Squirming, coy, a strip of striped pyjamas, Miss Sweater Girl of ten years later – already she knew how to stand, how to snuggle against the doorpost, how to frame her flannel-dressed limbs in the lamplight. Part of the effect is that he spends all but the last few pages describing rural (and even urban) Spain in 1934 as still living in medieval times, a state of serfdom, ignorance, poverty, disease, and filth that he observed but did not question. Along the way the reader are shown aspects of Spain that they would rather not see on a package holiday: bedbugs, blisters, wolves and fearful heat — “the brass-taloned lion which licks the afternoon ground ready to consume anyone not wise enough to take cover”, alongside things that you would want to experience: bright-whitewashed towns and the pine-cool foothills of the Sierras where he “slipped off the heat like a sweat-soaked shirt”. It is the account of the author’s walk from Vigo on the Atlantic coast, south to Castillo in AndalucÍa.

Laurie Lee Robert MacFarlane: in the footsteps of Laurie Lee

This has got to be one of the most evocative memoirs ever written; it certainly tops all the other road-trip/travelers tales I’ve read. 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.I bathed, as he did, in the blue streams that tumble off the high peaks, the water of which was “snow-cold, brutal and revivifying”. Lee himself falls in with one of these men of the road, the “garrulously secretive” Alf – a “tramp to his bones” and veteran of the brotherhood – who passes on the tricks of his trade, and scorns Lee’s affectation that he is some kind of “ TE Lawrence, engaged in [a] self-punishing odyssey”. But he waited 35 years before finally publishing an account of the long walk which took him through Spain in the run-up to the Civil War. After a period spent working on building sites in Putney, he finds himself on board a ship for Spain for no better reason than he knows how to ask for a glass of water.

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning - Penguin Books UK As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning - Penguin Books UK

Then one of them beckoned me indoors and offered me her giant daughter, who lay sprawled on a huge brass bed. The "War" chapter brings some more physical happenings aside from Lee's (mostly) aimless wanderings. 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.Lee's descriptions of people and places were frequently brilliant, but it loses a star for his disturbingly blasé attitude towards the violence, cruelty and paedophilia he witnessed throughout his journey.