Charm - Laurie Lee once wrote - is "the ultimate weapon, the supreme seduction, against which there are few defences".

He was the living proof. As new editions of his books are issued to mark the centenary of his birth, on June 26, and a shoal of events are planned, I recall the sunlit hours I shared with the writer, towards the end of his life, and how easy it was to succumb to his roguish charisma.

The old magic was at work as we chatted on a hillside overlooking the Mediterranean, close to where more than 50 years earlier a British destroyer had whisked him to safety at the start of the Spanish Civil War. As it turned out, it was to be his last visit to the country that inspired some of the most lyrical travel writing in the English language.

Over several glasses of wine, he reminisced about his life and loves and the inspiration for As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. "I have been in hospital," he told me. "The doctor said don't fly, drink or eat. So I flew down here and immediately felt much better."

Dressed in a natty cream suit, snow-white hair contrasting with a deep suntan, he had a mischievous, raffish air. As ever, he was attended by beautiful, adoring women, wife Kathy and daughter Jessy.

Their relationship had survived stressful times, as Jessy confessed some years later: "It was difficult being his daughter. His moods could be extreme and, of course, he liked a drink or two, so I never knew how he was going to be from one minute to the next."

After her tempestuous upbringing, Jessy trained as a psychotherapist, which helped her to handle her complex relationship with a controlling father. On that enchanted afternoon in Spain, however, there was no hint of tensions. No doubt the sun and the wine helped, but Lee was on his best, most charming, behaviour.

A smiling Kathy told me: "He has an amazing ability to make contact with people. He starts talking to somebody in the street and the next thing they're old friends."

She knew this better than anybody for she had an equally amazing ability: to tolerate Lee's many "relationships" with attractive girls. As recounted in his classic tale of youth, Cider With Rosie, he learned the secrets of seduction early on when he enjoyed tumbles in the haystacks of the Cotswolds.

Women played a major role in his life, whether in Spain, where he encountered "strange vivid girls ... with hair like coils of dripping tar and large mouths, red and savage" or when he was weaving his spell around upper-class British lasses, fiddling while they yearned.

"I lived an active adolescent life," he recalled. "I ran a dance band and spent a lot of time on a bike looking for girls. Then I realised that poetry was a means I had to declare my love. The important thing about a poem is that it must end strongly, just as a love affair should not peter away but end strongly."

Born poor, he had little formal education, leaving school at 14. "I had to find my own language and tone of life," he told me, "an immensely pleasurable occupation. When you go to university, you are inundated with other writers, but I think I was relieved of that pressure. I was not under any influence."

His reading gave him a taste for what he called "fat-bacon language", the sort that engraves itself on one's memory. His talent for the memorable phrase recalls Dylan Thomas's flights of imagination, but the two had little in common.

"Thomas was an innovator, but I can't say he influenced me as I started writing before knowing him. I remember he expressed amazement at my accent - he seemed to think I would speak with a broad Cotswold accent. He had a Welsh preacher's voice. His poems were for declaiming, so they could be heard across the valleys I suppose."

So how did Lee, who died in 1997, find exactly the right evocative word?

"Use language which doesn't trip the tongue," he advised me. "If you can't think of a word, leave a gap. Don't use a second-class word because you are in a hurry - leave it for a day or so until the word comes. Let your own feelings show. Don't use old expressions that are not yours.

"Where do I get my words from? Sight, smell, distance... they're all involved. And in my village we had a good grounding in the Bible and, of course, Shakespeare."

When writing autobiography, Lee maintained, "the only truth is what you remember". That credo did involve him in controversy, particularly with regard to A Moment Of War. This was not published until 1991, more than half a century after the events it described: how he tried to join Spain's Republican army fighting General Franco and was nearly executed as a suspected spy.

Lee blamed the loss of vital diaries and notebooks for the delay and also his habit of rewriting. Critics, however, including veterans of the International Brigades, claimed the book was more imagination than fact. In her biography, Laurie Lee: The Well-Loved Stranger, Valerie Grove suggested: "It must rest in the no man's land between history and invention" but she said that the book did give "an almost cinematically vivid impression" of Spain at war.

The title As I Walked Out occurred to Lee when looking out of a train window on the way to Swindon. "It's the starting line of many folk songs and I did leave my village in mid-June with everything on my back and walked off to see the world."

Hadn't he rather romanticised his experience in Spain? He rejected that suggestion. "If there was a romantic outlook to my writing, it was because I was young. But there are some grim moments. There was the shelling of a town nearby and I saw two men taken away to be shot. I saw the dark coming of war."

To protect his Republican friends during the Franco era, Lee invented the name "Castillo" for Almuñecar, the Granada coastal town where his wanderings ended in 1936. He recalled the fishermen toiling at their nets, "a labour without mercy, dignity or reward". Today it is a thriving tourist resort, backed by orchards of custard apples and avocados.

Revisiting the town, Lee was disenchanted. Wandering Almuñecar's labyrinthine old quarter, he had managed to find just one bar to his liking, a barrel-lined cave with a wooden counter, cured hams hanging from the ceiling and the pungent smell of fried fish, just like in the old days.

He lamented to me: "I remember how the fishermen used to exchange ancient stories in the bars. But now what have you got? Television shows, phony Hollywood stuff written by drunken scriptwriters. The fishermen are struck dumb. They are reduced to sitting in a corner, mute. The culture has been crippled. You see people in a bar drinking while watching Mass - on television!"

The great irony is that Lee's colourful imagery boosted the tourist invasion and helped to bring about the changes he later abhorred. Lee would certainly be provoked into colourful comment could he see a phallic-looking structure now gracing the Almuñecar seafront.

It bears a modest plaque honouring the penniless youth whose writings helped put the town on the tourist map. Nearby rise scores of high-rise apartments. And fishermen are hard to find.

Some things, however, do not change. Lee's vivid description of a typical dawn over the Mediterranean still holds true: "The stars snapped shut, vermilion tides ran over the water, the hills around took on the colour of firebrick, and the great sun drew himself at last raw and dripping from the waves ..."

And on my copy of As I Walked Out resonate the final words inscribed by the lad from Slad: "Encountered at the end of a golden journey."

Laurie Lee's centenary is being celebrated with special events in Slad, Gloucestershire, and at other locations. Penguin, Vintage and Unicorn are publishing new editions of his books. More information at centenary website www.laurielee.org.

David Baird is a journalist and author based in Spain. His books include Between Two Fires: Guerrilla War In The Spanish Sierras and Sunny Side Up: The 21st Century Hits A Spanish Village. Visit www.maromapress.wordpress.com