[An English educator, poet, translator, editor, dramatist, short story writer, and author of children's books, Causley has served as the vice-president of the Poetry Society of Great Britain. In the review below, he offers a mixed assessment of As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning.]

One evening at his house in the high sierras of Kensington, Roy Campbell told me of an encounter he and his wife once had with a street-musician in Toledo. The fiddler turned out to be not a German, as they'd supposed, but a young man from Gloucestershire walking across Spain with a knapsack and a violin wrapped in a blanket. The Campbells asked him how he was getting on. Fine, he replied with surprising alacrity. Except for the wild dogs that occasionally woke him, sniffing and howling round at night. 'He thought they were dogs!' roared Campbell, delightedly. Then, pianissimo: 'They were wolves, man.'

Whether they were or not is irrelevant. In any case, Laurie Lee in his As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning doesn't mention the wolves in connection with Campbell, but merely says 'they may have been'. To Campbell, always extravagantly and imaginatively generous, they had to be: for the same reason that he proudly introduced young Lee to his Toledan friends as: 'A champion, this boy. Walked all the way from Vigo. He walks a thousand miles a week. It's true, by God … The funny thing is—he's English.'

Laurie Lee's portrait of the good, gentle, fundamentally shy and uncertain Campbell—a poet shamefully neglected at the moment—is one of the best things in this new volume of autobiography. The encounter between the two poets—one established, the other to be—was unplanned, casual: like Lee's journey from Slad to London and the Mediterranean.

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning is a recreation, after a gap of 30 years, of the sensations of late adolescence and early manhood. It's admittedly romantic, and the style is as juicily ripe as an autumn pear. There's a formidable, instant charm in the writing that genuinely makes it difficult to put the book down. (Conversely, some might find it difficult to pick up for a second reading in case the magic had flown.) Now and then one's conscious of a slightly overblown, Renoir-ish bloom on the text, an air of the extended set-piece, that comes dangerously close to choking the senses. But if there is a lot of sweetness, it's pure cane; not a trace of saccharin.

The book has the intensity, as well as the title, of a ballad. There's an undertone of menace as the story moves to the bloody climax of a community and a country exploding into Civil War. Mr Lee begins his journey as a political innocent; he ends it involved inextricably with a beautiful and sinister land, 'so backward and so long ignored … [where] … the nations of Europe were quietly gathering'.

As a self-portrait, it's a little muzzy: though perhaps this was the intention. Like many a clever peasant before him, Mr Lee doesn't give much of himself away; he remains peering from behind screens of glittering prose. Was he really the innocent he appears? One feels cheated, certainly, when our hero—crossing mountain and plain, hammered by hangovers and sunstroke, but never (apparently) diarrhoea or constipation—suddenly disappears into a post-office to see if there's any mail. Or, just as one gets used to him in an hotel attic, working as fiddler and odd-job man, he appears in the next chapter living in a room in the house of an unnamed expatriate English novelist. Sometimes, too, the observation seems slightly off-target. The characteristic smell of Gibraltar isn't, I'd say, that of provincial groceries. Cigar smoke, surely. And as an exNaafi busker myself, I've never heard of a song called 'Wales! Wales!' The title is 'The Land of My Fathers': a tune that Mr Lee rightly remarks will always call up its supporters from a crowd. So, I hope, will this lollipop of an autobiography.