As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning
Encyclopedia
As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969
) is a memoir by Laurie Lee
, a British poet. It is a sequel to Cider with Rosie
which detailed his life in post First World War Gloucestershire
. The author leaves the security of his Cotswold
village in Gloucestershire to start a new life, at the same time embarking on an epic journey by foot.
It is 1934, and as a young man Lee walks to London from the security of his Cotswolds home. He is to live by playing the violin and by labouring on a London building site. When this work draws to a finish, and having picked up the phrase in Spanish for 'Will you please give me a glass of water?', he decides to go to Spain
. He scrapes together a living by playing his violin outside the street cafés, and sleeps at night in his blanket under an open sky or in cheap, rough posadas. For a year he tramps through Spain, from Vigo
in the north to the south coast, where he is trapped by the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War
.
Experiencing a Spain ranging from the utterly squalid to the utterly beautiful, Lee creates a story which evocatively captures the spirit and atmosphere of the towns and countryside he passes through in his own distinctive semi-poetic style. He is warmly welcomed by the Spaniards he meets and enjoys a generous hospitality even from the poorest villagers he encounters along the way.
In 1934 Laurie Lee leaves his home in Slad
, Gloucestershire, for London, one hundred miles away. It was a bright Sunday morning in early June, the right time to be leaving home… I was nineteen years old, still soft at the edges, but with a confident belief in good fortune. Never having seen the sea before, he decides he will go by way of Southampton though it will add another hundred miles to his journey. He begins to walk towards the Wiltshire Downs on country roads that
"…still followed their original tracks, drawn by packhorse or lumbering cartwheel, hugging the curve of a valley or yielding to a promontory like the wandering line of a stream. It was not, after all, so very long ago, but no one could make that journey today. Most of the old roads have gone, and the motor car, since then, has begun to cut the landscape to pieces, through which the hunched-up traveller races at gutter height, seeing less than a dog in the ditch."
He visits Southampton
and it is here that he first tries his luck at playing his violin in the streets. His apprenticeship proves profitable and with his pockets full of change he decides to move on eastwards. He catches his first glimpse of the sea a mile outside Southampton docks - "It was green, and heaved gently like the skin of a frog, and carried drowsy little ships like flies". Lee makes his way along the south coast, to Chichester
, where he is moved on by a policeman after playing Bless This House
, to Bognor Regis
, and then on again to Worthing
, "full of rich, pearl-chokered invalids". From there he turns inland , to the "wide-open Downs
", and heads north for London. "I was at that age which feels neither strain nor friction, when the body burns magic fuels, so that it seems to glide in warm air..Even exhaustion when it came had a voluptuous quality..."
As he makes his way to London, he lives on pressed dates and biscuits. "But I was not the only one on the road; I soon noticed there were many others, all trudging northwards in a sombre procession..the majority belonged to that host of unemployed who wandered aimlessly about England at that time
." He bumps into a veteran tramp, Alf, "a tramp to his bones", who gives him a very old and battered billy can for brewing up. Eventually, a few mornings later, coming out of a wood near Beaconsfield
he sees London at last: " - a long smoky skyline hazed by the morning sun and filling the whole of the eastern horizon. Dry, rusty-red, it lay like a huge flat crust, like ash from some spent volcano, simmering gently in the summer morning and emitting a faint, metallic roar." He decides to take the underground, and finally meets up with his American girlfriend, Cleo, who is the daughter of an American anarchist
.
Living with her family in a dilapidated house on Putney Heath, Lee tries to make love to her but she is too full of her father's political ideology. Her father finds him a job as a labourer and he is able to rent a snug little room above a cafe on the Lower Richmond Road. However, he has to move on as his room is taken over by a prostitute, and ends up living with the Flynns, a Cockney
family, who welcome him into the family's embrace. He lives in London for almost a year as part of a gang of wheelbarrow pushers, supplying newly-mixed cement to the builders. With money to spend, he whiles away his time wandering the London streets, scribbling poetry in his small bedroom and having occasional liaisons with some of the maids from the big houses around Putney Heath. However, once the building nears completion, he knows that his time is up and decides to go to Spain because he knows the phrase in Spanish for "Will you please give me a glass of water?". He pays £4 and takes a ship to Vigo
, a port of the north-west coast of Spain.
He lands in Galicia in July 1935. The first half of his journey takes him from Vigo to Madrid
. He has a tent, a blanket in which his violin is wrapped, and normally some fruit, bread and cheese to eat along the way. Joining up with a group of three young German musicians, he accompanies them around Vigo and then they split up outside Zamora
. Passing through Toro, he watches a religious procession in which a statue of the Mother of Toro is taken around the town. Lee leaves town the next day, and gives a vivid description of the searing heat of the Spanish sun:
"The violence of the heat seemed to bruise the whole earth and turn its crust into one huge scar. One's blood dried up and all juices vanished; the sun struck upwards, sideways, and down, while the wheat went buckling across the fields like a solid sheet of copper. I kept on walking because there was no shade to hide in, and because it seemed the only way to agitate the air around me...I walked on as though keeping a vow, till I was conscious only of the hot red dust grinding like pepper between my toes."
Valladolid
is 'a dark square city hard as its syllables'. It is full of beggars, cripples and beaten-down young Spanish conscripts who have nothing to do in their leisure time. The beggars he remembers , " as something special to Valladolid, something it had nursed to a peak of malformation and horror. One saw them little by day; they seemed to be let out only at night, surreptitiously, like mad relations..Young and old were like emanations of the stifling medievalism of this pious and cloistered city; infected by its stones, like the pock-marked effigies of its churches, and part of one of the more general blasphemies of Spain." The chapter ends on a sour note with his landlord's wife screaming and shouting at her husband because the Borracho has returned home drunk and tried to have sex with their daughter, Elvira.
Making his way to Segovia
, Lee's feet become hardened and his Spanish
is also improving after almost a month on the road. He spends only a few nights in the town because he is impatient to reach Madrid. He makes the long climb through the Sierra de Guadarrama
mountains and is finally given a lift by two young booksellers in their van.
Counting London, Madrid is only the second major city he has seen. Lee feels like he has "... slipped into Madrid as into the jaws of a lion. It has a lion's breath, too; something fetid and spicy, mixed with straw and the decayed juices of meat. The Gran Via itself has a lion's roar, though inflated like a circus animal's - wide, self-conscious, and somewhat seedy, and lined with buildings like broken teeth." However, he loves the city and is impressed by the pride that its citizens feel. The city lies on a mile high plateau and is the highest capital in Europe, and there is the proverb: 'From the provinces to Madrid - but from Madrid to the sky'. He spends his time drinking wine in the cool taverns during the daytime and playing his violin in the evenings in the older part of the city, the cliffs above the Manzanares where the streets are 'intimate as courtyards, with lamp lit arches smelling of wine and woodsmoke.' He lives in a cheap posada and befriends Concha, the girl who buys his breakfast. She is a husky young widow from Aranjuez
and spends her daytimes idling about, waiting for the return of her boyfriend from the Asturias
. Sometimes Lee sits out the morning by rubbing fish-oil into her hair. His last night is spent on a late-night drinking binge. He starts at the Calle Echegaray, 'a raffish little lane, half Goya, half Edwardian plush, with cafe-brothels full of painted mirrors, crippled minstrels and lacquered girls' and ends up at the Bar Chicote being chatted up by a young prostitute but who leaves him when a minor bullfighter arrives with his court of gypsies. He returns drunk to his posada and is helped into bed by Concha, who makes the sign of the cross before she joins him.
By August 1935 Lee reaches Toledo
, where he has a meeting with the South Africa
n poet Roy Campbell
, with his family, whom he comes across whilst playing his violin in the open-air cafés in the Plaza de Zocodover:
"It was the poet's saint's-day, and the party had dressed in his honour and were drinking his health in fizzy pop. Campbell himself drunk wine in long shuddering gasps, and suggested I do the same. I was more than satisfied by this encounter, which had come so unexpectedly out of the evening, pleased to have arrived on foot in this foreign city in time to be elected to this poet's table."
The Campbells invite him to stay in their house which lies close to the cathedral. Campbell spends the daytime sleeping but comes to life in the evenings:
"During most of the daylight hours Roy lay low and slept, appearing at nightfall like some ruffled sea-bird, leaning against a pillar with his arms stretched wide as though drying his salt-wet wings. One saw him gathering his wits in great gulps of breath, after which he would be ready for anything."
After a final day of drinking with the poet, Lee makes his departure the next day and is accompanied by the poet as far as the bridge by which he would cross the gorge of the Tagus
. By the end of September he has reached the sea, having passed through Valdepeñas
, Cordova
, and Seville to reach Cádiz
- " at that time..nothing but a rotten hulk on the edge of a disease-ridden tropic sea; its people dismayed, half-mad, consoled only by vicious humour, prisoners rather than citizens." He looks back on his last month on the road through September. He describes Valdepeñas as 'a surprise: a small graceful town surrounded by rich vineyards and prosperous villas - a pocket of good fortune which seemed to produce without effort some of the most genial wines in Spain.' It had been a very friendly town and whilst busking one evening three young men had invited him to go with them to a brothel. Lee played his violin and watched the customers coming and going as he was plied with wine by the old grandfather who ran the place. There were four girls, two sisters and two cousins, and the whole establishment had possessed a very intimate atmosphere, 'a casual atmosphere of neighbourly visiting, hosted by these vague and sleepy girls; subdued talk, a little music, an air of domestic eroticism, with unhurried comings and goings.'
Then he came to the Sierra Morena
mountains, "one more of those east-west ramparts which go ranging across Spain and divide its people into separate races." South of the Sierra, he met:
"... a new kind of heat, brutal and hard, carrying the smell of another continent
. As I came down the mountain this heat piled up, pushing against me with blasts of sand, so that I walked half-blind, my tongue dry as a carob bean, obsessed once again by thirst. These were ominous days of nerve-bending sirocco
, with peasants wrapped up to the eyes,..but far down in the valley, running in slow green coils, I could see at last the tree-lined Guadalquivir
.. "
Entering the province of Andalusia
through fields of ripening melons, he saw the first signs of the southern people: men in tall Cordobese hats, blue shirts, scarlet waistbands, and girls with smouldering Arab faces. Instead of taking the road south to Granada
, he decided to turn west and follow the Guadalquivir, adding several months to his journey, and taking him to the sea in a roundabout way. He lives in Seville
, - " dazzling - a creamy crustation of flower-banked houses fanning out from each bank of the river...[yet]..no paradise, even so. There was the customary squalor behind it - children and beggars sleeping out in the gutters.." He lives on fruit and dried fish, and sleeps at night in a yard in Triana
a ramshackle barrio
on the north bank of the river, which has 'a seedy vigour, full of tile-makers and free-range poultry, of medieval stables, bursting with panniered donkeys, squabbling wives and cooking pots.' Whilst he spends his evening trying to get cool on the flat roof of the Café Faro, eating chips and gazing at the river, he hears the first mention of the upcoming war:
"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. Naïve and uncritical, I'd thought it part of the scene, not asking whether it was right or wrong ... A young sailor approached me with a "Hallo, Johnny" ... "I don't know who you are", he said, "but if you want to see blood, stick around - you're going to see plenty."
Disliking Cadiz
- 'life in Cadiz was too acrid to hold me' - Lee turns eastwards, heading along the bare coastal shelf of Andalusia. He hears talk of war - in Abyssinia
, " meaningless to me, who hadn't seen a newspaper for almost three months." He arrives at Tarifa
, the southernmost point of Europe, 'skulking behind its Arab walls' and moves on into the country, making another stop over in Algericas, a town which he very much likes for its aura of illicitness:
"It was a scruffy little town built round an open drain and smelling of fruit skins and rotten fish. There were a few brawling bars and modest brothels; otherwise the chief activity was smuggling ... it seemed to be a town entirely free of malice, and even the worst of its crooks were so untrained in malevolence that no one was expected to take them seriously..I remember the fishing boats at dawn bringing in tunny from the Azores
, the markets full of melons and butterflies, the international freaks drinking themselves into multi-lingual stupors, the sly yachts running gold to Tangier
..."
Half in love with Algeciras
, he felt he "could have stayed on there indefinitely" but decides nevertheless to stick to his plan to follow the coast round Spain, and sets off for Málaga
. He makes a stop over in Gibraltar
, " more like Torquay
" , is questioned by the police, and told to report to their station at night. 'Leaving Gibraltar was like escaping from an elder brother in charge of an open jail.' It takes him five days to walk to Malaga, following a coastline smelling of hot seaweed, thyme and shellfish, and occasionally passing through cork-woods smoking with the camp fires of gypsies. At night he finds a field and wraps himself up in his blanket. "The road to Malaga followed a beautiful but exhausted shore, seemingly forgotten by the world. I remember the names - San Pedro
, Estepona
, Marbella
, and Fuengirola
..They were salt-fish villages, thin-ribbed..At that time one could have bought the whole coast for a shilling. Not Emperors could buy it now."
In Málaga, he stays in a posada
, sharing the courtyard with a dozen families who are mostly mountain people selling their beautiful hand-woven Alpujarras
blankets and cloth in the city. The young girls are some of the most graceful he has ever seen, 'light-footed and nimble as deer, with long floating arms and articulate bodies which turned every movement into a ritual dance.' Malaga was full of foreigners, a snug expatriate colony, and everyone is very chummy apart from the English debs with 'that particular rainswept grey of their English eyes, only noticeable when abroad.'
It is the young Germans who outnumber the rest of the colony, amongst them - " Walter and Shulamith, two Jewish refugees, who had walked from Berlin
carrying their one year old child. I see them today as part of the shadow of the times
.." Disaster seems to arrive during his last days in Malaga when his violin breaks. After his new line of work, acting as a guide to British tourists, is curtailed by local guides , he is then fortunate to meet a young German who gives him a violin for free . It had belonged to his girlfriend and she'd run off with a Swede.
Winter 1935. Lee decides to hole-up in Almuñécar
, sixty miles east of Malaga:
"It was a tumbling little village, built on an outcrop of rock in the midst of a pebbly delta, backed by a bandsaw of mountains and fronted by a grey strip of sand which some hoped would be an attraction for tourists ... Almuñécar itself, built of stone steps from the delta, was grey, almost gloomily Welsh. The streets were steep, roughly paved, and crossed by crude little arches, while the square was like a cobbled farmyard...past glories were eroding fast."
He manages to get work in a hotel run by a Swiss, Herr Brandt, who has unfortunately arrived there twenty years too early. The whole area is very poor, with the peasants just managing to scrape a living from the sugar cane grown in the delta, and the sea:
"But the land was rich compared with the sea, which nourished only a scattering of poor sardines. As there were no boats or equipment for deep-sea fishing, the village was chained to the offshore wastes, shallow, denuded, too desperately fished to provide anything but constant reproaches...The only people with jobs seemed to be the village girls, most of them in service to the richer families, where for a bed in a cupboard and a couple of pounds a year they were expected to run the whole house and keep the men from the brothel
s."
With nothing much to do in their spare time, Lee and his friend Manolo, the hotel's waiter, drink in the local bar alongside the other villagers, drinking rough brandy mixed with boiling water and eating morunos - little dishes of hot pig flesh stewed in sauce. Manolo is the leader of a group of fishermen and labourers and they sit in a room at the back discussing the expected revolution - " a world to come - a world without church or government or army, where each man alone would be his private government. "
February 1936. The Socialists win the election and a Popular Front
, People's Government, arrives. As Spring appears a whiff of change is in the air, with a loosening of social and sexual behaviour and manners:
"Books and films appeared, unmutilated by Church or State, bringing to the peasants of the coast, for the first time in generations, a keen breath of the outside world. For a while there was a complete lifting of censorship, even in newspapers and magazines. But most of all it was the air of carnality, the brief clearing away of taboos, which seemed to possess the village - a sudden frank, even frantic, pursuit of lust, bred from a sense of impending peril."
The villagers, in an act of revolt, burn down the church but then do a volte-face when Feast Day arrives and the images of Christ and the Virgin are brought out into the open, loaded as usual on the fishermen's backs. In the middle of May, there is a strike and the peasants come in from the countryside to lend their support as the village splits down the middle between 'Fascists
' and 'Communists
'. " The local flag of revolution was the Republican flag, the flag of the elected government. The peasants strung it like a banner across the Town Hall balcony and painted their allegiance beneath it in red ." There is also hope in the air that the working class will see an improvement in their terrible living conditions:
"Spain was a wasted country of neglected land - much of it held by a handful of men, some of whose vast estates had scarcely been reduced or reshuffled since the days of the Roman Empire
..Now it was hoped that there might be some lifting of this intolerable darkness, some freedom to read and write and talk. Men hoped that their wives might be freed of the triple trivialities of the Church - credulity, guilt and confession; that their sons might be craftsmen rather than serfs, their daughters citizens rather than domestic whores, and that they might hear the children in the evening coming home from the fresh-built schools to astonish them with new facts of learning."
The middle of July 1936. War now breaks out. There had been anti-Government uprisings in the garrisons of Spanish Morocco
- at Melilla
, Tetuan and Larache
. General Francisco Franco
, the butcher of the Asturias
, had flown from the Canaries
to lead the rebels. With the disappearance of the police, " the village was on its own: Government supporters facing the enemy within." Manolo and El Gato (the leader of one of the new-formed unions) start to organise some kind of militia. Granada
is held by the rebels, and so is Almunecar's neighbour Altofaro, ten miles down the coast. Almuñécar is mistakenly fired on by a Government warship that thinks it is shelling rebel-held Altofaro. Lee hears on Radio Sevilla Queipo de Llano exulting in the fall of the city. The rebel general is drunk and slurs his phrases. "Christ had triumphed, he ranted, through God's army in Spain, of which Generalissimo Franco was the sainted leader...'Viva España! Viva la Virgen!' ". Finally, a British destroyer from Gibraltar arrives to pick up any British subjects who might be marooned on the coast. Lee and the English novelist he is renting a room from are taken on board and he takes his last look at Almuñécar and Spain as they grow smaller in the distance.
"All I'd known in that country - or had felt without knowing it - seemed to come upon me then; lost now, and too late to have any meaning, my twelve months' journey gone. Spain drifted away from me, thunder-bright on the horizon, and I left it there beneath its copper clouds."
The Epilogue describes Lee's return to his family home in Gloucestershire and his desire to help his comrades in Spain. He is held back by a liaison with a wealthy lover but finally decides to make his way through France in order to cross the Pyrenees into Spain. After a desperate climb starting from Ceret
in the foothills, in which he gets caught in a snow storm, he ends up in another French village. Here he is helped by a peasant, after another tortuous climb through the thick snow, to cross the border once more into Spain.
documentary series Travellers' Century
presented by Benedict Allen
. In the episode, which looks at As I Walked Out..., a friend of Lee reveals that the title of the book comes from a Gloucestershire folk song. The traditional song 'The Banks of Sweet Primroses' starts with the line "As I walked out one mid-summer morning'.
1969 in literature
The year 1969 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:* The first Booker Prize is awarded.* "Penelope Ashe", author of the bestselling novel Naked Came the Stranger, is found to be several people who each took a turn writing a chapter of what they described as "junk" in...
) is a memoir by Laurie Lee
Laurie Lee
Laurence Edward Alan "Laurie" Lee, MBE was an English poet, novelist, and screenwriter, raised in the village of Slad, and went to Marling School, Gloucestershire. His most famous work was an autobiographical trilogy which consisted of Cider with Rosie , As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning and...
, a British poet. It is a sequel to Cider with Rosie
Cider with Rosie
Cider with Rosie is a 1959 book by Laurie Lee . It is the first book of a trilogy that continues with As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning and A Moment of War...
which detailed his life in post First World War Gloucestershire
Gloucestershire
Gloucestershire is a county in South West England. The county comprises part of the Cotswold Hills, part of the flat fertile valley of the River Severn, and the entire Forest of Dean....
. The author leaves the security of his Cotswold
Cotswold
The Cotswolds are a range of hills in central England that give their name to:*Cotswold *Cotswold *Cotswold Chase, a horse race*Cotswold Games, annual games in Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire...
village in Gloucestershire to start a new life, at the same time embarking on an epic journey by foot.
It is 1934, and as a young man Lee walks to London from the security of his Cotswolds home. He is to live by playing the violin and by labouring on a London building site. When this work draws to a finish, and having picked up the phrase in Spanish for 'Will you please give me a glass of water?', he decides to go to Spain
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
. He scrapes together a living by playing his violin outside the street cafés, and sleeps at night in his blanket under an open sky or in cheap, rough posadas. For a year he tramps through Spain, from Vigo
Vigo
Vigo is a city and municipality in north-west Spain, in Galicia, situated on the ria of the same name on the Atlantic Ocean.-Population:...
in the north to the south coast, where he is trapped by the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil WarAlso known as The Crusade among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War among Carlists, and The Rebellion or Uprising among Republicans. was a major conflict fought in Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939...
.
Experiencing a Spain ranging from the utterly squalid to the utterly beautiful, Lee creates a story which evocatively captures the spirit and atmosphere of the towns and countryside he passes through in his own distinctive semi-poetic style. He is warmly welcomed by the Spaniards he meets and enjoys a generous hospitality even from the poorest villagers he encounters along the way.
Synopsis
- In England
In 1934 Laurie Lee leaves his home in Slad
Slad
Slad is a village in Gloucestershire, England, located in the Slad Valley, about from the town of Stroud.Slad is famous for being the home of Laurie Lee, who based his book Cider with Rosie on his own life in the village....
, Gloucestershire, for London, one hundred miles away. It was a bright Sunday morning in early June, the right time to be leaving home… I was nineteen years old, still soft at the edges, but with a confident belief in good fortune. Never having seen the sea before, he decides he will go by way of Southampton though it will add another hundred miles to his journey. He begins to walk towards the Wiltshire Downs on country roads that
"…still followed their original tracks, drawn by packhorse or lumbering cartwheel, hugging the curve of a valley or yielding to a promontory like the wandering line of a stream. It was not, after all, so very long ago, but no one could make that journey today. Most of the old roads have gone, and the motor car, since then, has begun to cut the landscape to pieces, through which the hunched-up traveller races at gutter height, seeing less than a dog in the ditch."
He visits Southampton
Southampton
Southampton is the largest city in the county of Hampshire on the south coast of England, and is situated south-west of London and north-west of Portsmouth. Southampton is a major port and the closest city to the New Forest...
and it is here that he first tries his luck at playing his violin in the streets. His apprenticeship proves profitable and with his pockets full of change he decides to move on eastwards. He catches his first glimpse of the sea a mile outside Southampton docks - "It was green, and heaved gently like the skin of a frog, and carried drowsy little ships like flies". Lee makes his way along the south coast, to Chichester
Chichester
Chichester is a cathedral city in West Sussex, within the historic County of Sussex, South-East England. It has a long history as a settlement; its Roman past and its subsequent importance in Anglo-Saxon times are only its beginnings...
, where he is moved on by a policeman after playing Bless This House
Bless This House (song)
"Bless This House" is a song. The words were written by Englishwoman Helen Taylor, a poet, under the original title "Bless the House." The music was composed by Australian May Brahe, a friend of Taylor's. It was published in 1927....
, to Bognor Regis
Bognor Regis
Bognor Regis is a seaside resort town and civil parish in the Arun district of West Sussex, on the south coast of England. It is south-south-west of London, west of Brighton, and south-east of the city of Chichester. Other nearby towns include Littlehampton east-north-east and Selsey to the...
, and then on again to Worthing
Worthing
Worthing is a large seaside town with borough status in West Sussex, within the historic County of Sussex, forming part of the Brighton/Worthing/Littlehampton conurbation. It is situated at the foot of the South Downs, west of Brighton, and east of the county town of Chichester...
, "full of rich, pearl-chokered invalids". From there he turns inland , to the "wide-open Downs
South Downs
The South Downs is a range of chalk hills that extends for about across the south-eastern coastal counties of England from the Itchen Valley of Hampshire in the west to Beachy Head, near Eastbourne, East Sussex, in the east. It is bounded on its northern side by a steep escarpment, from whose...
", and heads north for London. "I was at that age which feels neither strain nor friction, when the body burns magic fuels, so that it seems to glide in warm air..Even exhaustion when it came had a voluptuous quality..."
As he makes his way to London, he lives on pressed dates and biscuits. "But I was not the only one on the road; I soon noticed there were many others, all trudging northwards in a sombre procession..the majority belonged to that host of unemployed who wandered aimlessly about England at that time
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
." He bumps into a veteran tramp, Alf, "a tramp to his bones", who gives him a very old and battered billy can for brewing up. Eventually, a few mornings later, coming out of a wood near Beaconsfield
Beaconsfield
Beaconsfield is a market town and civil parish operating as a town council within the South Bucks district in Buckinghamshire, England. It lies northwest of Charing Cross in Central London, and south-east of the county town of Aylesbury...
he sees London at last: " - a long smoky skyline hazed by the morning sun and filling the whole of the eastern horizon. Dry, rusty-red, it lay like a huge flat crust, like ash from some spent volcano, simmering gently in the summer morning and emitting a faint, metallic roar." He decides to take the underground, and finally meets up with his American girlfriend, Cleo, who is the daughter of an American anarchist
Anarchism
Anarchism is generally defined as the political philosophy which holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, or alternatively as opposing authority in the conduct of human relations...
.
Living with her family in a dilapidated house on Putney Heath, Lee tries to make love to her but she is too full of her father's political ideology. Her father finds him a job as a labourer and he is able to rent a snug little room above a cafe on the Lower Richmond Road. However, he has to move on as his room is taken over by a prostitute, and ends up living with the Flynns, a Cockney
Cockney
The term Cockney has both geographical and linguistic associations. Geographically and culturally, it often refers to working class Londoners, particularly those in the East End...
family, who welcome him into the family's embrace. He lives in London for almost a year as part of a gang of wheelbarrow pushers, supplying newly-mixed cement to the builders. With money to spend, he whiles away his time wandering the London streets, scribbling poetry in his small bedroom and having occasional liaisons with some of the maids from the big houses around Putney Heath. However, once the building nears completion, he knows that his time is up and decides to go to Spain because he knows the phrase in Spanish for "Will you please give me a glass of water?". He pays £4 and takes a ship to Vigo
Vigo
Vigo is a city and municipality in north-west Spain, in Galicia, situated on the ria of the same name on the Atlantic Ocean.-Population:...
, a port of the north-west coast of Spain.
- In Spain
He lands in Galicia in July 1935. The first half of his journey takes him from Vigo to Madrid
Madrid
Madrid is the capital and largest city of Spain. The population of the city is roughly 3.3 million and the entire population of the Madrid metropolitan area is calculated to be 6.271 million. It is the third largest city in the European Union, after London and Berlin, and its metropolitan...
. He has a tent, a blanket in which his violin is wrapped, and normally some fruit, bread and cheese to eat along the way. Joining up with a group of three young German musicians, he accompanies them around Vigo and then they split up outside Zamora
Zamora, Spain
Zamora is a city in Castile and León, Spain, the capital of the province of Zamora. It lies on a rocky hill in the northwest, near the frontier with Portugal and crossed by the Duero river, which is some 50 km downstream as it reaches the Portuguese frontier...
. Passing through Toro, he watches a religious procession in which a statue of the Mother of Toro is taken around the town. Lee leaves town the next day, and gives a vivid description of the searing heat of the Spanish sun:
"The violence of the heat seemed to bruise the whole earth and turn its crust into one huge scar. One's blood dried up and all juices vanished; the sun struck upwards, sideways, and down, while the wheat went buckling across the fields like a solid sheet of copper. I kept on walking because there was no shade to hide in, and because it seemed the only way to agitate the air around me...I walked on as though keeping a vow, till I was conscious only of the hot red dust grinding like pepper between my toes."
Valladolid
Valladolid
Valladolid is a historic city and municipality in north-central Spain, situated at the confluence of the Pisuerga and Esgueva rivers, and located within three wine-making regions: Ribera del Duero, Rueda and Cigales...
is 'a dark square city hard as its syllables'. It is full of beggars, cripples and beaten-down young Spanish conscripts who have nothing to do in their leisure time. The beggars he remembers , " as something special to Valladolid, something it had nursed to a peak of malformation and horror. One saw them little by day; they seemed to be let out only at night, surreptitiously, like mad relations..Young and old were like emanations of the stifling medievalism of this pious and cloistered city; infected by its stones, like the pock-marked effigies of its churches, and part of one of the more general blasphemies of Spain." The chapter ends on a sour note with his landlord's wife screaming and shouting at her husband because the Borracho has returned home drunk and tried to have sex with their daughter, Elvira.
Segovia
Segovia is a city in Spain, the capital of Segovia Province in the autonomous community of Castile and León. It is situated north of Madrid, 30 minutes by high speed train. The municipality counts some 55,500 inhabitants.-Etymology:...
, Lee's feet become hardened and his Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
is also improving after almost a month on the road. He spends only a few nights in the town because he is impatient to reach Madrid. He makes the long climb through the Sierra de Guadarrama
Sierra de Guadarrama
The Sierra de Guadarrama is a mountain range forming the main eastern section of the Sistema Central, the system of mountain ranges at the centre of the Iberian Peninsula. It is located between the Sierra de Gredos in the province of Ávila, and Sierra de Ayllón in the province of Guadalajara...
mountains and is finally given a lift by two young booksellers in their van.
Counting London, Madrid is only the second major city he has seen. Lee feels like he has "... slipped into Madrid as into the jaws of a lion. It has a lion's breath, too; something fetid and spicy, mixed with straw and the decayed juices of meat. The Gran Via itself has a lion's roar, though inflated like a circus animal's - wide, self-conscious, and somewhat seedy, and lined with buildings like broken teeth." However, he loves the city and is impressed by the pride that its citizens feel. The city lies on a mile high plateau and is the highest capital in Europe, and there is the proverb: 'From the provinces to Madrid - but from Madrid to the sky'. He spends his time drinking wine in the cool taverns during the daytime and playing his violin in the evenings in the older part of the city, the cliffs above the Manzanares where the streets are 'intimate as courtyards, with lamp lit arches smelling of wine and woodsmoke.' He lives in a cheap posada and befriends Concha, the girl who buys his breakfast. She is a husky young widow from Aranjuez
Aranjuez
Aranjuez is a town lying 48 km south of Madrid, in the southern part of the Community of Madrid. It is located at the confluence of the Tagus and Jarama rivers, 48 km from Toledo. As of 2009, it has a population of 54,055.-History:...
and spends her daytimes idling about, waiting for the return of her boyfriend from the Asturias
Asturias
The Principality of Asturias is an autonomous community of the Kingdom of Spain, coextensive with the former Kingdom of Asturias in the Middle Ages...
. Sometimes Lee sits out the morning by rubbing fish-oil into her hair. His last night is spent on a late-night drinking binge. He starts at the Calle Echegaray, 'a raffish little lane, half Goya, half Edwardian plush, with cafe-brothels full of painted mirrors, crippled minstrels and lacquered girls' and ends up at the Bar Chicote being chatted up by a young prostitute but who leaves him when a minor bullfighter arrives with his court of gypsies. He returns drunk to his posada and is helped into bed by Concha, who makes the sign of the cross before she joins him.
By August 1935 Lee reaches Toledo
Toledo, Spain
Toledo's Alcázar became renowned in the 19th and 20th centuries as a military academy. At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 its garrison was famously besieged by Republican forces.-Economy:...
, where he has a meeting with the South Africa
South Africa
The Republic of South Africa is a country in southern Africa. Located at the southern tip of Africa, it is divided into nine provinces, with of coastline on the Atlantic and Indian oceans...
n poet Roy Campbell
Roy Campbell (poet)
Ignatius Royston Dunnachie Campbell, better known as Roy Campbell, was an Anglo-African poet and satirist. He was considered by T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas and Edith Sitwell to have been one of the best poets of the period between the First and Second World Wars...
, with his family, whom he comes across whilst playing his violin in the open-air cafés in the Plaza de Zocodover:
"It was the poet's saint's-day, and the party had dressed in his honour and were drinking his health in fizzy pop. Campbell himself drunk wine in long shuddering gasps, and suggested I do the same. I was more than satisfied by this encounter, which had come so unexpectedly out of the evening, pleased to have arrived on foot in this foreign city in time to be elected to this poet's table."
"During most of the daylight hours Roy lay low and slept, appearing at nightfall like some ruffled sea-bird, leaning against a pillar with his arms stretched wide as though drying his salt-wet wings. One saw him gathering his wits in great gulps of breath, after which he would be ready for anything."
After a final day of drinking with the poet, Lee makes his departure the next day and is accompanied by the poet as far as the bridge by which he would cross the gorge of the Tagus
Tagus
The Tagus is the longest river on the Iberian Peninsula. It is long, in Spain, along the border between Portugal and Spain and in Portugal, where it empties into the Atlantic Ocean at Lisbon. It drains an area of . The Tagus is highly utilized for most of its course...
. By the end of September he has reached the sea, having passed through Valdepeñas
Valdepeñas
Valdepeñas is a municipality in the province of Ciudad Real, in the autonomous community of Castile-La Mancha, Spain. It is also the seat of the judicial district that covers the localities of Moral de Calatrava, Santa Cruz de Mudela, Viso del Marqués, Torrenueva, Castellar de Santiago and...
, Cordova
Córdoba, Spain
-History:The first trace of human presence in the area are remains of a Neanderthal Man, dating to c. 32,000 BC. In the 8th century BC, during the ancient Tartessos period, a pre-urban settlement existed. The population gradually learned copper and silver metallurgy...
, and Seville to reach Cádiz
Cádiz
Cadiz is a city and port in southwestern Spain. It is the capital of the homonymous province, one of eight which make up the autonomous community of Andalusia....
- " at that time..nothing but a rotten hulk on the edge of a disease-ridden tropic sea; its people dismayed, half-mad, consoled only by vicious humour, prisoners rather than citizens." He looks back on his last month on the road through September. He describes Valdepeñas as 'a surprise: a small graceful town surrounded by rich vineyards and prosperous villas - a pocket of good fortune which seemed to produce without effort some of the most genial wines in Spain.' It had been a very friendly town and whilst busking one evening three young men had invited him to go with them to a brothel. Lee played his violin and watched the customers coming and going as he was plied with wine by the old grandfather who ran the place. There were four girls, two sisters and two cousins, and the whole establishment had possessed a very intimate atmosphere, 'a casual atmosphere of neighbourly visiting, hosted by these vague and sleepy girls; subdued talk, a little music, an air of domestic eroticism, with unhurried comings and goings.'
Then he came to the Sierra Morena
Sierra Morena
The Sierra Morena is one of the main systems of mountain ranges in Spain.It stretches for 400 kilometres East-West across southern Spain, forming the southern border of the Meseta Central plateau of the Iberian Peninsula, and providing the watershed between the valleys of the Guadiana to the...
mountains, "one more of those east-west ramparts which go ranging across Spain and divide its people into separate races." South of the Sierra, he met:
"... a new kind of heat, brutal and hard, carrying the smell of another continent
Africa
Africa is the world's second largest and second most populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.2 million km² including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of the Earth's total surface area and 20.4% of the total land area...
. As I came down the mountain this heat piled up, pushing against me with blasts of sand, so that I walked half-blind, my tongue dry as a carob bean, obsessed once again by thirst. These were ominous days of nerve-bending sirocco
Sirocco
Sirocco, scirocco, , jugo or, rarely, siroc is a Mediterranean wind that comes from the Sahara and reaches hurricane speeds in North Africa and Southern Europe. It is known in North Africa by the Arabic word qibli or ghibli Sirocco, scirocco, , jugo or, rarely, siroc is a Mediterranean wind...
, with peasants wrapped up to the eyes,..but far down in the valley, running in slow green coils, I could see at last the tree-lined Guadalquivir
Guadalquivir
The Guadalquivir is the fifth longest river in the Iberian peninsula and the second longest river to be its whole length in Spain. The Guadalquivir is 657 kilometers long and drains an area of about 58,000 square kilometers...
.. "
Andalusia
Andalusia is the most populous and the second largest in area of the autonomous communities of Spain. The Andalusian autonomous community is officially recognised as a nationality of Spain. The territory is divided into eight provinces: Huelva, Seville, Cádiz, Córdoba, Málaga, Jaén, Granada and...
through fields of ripening melons, he saw the first signs of the southern people: men in tall Cordobese hats, blue shirts, scarlet waistbands, and girls with smouldering Arab faces. Instead of taking the road south to Granada
Granada
Granada is a city and the capital of the province of Granada, in the autonomous community of Andalusia, Spain. Granada is located at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains, at the confluence of three rivers, the Beiro, the Darro and the Genil. It sits at an elevation of 738 metres above sea...
, he decided to turn west and follow the Guadalquivir, adding several months to his journey, and taking him to the sea in a roundabout way. He lives in Seville
Seville
Seville is the artistic, historic, cultural, and financial capital of southern Spain. It is the capital of the autonomous community of Andalusia and of the province of Seville. It is situated on the plain of the River Guadalquivir, with an average elevation of above sea level...
, - " dazzling - a creamy crustation of flower-banked houses fanning out from each bank of the river...[yet]..no paradise, even so. There was the customary squalor behind it - children and beggars sleeping out in the gutters.." He lives on fruit and dried fish, and sleeps at night in a yard in Triana
Triana, Seville
Triana is a neighborhood and administrative district in the city of Seville that lies on the west bank of the Guadalquivir river. Like other neighborhoods that were historically split from the main city, it was known as an arrabal. Triana is placed in an almost-island between two branches of the...
a ramshackle barrio
Barrio
Barrio is a Spanish word meaning district or neighborhood.-Usage:In its formal usage in English, barrios are generally considered cohesive places, sharing, for example, a church and traditions such as feast days...
on the north bank of the river, which has 'a seedy vigour, full of tile-makers and free-range poultry, of medieval stables, bursting with panniered donkeys, squabbling wives and cooking pots.' Whilst he spends his evening trying to get cool on the flat roof of the Café Faro, eating chips and gazing at the river, he hears the first mention of the upcoming war:
"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. Naïve and uncritical, I'd thought it part of the scene, not asking whether it was right or wrong ... A young sailor approached me with a "Hallo, Johnny" ... "I don't know who you are", he said, "but if you want to see blood, stick around - you're going to see plenty."
Disliking Cadiz
Cádiz
Cadiz is a city and port in southwestern Spain. It is the capital of the homonymous province, one of eight which make up the autonomous community of Andalusia....
- 'life in Cadiz was too acrid to hold me' - Lee turns eastwards, heading along the bare coastal shelf of Andalusia. He hears talk of war - in Abyssinia
Second Italo-Abyssinian War
The Second Italo–Abyssinian War was a colonial war that started in October 1935 and ended in May 1936. The war was fought between the armed forces of the Kingdom of Italy and the armed forces of the Ethiopian Empire...
, " meaningless to me, who hadn't seen a newspaper for almost three months." He arrives at Tarifa
Tarifa
Tarifa is a small town in the province of Cádiz, Andalusia, on the southernmost coast of Spain. The town is located on the Costa de la Luz and across the Straits of Gibraltar facing Morocco. The municipality includes Punta de Tarifa, the southernmost point in continental Europe. There are five...
, the southernmost point of Europe, 'skulking behind its Arab walls' and moves on into the country, making another stop over in Algericas, a town which he very much likes for its aura of illicitness:
"It was a scruffy little town built round an open drain and smelling of fruit skins and rotten fish. There were a few brawling bars and modest brothels; otherwise the chief activity was smuggling ... it seemed to be a town entirely free of malice, and even the worst of its crooks were so untrained in malevolence that no one was expected to take them seriously..I remember the fishing boats at dawn bringing in tunny from the Azores
Azores
The Archipelago of the Azores is composed of nine volcanic islands situated in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean, and is located about west from Lisbon and about east from the east coast of North America. The islands, and their economic exclusion zone, form the Autonomous Region of the...
, the markets full of melons and butterflies, the international freaks drinking themselves into multi-lingual stupors, the sly yachts running gold to Tangier
Tangier
Tangier, also Tangiers is a city in northern Morocco with a population of about 700,000 . It lies on the North African coast at the western entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar where the Mediterranean meets the Atlantic Ocean off Cape Spartel...
..."
Half in love with Algeciras
Algeciras
Algeciras is a port city in the south of Spain, and is the largest city on the Bay of Gibraltar . Port of Algeciras is one of the largest ports in Europe and in the world in three categories: container,...
, he felt he "could have stayed on there indefinitely" but decides nevertheless to stick to his plan to follow the coast round Spain, and sets off for Málaga
Málaga
Málaga is a city and a municipality in the Autonomous Community of Andalusia, Spain. With a population of 568,507 in 2010, it is the second most populous city of Andalusia and the sixth largest in Spain. This is the southernmost large city in Europe...
. He makes a stop over in Gibraltar
Gibraltar
Gibraltar is a British overseas territory located on the southern end of the Iberian Peninsula at the entrance of the Mediterranean. A peninsula with an area of , it has a northern border with Andalusia, Spain. The Rock of Gibraltar is the major landmark of the region...
, " more like Torquay
Torquay
Torquay is a town in the unitary authority area of Torbay and ceremonial county of Devon, England. It lies south of Exeter along the A380 on the north of Torbay, north-east of Plymouth and adjoins the neighbouring town of Paignton on the west of the bay. Torquay’s population of 63,998 during the...
" , is questioned by the police, and told to report to their station at night. 'Leaving Gibraltar was like escaping from an elder brother in charge of an open jail.' It takes him five days to walk to Malaga, following a coastline smelling of hot seaweed, thyme and shellfish, and occasionally passing through cork-woods smoking with the camp fires of gypsies. At night he finds a field and wraps himself up in his blanket. "The road to Malaga followed a beautiful but exhausted shore, seemingly forgotten by the world. I remember the names - San Pedro
San Pedro de Alcántara
San Pedro de Alcántara lies on the main Costa del Sol coastal road the N340/A7 as well as the new toll motorway the AP7, 10 km west of Marbella in Andalucia, Southern Spain....
, Estepona
Estepona
Estepona is a town and municipality in the region of the Costa del Sol, southern Spain. It is located in the province of Málaga, part of the autonomous community of Andalusia. Estepona is renowned for its beaches, which stretch along some 21 km of coastline...
, Marbella
Marbella
Marbella is a town in Andalusia, Spain. It is situated on the Mediterranean Sea, in the province of Málaga, beneath the La Concha mountain. In 2000 the city had 98,823 inhabitants, in 2004, 116,234, in 2010 approximately 135,000....
, and Fuengirola
Fuengirola
Fuengirola, in ancient times known as Suel and then Suhayl, is a large town and municipality on the Costa del Sol in the province of Málaga, autonomous community of Andalusia in southern Spain. It is a major tourist resort, with more than 8 km of beaches, and home to a mediæval Moorish fortress...
..They were salt-fish villages, thin-ribbed..At that time one could have bought the whole coast for a shilling. Not Emperors could buy it now."
In Málaga, he stays in a posada
Posada
Posada , also previously known as Feronia or Pausata, is a comune in the Province of Nuoro in the Italian region Sardinia. The city sits on the coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea...
, sharing the courtyard with a dozen families who are mostly mountain people selling their beautiful hand-woven Alpujarras
Alpujarras
thumb|250px|A typical Alpujarran village, [[Busquístar]].La Alpujarra is a landlocked historical region in Southern Spain, which stretches south from the Sierra Nevada mountains near Granada in the autonomous community of Andalusia. The western part of the region lies in the province of Granada...
blankets and cloth in the city. The young girls are some of the most graceful he has ever seen, 'light-footed and nimble as deer, with long floating arms and articulate bodies which turned every movement into a ritual dance.' Malaga was full of foreigners, a snug expatriate colony, and everyone is very chummy apart from the English debs with 'that particular rainswept grey of their English eyes, only noticeable when abroad.'
It is the young Germans who outnumber the rest of the colony, amongst them - " Walter and Shulamith, two Jewish refugees, who had walked from Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
carrying their one year old child. I see them today as part of the shadow of the times
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...
.." Disaster seems to arrive during his last days in Malaga when his violin breaks. After his new line of work, acting as a guide to British tourists, is curtailed by local guides , he is then fortunate to meet a young German who gives him a violin for free . It had belonged to his girlfriend and she'd run off with a Swede.
Winter 1935. Lee decides to hole-up in Almuñécar
Almuñécar
Almuñécar is a municipality in the Spanish Autonomous Region of Andalusia on the Costa Tropical between Nerja and Motril . It has a subtropical climate...
, sixty miles east of Malaga:
He manages to get work in a hotel run by a Swiss, Herr Brandt, who has unfortunately arrived there twenty years too early. The whole area is very poor, with the peasants just managing to scrape a living from the sugar cane grown in the delta, and the sea:
"But the land was rich compared with the sea, which nourished only a scattering of poor sardines. As there were no boats or equipment for deep-sea fishing, the village was chained to the offshore wastes, shallow, denuded, too desperately fished to provide anything but constant reproaches...The only people with jobs seemed to be the village girls, most of them in service to the richer families, where for a bed in a cupboard and a couple of pounds a year they were expected to run the whole house and keep the men from the brothel
Brothel
Brothels are business establishments where patrons can engage in sexual activities with prostitutes. Brothels are known under a variety of names, including bordello, cathouse, knocking shop, whorehouse, strumpet house, sporting house, house of ill repute, house of prostitution, and bawdy house...
s."
With nothing much to do in their spare time, Lee and his friend Manolo, the hotel's waiter, drink in the local bar alongside the other villagers, drinking rough brandy mixed with boiling water and eating morunos - little dishes of hot pig flesh stewed in sauce. Manolo is the leader of a group of fishermen and labourers and they sit in a room at the back discussing the expected revolution - " a world to come - a world without church or government or army, where each man alone would be his private government. "
February 1936. The Socialists win the election and a Popular Front
Popular Front (Spain)
The Popular Front in Spain's Second Republic was an electoral coalition and pact signed in January 1936 by various left-wing political organisations, instigated by Manuel Azaña for the purpose of contesting that year's election....
, People's Government, arrives. As Spring appears a whiff of change is in the air, with a loosening of social and sexual behaviour and manners:
"Books and films appeared, unmutilated by Church or State, bringing to the peasants of the coast, for the first time in generations, a keen breath of the outside world. For a while there was a complete lifting of censorship, even in newspapers and magazines. But most of all it was the air of carnality, the brief clearing away of taboos, which seemed to possess the village - a sudden frank, even frantic, pursuit of lust, bred from a sense of impending peril."
The villagers, in an act of revolt, burn down the church but then do a volte-face when Feast Day arrives and the images of Christ and the Virgin are brought out into the open, loaded as usual on the fishermen's backs. In the middle of May, there is a strike and the peasants come in from the countryside to lend their support as the village splits down the middle between 'Fascists
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
' and 'Communists
Communism
Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...
'. " The local flag of revolution was the Republican flag, the flag of the elected government. The peasants strung it like a banner across the Town Hall balcony and painted their allegiance beneath it in red ." There is also hope in the air that the working class will see an improvement in their terrible living conditions:
"Spain was a wasted country of neglected land - much of it held by a handful of men, some of whose vast estates had scarcely been reduced or reshuffled since the days of the Roman Empire
Roman Empire
The Roman Empire was the post-Republican period of the ancient Roman civilization, characterised by an autocratic form of government and large territorial holdings in Europe and around the Mediterranean....
..Now it was hoped that there might be some lifting of this intolerable darkness, some freedom to read and write and talk. Men hoped that their wives might be freed of the triple trivialities of the Church - credulity, guilt and confession; that their sons might be craftsmen rather than serfs, their daughters citizens rather than domestic whores, and that they might hear the children in the evening coming home from the fresh-built schools to astonish them with new facts of learning."
The middle of July 1936. War now breaks out. There had been anti-Government uprisings in the garrisons of Spanish Morocco
Spanish Morocco
The Spanish protectorate of Morocco was the area of Morocco under colonial rule by the Spanish Empire, established by the Treaty of Fez in 1912 and ending in 1956, when both France and Spain recognized Moroccan independence.-Territorial borders:...
- at Melilla
Melilla
Melilla is a autonomous city of Spain and an exclave on the north coast of Morocco. Melilla, along with the Spanish exclave Ceuta, is one of the two Spanish territories located in mainland Africa...
, Tetuan and Larache
Larache
Larache is an important harbour town in the region Tanger-Tétouan in northern Morocco. It was founded in the 7th century when a group of Muslim soldiers from Arabia extended their camp at Lixus onto the south bank of the Loukkos River.In 1471, the Portuguese settlers from Asilah and Tangier drove...
. General Francisco Franco
Francisco Franco
Francisco Franco y Bahamonde was a Spanish general, dictator and head of state of Spain from October 1936 , and de facto regent of the nominally restored Kingdom of Spain from 1947 until his death in November, 1975...
, the butcher of the Asturias
Asturian miners' strike of 1934
The Asturian miners' strike of 1934 was a major strike action which took place in Asturias in northern Spain soon developing into armed insurrection against the Spanish government.-Background:...
, had flown from the Canaries
Canary Islands
The Canary Islands , also known as the Canaries , is a Spanish archipelago located just off the northwest coast of mainland Africa, 100 km west of the border between Morocco and the Western Sahara. The Canaries are a Spanish autonomous community and an outermost region of the European Union...
to lead the rebels. With the disappearance of the police, " the village was on its own: Government supporters facing the enemy within." Manolo and El Gato (the leader of one of the new-formed unions) start to organise some kind of militia. Granada
Granada
Granada is a city and the capital of the province of Granada, in the autonomous community of Andalusia, Spain. Granada is located at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains, at the confluence of three rivers, the Beiro, the Darro and the Genil. It sits at an elevation of 738 metres above sea...
is held by the rebels, and so is Almunecar's neighbour Altofaro, ten miles down the coast. Almuñécar is mistakenly fired on by a Government warship that thinks it is shelling rebel-held Altofaro. Lee hears on Radio Sevilla Queipo de Llano exulting in the fall of the city. The rebel general is drunk and slurs his phrases. "Christ had triumphed, he ranted, through God's army in Spain, of which Generalissimo Franco was the sainted leader...'Viva España! Viva la Virgen!' ". Finally, a British destroyer from Gibraltar arrives to pick up any British subjects who might be marooned on the coast. Lee and the English novelist he is renting a room from are taken on board and he takes his last look at Almuñécar and Spain as they grow smaller in the distance.
"All I'd known in that country - or had felt without knowing it - seemed to come upon me then; lost now, and too late to have any meaning, my twelve months' journey gone. Spain drifted away from me, thunder-bright on the horizon, and I left it there beneath its copper clouds."
The Epilogue describes Lee's return to his family home in Gloucestershire and his desire to help his comrades in Spain. He is held back by a liaison with a wealthy lover but finally decides to make his way through France in order to cross the Pyrenees into Spain. After a desperate climb starting from Ceret
Céret
Céret is a commune in the Pyrénées-Orientales department in southern France. It is the capital of Vallespir historical Catalan comarca.-Geography:...
in the foothills, in which he gets caught in a snow storm, he ends up in another French village. Here he is helped by a peasant, after another tortuous climb through the thick snow, to cross the border once more into Spain.
Title
An insight into the origin of the title of the book is found in the second episode the BBC FourBBC Four
BBC Four is a British television network operated by the British Broadcasting Corporation and available to digital television viewers on Freeview, IPTV, satellite and cable....
documentary series Travellers' Century
Travellers' Century
Travellers' Century is a 2008 BBC Television documentary series presented by Benedict Allen that profiles the lives of three influential 20th century British travel writers.-Production:...
presented by Benedict Allen
Benedict Allen
Benedict Colin Allen is a British traveller. He is best known for his survival modus operandi: tapping into local, indigenous knowledge above reliance on modern inventions. His approach is to present himself as ready to learn, like an infant; the communities that he visits take him under their...
. In the episode, which looks at As I Walked Out..., a friend of Lee reveals that the title of the book comes from a Gloucestershire folk song. The traditional song 'The Banks of Sweet Primroses' starts with the line "As I walked out one mid-summer morning'.