We economized on everything, and wasted nothing. Magazines or newspapers no longer needed were exchanged weight for weight for charcoal to heat water for coffee in the morning and cook the evening meal. Firemaking was my job, and I could bring a kettle to the boil with charcoal as quickly as a gas stove could have done it. Bleach and wood ash were used for cleaning, and esparto grass as a brush for washing up, always in cold water. A geyser system gave heat for showers, however, so comfort was by no means absent.
It was remarkable how clothes could last if you slopped around all summer in shorts and a shirt, or even with nothing on above the waist. Ruth’s aunt in America sent a dark suit for me which needed little work from a local tailor to make it fit, and was formal enough to wear at a film première some years later.
During the Christmas season, and into 1956, a young American writer, Nancy Warshaw (later Bogen) would take refuge with us on days when her house on the outer confines of the valley became almost uninhabitable in the damp and gloomy weather. She cheered our lives with New York humour, and laughter at what she called my ‘jungle stories’, later saying she had seen me in those days as being a potentially violent character — the only point of dispute between us.
In February nearly a foot of snow covered the island, and from the terrace below we picked huge navel oranges thinly coated with ice, delicious to eat but even more so for their cold sweet juice. The landlord let us take as many as we liked, since they would rot anyway when they fell, so that however bad the winter, there was plenty of vitamin C.
When a publisher sent back The Palisade — after much consideration, it was said — Rosica posted it somewhere else, and intended trying another firm should it come back from there. As long as I kept working there would be typescripts to send out, and as long as things were being sent out I couldn’t lose hope, and as long as there was hope my optimism enabled me to continue working.
The wireless kept us informed on what was happening in the world, though it didn’t seem to be much, for I was as adept as I should have been at slinging an aerial to get all kinds of foreign stations. At eight thirty one evening a melancholy tune played across the aether, and on listening to the news in English which followed I learned that it was the Ha-Tikva — the national anthem of Israel, coming from Kol Zion Lagola in Jerusalem.
Tuning in to the same station from then on, I learned something of what modern life was like in the Holy Land. Every day there were murderous raids across its borders from Arab countries, who were determined to destroy it. Israel was in the same situation as Great Britain in 1940, except that for Israel the threat seemed to be permanent. The announcer of Kol Zion invited listeners to send reports of their transmitter’s strength, and on posting a detailed wireless operator’s assessment I received a monthly magazine of news and comment.
I was requested to attend the military hospital in Gibraltar for another medical board, and arrived there on 29th February. During a haircut and shave in Algeciras the barber assumed I was native to the Balearic Islands, my Spanish accent sounding merely provincial, no longer English or entirely foreign.
My time in the hospital ward seemed much longer than three days, taking me vividly back to the RAF time. To National Service soldiers in the ward I was the older man, and they assumed I was able to answer all their questions. On admitting I was a writer one of the swaddies in his dressing-gown came to my bed with some verses he had written. Unfortunately they were no good, but I told him to keep on writing. I did some shopping while on the Rock, and returned to Soller with kippers, bacon and English tobacco. News came a few weeks later that my pension would continue until further notice.
A friend sent us A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, and I began the 600 page anthology at random by reading a tale of Israel Joshua Singer’s called ‘Sand’, set in the Jewish village of Podgurna on the banks of the Vistula in nineteenth-century Russia. Aaron, a travelling ritual slaughterer recently widowed, is invited to lodge at the Rabbi’s house, in which he seduces the daughter who becomes pregnant. When the fact can no longer be concealed, the pair are married, though not before the whole community has come together in uproar to make sure the matter is put right. A further strand of the story takes us through four seasons, and tells of how the settlement acquires its own burial ground, no longer having to use the one in the next village which is slightly more prosperous, and whose charges the people of Podgurna can barely afford.
Strange as it may seem I felt some connection between the poor of these Yiddish stories and those I had grown up with, as if I had half known such people before. The style of writing was in some way responsible, but I also learned that in a story much can be told between the A of the beginning and the Z of the conclusion, the kind of detail which, though not apparently relevant, becomes so in the completed work, and is all the richer for being written in an unhurried, meandering and therefore more human way. This is one method by which the author of ‘Sand’ gives reality to the lives of those who lead such hard and uncertain lives. Though the people in Nottingham were not Jewish, and did not therefore have the same passionate belief in their religion and its ethics (nor, of course, the ever present peril from physical persecution), their sense of humour, ability to endure and, flexible attitudes to the minutiae of life, showed some similarity. It was impossible to be unmoved on reading Isaac Bashevis Singer: ‘The Jew never looked askance at the deserter who crept into a cellar or attic while armies clashed in the streets outside,’ something with which my mother would certainly have agreed.
The anthology also contained such masterpieces of the short story as ‘Kola Street’, ‘Repentance’, ‘White Chalah’ and ‘Competitors’. Poor people have vivid lives and suffer much (though not, once they can afford to eat, more than other people) and one has to write about their tribulations and follies as if one loves them. Every person is a unique individual, and no writer should generalize, or classify people into any kind of political or sociological group, something doubly confirmed by those classics of Yiddish literary art.
Early in 1956 we met the Swedish film actress Ulla Jacobsson, famous for her recent performance in Smiles of a Summer Night. She was a quiet, tense and beautiful young woman who, when in the Soller valley, was probably as much at ease as she ever could be. Her husband was the Dutch artist Frank Lodeizen and, with Nancy, the five of us were to become good friends, though I contested Frank’s assertion when we got on to political topics that the Royal Air Force during the war had never really tried to bomb the Krupp works at Essen because too many British capitalists had shares in the firm.
During our half drunken and hilarious sessions we devised a religion based on the worship of Globoes, enormous coloured tissue-paper lighter-than-air balloons acquired at the local stationers’. Some, shaped like pigs or other animals, were popular for sending aloft at fiestas or birthdays. Before launching, the Globo had to be opened as far as possible by hand, so that a wad of cotton wool soaked in alcohol could be tied to the wire frame of the opening and lit.
The shape slowly filled with hot air and, when it was released, began to ascend and drift majestically across the valley at a height of several hundred feet. Ruth and I wrote ‘The Globo Anthem’, and a one-act ritualistic play to be performed on the Globo Sabbath before each series of balloons was released, the Globo Sabbath being any day the five of us felt like getting together over a bottle or two of champagne.