The two great walks of 20th-century English literature began within a few months of each other. On a snowy midwinter morning in December 1933, Patrick Leigh Fermor set out on foot along the icy road that led east from the Hook of Holland towards Rotterdam. He was 18 years old, he had an ash stick in his hand and a copy of the Oxford Book of English Verse in his rucksack. And on a sunny midsummer morning in June 1934, Laurie Lee set out on foot along the dusty road that led east from his Gloucestershire village of Slad towards London. He was 19 years old, he had a hazel stick in his hand and a violin wrapped in a blanket under his arm.
Leigh Fermor would walk from Holland to Constantinople over the course of 13 months, passing en route through a Mitteleuropa on the brink of catastrophe. Several decades later, he would publish two books recounting his wanderings through those shadowed lands, A Time of Gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986). Both have become classics, celebrated for their evocation of a since-shattered world, and for the lushness of their language.
Lee would walk first to London, and then south through Spain, passing en route through a country on the edge of civil war. Several decades later, he would publish a book recounting his wanderings through that shadowed land, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969), which has become a classic, celebrated for its evocation of a since-shattered world, and for the lushness of its language.
Lee understood afterwards what a fortunate moment of history he had occupied. ‘I was,” he reflected, “a young man whose time coincided with the last years of peace, and so was perhaps luckier than any generation since. Europe at least was wide open, a place of casual frontiers, few questions and almost no travellers.” Certainly, the ease with which both men crossed borders seems remarkable now, and this simplicity of passage, combined with their open-hearted innocence, lends much magic to their journeys. In the course of their walks both Lee and Leigh Fermor enjoyed epic drinking bouts, wild parties, notable meetings, the kindness of strangers and sex with a series of young women (the euphemistic recounting of which can recall, at times, Humbert Humbert’s oblique lubricities). Reading them, you feel again the extreme excitement at possibility that is the hallmark of youth. You wear seven-league boots, able to traverse vast territories with barely a blister. Here is Lee, early in his adventure:
[The] next day, getting back on to the London road, I forgot everything but the way ahead. I walked steadily, effortlessly, hour after hour in a kind of swinging, weightless realm. I was at that age which feels neither strain nor friction, when the body burns magic fuels, so that it seems to glide in warm air, about a foot off the ground, smoothly obeying its intuitions. Even exhaustion, when it came, had a voluptuous quality, and sleep was caressive and deep, like oil.
The writing here is “voluptuous” yet precise, and as such it is characteristic of Lee’s style, in which elaborate metaphors serve not as ornaments, but rather as the means of most closely evoking complex experience. Lee does not walk so much as levitate or hover, borne aloft by supernatural stamina, and, in mimicry of this sensation, his clauses, suspended by their commas, also bear the reader along “the way” and onwards into the unknown. If the power of Cider With Rosie derives from its dream of dwelling, the power of As I Walked Out derives from its dream of leaving. If only I could live forever in one place, and come to know it so well, you think, reading Lee’s first volume of memoir. If only I could step from my front door, walk away and just keep going, you think, reading his second. Yet one does not have to get far into the book to discover that such fantasies are prone to disruption. Lee’s first night out is “wretched”: he falls asleep in a field, a rainstorm soaks him, he wakes to find two cows “windily sighing” over him and he takes shivering refuge in a damp ditch. This miserable bivouac begins his disillusionment with the dream of life on the move.
The English chapters of As I Walked Out, indeed, constitute an important record of the culture of vagrancy in the interwar years. Within a few days of setting out, Lee can categorise the other foot-folk he meets: there are a few recreational walkers, there are long-term professional tramps (“the brotherhood”, identifiable because they “brewed tea by the roadside, took it easy, and studied their feet”) and there is a third type, “trudging northwards in a sombre procession”, being “that host of unemployed who wandered aimlessly about England at that time.” These men:
went on their way like somnambulists, walking alone and seldom speaking to each other. There seemed to be more of them inland than on the coast – maybe the police had seen to that. They were like a broken army walking away from a war, cheeks sunken, eyes dead with fatigue. Some carried bags of tools, or shabby cardboard suitcases; some wore the ghosts of city suits; some, when they stopped to rest, carefully removed their shoes and polished them vaguely with handfuls of grass. Among them were carpenters, clerks, engineers from the Midlands; many had been on the road for months, walking up and down the country in a maze of jobless refusals, the treadmill of the mid-30s.
It is a sad and brilliant paragraph, compassionate in its noticing – especially the “vague” polishing of shoes by men who had once been in jobs where shininess of shoe mattered – and respectful of these brigades of broken men who walked the landscape, but who often fall out of the headier accounts of life on the path.
For there are, broadly speaking, two intertwined histories of British long-distance walking. One involves the wilful wanderer: those like Lee and Leigh Fermor who set out to relish the romance of the open road, and often subsequently to write about it. The other is a shadow history – harder to see because its participants left little trace – of those who had no choice but to walk, and who barely held life together as they “padded it” down the paths. The unhappy population of Britain’s roads boomed in the years before Lee left Slad. Many of the men who survived the first world war had returned to find no settled employment and no home. Life on foot was the only option available to them, and in the two decades after 1918, plumes of smoke rose from copses and spinneys as the woods of England filled with these shaken-out casualties of war – men who slept out and lived rough, begging as they went and working where they could. Their numbers grew further when the economic crash of the 1930s left millions jobless across Europe and America.
Occasionally, these two walking worlds intersected. The naturalist writer WH Hudson once met a tramp who, on seeing Hudson admiring a hedgerow, reprimanded him: “An artist enjoys looking at this sort of thing, and it’s nice for all those who go about just for the pleasure of seeing things. But when it comes to a man tramping 20 or 30 miles a day on an empty belly, looking for work which he can’t find, he doesn’t see it in quite the same way.” In the 1970s, a tramp known as “Toby” published a memoir of his years on the roads of the west of England – in it he described how, during the early 1930s, he would cross paths with the composer Edward Elgar, who regularly strolled the tracks around his home in Malvern. Lee himself falls in with one of these men of the road, the “garrulously secretive” Alf – a “tramp to his bones” and veteran of the brotherhood – who passes on the tricks of his trade, and scorns Lee’s affectation that he is some kind of “TE Lawrence, engaged in [a] self-punishing odyssey”.
It is conventional to criticise Lee for his rose-tinted view of Englishness, but his writing – at least in the opening chapters of As I Walked Out – is full of disenchantment and darkness. The darkness thickens when, after six months working as a labourer in London, he decides to leave for a foreign country in which he might “arrive newborn”, devoid of knowledge or preconception. He chooses to go to Spain – the nation that would come to define his adulthood – more or less arbitrarily, on the basis that he knows the Spanish for “Will you please give me a glass of water?”
It turns out to be an important phrase, for Lee sets out on his great walk in early June, at the start of the fearsome Iberian summer. Thirst becomes a key aspect of his journey: it makes him move (“I kept on walking because there was no shade to hide in and because it seemed the only way to agitate the air around me”); it brings him into contact with the locals; and it prompts some of the most memorable prose of the book. There are brilliant evocations of intense heat (“the brass-taloned lion that licks the afternoon ground ready to consume anyone not wise enough to take cover”) and sunlight (it “struck upwards, sideways and down, while the wheat went buckling across the fields like a solid sheet of copper”), while Lee’s attempt to cross the open country north of Valladolid causes his parched brain to irrigate itself with “fantasies of water” that “rose up and wrapped me in cool wet leaves” …
or pressed the thought of cucumber peel across my stinging eyes and filled my mouth with dripping moss. I began to drink monsoons and winter mists, to lick up the first fat drops of thunder, to lie down naked on deep-sea sponges and rub my lips against the scales of fish …
Shortly afterwards, he reaches a “roadside tavern” in a state of near-collapse. He is given ice to suck, while the locals speculate on his nationality and reason for being out in the midday sun. ‘“If he’s English, he’s the first walking Englishman I’ve seen,” said one. “They walk all over the place,” said the other. “Up and down mountainsides. Round and round the poles.” “Yes, yes – but they do not walk in Spain.”’
The nameless local was wrong. The English – or the British and the Irish – have long walked in Spain, and they continue to do so: drawn to the country by the profusion of paths and tracks that crisscross it, the repute of the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, and the picaresque tradition of wandering in search of adventure that was made famous by Don Quixote. By the time Lee got to Spain, George Borrow had traversed the country on horseback and foot in the 1830s, Richard Ford had published his influential A Handbook for Travellers in Spain (1845), the Hispanist and walker Gerald Brenan had moved in 1919 to live in the Alpujarras region of Granada, VS Pritchett had published his travelogue Marching Spain (1928) and Walter Starkie was busy busking his way across the north of the country as a self-styled “don gypsy”. After Lee would come, among others, Jan Morris, Michael Jacobs, Chris Andrews, Jason Webster – and the remarkable walking artist Hamish Fulton, who, in a campaign of chronic athleticism, has now stomped across Spain more than a dozen times, clocking up thousands of miles and wearing through several pairs of boots.
I am another of those “English walkers” who has been drawn to Spain, and I was inspired to do so in part by reading Lee’s book. One autumn I set out to walk from Madrid, up and over the Guadarrama mountains, down to the ancient walled city of Segovia and then on across the Castilian plains. In doing so, I aimed to repeat in reverse one of the happiest and most enchant- ing sections of Lee’s own journey. He leaves with relief the grim “shuttered city” of Valladolid, which has shocked him with its poverty, and walks south for several days, “living on figs and ears of wheat”. “Never in my life had I felt so fat with time,” he writes gladly, “so free of the need to be moving or doing.” He reaches Segovia and rests before beginning the climb up and over the Guadarrama. I took two days to cross the Guadarrama, as did Lee, and like him I climbed “a magnificent road of granite blocks to a point almost two miles high”: the Calzada Romana, built by the Emperor Vespasian between AD69 and 79. I bathed, as he did, in the blue streams that tumble off the high peaks, the water of which was “snow-cold, brutal and revivifying”. I slept out in the great pine forests that cloak the upper Guadarrama, and I experienced there an elation I am unlikely to forget, as did Lee: “Gulping the fine dry air and sniffing the pitch-pine mountain, I was perhaps never so alive and so alone again.” Lee is superb at evoking such moments where spirit and landscape fuse into “a point of time”. Superb, too, at recording what he calls “the arrested moment of casual detail, the unsorted rubbish of now”. His prose is full of such “rubbish” – minor phenomena that possess huge evocative power – the “low furred voices” of the seamstresses who murmur in the background of a tavern where he is eating a meal, for instance, “their needles darting like silver fish”; or the girls on a riverbank who stop their work to watch Lee pass, “their blank shining pupils, like pebbles in water”; or the “resin and honey” scent of the Guadarraman air.
He gathered these details as he walked, and he could not have done so had he not opened himself to the kinds of encounter and perception that travel on foot makes possible. Walking, Lee notes early on, refines awareness: it compels you to “tread” a landscape “slowly”, to “smell its different soils”. The car passenger, by contrast, “races at gutter height, seeing less than a dog in a ditch”. Lee, like Leigh Fermor, believed in walking not only as a means of motion but also as a means of knowing – and this unforgettable book is proof of the truth of that belief.
• As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning is being reissued by Penguin Classics.
