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LAURIE LEE’S GIBRALTAR Laurence Edward Alan "Laurie" Lee, MBE, English poet, novelist and screenwriter brought up in the small village of Slad in Gloucestershire, recounts his trip to Gibraltar.
BY CLAIRE SPENCER
I
n the Autumn of 1935, a young traveller in his early twenties set foot in Gibraltar from off the ferry from Algeciras. He’d left his idyllic home in the Cotswolds the previous year and had walked to London, where he worked on building sites to earn enough money for his passage from the port of Tilbury to Vigo in North Western Spain. He’d decided this on a whim after being taught how to ask for a glass of water in Spanish from an Argentinian girlfriend, and imagined himself “Brown as an apostle, walking the white dust roads through the orange groves.” The young man in question was Laurie Lee, who went on to be a well-known author, most famous for his book Cider with Rosie. Laurie Lee had walked all the way from Vigo on a torturous route that had taken in Valladolid, Madrid and Seville before ending up in Algeciras, where, as he described in his book As I walked Out One Midsummer Morning, he saw Gibraltar from across the bay “As if it had been towed out from Portsmouth and anchored offshore still wearing its own grey roof of weather.” 48
Unfortunately, there was to be no welcoming committee for the bedraggled traveller, carrying his few possessions in a pack on his back along with his treasured violin, on which he played for his food and keep. Instead, he was
“Gun-metal faced, disciplined and dour, it could never do less than command our respect,” put on one side like a bad apple whilst the port officials decided what to do with him. After being taken to see the Chief of Police, it was agreed he could stay as long as he reported to the police station (those days in Irish Town) in the evening, where he was given a cell to sleep in. Laurie relates that he played dominoes with the prisoners, but how after a few days he became bored with the tedious restrictions placed on him, and he was escorted to the
border by a policeman. “It was like escaping from an elder brother in charge of an open jail,” he goes on to say in the book. This is a feeling that some might even relate to today after days of relentless cold levanter, where, after the well-practised formalities of showing passports to bored border guards they are greeted by bright lively bars with their delicious smells of coffee and croissants. Laurie continued his journey through a very different Spain to now, through cork woods and fishing villages before ending up in Almuñécar, referred to in his book as “Castillo”. He wintered here, playing his violin in a hotel, before he was rescued by a Royal Navy destroyer looking to evacuate Britons at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, where he relates that he was “piped aboard to a line of saluting officers”. He visited Gibraltar once again in 1950 with his wife Cathy, though preferring to stay across the bay in Algeciras. He described the view of the Rock from the balcony of his hotel in the sequel A Rose GIBRALTAR MAGAZINE APRIL2020
