Great

Great

Great

“I felt it was for this I had come: to wake at dawn on a hillside and look out on a world for which I had no words, to start at the beginning, speechless and without plan, in a place that still had no memories for me.”

Not as well known as 'Cider With Rosie' this book is the second in Laurie Lee's autobiographical trilogy. Its 1934 and without of a job 19-year-old Lee leaves his Gloucestershire hometown to tramp to London. In the capital he works for a year as a labourer on a building site but when that job nears completion he sets his sights on Europe: “a place of casual frontiers, few questions and almost no travellers”. He chose Spain because he knew a single Spanish phrase “‘will you please give me a glass of water?’” and so begins probably the best travelogue I've ever read.

Initially Lee lands on Spanish soil in Vigo from where he walks and busks east to Valladolid, south to Cadiz via Madrid and Seville, before turning left along the Andalusian coast to eventually arrive at Castillo. 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”. Along the way he meets bootblacks, peasants, innkeepers, drovers, priests, soldiers, fellow buskers, limbless beggars and of course a variety of women. Lee arrives as a callow and naïve 20-year-old but gradually comes to realise that the country is on the brink of Civil War and on account the writing slowly grows darker as the story progresses.

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.” But it would also only fair to remember that this book wasn’t published until 1969 so some 30+ years after the actual events took place. No doubt some of the conversations and events are re-imagined recollections and there is also an element of rose-tinted glasses about it. All the same its a beautiful piece of writing that although dated shouts out to be read. ( )

How about if you could just walk away from your little house in the countryside of England, and go walking across England to London, making money to pay for crappy food and a bed full of bugs by playing your violin in the streets? You could cross the English channel on a boat that just cost a couple of bucks to get on, walk all around the coast of France towards the Atlantic, stopping in little villages and finding inns to stay at, still supporting yourself by playing the violin. Keep going and sooner or later you were in Spain, eventually ending up on the Costa del Sol, before it was named that.

You couldn't do that, if you were born female like me, or even if you were a male, in this time, 80 years later. Because if you look at the Costa del Sol on Google maps, you'll see that the area that used to be impoverished little fishing villages strung far apart on the southern coast, is now one unending sprawl of resorts, for the wealthy. Makes me wonder what this part of the world, and the East side of San Jose will look like in 80 more years? Melted slag, empty of all life perhaps?

This book was a beautiful read. ( )