Introduction

Many years ago I bought the book 'As I walked out One Midsummer Morning' by Laurie Lee, an autobiographical memoir that describes his travels on foot through Spain just prior to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. At the time I knew nothing of its content and little of its author - those were less informed days for me - and I had purchased it purely on the basis that the title captured my imagination when I saw it while browsing through a London bookstore. It has turned out to be one of my better impulse buys: while some of his and others' books of those years have lost the shine imbued of youth, an older, more critical and hopefully wiser me still finds a touch of charm in this one over four decades later.

The book describes the nineteen year old Laurie Lee's twelve month journey through Spain between July 1935 and July 1936, walking from the north to the south of the country. It captures a Spain that no longer exists, one on the cusp of historical change, about to be tipped into a brutal and savage civil war. It is also a Spain of people in poverty, of subsistence and subservience, and an almost feudal existence for many. For me, Lee's writing describes that Spain in a simple yet lyrical and engaging way, capturing the rawness, the hardship and the beauty of remote and underdeveloped parts of the country while also exposing the humanity - and sometimes brutality - that lay hidden within. It is also a picture of a bygone age where most routes were more suited to foot or animals rather than cars and in an era where travel was more an adventure than a pastime, where crossing a border meant passing through into an alien and unfamiliar world and not just a change of language. 

Some years ago I seem to recall controversy about Lee's literary merit, particularly with regard to his book 'Cider With Rosie' and its inclusion in the school curriculum. Meretricious or not, the poetry and vividness of his writing chimes with me and the idea of following his route through Spain and visiting the places he describes has been in my mind for a while. Of course nearly a century of time and politics has swept through the nation, dramatically changing the country that Lee discovered and wrote about, and in places even smothering it completely. But my two walks across Spain have shown me that there are still vestiges of a country similar to the one he describes to be found, of small villages lost in the remoteness of the countryside and swathes of exposed and sweeping landscape. It is aspects of that Spain I hope to capture in the coming weeks as I retrace the route that Lee walked some ninety years ago, maybe to experience in some small part his sense of discovery and that feeling of carefree timelessness a journey not set against the clock brings.