Laurie Lee - As I walked out one midsummer morning

The two great walks of twentieth-century English literature began within a few months of each other. On a snowy midwinter morning in December 1933, Patrick Leigh Fermor set out on foot along the icy road that led east from the Hook of Holland towards Rotterdam. He was eighteen years old, he had an ash stick in his hand, and a copy of the Oxford Book of English Verse in his rucksack. And on a sunny midsummer morning in June 1934, Laurie Lee set out on foot along the dusty road that led east from his Gloucestershire village of Slad towards London. He was nineteen years old, he had a hazel stick in his hand, and a violin wrapped up in a blanket under his arm.

Leigh Fermor would walk from Holland to Constantinople over the course of thirteen months, passing en route through a Mittel-Europa on the brink of catastrophe. Several decades later, he would publish two books recounting his wanderings through those shadowed lands, A Time of Gifts (1977) and Between The Woods and the Water (1985). Both have become classics, celebrated for their evocation of a since-shattered world, and for the lushness of their language.

Lee would walk first to London, and then south through Spain, passing en route through a country on the edge of civil war. Several decades later, he would publish a book recounting his wanderings through that shadowed land, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969), which has become a classic, celebrated for its evocation of a since-shattered world, and for the lushness of its language.

Lee understood afterwards what a fortunate moment of history he had occupied: I was, he reflected, a young man whose time coincided with the last years of peace, and so was perhaps luckier than any generation since. Europe at least was wide open, a place of casual frontiers, few questions and almost no travellers. Certainly, the ease with which both men crossed borders seems remarkable now, and this simplicity of passage, combined with their open-hearted innocence, lends much magic to their journeys. In the course of their walks both Lee and Leigh Fermor enjoyed epic drinking bouts, wild parties, notable meetings, the kindness of strangers, and sex with a series of young, eager women (the euphemistic recounting of which can recall, at times, Humbert Humberts oblique lubricities). Reading them, you feel again the extreme excitement at possibility that is the hallmark of youth. You wear seven-league boots, able to traverse vast territories with barely a blister. Here is Lee, early in his adventure:

[The] next day, getting back onto the London road, I forgot everything but the way ahead. I walked steadily, effortlessly, hour after hour in a kind of swinging, weightless realm. I was at that age which feels neither strain nor friction, when the body burns magic fuels, so that it seems to glide in warm air, about a foot off the ground, smoothly obeying its intuitions. Even exhaustion, when it came, had a voluptuous quality, and sleep was caressive and deep, like oil.

The writing here is voluptuous yet precise, and as such it is characteristic of Lees style, in which elaborate metaphors serve not as ornaments, but rather as the means of most closely evoking complex experience. Lee does not walk so much as levitate or hover, borne aloft by supernatural stamina, and in mimicry of this sensation his clauses, suspended by their commas, also bear the reader along the way and onwards into the unknown.

If the power of Cider With Rosie derives from its dream of dwelling, the power of As I Walked Out derives from its dream of leaving. If only I could live forever in one place, and come to know it so well, you think, reading Lees first volume of memoir.