As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Lee begins by leaving his home in Stroud and heading to the south coast where he makes money as a violin busker. He was penniless, young, and open to experience, and as a result, he had a wonderful time wandering from town to town playing his violin for small change, food and lodging. Waking up 117 years later, Bob discovers his mind has been uploaded into a sentient space probe with the ability to replicate itself. So I lay for a while in the anchored silence and listened to the first faint sounds of Spain – a howling dog, the gasping spasms of a donkey, the thin sharp cry of a cockerel.

Some primitive instinct had forced me to leave the road and climb to this rocky tower, which commanded an eagle’s view of the distant harbour and all the hills and lagoons around it.After his new line of work, acting as a guide to British tourists, is curtailed by local guides, he meets a young German who gives him a violin. What raises this above the level of an ordinary travelogue is Lee's unique and deceptively simple yet poetic language, virtually every other page seemed to contain a beautiful turn of phrase: “Stepping in from the torrid street, you met a band of cool air like fruit-peel pressed to your brow. Minor issues present such as mild cracking, inscriptions, inserts, light foxing, tanning and thumb marking. I found a rough little hollow out of the wind, a miniature crater among the rocks, ate some bread and dates, unrolled the blanket and wrapped myself inside it. He also wrote three bestselling volumes of autobiography: Cider with Rosie (1959), which has sold over six million copies worldwide, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969) and A Moment of War (1991).

The quality of writing is superb and, though it is said of so many books, this genuinely is 'a page turner'. Neither claim is remotely credible, the pins nor the clock, and the first even less so when juxtaposed against the second. Never having seen the sea, he walked to Southampton, and then walked onto London to meet his girlfriend and work as a labourer for a year before going onto Spain where he walked the length of the country. Two years later he is fortuitously “rescued” off the coast of southern Spain by the Royal Navy trawling the Spanish beaches for stray Brits marooned between the warring factions of the Spanish Civil War. Lee walked pretty much everywhere in Britain and in Spain, mainly on back roads and there are lots of descriptions of small, poor Spanish villages.Small 8vo, 238 pages, illustrations by Leonard Rosoman, page marker ribbon, fine condition in cloth binding, number 200 of an edition of 2000 copies. In As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, the second of the trilogy, Laurie Lee leaves his home in Gloucestershire, travels by foot as a young man of nineteen, to London, via Southampton. The evening was hazy and peacock-coloured; delicate hues ran slowly over the sea and sky and melted together like oil.

His most famous work was an autobiographical trilogy which consisted of Cider with Rosie (1959), As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969) and A Moment of War (1991). Some of the scenes he describes are frankly horrific and yet, he observes, remarks, and leaves without, in most cases, changing anything. A library book, or relatively cheap copy would be worth looking into if the summary sounds interesting.

Slightly Foxed brings back forgotten voices through its Slightly Foxed and Plain Foxed Editions, a series of beautifully produced little pocket hardback reissues of classic memoirs, all of them absorbing and highly individual. Laurie Lee's childhood, so beautifully and evocatively related in Cider With Rosie is over and Laurie Lee is now a young man. He details the people and landscapes of each new place as well as his various encounters with brothels and drinking establishments. Laurie Lee published four collections of poems: The Sun My Monument (1944), The Bloom of Candles (1947), My Many-Coated Man (1955) and Pocket Poets (1960).