I picked this memoir up under the arches of Waterloo Bridge, with Sedley. The bookstalls under the arches feel like a throwback now. Firstly as we now live in a digital age, secondly in the allowance of the use of prime public space to such a marginal enterprise as second hand bookselling. There’s always a book there you feel like buying, one that will take you by surprise.
Lee’s Spanish Civil War memoir felt an appropriate find. Lee is an unfashionable writer. He was a background voice in the childhood of anyone growing up in the second half of the twentieth century in the UK. A connection to another, supposedly more innocent age, allied to the romantic, Hardyesque notion of the wanderer, the rural exile. In this sense Lee’s journey echoes those being taken in other parts of the globe in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, as the countryside is emptied with people seeking work in the great cities. Yet as ever, the ideals of romanticism and the actuality exist at arm’s length. Lee’s account of his year in Spain is a hard, dispiriting document. He arrives late, with the war already being lost. The in-fighting, which Orwell also wrote about, means he spends more time incarcerated than he does fighting. There’s more chance of him being killed by a Republican bullet than a Fascist one. It’s an account of someone on the losing side, trying to understand why. His poetic but always accessible prose escorts us through a strange year of defeat, even if at times it reinforces the sense that he was but a visitor, lending his time to the cause. Having said which, he is clear in his account that the Spanish civil war was the precursor of the war that followed, and as such there was no real escape to be had from the fascist enemy. You could flee the battle, but the war would catch up with you in the end.
When they remove the second hand booksellers from beneath Waterloo Bridge, perhaps this will be the day that we realise the battle has well and truly been lost, there is no escaping the war.
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