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:

I'm interested to shortly read the final novel in the trilogy and see what Lee's description of the Civil War is; right now, when I think of it, I think of Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls and Orwell's Homage to Catalonia. He works in clear, precise statements slowly building the panorama and action, so that you can see, feel and hear what he sees and feels; stark, vivid, pictures of scenes, events and people, a country destroyed by war. Lee's writing is so honest and skilled that I read this book for his writing, and only later realized there was an understated narrative. Paul Murphy: I guess the answer to this is: yes and no. Yes, in the sense that I have been fascinated by the book it is based on and its author, and the idea of walking across Spain, since I was 17 and first read As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. No, in that the first time I seriously considered undertaking the journey as a book project was when I had to pitch an idea for a non-fiction book to my tutor on my MA Professional Writing Course at Falmouth University in February 2012. Somehow I had discovered that June 2014 would be Lee’s centenary and I thought my tutor would like the hook. She did, but cautioned me that she had doubts about whether I could do the walk/journey, write the book, and find a publisher, all in time for the centenary. She was right to be cautious, but I did manage to meet the deadline... by a week!I highly recommend the book, these books and the author. I will soon be reading the following two. I am consciously avoiding a detailing of events. My words cannot match up with Lee’s! A winter sunrise over the Stroud valley in winter from Swifts Hill Nature Reserve. Photograph: Peter Llewellyn/Getty Images Looking for a holiday with a difference? Browse Guardian Holidays to see a range of fantastic trips Over the course of a year he makes his way steadily east, with plenty of diversions. Lee meets up with various people who he finds something in common with, settling for a week or two, or moving on within days. He stays as long as he takes joy from being in a place, or with certain people, but happily moves on once that is over. He shares a lot of his year, but remains fairly discrete about his love life, happily sharing the details of other people though! The Spain that Lee describes is a poor, almost destitute country at this time, politically ripe for resolution as the rich and well separated from the poor. Increasingly we believe the world needs more meaningful, real-life connections between curious travellers keen to explore the world in a more responsible way. That is why we have intensively curated a collection of premium small-group trips as an invitation to meet and connect with new, like-minded people for once-in-a-lifetime experiences in three categories: Culture Trips, Rail Trips and Private Trips. Our Trips are suitable for both solo travelers, couples and friends who want to explore the world together.

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.” Lee continued to write and his poems were published in The Gloucester Citizen and The Birmingham Post, and in October 1934 he won a poetry competition organized by a national newspaper, The Sunday Referee. The prose captures the existence of ordinary villagers, those having little, those struggling to survive. Why the Spanish rise up and seek to improve their lot is perceived as a given. The description of flora ad fauna grabs at one’s senses. The book can be read for either its history and for its nature writing. In his teens Lee had already began to write poems. He had met two sisters who encouraged him in his writing aspirations. Both sisters were passionately involved with him. At the age of twenty Lee left for London, and worked for a year as a builder's labourer. He then spent four years travelling in Spain and the eastern Mediterranean. During these years he met a woman who took him under her wing and sent him to university to study art. According to many biographical sources, Lee fought in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) in the Republican army against Franco's Nationalists. However, there has been controversial claims that Lee's involvement in the war was a fantasy. Anyway, maybe it was the age thing, being hyper-sensitive because of the funeral, it being a windy, stormy night, or the ginger wine, but I read the whole thing in a night. Instantly it became one of my favourite books, and I read it loads leading up to, and at, college.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. Lee manages to covey intimately, the muddle, the mistakes, the hierarchy, the comeradary of men at war. Actually, Lee went on two separate walks. First of all he left the Cotswolds village of Cider With Rosie fame to walk to London, receiving much-needed advice from an experienced tramp on the way. Then, after losing his job as a building labourer, he decided to set off on another adventure, this time to Spain, taking his battered violin so that he could earn some money as a busker. During the early stages of the Spanish Civil War the area where he was living was bombed and Lee decided to return to England. Soon afterwards he met Lorna Wishart, the wife of Ernest Wishart, the owner of Lawrence and Wishart, on the beach at Gunwalloe. She stopped and asked him to play his violin for her. Valerie Grove has argued: "Rich, startlingly beautiful, the mother of two sons, she tempted and taunted him, showered him with gifts, was his Muse."