entering Spain from the north. From there, Lee gained his first real insights into the realities of the Civil War:

'Day after day, more groups of newcomers appeared – ill-clad, crop-haired and sunken-cheeked, they were (as I was) part of the skimmed-milk of the middle-Thirties... ex-convicts, the alcoholics, the wizened miners, dockers, noisy politicos and dreaming undergraduates... But what had brought us here, anyway? My reasons seemed simple enough, in spite of certain confusions. But so then were those of most of the others – failure, poverty, debt, the law, betrayal by wives or lovers – most of the usual things that sent one to foreign wars. But in our case, I believe, we shared something else, unique to us at that time – the chance to make one grand, uncomplicated gesture of personal sacrifice and faith which might never occur again. Certainly, it was the last time this century that a generation had such an opportunity before the fog of nationalism and mass-slaughter closed in... We had found a new freedom, almost a new morality, and discovered a new Satan – Fascism.'

Lee vividly describes the squalor, the degradation, the futility, misery and despair of war, whilst accentuating time and again how Franco had delivered Spain up to Hitler and his Luftwaffe as a testing ground to see what mass bombing could do to a major European country. The answer was the ancient city of Guernica and its annihilation.

As for the anarchists, socialists and communists of the International Brigades, Lee has nothing but respect:

'Public schoolboys, undergraduates, men from coal mines and mills, they were the ill-armed advance scouts in the, as yet, unsanctified Second World War. Without recognition, often ridiculed, they saw what was coming, jumped the gun, and went into battle too soon.'

It's not until near the end of his story that Lee finally gets transferred to the front-line to at last engage with the enemy, only to almost immediately be blasted by a bombardment of shellfire and then over run by an enemy charge. It all happens and is all over too quickly for him to comprehend and all that he knows is that he has killed a man for reasons he would never understand:

'I had killed a man, and remembered his shocked, angry eyes. There was nothing I could say to him now. Tanks rattled by and cries receded. I began to have hallucinations and breaks in the brain. I lay there knowing neither time nor place. Some of our men found me, I don't know who they were, and they drove me back speechless to Tarazona.

Was this then what I'd come for, and all my journey had meant – to smudge out the life of an unknown young man in a blur of panic which in no way could affect victory or defeat?'

From the hospital that he is taken, Lee is told that he's being sent back to London: '”You'd be more use to us there. After all, you're not much use to us here.”' says a doctor '”You could write about us, make speeches, paint posters – or something...”'

So Lee is sent to Barcelona where he's told to present himself to the police, who promptly arrest him as a deserter and spy, and throw him into a prison cell. Weeks later, by some miracle again, he's released, packed onto a train and returned to Britain where he would live out the rest of his life... but with an indelible stain upon it.

A Moment Of War accentuates the fact that in war there is no glory. As the song goes: War? What is it good for? Absolutely nothing. War is oblivion and the ghost of mankind. War is a black hole to avoid. Fight war not wars. Give peace a chance. War is over if you want it. The dichotomy here being that however futile and inglorious war is, there are some wars that need to be fought to avoid a greater war, the Spanish Civil War being a case in point.

If England, France and America had only taken heed of the requests and appeals for help and support from the Spanish Republicans and their comrades, even if only in the form of weapons being supplied, then there would have been more of a chance of withstanding the attack from Franco and his Fascist supporters.

If only England, France and America had intervened against the amalgamating forces of Fascism as represented by Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy and Franco in Spain then the course toward the Second World War may have been altered. That's not to say the Second World War may have been averted but Germany would not have been so practised in aerial bombardment if they hadn't been able to use Spain as a testing ground.

There is no glory in war, and Laurie Lee makes that very clear. There are, however, some wars that needed and need to be fought. The Spanish Civil War was one of them.

John Serpico

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning - Laurie Lee

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