Laurie Lee – Almunecar of the Sugar Canes

Laurie Lee blurred the division between memoir and travel literature.

A Rose for Winter is the poorest of the Spain books. The naivety and wonder has gone and the writing feels syrupy, the descriptions rose tinted. The gypsies of Andalusia are romanticised almost to cartoon level. My own encounter with gypsies in southern Spain may have coloured this; sprinting after a bag thief in the streets of Cordoba who pulled a knife when confronted. The sort of experience that can only lead to prejudice and a million miles from Lee’s depiction of camp fires and guitars and the loveable vagabond.

Laurie Lee was rescued by the British Navy as the civil war gathered momentum and a memorial graces the main street in Almunecar. The town is close enough to Malaga to have a tourist overlay and pizzerias line the promenade, British and Germans in the bars. He came back and fought and the book of his civil war experiences is a strange one. The war is almost peripheral to the text and the danger inadvertently brought on by his own naivety and ill-health. Lee was too much in love with Spain to be a spy, but I can understand why the Republicans had suspicions.

Laurie Lee died in 1997 and lies buried at Slad in the Cotswold foothills; his gravestone hasn’t had time and weather enough to blend into the churchyard and looks stark on the steep hill. Opposite is the schoolhouse and the landscape of Cider with Rosie, the home he walked away from, to discover the beauty of other lands and to fight and romanticise them so many years later.