Alastair Humphreys - My Midsummer Morning

One Moment Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph Prologue Imagine Life One Moment Laurie Direction Adventure Becks Music Lesson Progress Into Spain First Play Hope Encouragement Preparation First Walk First Night Marriage Dawn The Pram in the Hall Swifts Kleos Reverence Polar Grace Help Choices Fear Casting One Day Lost Rhythm Baggage First Light Buscando Manna Health Check Bravery Privilege Camping Changes Hitchhiking Loneliness The People of this Earth Siesta Daily Bread The Music in Me Jungle Postman The Greatest Day Evening Last Light Treasure Coffee Kindness Gambling The Art of Busking Alone Fiesta Respite Chorizo Cassiopeia Party Forest Permission Last Days Mountains Way Back River Thunder Road Last Play The Wall Last Night Into Madrid Home from Abroad Reward It’s All Right Photos from the Adventure Acknowledgements The Violin Case About the Author About the Book Books by Alastair Humphreys Books by Laurie Lee About the Publisher

I GLANCED DOWN AT the book in my lap, closed my eyes, and sighed. Then, without thinking, I pulled my phone from the pocket of my jeans, contorting myself on the cramped seat to do so. But instead of the artificial escape of social media, today I opened Google.

‘Find a local violin teacher’, I thumbed.

A website popped up, I found an email address, and before I had time to dwell on it, I began to type.

Fri, 20 Nov 2015, 11:56

TO: Becks Violin

FROM: Alastair Humphreys

SUBJECT: Can you teach me the violin really quickly?

Every journey, every change in direction, begins with one tiny deed, quick to revoke and easy to forget. An action so devoid of binding consequence that there is no reason not to take it. No reason except inertia and fear. The hardest part of every adventure is this one moment, small yet significant. It is the decision to begin, to get moving, to push back the boundaries of your normality, perhaps even to turn your whole life around.

I hit ‘Send’ and went back to my book.

LAURIE LEE AND I first met as teenagers, though he was 63 years older than me. Laurie lived in a lush valley in Gloucestershire where, emboldened by booze, he was busy getting his leg over with half the girls in the village. I was studying Cider with Rosie for English GCSE, avoiding eye contact with the teacher – all irascible nicotine and tweed – and willing the lunch bell to save me. Not for the final time, I envied Laurie.

Cider with Rosie is the story of Laurie’s childhood. It is vivid with eccentric village characters and tales of his friends roaming the countryside. Laurie grew up in a chaotic but loving home with his mother and six siblings. One of his earliest memories was of a man in uniform knocking on the door to ask for a cup of tea. Laurie’s mother had ‘brought him in and given him a whole breakfast’. The soldier was a deserter from World War I, sleeping rough in the woods.

Laurie left school at 14 and went on to become a poet, screenwriter and author. He procrastinated prolifically in the pubs and clubs and literary parties of London. When he did write, he worked slowly with a soft pencil, editing and re-editing obsessively. Throughout his life, Laurie was plagued by self-doubt and often considered himself a failure, despite the unexpected, extraordinary success of Cider with Rosie , which sold more than six million copies. He described himself as ‘a melancholic man who likes to be thought merry’.

The next time Laurie and I met, in our twenties, we were both looking for adventure. I was in my final year at university when I picked up an old copy of As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning , the sequel to Cider with Rosie , in a charity shop at the end of my street.

‘You’ll enjoy that,’ remarked Ziggy, the friend I was browsing with. ‘It’s about a guy wandering around Spain, half drunk with wine, and a bunch of dark-eyed beauties.’

Ziggy and I convened regularly in the greasy spoon café next door to nurse hangovers or refuel after frosty runs along the river. We spoke incessantly of travel and adventure ideas. Ziggy wanted to live in Africa. I wanted to hit the road. We were impatient for our course to end and the chance to charge across the start line into real life. Until then, I was burning off my energy with the university boxing club, muddy football matches and tomfoolery. It was fun, but what I really wanted was, once again, what Laurie Lee was doing.

Ziggy and I headed to the café with our small pile of books. I ordered mugs of tea while Ziggy found a table in the corner. He cleared a circle in the steamed-up window with his sleeve, then peered out. I took a slurp of tea and opened my new book. I have the same copy beside me today, faded and torn. It falls open to well-thumbed passages for I reread it almost every year.

Back then, I gorged on books about polar exploration and mountaineering. These tales on the margins of possibility – the best of the best doing the hardest of the hard – were exhilarating but unattainable to someone as callow as me. Laurie’s story was immediately different. It read like a poetic version of my own life. The cover showed a young man walking towards a red-roofed village under a clear blue sky. Bored with his claustrophobic life, Laurie dreamed of seeing the world. He didn’t have much cash. His mum waved goodbye from the garden gate. He felt more homesick than heroic. So far, so me.

I was disillusioned preparing for a career that did not excite me as much as I thought life ought to. I had gone to university only because all my friends were going. It was a privileged but naive decision, for it had literally not occurred to me that it was possible to do anything else. I was training to be a teacher, but dreaming of being an explorer. While my classmates sent their CVs out to schools, I researched joining the Foreign Legion, the SAS, or MI6. I wanted mayhem, not timetables. Today, it astonishes me how little I knew of life back then that I saw only binary options: the Legion, or lesson planning. Sensible and realistic, or thrilling but absurd.