Laurie Lee: A Rose for Winter

At Borders Laurie Lee's autobiographical works are slotted into the Fiction section. It sort of makes sense, as the narrative voice that here relates Lee's experiences during a 3 month return visit to Franco's Spain in the 50s is a creation of careful artifice.

This is some of the most intensely lyrical writing I have ever come across: "Slow time dripped musically from the fountains, wine barrels and the guitarist's fingers...the moonlight seemed to collect in warm pools along the little streets and to drip off the white walls with a visual texture as smooth and tender as oil."

Moving through this ornate prose almost feverishly I felt I could feel its beauty taking shape in the back of my throat. And yet there are a number of passages which are simply too choca with adjectives:"The great interior was a rouged twilight, where the fretted choir, the candled images and many gilden, dim-lit chapels, presented to the eye the massed details of an intricate sanctity."

The purpose of the trip and the presence of Lee's wife Kati become apparent only gradually. Her physical appearance − it becomes increasingly clear − is like a siren song to the lustful Iberian male. There are some comic scenes where the author has been laid low by a fever and is reassured by one of the locals keeping vigil at his bedside that "everyone is saying what a beautiful widow the señora will make".

His travel journal also contains marvellous little stand-alone one sentence vignettes like this: "I remember sitting in the Garden of Hercules at dusk, writing, sipping wine and being stroked on the nose by a whore." (and "small dogs slept in shadows as if bred only for sleep.")

Over the last few pages Lee makes what now appear to be somewhat optimistic assessments of the unchangeability of a nation which "rejects all short-cuts to a smoother life...for they possess a natural resistance to Civilisation's more superficial seductions."

He expects that time will continue to function differently for the Spanish (that much is still very much the case) and that their girls will remain "unslacked, and their music unswung." I wonder what he would have made of Las Ketchup?

Now Spain may have become one of the most self-consciously modern countries within the EU, but it surely still retains many of the qualities that Lee was apt to describe as "incorruptible" or "unenslaved". And each time we have crossed the Pyrenees on the return leg of a trip down to Iberia, we have certainly − as Laurie and Kati did back then − experienced that saddening sense of "all there was to leave."