Modern Classics Red Sky At Sunrise

by Laurie Lee

A beautiful new edition of Laurie Lee's celebrated autobiographical trilogy: Cider with Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning and A Moment of War '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

544 pages, Paperback

Published July 1, 2014

About the author

Laurence Edward Alan "Laurie" Lee, MBE, was an English poet, novelist, and screenwriter. His most famous work was an autobiographical trilogy which consisted of Cider with Rosie (1959), As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969) and A Moment of War (1991). While the first volume famously recounts his childhood in the idyllic Slad Valley, the second deals with his leaving home for London and his first visit to Spain in 1934, and the third with his return in December 1937 to join the Republican International Brigade.

Reviews

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an auto-biographical trilogy.

It begins with 'Cider with Rosie' which charts the childhood and school years of Laurie Lee in the village of Slad in Gloucestershire. It is an excellent piece of social history.

I was prompted to re-read this by a recent TV drama. The writing is beautifully prosaic, capturing both the sense of time and space in this part of rural England.

The second book 'As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning' tells the tale of a young Laurie journeying through Spain just before the Spanish Civil war.

The sense of innocence of youth is a recurring element of this part of Laurie's life. The first couple of chapters chart his walk to London. Then he arrives in Spain

'and the new life beginning. I had a few shillings in my pocket and no return ticket; I had a knapsack, blanket, spare shirt, and a fiddle' and enough words to ask for a glass of water.'

I really like the self-effacing way he writes about his adventures.

'But I was innocent then of my ignorance, and so untroubled by it.'

The writing, a bit like in Cider with Rosie, paints a literary picture of the life the people in the time before the conflict to come. This book ends as Spain is moving in to civil war, in the Epilogue when he is back in Gloucestershire he writes:

'Unlike so many of my age, for whom Spain in the Thirties represented one of the last theatres of political romanticism, I hadn't consciously chosen it as a cause but had stumbled on it by accident, simply by happening to be there.'

The final book of the trilogy is called 'A Moment of War'. In this Laurie makes the decision to return to join the anti-Fascists opposing Franco. In his naivety he finds himself treated as a spy and facing death, before finally being accepted for what he is.

He successfully manages to explain a little of the tragedy of this war:

'It was then that I began to sense for the first time something of the gaseous squalor of a country at war, an infection so deep it seemed to rot the earth, drain it of colour, life and sound.'

'Worse than a country at war, this one was at war with itself- an ultimate, more permanent wastage.'

[Samuel]

The first two books are evocatively poetic; the third becomes yet another account of the miserable tragedy of the Spanish Civil War, with a spattering of bitter hindsight directed at Western powers.