Having secured a Spanish visa in Nice, I trundled my belongings downhill to the station in the same way that they had come up. I walked out of a clean house, and left Menton owing nothing, closing the door on memories I preferred to forget. A final visit to the doctor showed my weight to be 130lbs, even less than when I came out of the jungle.
Chapter Twenty-eight
On the evening of Thursday 28 January 1953, at the age of twenty-four — such facts are important as the underpinnings of an otherwise slipping by of time — I left on the all-night express for Spain. In my raincoat pocket was Baedeker’s Mediterranean, 1911, sent by Ruth some weeks before. Having lived four months alone, and being again on the move, the feeling of adventure barely outdid the flutter of uncertainty as to what would be found on arrival. After the frontier the train went at a slower speed, but time passed in talk on all topics (including religion) with an amiable and bespectacled priest who knew some English, though we conversed mainly in French.
A phthisical-looking man at the station in Barcelona transported my goods by handcart to the wharf, for which work I paid him well, since the taxi drivers considered my handmade chest too big and heavy for their dilapidated vehicles. Sixty-five pesetas at the shipping office secured a third-class berth on the Rey Jaime Primero. After wandering a while around the Old Town I sat down to a plate of paella and a bottle of wine at a workmen’s café, and talked the bartender into providing a saucer of bread and milk for Nell in her box. By nine o’clock I was asleep in my bunk, crossing the calm Balearic Sea to Palma. At half past six the dawn was chilly, and Majorca seemed to be sliding by the ship like some new geological world emerging from the womb of creation. The light of Dragonera winked on the western tip, and a blue tinge in the east made the summit-line of the mountains more and more distinct, the dark sea lightening into dull green, deep yellow, then orange, until a spread of sun above the horizon showed houses along the shore in sharper detail. A few soldiers who had spent the night on deck shivered in their drab khaki, and the ship’s engines were so quiet it might almost have been pushed along by the current alone. Such a palpable new day went deep into my spirit, and the endpapers of Ruth’s copy of The Knapsack were covered with notes.
A taxi took me by the cathedral, and up the main avenue to the station for Soller, a town twenty miles north through the mountains. The ticket clerk, a tall good-looking young man with fair hair and brown eyes, spoke some English, and proudly brought out the grammar he was studying, which had as its bookmark a postcard from a girl in England called Kitty. Helped by a packet of Chesterfields bought at the frontier, we talked for a while, until he registered my heavy baggage, charging only half price, and installed me with the rest into the waiting carriage.
The train toy-trumpeted between acres of almond trees in white bloom, and soon the foothills drew us into a long tunnel under the island’s watershed. Elbowing down to Soller through cuttings and shorter tunnels, wide views revealed a large valley sheltered by mountains except for an opening to the sea on the north-west, the north-eastern side blocked by the main peak of Majorca rising to 4,739 feet. At lower levels fragrant air from lemon and orange trees came through open windows till the train hooted between the backs of houses and drew into the little station. Waiting for a tram to take me two miles to the port, a woman came out of the pork butcher’s with a household chair for me to sit on.
The Tarrs invited me to stay at the Villa Catalina, paying my share of food and general expenses. The room John used for his library had a table I could write at, though my first days passed in walking the beach and exploring the byways of the valley.
Two letters from Ruth were waiting, as well as one from the Nottinghamshire Weekly Guardian requesting a couple of articles about Majorca. Notification also came from the BBC to say they would like me to go to London and read my talk ‘Kedah Peak’ on the wireless, for a fee of eighteen guineas. I had sent it to them as little more than a forlorn hope, and was encouraged by what seemed my first real acceptance. The promised payment was more than I had so far been offered, but because it would barely cover my return fare to London and a night or two in a hotel I asked for the piece to be held till I had other reasons to go there.
I continued studying French, made a desultory attempt at Spanish, and started a notebook on the Majorcan dialect. John, with his quick and flexible mind, was endlessly zestful at unravelling the meanings and derivations of words in almost any language, causing a lot of discussion. Knowing that an understanding of Romance languages would enable my own to be more thoroughly comprehended, I tackled a novel by Simenon, and translated poems by Verlaine and Baudelaire. I also read, though as yet in English, Proust and Stendhal.
At the British Consulate in Palma I obtained the name of a doctor, and arranged payment for the pneumothorax refills, which system made me a private patient with my own waiting room. The nurse, Francesca, was so attractive and charming that I in no way objected to being looked on as a gentleman-invalid sent out by doting parents from England to recover health and strength in a supposedly more benign climate.
Despite my easygoing attitude to the tuberculosis that had undoubtedly been more positive than it was now, there was always the possibility that, if I didn’t take care, symptoms would reappear and, with insidious speed, reduce me to a state of real illness. For some weeks there had been snow on the surrounding mountains, and the valley of Soller was dull and cold from continual rain. Heating at the house came from a small woodstove in the living room, and I was plagued by one cold after another, each with an ominous cough that made my good lung also feel somewhat sluggish. Tests which the doctor gave showed that my blood sediment rate had gone up to twelve from almost nothing since leaving France. This was a bad sign, he said, but added with a smile that it was sure to go down once the good weather came, which it in fact did. Fortunately my instinct and self-indulgence coincided so neatly as to suppress all worry.
My articles for the Nottinghamshire Weekly Guardian described Majorca as being fifty years behind the times, a place where one could live on little because rents were cheap, decent wine was sixpence a pint, and tobacco twopence an ounce. The people were honest and hardworking, and there was little or no poverty, the island being blessed with much fertile land and a fairly short winter — most of which was true enough. A short piece printed in the Scribe later in the year, about a car trip over the hills to Palma, was my last publication for some time.
At the Villa Catalina I worked desultorily on The Deserters, and talked with John about our writing an up-to-date guidebook for foreign visitors, a project which never got beyond the synopsis. The only available map of the island was a rudimentary one for tourists. Proper survey maps were unobtainable, which proved, if proof was needed, that Spain was an undemocratic country, since a refusal to sell large-scale topographical maps to ordinary people signified a fundamental lack of other human rights. During the worst of the weather I enlarged an existing map to a scale of 1:50,000, on four big sheets which were fitted together after John had scripted in the place names. Details were added from the map in Baedeker, and I also put in data from my own explorations.
One afternoon, with not so much as a knock on the door, a stout priest in full canonicals entered the house, followed by several altar boys decked out in white surplices. To John’s anti-Catholic consternation they began intoning a hymn of blessing for the place, the priest swinging a heavily smoking censer which sent fumes into every room. All John could say when they left was thank you, but I think he was rather pleased about it, even while saying he was glad to have wasted their time.