Authors: Laurie Lee
Red Sky at Sunrise: Cider with Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, A Moment of War
PENGUIN BOOKS
RED SKY AT SUNRISE
Laurie Lee was born in Stroud, Gloucestershire, in 1914, and was educated at Slad village school and Stroud Central School. At the age of nineteen he walked to London and then travelled on foot through Spain, where he was trapped by the outbreak of the Civil War. He later returned by crossing the Pyrenees, as described in his book
As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning.
In 1950 he married Catherine Polge and they had one daughter.
Laurie Lee published four collections of poems:
The Sun My Monument
(1944),
The Bloom of Candles
(1947),
My Many-Coated Man
(1955) and
Pocket Poems
(1960). His other works include
The Voyage of Magellan
(1948), a verse play for radio;
A Rose for Winter
(1955), which records his travels in Andalusia;
The Firstborn
(1964); /
Can’t Stay Long
(1975), a collection of his occasional writing; and
Two Women
(1983). He also wrote three bestselling volumes of autobiography:
Cider with Rosie
(1959), which has sold over six million copies worldwide,
As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning
(1969) and
A Moment of War
(1991), which are published together in this volume.
Laurie Lee died in May 1997. In its obituary the
Guardian
wrote, ‘He had a nightingale inside him, a capacity for sensuous, lyrical precision’, and the
Independent
praised him as ‘one of the great writers of this century whose work conjured up a world of earthly warmth and beauty’. A collection of the pieces read at his memorial service, entitled
Laurie Lee: A Many-Coated Man,
has recently been published by Viking.
RED SKY AT SUNRISE
CIDER WITH ROSIE
AS I WALKED OUT ONE MIDSUMMER
MORNING
A MOMENT OF WAR
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcom Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India
Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Cider with Rosie
first published by The Hogarth Press 1959
Published in Penguin Books 1962
Copyright © Laurie Lee, 1959
As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning
first published by Andre Deutsch 1969
Published in Penguin Books 1971
Copyright © Laurie Lee, 1969
A Moment of War
first published by Viking 1991
Published in Penguin Books 1992
Copyright © Laurie Lee, 1991
This omnibus edition published by Viking 1992
Published in Penguin Books 1993
16
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-192737-4
As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning
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.
The last volume tells of my winter return to Spain to join the International Brigade. Naive and idealistic as I was, I felt it was a debt I owed to my beleaguered friends. Writing this book also taught me the full extent of that indebtedness.
These autobiographies, written with slow and miserly care, span the first twenty-three years of my life. They cover both the light and the dark, as do most remembrances, but I still feel I have much left to confess and celebrate.
Laurie Lee
Slad, August 1992
Illustrated by John Ward
To My Brothers and Sisters
– The Half and the Whole
6. Public Death, Private Murder
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.
The June grass, amongst which I stood, was taller than I was, and I wept. I had never been so close to grass before. It towered above me and all around me, each blade tattooed with tiger-skins of sunlight. It was knife-edged, dark, and a wicked green, thick as a forest and alive with grasshoppers that chirped and chattered and leapt through the air like monkeys.
I was lost and didn’t know where to move. A tropic heat oozed up from the ground, rank with sharp odours of roots and nettles. Snow-clouds of elder-blossom banked in the sky, showering upon me the fumes and flakes of their sweet and giddy suffocation. High overhead ran frenzied larks, screaming, as though the sky were tearing apart.
For the first time in my life I was out of the sight of humans. For the first time in my life I was alone in a world whose behaviour I could neither predict nor fathom: a world of birds that squealed, of plants that stank, of insects that sprang about without warning. I was lost and I did not expect to be found again. I put back my head and howled, and the sun hit me smartly on the face, like a bully.
From this daylight nightmare I was awakened, as from many another, by the appearance of my sisters. They came scrambling and calling up the steep rough bank, and parting the long grass found me. Faces of rose, familiar, living; huge shining faces hung up like shields between me and the sky; faces with grins and white teeth (some broken) to be conjured up like genii with a howl, brushing off terror with their broad scoldings and affection. They leaned over me – one, two, three – their mouths smeared with red currants and their hands dripping with juice.
‘There, there, it’s all right, don’t you wail any more. Come down ‘ome and we’ll stuff you with currants.’