I found this a painterly and evocative book. My knowledge of Spain is limited to the 21st century, and Catalonia, so very different from 1950s Andalucia. He takes us with him as he travels in leisurely fashion from Algeciras to Granada and back again in the warm winter season. He takes in the landscape, describes towns, communities and individuals who come alive thanks to his vivid way with words. It's a short book, but one to savour, perhaps particularly if you know this area. He's made me want to know it, though the barren landscapes and way of life must be long gone. ( )

Great

I picked this up mistakenly thinking it was the third part of Lee’s memoirs – it isn’t, but it is actually very similar to part two of those memoirs, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning.

‘…Midsummer Morning’ tells of Lee’s travels around Spain from 1935 until the Spanish Civil War started in 1936. In this book, he revisits Spain fifteen years later – this time taking his wife with him – and they travel a circular route in the south of the country, from Algeciras through Seville, Ecija, Granada and Castillo before returning to Algeciras. Everywhere they travel they are overwhelmed by the hospitality they are shown and they quickly become part of any family whose hotel/guest house they choose to stay in.

Of course, it’s dated now, although I am sure there must still be parts of Spain where the residents live a simple peasant life, but as with the other books I’ve read by Lee, this is an easy read and also a very entertaining one. Lee writes with such passion and builds up such a vivid picture in the reader’s mind that they feel they are on the journey with him.
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A beautifully written evocation of post-civil war Spain, this is a book where you want to read every word. Laurie Lee has a knack for immersing himself in the lives of the people he meets, and the places he visits are interpreted through the personalities and experiences of these people. Read it before you go to Spain. ( )

This, then, is a hymn to the pain and the passion, the beggars and the taverns, the lovers and the fighters, tyrants and romantics of Spain and the book falls into my rarest of categories; one that I would recommend without hesitation.

I was once in Seville. As soon as I had checked into my hotel I went for a walk round the block to check out the neighbourhood. To say it was hot is not doing the place justice, the exhaust fumes hung in the air, too hot and too lazy to go anywhere. The dust lay baking on the pavement. I bought some postcards and turned up a narrow side street, hoping for some shade and relief from the heat, but the sun seemed to reposition itself so that it was always overhead. With the sweat running down the back of my knees, I saw the Cruzcampo sign and ducked into a bar.

The bars in the side streets of Seville are deep and narrow. It takes time for your eyes to adjust to the darkness when you first step into this tiled cave, before you see the bar with the Cruzcampo beer pump sitting atop it, sweating despite the cool of the bar (which you realise is a comparative cool), the grill for tapas and the barman, happy to have you here.

I mumbled something about a beer and the barman produced a glass from the freezer, filled it, pushed it towards me and turned away to deal with another customer. He was a gentleman, he assumed I was a gentleman, it was understood I would be running a tab.

As I sat there writing my postcards, drinking my cold beer and glancing occasionally into the street, bleached by sunlight. I was having my foremost, formative Spanish experience.

This book is a formative Spanish experience made print. I’ve been to a few of places mentioned and it nails the character of the towns so perfectly, so absolutely, that I can almost feel the cool tiles, taste the cold beer (although Lee prefers wine).

The Spanish character is examined carefully, lovingly here. Well, the central contradiction of it at least; how can a people so obviously in love with life worship death? It’s bound up of course in a Catholicism so strong that in Seville they think they know better than the Pope what God wants, and in bullfights and music and love and feuds but there’s more to it than that, it’s the way that that mentality seems to infect every aspect of Spanish life.

I saw it myself, again in Seville. Looking in the window of a shop selling model kits there were the usual dioramas that model shops put in the window to show what you might be capable of one day, if you are patient and talented and paint the parts before assembly like you’re told. Tanks bursting through WWII houses, jeeps fording rivers and there, in the middle, a train crash. That’s right, not a train chuffing along or even doing something thrilling like unloading fruit in a goods yard, but a train derailed, with a herd of burst cows spread behind it along the track. Nice.

The moment of realisation I had looking at that scale model carnage is in every line of this book. Every word. Because Lee was a poet and it’s obvious that each sentence is constructed with the sort of care a line of poetry needs. It is writing on quite another level. One imagines Lee with notebook in one hand, glass of wine in the other, pulling together his experiences of the day, the pen and the ink on the paper describing the sword and the blood in the bullring.

The sense of place is overwhelming. If you want to know where you’re going in Spain, buy a guide book, if you want to know what people will be saying, buy a phrase book. If you want to know about the people you will be meeting, read this book.

In Almunecar, in southern Spain, there’s a monument to Laurie Lee. The town honours a man who raised his own monument in print to Spain and the Spanish. ( )