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Red Sky at Sunrise (The Autobiographical Trilogy) by Laurie Lee: book review

 


Red Sky at Sunrise (compiled in 1993) are three memoirs set in England and Spain in the 1930s, spanning 23 years of the author’s life.

 

Cider with Rosie (written in 1959) is a memoir of the author’s life in the Cotswold Valley in England. As I Walked out on Midsummer Morning (1969) is a memoir of the author walking from the Cotswolds to London and throughout Spain. The last in the trilogy, A Moment of War (1991), is a memoir of the author’s return to Spain to join the International Brigade.

 

Laurie Lee’s childhood in Cotswold country with his three sisters and his brother is idyllic. The cottage in the village Slad is surrounded by the peace of nature – in its landscape, flora, and fauna. His life revolves around school, church, the fields, and the kitchen of his parent’s 17th century home. Why would anyone want to leave this place?

 

At nineteen years of age in 1934, the author walks to Spain, carrying a ‘small rolled-up tent, a violin in a blanket, a change of clothes, a tin of treacle biscuits, and some cheese.’ It is this book in the trilogy that I liked most. It took him a week to cross the Salisbury Plains to get to the coast of England. He played the violin to raise money in the seaside cities along the way to London, living on dates and biscuits. In London, it was ‘a time of rootless enjoyment, and also luxurious melancholy’ wandering alone. 


He crosses the English Channel by ship and wanders around Spain for a year: ‘I lay on my belly, the warm earth against me, and forgot the cold dew and the wolves of the night. I felt it was for this I had come: to wake at dawn on a hillside and look out on a world for which I had no words; to start at the beginning, speechless and without plan.’

 

The imagery of Spain is amazing, but it also awakens the author to poverty, priests, and an impending civil war. He was impatient to reach Madrid. When his violin broke, he worked as a guide for British tourists. Mostly, he spent his time in Almuriecar, when war started.

 

In the last book of the trilogy, the author returns to Spain, entering illegally in December 1937. As planned, he joined the International Brigade, but it was a disappointing time due to the incompetencies of its leaders and the ineffective efforts of a band of bewildered fighting forces. This led to his capture as an alleged spy. I also like his account of how he made it back to England.

 

I’m glad I read the trilogy together, as the growth of the Laurie Lee’s language from a teenager to an adult, as well as his confidence and sense of adventure, flowed seamlessly through the autobiographies. As Lee says, ‘I was older, stronger.’ Historically interesting, it is also fascinating for his perception of people, places, and events. It’s a great memoir trilogy.










 

 

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author  of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce  (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

 

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