A Moment of War (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Man Must Move: The Story of Transport (with David Lambert, 1960); published in the US as The Wonderful World of Transportation (1960) – for children

The audiobook I listened to is read by Stephen Thorne, not the author. Thorne’s narration is fine. It’s good. It’s easy to follow, but it doesn’t reach halfway up to the magnificence of the author’s own reading of his books. It simply does not have Laurie Lee’s superb inflection. The essence of prose poetry is lost. In addition, when you’ve got a word that is French, I think it should be pronounced as the French do. It irritated me that “la grippe” is by Thorne pronounced as the English word “gripe”, which has a very different sound and meaning! I have given the narration three stars. Another weird fact is that, after spending quite a few days at Albacete, he never mention André Marty, the much-feared psychotic French Communist who was in charge of the International Brigades. And he keeps talking about the Azaña Largo Caballero as though it were one person. And he tell us that Madrid is a mile-high, when, in fact, the altitude of Madrid is only about a third of that. Or perhaps he was thinking of Denver... Passino, Carla (9 September 2019). "Laurie Lee's childhood home, the house that inspired 'Cider with Rosie', is up for sale". Country Life. Archived from the original on 10 September 2019 . Retrieved 2 September 2020. Lee left the Central School at 15 to become an errand boy at a Chartered Accountants in Stroud. In 1931, he first found the Whiteway Colony, two miles from Slad, a colony founded by Tolstoyan anarchists. This gave him his first smattering of politicisation and was where he met the composer Benjamin Frankel and the "Cleo" who appears in As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. [3] In 1933 he met Sophia Rogers, an "exotically pretty girl with dark curly hair" who had moved to Slad from Buenos Aires, an influence on Lee who said later in life that he only went to Spain because "a girl in Slad from Buenos Aires taught me a few words of Spanish." [4] Powell, Tom (15 June 2014). "When Laurie Lee walked out". The Olive Press. Archived from the original on 18 April 2019 . Retrieved 2 September 2020.Lee's first love was always poetry, though he was only moderately successful as a poet. Lee's poems had appeared in the Gloucester Citizen and the Birmingham Post, and in October 1934 his poem 'Life' won a prize from, and publication in, the Sunday Referee, a national paper. [7] [15] Another poem was published in Cyril Connolly's Horizon magazine in 1940 and his first volume of poems, The Sun My Monument, was published in 1944. This was followed by The Bloom of Candles (1947) and My Many-coated Man (1955). Several poems written in the early 1940s reflect the atmosphere of the war, but also capture the beauty of the English countryside. The poem "Twelfth Night" from My Many-coated Man was set for unaccompanied mixed choir by American composer Samuel Barber in 1968. Wishart family of artists". www.binsted.org. Archived from the original on 5 June 2019 . Retrieved 5 June 2019.

I suspect that his purpose in writing the book was to bring home the horrors of war, and he does this remarkably well with his beautiful descriptive writing. His personal story is related as a very minor secondary element, which is how he wanted it. It also helps to explain why I was dismayed at the beginning; there was such an emotional gulf after the execution of the young deserter, and then his detailed account of the volunteers at Figueras. Nothing about his own feelings at almost being executed.Grove, Valerie (18 December 2019). "Laurie Lee's rural myths". New Statesman. Archived from the original on 22 January 2020 . Retrieved 2 September 2020. Lee manages to covey intimately, the muddle, the mistakes, the hierarchy, the comeradary of men at war.