Customer Reviews

Red Sky at Sunrise: Cider With Rosie/As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning/a Moment of War

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4 star:		(1)
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My english literature teacher back home in my secondary comprehensive school in Dorset, first introduced me to Laurie Lee's work. I was living in my early formative years, and I had a lot to relate to, at age 14, with Lee's beautiful tale of first love, in Somerset in his 'Cider with Rosie' book. This particular volume, 'Red Sky at Sunrise' really makes your heart and mind expand, palpitate and gracefully sink back to the safety of your fireside hearth. His work is such a pleasure, it is a shame that so few people have ever read his work.

I bought this book because I was interested in the Spanish Civil war. You get three books in one, which is great. I'd read Cider with Rosie when I was at school, but not since, and I was disappointed when I read it again - I remembered it being so much better! Laurie Lee is heavy on description, which makes for slow reading, and basically very little happened during his childhood years.

As I walked out one midsummer morning is Lee's account of a trip he made to Spain just before the start of the civil war. It's very bizarre in places - he goes to Spain with £5 in his pocket, his passport and his violin. A lot of the rest of the story is about food, since he was usually stony broke and starving! It seems to be a romantised account though - either that or he really did meet every eccentric, unusual or downright mad person in Spain.

A moment of war takes over where the previous book left off. Lee returns to Spain to join the International Brigade and help fight the fascists (as Hemmingway did). I found this story quite disturbing, because it showed just how easy it was for an untrained, very young English boy to become part of a badly equipped and ultimately hopeless struggle.

Overall, this is not a book that I would consider enjoyable - a lot of it is just too bleak. But it does give you a good insight into what life was like in Spain just before and during the Civil War, and you get a classic read in Cider with Rosie to boot.

Lee is most famous for three autobiographical books: "Cider with Rosie," which deals with his childhood in England; "As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning," which covers the year he spent bumming through Spain (1934); and "A Moment of War," which tells how he returned to Spain during the Civil War to fight for the communists.

The three have now been brought together in this volume, entitled "Red Sky at Sunrise."

Overall, I would say the three are well worth reading, even though the quality is uneven. The first, "Cider with Rosie," is most well-known, but my favorite was the second, in which he recounts his trompings through Iberia. At times Lee's writing can be achingly poignant, but other times he manages to alienate his reader because everything in his narrative sometimes seems to take a backseat to stressing how bold and romantic he was:

"Having not a shilling to my name, having not eaten in weeks, having not changed my underwear in months, having slept under a series of bridges for two weeks running, and having not a friend in the world, I decided I would embark for . . . "

You get the idea.

I am currently meandering through "as I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning" and honestly I am enjoying it as if I was witness to the sunrise climbing up onto the first Spring's dew-covered hilltop, breathing in full stop the morning's fragrance of freshly turned soil, new budding wildflowers and sunshine warming the sleep tousled heads of children discovering a fresh new day. It is breathtaking...