By Laurie Lee. With pieces dating from the 1940s and 50s, Lee captures a world now for ever changed by war and mass tourism, ‘when to be a traveller was not yet to be just a labelled unit’. ‘I was lucky to have known them when I did, before darkness began to fall from the air’ When Laurie Lee first left his country village aged nineteen, he discovered a delight in the outside world that remained undiminished throughout his writing life.