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