As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning is the moving follow-up to Laurie Lee's acclaimed Cider with Rosie Abandoning the Cotswolds village that raised him, the young Laurie Lee walks to London. There he makes a living labouring and playing the violin. But, deciding to travel further a field and knowing only the Spanish phrase for 'Will you please give me a glass of water?', he heads for Spain. With just a blanket to sleep under and his trusty violin, he spends a year crossing Spain, from Vigo in the north to the southern coast. Only the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War puts an end to his extraordinary peregrinations . . . 'He writes like an angel and conveys the pride and vitality of the humblest Spanish life with unfailing sharpness, zest and humour' Sunday Times 'There's a formidable, instant charm in the writing that genuinely makes it difficult to put the book down' New Statesman 'A beautiful piece of writing' Observer

‘A Moment of War’ is the magnificent conclusion to Laurie Lee’s autobiographical trilogy begun in ‘Cider with Rosie’ and ‘As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning’. It was December 1937 when the young Laurie Lee crossed the Pyrenees and walked into the bitter winter of the Spanish Civil War. With great vividness and poignancy, Lee portrays the brave defeat of youthful idealism in Auden’s ‘low dishonest decade’. Writing in the Literary Review, John Sweeney praised the memoir as, ‘A great, heart-stopping narrative of one young Englishman’s part in the war in Spain ... crafted by a poet, stamping an indelible image of the boredom, random cruelty and stupidity of war’

A Financial Times Summer Book of 2019 Seasoned adventurer Alastair Humphreys pushes himself to his very limits – busking his way across Spain with a violin he can barely play.

'I was set down from the carrier's cart at the age of three; and there with a sense of bewilderment and terror my life in the village began.' 'This trilogy is a sequence of early recollections, beginning with the dazzling lights and sounds of my first footings on earth in a steep Cotswold valley some three miles long. For nineteen years this was the limit of my world, then one midsummer morning I left home and walked to London and down the blazing length of Spain during the innocent days of the early thirties. Never had I felt so fat with time, so free to go where I would. Then such indulgence was suddenly broken by the savage outbreak of the Civil War . . .' - Laurie Lee

This book presents a new history of the most important conflict in European affairs during the 1930s, the Spanish Civil War. It describes the complex origins of the conflict, the collapse of the Spanish Republic and the outbreak of the only mass worker revolution in the history of Western Europe. Stanley Payne explains the character of the Spanish revolution and the complex web of republican politics, while also examining the development of Franco's counter-revolutionary dictatorship. Payne gives attention to the multiple meanings and interpretations of war and examines why the conflict provoked such strong reactions at the time, and long after. The book also explains the military history of the war and its place in the history of military development, the non-intervention policy of the democracies and the role of German, Italian and Soviet intervention, concluding with an analysis of the place of the war in European affairs, in the context of twentieth-century revolutionary civil wars.

'They are memorials to times and countries whose best is probably past and gone . . . I was lucky to have known them when I did, before darkness began to fall from the air.' In this much-loved volume, a mature Laurie Lee returns to the Gloucestershire childhood familiar to readers of Cider with Rosie, a world lost even at the time of writing to the march of twentieth-century technology. Lee also explores the post-war travels that took him to, amongst others, the Netherlands, Tuscany, Mexico and the West Indies. With pieces dating from the 1940s and 50s, Lee captures a world now for ever changed by war and mass tourism, 'when to be a traveller was not yet to be just a labelled unit'.

The Heinemann Plays series offers contemporary drama and classic plays in durable classroom editions. Many have large casts and an equal mix of boy and girl parts. This is a dramatization of Laurie Lee's warm and humorous memories of his boyhood in a Cotswold village.

A moving portrait of the landscape that shaped the life of Laurie Lee, the beloved author of Cider With Rosie 'Before I left the valley I thought everywhere was like this. Then I went away for 40 years and when I came back I realized that nowhere was like this.' Laurie Lee walked out of his childhood village one summer morning to travel the world, but he was always drawn back to his beloved Slad Valley, eventually returning to make it his home. In this portrait of his Cotswold home, Laurie Lee guides us through its landscapes, and shares memories of his village youth - from his favourite pub to winter skating on the pond, the church through the seasons, local legends, learning the violin and playing jazz records in the privy on a wind-up gramophone. Filled with wry humour and a love of place, Down in the Valley is a writer's tribute to the landscape that shaped him, and where he found peace.