As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

"As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning is about a young man in the 1930s who, one day in early June, walks out from the little village where he grew up. He waves goodbye to his mum at the garden gate and goes to explore, to have an adventure—as young people have done since the beginning of time, I suppose. He makes his way to Spain and then he walks the length of Spain. He plays his violin to pay his way, sleeping out on the hills, playing in bars and talking to people. He’s just living a very simple but idyllic-sounding life. It’s quite a short book and it’s very beautifully and poetically written. I first read it when I was at university, and at the time I was completely smitten with these crazy hardcore stories of South Pole suffering and mountaineers chopping off their own arms. I loved all that sort of stuff. Reading Laurie Lee was suddenly a very different perspective on adventure, because he was just a normal young guy. He was not very tough. He wasn’t very fit. He didn’t claim to be trying to do anything extraordinary. He was just out in the world, living vividly and being curious and I loved that, mostly because it sounded like me. I enjoyed reading the big tough expedition books partly because I felt that was quite distant from what my personality was, but Laurie Lee felt very much like me. Ever since I read As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning I thought I wanted to go and do the trip myself. I kept reading the book every couple of years for about 15 years, but kept putting off actually doing anything about it. So rather than walking across Spain playing my violin, I spent years doing all sorts of other stuff, the big trips we’ve talked about. I gradually started to notice, though, that the reasons I was doing those big trips—for the excitement and the risk and the fear of failure and the uncertainty—because I’d been doing this sort of stuff for about 20 years, I’d got quite good at it and therefore a lot of those things had faded away. I realized that carrying on with big adventures was just my own version of being in a rut and a routine and a comfort zone. I wanted to try to look differently at adventure, and what adventure meant to me, and also to try and find a way to get back those thrills and uncertainties. So I decided what I needed to do was something that I was very bad at, that I’d never done before and was really daunting to me. That’s when I came up with the idea of taking up the violin, learning it and then trying to walk through Spain for a month with no money or credit cards and only my appalling musical skills to see me through. Yes. Normally when someone says, ‘I’m bad at the violin’ everyone thinks they’re just being modest. The benefit of listening to the audiobook version of my book is that it actually has some of my violin playing. When I got home, I kept practising and managed to pass grade one violin—so I was worse than that when I began. If you’ve heard a six-year-old playing a violin you’ll know about how bad I was. Laurie Lee was really good at the violin, but he’d never been on an adventure and had never spoken Spanish before. So what he got out of that trip was quite different to me. My Spanish was fine. I’d been abroad many times and I’d done long walks. But I can’t really play the violin and the idea of standing up in public and performing is something that scares me greatly. I hate karaoke. I hate dancing. I find it mortifyingly embarrassing. So having to do that in order to get money was, for me, at least as frightening as some of the bigger expeditions I’ve done. Before the trip began, I was really sure I was going to be borderline starvation, rummaging in bins, stealing crusts off café tables, pinching corn from fields. That was how I anticipated it would go. No, no! Oh yes, I did once find some pork scratchings in a bin, but that was just luck, I wasn’t trying to rummage. On the very first day I actually earned four euros, which I was just ridiculously thrilled about. You can have a feast for four euros. In the whole month I earned 120 euros, so four euros a day, but I had this rule that in every town, whenever I earned money, I had to spend all of that money that day. I couldn’t hoard it up because I wanted, when I got to the next village, to be back at zero again, to be hungry and afraid and vulnerable. So it was quite feast or famine. One day, for example, I earned 20 euros. It was a Sunday morning and I ate ice creams and peanuts and all sorts of luxury things. Then, the next day, I was back to carrot sandwiches. It was carrot sandwiches when times were hard. My staple was banana sandwiches. That’s been my staple for many, many years on adventures. It’s completely different. For starters, Laurie is about 20 when he arrives in Spain. He is a young man filled with the joys of youth, of wine, women and song—literally those three. That essentially keeps him going happily through Spain, having the best time of his entire life. In my head, that is how I always imagined myself, as an adventurer. I still see myself as that carefree, young spirit, but the reality of my life is that I am now a middle-aged man with two kids. “How can I still be this adventurous individual, this carefree spirit I see myself as, and also be a stay-at-home, sensible Dad?” That becomes quite an important part of the book, this struggle I have figuring out: how can I still be this adventurous individual, this carefree spirit I see myself as, and also be a stay-at-home, sensible Dad who is paying the mortgage and taking my kids to football lessons? The frustration I had, this feeling that I was not doing either side of my life justice, is one of the things that finally booted me out the door to go and do this walk. It’s one of those things we don’t really write about. Pretty much all adventure books involve ‘Person goes off does something heroic. Isn’t life brilliant? The End.’ My reality from all my own experiences—and I also have a lot of friends who do stuff like this and write books—is that almost without exception there’s a huge anticlimax and a down period after trips. You come back and think, ‘Wow, I’ve done this amazing thing. But I’m still the same me. I still have all the insecurities or itchiness or whatever it was that drove me away in the first place.’ Pretty much everyone I know has had a big slump after their trips. But it’s not really written about, because it’s much more exciting just to write about getting to the top of the mountain. I suspect they are, because if you want to go and be a hardcore adventurer, you have to be pretty spectacularly selfish. I’ve certainly found that a big struggle in my life, between the selfish and ambitious me versus trying to be a good husband and a good dad. Essentially it comes down to a choice. The choice for me happened quite a few years ago, when I had a choice between going to the South Pole—this expedition I’d spent five years training and preparing for—and leaving behind my young family or quitting those big, extreme expeditions and trying to learn to become a new version of me. He did the ideal thing, which is go away when you’re young, do something incredibly crazy and epic—but do it just because you want to do it, not because you’re trying to get famous. He hated being famous. Then you’ve got that out of your system and can get on and do other good stuff in your life. He’s a person who did a very good job of it."

"It’s an interesting book, a young man’s coming-of-age classic. He’s a 20-year-old troubadour wandering through Spain, playing his fiddle for supper, enjoying the romance of it, and just in love with the freedom, with the road under his feet. And he just happens to walk into one of the most devastating civil wars of the 20th century. The sheer exuberance of youth comes over in the book, and his vivid description of the landscape—the same intense description you get in Cider With Rosie , the first of his trilogy of memoirs. The prose feels as fresh and youthful as the day it was written. It’s like poetry to me. The book was published in 1969, but he was walking in 1935. I’ve heard other people say, well, a lot of it was recreated, it’s written through the prism of memory. I don’t really think it’s an issue that some of it might not be as accurate as if he’d written it while he walked. These writers aren’t journalists. This is literature, after all. It’s a very northern European concept, to believe there is a clear division between fiction and nonfiction. There’s less of a divide in South America and southern Europe. It’s a false binary. After all, we all rely on memory to recall the past. We’re not taking notes about every incident of our lives. Some people keep diaries, I guess, but things we recall change in the recollection. That’s a reflection of reality."

"Yes. Cider With Rosie , for those who haven’t read it, is set in old-world Gloucestershire before the motor car. It’s definitely a lost time, sadly. That book is almost a historical artifact. What you do get in this book is the arrival of modernity into this very low-key village. This was obviously taking place all over rural England and beyond. It’s set in 1934, and, as we know, war is coming. But he doesn’t yet know this, and he feels like he has to make life happen. So he leaves home in Gloucestershire and moves to London where he starts working on a building site, where he starts to learn a bit of Spanish because one of the other builders is Spanish. He learns the Spanish for ‘Will you give me a glass of water?’ and that’s enough for him to think, right, I’m off. “It’s only later, once the dust has settled, that you start to understand on an emotional level what has been happening to you” He’s got a bit of cash in his back pocket, and he effectively hitchhikes all the way to Galicia. He arrives there in 1935, then heads down to Zamora, then Toledo, and reaches the sea by September. He’s in Almuñécar in 1936, when the Spanish Civil War breaks out. A British destroyer arrives at Gibraltar, and he’s quite torn. He’s a Brit abroad and he is in danger, he should take the opportunity to go home. But he’s been searching for a story, for life on the road. He does go back to the UK, but then the rest of the book is about him trying to return to Spain—he makes his way back through down through France and through the Pyrenees, to fight. The backdrop to all this, of course, is the violin. It’s his tool, a simple instrument with which he makes his way financially. It’s so easy to carry, and everyone understands the language of music. They invite him to all these wonderful places. I always thought of my horse like that. You can’t put a horse on your back, but there’s a wonderful simplicity to it that people respond to. Yes. One of the strange things about writing In Green was working out why I did it. I think that takes time to work out, unless you have an inciting incident in your life that forces you to change. You know—a breakup or a death, something that makes you want to move. I didn’t understand it at the time. After writing and editing the book, I realised I was desperately looking for a story or a purpose, a sense of belonging, because I had been living and working in London feeling very lost without admitting it. That was my motivation to make a story of my own, and that’s why I understand, in a distant way, what drove Laurie Lee. He had no personal loss or tragedy to write of, he was a happy-go-lucky guy who felt pretty good about life. But he wanted to create something he could call his own. With his violin, he did that, and you get this wonderful journey, the kindness of strangers, this river-like walk that he did. He knitted these things together and you get a book of real discovery in the process. You’re not alone. To think that you are alone is to detach yourself from your surroundings. It’s not a love of serendipity, really. I think what I love about long-distance journeys is that at some stage you will have to ask a stranger, and you are in their hands. Something in that interaction will fuel you. That’s a wonderful thing, because you eventually realise that all these strangers are potential friends, and you are never truly lost. There’s always someone who can point you somewhere or give you a glass of wine."

"Yes, I think so. I chose him because I felt, of the various foreigners who come to Spain and engage with Spain, his is the best book in terms of engaging with this dreamy and poetic truth at the heart of Spain. Lee really expresses that very well. The book is set in the 1930s so the timing is interesting. This is the second book in his trilogy of memoirs. His first is Cider with Rosie about his childhood, then this book and finally, A Moment of War . In this one he leaves his home in the Cotswolds in England and decides to go to Spain. He says the reason he did that is because he knew how to ask for a glass of water in Spanish! It was the only language he knew, so he jumped on a boat and came to Spain. He just about made ends meet by playing the fiddle. He was there for a few years and left just as the Civil War was breaking out. So he was there at an extraordinary time. Interestingly, in the book this is only ever hinted at and I think it is all the more powerful for that, because you know what is happening and what is going to happen. And then he comes back and fights against Franco, which is the story he tells in his next book."