The sea during our crossing to Palma was almost as rough as the English Channel two years before, though this time my stomach did not dance to its tune. Noreen Harbord drove us from the ship in ‘my’ Ford Popular, over the mountains to her hotel at the Playa of Soller, where we were generously provided with free board and lodging for a fortnight.
We rented a furnished ground-floor apartment of a tall narrow house on the Calle Jose Antonio in the town for 500 pesetas a month — about a pound a week. Our landlady was Doña Maria Mayol, a retiring person who spoke little. Short and stout, she seemed older than she was, and had been a Republican deputy before the Civil War. When Barcelona fell to the fascist forces in 1939 she walked the hundred miles to France as a refugee, but was afterwards allowed to return unmolested to her properties in Majorca. In her younger days she had been known as a poet, and I later persuaded her to let me translate some of her verses from Mallorquin. I suspected there had been more than one tragedy in her life, and that she had witnessed others, though she never said anything to confirm this. Humour gleamed through her eyes occasionally, but it was as if wisdom and experience did not allow her to laugh, and even barely to smile. She was, however, superstitious, because when the Greek painter Varda and his wife nailed a bunch of garlic above one of their doors she called on Ruth to come and take it down after they had left.
Majorca was a kind of homecoming, after the precarious (so it seemed) life on the mainland, a civilization in which I knew the peculiar language and was familiar with people who were honest and tolerant. Because they resented rule from Madrid there was less evidence of Franco-worship, the Majorcans being pragmatic enough to get on as quietly and industriously as possible with their business.
The winter, never very equable, as George Sand and Chopin discovered during their sojourn at Valdemosa in 1838–39, still had some weeks to run. Our main provision against the climate was a small stove in the living room which we could afford to light only in the evening. Otherwise there was a pan of burning charcoal and its ash — called a brasero — placed in a fixture under a small round table, with a blanket-like cloth circling it to the floor for holding in the heat. You put your legs and feet through slits in the cloth, thus keeping at least part of your body warm. The disadvantage was that the charcoal fumes had a soporific not to say poisonous effect, making it necessary to get away from it every half hour, and hence become cold again. In past centuries, when the crops failed, the standard method for a Majorcan family to do away with itself had been to gather in an air-tight room and let charcoal fumes do the rest.
So little happened during my stay on the island that it is difficult to divide one year from another. Most dates are known only because of the particular book I happened to be working on, though these can’t always be pinpointed either, such margins of error signifying peace, and that gift of unlimited time and security which is a godsend to any writer.
As far as the future existed it was only in the hope that our standard of living would change with the publication of a work that might bring in as much as a hundred pounds. On the other hand our income of four pounds seven shillings and sixpence a week was, in the Spain of that time, the salary of a rather senior clerk with a family to keep, so we always had a fully furnished five-roomed flat or house, wine on the table, tobacco to smoke, enough cash for postage, and a girl to come in now and again to do the laundry and clean the place.
At the beginning of April Rosica Colin wrote to say she was pleased I wanted her to be my agent, and that she had already sent The General’s Dilemma to a publisher. Ruth and I, by constant application to our work, had some justification for hope. Shortly after getting back to Majorca I wrote the fourth draft of Letters from Malaya, based on that old manuscript The Green Hills of Malaya, turning it more into a novel by introducing Mimi, a Chinese girl who earns her living as a dance hostess and becomes the friend of Brian Seaton. More was made out of the Malayan Emergency, and the book ends by Brian killing a communist bandit when his jungle rescue group is ambushed during the search for a crashed aircraft.
While doing this I assembled a number of Nottingham stories into one folder, with the idea that they might one day be published as a book. By June Letters from Malaya had gone through a further draft, and in July went off to Rosica with a note explaining that the 70,000 word novel was about the beginning of the Malayan Emergency, that a part was already accepted as a talk by the BBC, and that another extract had been published in the Nottinghamshire Weekly Guardian as a story some years before.
The painter Eddie Allen came to live in the valley with his Austrian wife. Eddie and I had been brought up in the same area of Nottingham but, he being a few years older, we met for the first time in Soller. Another coincidence was that he had been a wireless operator in the RAF, which gave us something to talk about except painting and writing. Ruth and I sometimes walked the round trip of twenty kilometres to call on the Graves in Deya. We were also friendly with the Tarrs, though they left after a while to run a language school in Valencia, a venture which flourished due to John’s excellent teaching methods.
Tony Buttita, a theatre press agent, who was also writing a novel, came frequently from the United States to see Elizabeth Trocchi. He had known Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood during the ’30s, and was later to write a book about him. Tony usually arrived with boxes of literary magazines from New York and San Francisco, as well as novels by Mailer, Salinger, Styron, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal and others. Their books were like gold at a time when equally vigorous writing in England seemed not to exist, except for recently published first novels by Kingsley Amis and John Wain, which we hadn’t yet been able to read.
England had vanished beyond the northern rim of the world, for I had now been away longer than the time spent in Malaya. Her Majesty the Queen — God bless her! — or her representatives, continued to provide what by now had become my private remittance-man income, enabling Ruth and myself to stay out of the way and go on with our writing.
In September we rented a large old farmhouse in the orchard area between the town and the sea, drawing our water from a well under fig and olive trees in the garden. Don Jose, the man of the neighbouring family, had been in prison during the Civil War for expressing socialist sympathies, and had caught tuberculosis. A pig they kept was fed on figs and peaches from their garden, and we were invited to the feast when it was killed, its dreadful squealing taking me back to the time when my grandfather’s pig had been slaughtered by the back door of the cottage at Old Engine Houses. Jose and his family later emigrated to Canada where, due to a better standard of life, he recovered his health.
Rosica Colin was trying to get my children’s story ‘Big John and the Stars’ published, but meanwhile The General’s Dilemma and Letters from Malaya had been turned down by half a dozen firms. Editors, she said, were afraid to take on something like Letters from Malaya because of the ‘strong language’, certain expressions not being permitted at a time when there was a drive against ‘obscene’ books. I told her that the notion of being obscene had never occurred to me, and though I didn’t like the idea of cutting anything out of my novel I would excise the occasional swear word (of which there weren’t many) if it meant getting the book published, and me receiving money for it. Rosica asked me not to be discouraged by such criticism, and to continue writing.