The way in which Lee constructed his trip so that every encounter fills up the senses, the way in which he brought the warmth and life out of all the characters he met, the dangers and their happy endings, and the ceaseless bounding from one place to another imbues Lee’s accounts with romance. I think that is partly due to the fact that I first read it at 21 and I'm sure that like like most people my desire to experience new things without a safety net is strongest around that age. An archive recording of Lee's voice was used for the narration of the Carlton Television film Cider with Rosie (1998), which was first broadcast after his death. The screenplay was written by his friend John Mortimer. [19]

Acres of writing statues, walks, and fountains rising from the dust like a mirage. It was a grandiose folly, as large as Versailles and even more extravagant, and I found it in the peak of bloom and entirely deserted except for a few old gardeners… who went shuffling about as though under some timeless instruction, preparing for the return of some long-dead queen. Collecting Letters Lee is also an observer of people. The first few chapters involve his walk to London and his experiences there. It is 1934 and there is still a depression. Lee recalls men who: It was in Almuñécar, on the south coast of Spain, in the summer of 1936, that Lee witnessed the beginning of the civil war in Spain. His reflections on the time appeared to set the context for the war, a Spain which was divided into the very poor and disenfranchised, and the rich landowners, who took everything, including the dignity of the poor. He described witnessing how some thirty men worked in vain to make the most paltry of catches of fish, and ended up with a paltry handful of sandy sardines for their labours. It really hit me, in 2003, the night I found myself walking around Pamplona on one of the evenings of San Fermin. There were crowds of people here and there drinking outside bars, charangas playing gay tunes and hundreds of pairs and groups wandering around with beers in their hand. However, I noted, that at no point did I feel cowed or scared. Unlike in the United Kingdom I found that whilst the Spanish liked to drink, wine and beer, and many other things, they seldom got drunk, lairy or aggressive. It seemed that everyone was in pretty good spirits and that if they weren’t they weren’t going to try and ruin it for everyone else. Each considered his struggle to be older than Communism, to be something exclusively Spanish, part of a social perversion which he alone could put right by reason of his roots in this particular landscape.I remember once visiting the royal palace known as ‘La Granja’ situated some 100km north of Madrid, in the centre of Spain. It was a very hot day, there was hardly anyone there, and I seem to remember some part of it being shut, perhaps the gardens, the palace or the fountains. “Palacio Real de La Granja de San Ildefonso – Segovia” by Antonio Marín Segovia Laurie Lee died of bowel cancer at home in Slad on 13 May 1997, at the age of 82. He is buried in the local churchyard. [7] Works [ edit ] Books [ edit ] For there are, broadly speaking, two intertwined histories of British long-distance walking. One involves the wilful wanderer: those like Lee and Leigh Fermor who set out to relish the romance of the open road, and often subsequently to write about it. The other is a shadow history – harder to see because its participants left little trace – of those who had no choice but to walk, and who barely held life together as they “padded it” down the paths. The unhappy population of Britain’s roads boomed in the years before Lee left Slad. Many of the men who survived the first world war had returned to find no settled employment and no home. Life on foot was the only option available to them, and in the two decades after 1918, plumes of smoke rose from copses and spinneys as the woods of England filled with these shaken-out casualties of war – men who slept out and lived rough, begging as they went and working where they could. Their numbers grew further when the economic crash of the 1930s left millions jobless across Europe and America. Another thing about the Spanish – they never seem to get drunk. The only intoxicated people I saw in Spain were one or two Britons.

He gathered these details as he walked, and he could not have done so had he not opened himself to the kinds of encounter and perception that travel on foot makes possible. Walking, Lee notes early on, refines awareness: it compels you to “tread” a landscape “slowly”, to “smell its different soils”. The car passenger, by contrast, “races at gutter height, seeing less than a dog in a ditch”. Lee, like Leigh Fermor, believed in walking not only as a means of motion but also as a means of knowing – and this unforgettable book is proof of the truth of that belief. I hate being lied to. If a book is sold as fiction, that’s fine; but this was supposed to be a travel memoir and it turned out to be a fabulist’s yarn (to put it nicely). By the second day I’d finished my bread and dates, but I found a few wild grapes and ate them green, and also the remains of a patch of beans. 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 brothels.

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Laurie Lee reading 'Cider with Rosie' complete and unabridged. ISIS audio books 1988. 7 disc set 7 h 55 min