Laurie lee wife

Primary Sources

(1) Laurie Lee, A Moment of War (1991)

An official, bowed at his tiny desk, looked at me with a kind of puff-eyed indifference. Then he sniffed, asked me my name and my next of kin, and wrote down my answers in a child's exercise book. As he wrote he followed the motions of the pen with his tongue, breathing hard and sniffing rhythmically as he did so. Finally, he asked for my passport and threw it into a drawer, in which I saw a number of others of different colours.

"We'll take care of that for you," he said. "Would you like some prophylactics?"

Not knowing what these were, I nevertheless said yes, and he handed me a bagful which I stowed away in my pocket. Next he gave me a new hundred peseta note, a forage-cap with a tassel, and said, 'You are now in the Republican Army.' He considered me dimly for a moment, then suddenly shot to his feet, raised his fist and saluted.

(2) Laurie Lee's International Brigades file written on 23rd December 1937.

He did not come through the usual channels. He had tried to do so in January of this year when things were much stricter and he was turned down. He gives recommendations which seem to show that he is perfectly reliable. One of the men he knows is the present Commander of the British Battalion (Fred Copeman, strike organizer on the Putney building site, now attached to the staff of the 15th Brigade). We have not yet been able to check this, however. His reason for avoiding normal channels is that he did not want to be turned down and did not want anybody to go to the expense of sending him out, because he could not be sure of his physical fitness for the fighting out here. He paid his own fare out, and has enough cash to pay his own fare back if necessary.

He was in Spain from July 1935 to August 1936. He was then at Almuneca near Motril. He says that they were then shelled occasionally and this brought on the epileptic fits from which he suffers. Because of this he was evacuated by a British destroyer in August of 1936. His sympathies however were all with the Republic and he resolved to come out as soon as he had recovered. As stated above he tried to come in January, but was turned down.

After a year without any fits, he thought he was perfectly OK and decided to come definitely and here he is.

He had two epileptic fits in Figueras, which he attributes to the increased excitement of being in Spain and of his journey over the mountains.

He seems to be a fairly good violinist and artist. At present he is assisting in the cultural work at Tarazona.

It seems clear that being, generally speaking, physically weak, he will not be of any use at the front. He agrees that the added excitement would be too much for him. On the other hand he seems a perfectly sincere comrade, who is very sympathetic to the Spanish government.

(3) In his autobiography, A Moment of War (1991), Laurie Lee described how in Madrid soldiers searched for Nationalist supporters during bombing attacks.

It had happened before, when night-shelling was heavy and precise - someone, some 'Franco agent', would have been flashing a torch from a rooftop or an upper window, and then, when the bombardment was heaviest, would toss a few grenades down into the street to confuse the fire-trucks and rescue parties.

After two winters of siege, the inside war was still active, and not everyone, even in this poor bare tavern, as he talked and moved his eyes about, could be absolutely sure of the man who sat beside him.

'We caught one of them, anyway,' the younger soldier said fiercely. 'Running across the tiles with a cart lamp.'

'Could have been trying to save his skin,' said someone.

'Did you arrest him?'

'Hell, no. We just threw him off the roof. He'd done enough. His body's outside in a barrow.'

Someone drew back the shutters on the cold grey street. A boy sat on the shafts of a hand-barrow, smoking. Stretched out on sacks between the high wooden wheels lay the crumpled body of a thin, old man. It was smartly dressed, and the head which hung down from the tailboard still wore a white-haired look of distinction.

(4) Valerie Grove, The Times (9th June, 2004)

Lee was captivated, in the 1930s, by a woman named Lorna Wishart. Rich, startlingly beautiful, the mother of two sons, she tempted and taunted him, showered him with gifts, was his Muse, bore him a daughter. During the war he camped in a caravan near her husband’s Sussex estate; she arrived daily in her Bentley, bringing poetic inspiration and erotic fulfilment. And then, in 1943, she broke his heart. She had become infatuated with a 20-year-old Berlin-born artist, a boy wonder of the art world, with dark hair and pale, mesmeric eyes — Lucian Freud. She became his Muse, too: she was his first portrait subject, the first woman who meant anything to him. And when Wishart ditched him, he married Kitty, one of Wishart’s nieces, as his first wife — portrayed in his Girl With A White Dog, in Tate Britain. (Two years later, Lee did the same: he married Kathy, another of Wishart’s nieces.) This enthralling tale of a true femme fatale will be told later this summer in The Rare and the Beautiful, Cressida Connolly’s composite biography of Wishart and her eight equally amazing siblings.