"It was 1934 and a young man walked to London from the security of the Cotswolds to make his fortune. He was to live by playing the violin and by labouring on a London building site. Then, knowing one Spanish phrase, he decided to see Spain. For a year he tramped through a country in which the signs of impending civil war were clearly visible.
Thirty years later Laurie Lee captured the atmosphere of the Spain he saw with all the freshness and beauty of a young man's vision, creating a lyrical and lucid picture of the beautiful and violent country that was to involve him inextricably." From the back cover of the book.
This beautifully written autobiographical book was recommended to me by one of my 'class mates' from Spanish Conversation and Culture class I attend once a week. Since anything connected with the Spanish language, and both culture and history of the Spanish-speaking world is interesting to me I got immersed in the book as soon as I was able to take it out from my local library. The copy that I just read looks really worn out, yellow pages, beaten cover - must have been read by many over the last years. Yet, it felt good to go through its pages. I love the style of the author - beautiful English. Not being English (nor from any other English speaking country) myself I do appreciate a beautiful English word. Every language has its own beauty and one can definitely find beauty here. At least I did.
The young Laurie walks pre-Civil-War Spain with nothing but his violin and a few basic possessions - which he carries all in one bag. He starts off in Vigo and walks his way down south (via Madrid, Cordova, Seville and many other places), then walks along the southern coast to Almunecar (60 miles east of Malaga). His adventure ends when the Civil War breaks out and he gets picked up by an English destroyer from Gibraltar and taken back home to England. However, in the epilogue he returns to Spain one year later to fight alongside the Republicans. This apparently is the story of Laurie Lee's other autobiographical book 'A Moment of War' - his own real experience of the Spanish Civil War.
The way he paints pre-Civil-War Spain in his novel is very observant. One can easily imagine/feel his impression. At times it can be really surprising. Having in mind how modern Spain is nowadays it is really difficult to imagine that before the Civil War a great percentage of the Spanish population could not read nor write, and that the Catholic church had enormous influence on people's lives. Loads of young men and women were choosing (or were made to choose) church life (even very young girls). The impression young Laurie got was that it felt like being trapped in the past. He compared the situation of the 'pueblo' - the Spanish country people to the situation English must have been hundreds years ago. He noticed the poor, the injustice and the beauty. He fell in love with Spain and with its people, and felt connected to them so much he did all to return and fight beside them.
A few quotes from the book:
(in Zamora) "I was getting used to this pattern of Spanish life, which could have been that of England two centuries earlier."
"At the end of the day, the doors and windows admitted all the creatures of the family: father, son, daughter, cousin, the donkey, the pig, the hen, even the harvest mouse and the nesting swallow, bedded together at the fall of darkness."
(in Madrid) "But I think my most lasting impression was still the unhurried dignity and noblesse with which the Spaniard handles his drink. He never gulped, panicked, pleaded with the barman, or let himself be shouted into the street. Drink, for him, was on of the natural privileges of living, rather than the temporary suicide it so often is for others. But then it was lightly taxed here, and there were no licensing laws; and under such conditions one could take one's time."
"Indeed Madrid, the highest capital in Europe, was a crystal platform at his early hour, and the clarity of the air may have been the cause of a number of local obsessions - the people's concern for truth, their naked and pitiless mysticism, their fascination with pleasure and death. They were certainly lofty in their love of the city, putting it first among the many proverbs. 'From the provinces to Madrid - but from Madrid to the sky,' said one with ascending pride. Also; 'When I die, please God, let me go to Heaven, but have a little window to look back on Madrid.' Standing on its mile-high plateaux their city was considered to be the top rung of a ladder reaching just this side of paradise."
(in Cadiz) "I seemed to meet no one in Cadiz except the blind and the crippled, the diseased, the deaf and dumb, whose condition was so hopeless they scarcely bothered to complain but treated it all as a twisted joke. They told me tittering tales of others even more wretched than themselves - the homeless who lived in the Arab drains, who lay down at night among rats and excrement and were washed out to sea twice a year by the floods. They told me of families who scraped the tavern floors for shellfish and took it home to boil for soup, and of others who lived by trapping cats and dogs and roasting them on fires of driftwood."
(in Valdepenas) "Valdepenas was a surprise: a small graceful town surrounded by rich vineyards and prosperous villas - a pocket of good fortune which seemed to produce without effort some of the most genial wines in Spain. the town had an air of privileged well-being, like an oil-well in a desert of hardship; the old men and children had extra flesh on their bones, and even the dogs seemed to shine with fat."
(while he was playing his violin) "I remember the villagers as they listened, blankets held to their throats, dribbles of damp lying along their eyebrows. I felt I could have been with some lost tribal remnant of seventeenth-century Scotland, during one of their pauses between famine and massacre - the children standing barefooted in puddles of dew, old women wrapped in their rancid sheepskins, and the short shaggy men whose squinting faces seemed stuck between a smile and a snarl."
(in Seville) "The Seville quays were unpretentious, and seemed no more nautical than a coal-wharf in Birmingham. The Guadalquivir, at this point, was rather like the Thames at Richmond, and was about as busy as the Paddington Canal. Yet it was from this narrow river, fifty miles from sea, that Columbus sailed to discover America, followed a few years later by the leaking caravelles of Magellan, one of which was the first to encircle the world. Indeed, the waterfront at Seville, with its paddling boys and orange-boats, and its mossy provincial stones, was for almost five hundred years - till the coming of space-aimed rockets - history's most significant launching-pad."
(changes with the Republic, in Almunecar)"So the boys and girls of Almunecar used our rackety dances to explore their new-found liberties. During the warm spring evenings they clung earnestly together, as though intimacy was a new invention, dancing, holding hands, or walking in couples along the shore, arms entwined, watching each other's faces. There were also other freedoms. Books and films appeared, unmutilated by Church of State, bringing to the peasants of the coast, for the first time in generations, a keen breath of the outside world. For a while there was a complete lifting of censorship, even in newspapers and magazines."
(burning of the village church) "...A week later came Feast Day, and a quick change of heart. The smoke-blackened church was filled with lilies. The images of Christ and the Virgin were brought out into the sunlight and loaded as usual on to the fishermen's backs...(...) ...procession...'Blessed be the Virgin....Do not forsake us...' ...It was a day of tears and breast-beating...(...)..Rich and poor mixed their cries together...Profanity, sacrilege, had been a passing madness. This was the Faith as it had always been. Then a few days later, the church was fired again, and this time burnt to a shell."
"Spain was a wasted county of neglected land - much of it held by a handful of men, some of whose vast estates had scarcely been reduced or reshuffled since the days of the Roman Empire. Peasants could work this land for a shilling a day, perhaps for a third of the year, then go hungry. It was this simple incongruity that they hope to correct; this, and a clearing of the air, perhaps some return of dignity, some razing of the barriers of ignorance which still stood as high as the Pyrenees. A Spanish schoolmaster at this time knew less of the outside world than many a shepherd in the days of Columbus. Now it was hoped that there might be some lifting of this intolerable darkness, some freedom to read and write and talk. Men hoped that their wives might be freed of the triple trivialities of the Church - credulity, guilt, and confession; that their sons might be craftsmen rather than serfs, their daughters citizens rather than domestic whores, and that they might hear the children in the evening coming home from fresh-built schools to astonish them with new facts of learning. All this could be brought about now by an act of their government and the peaceful process of law. There was nothing to stop it. Except for that powerful minority who would rather the country first bled to death."
