Spanish newspapers were so biased against Britain and France (not to mention Israel) and so heavily censored, and supplied only with official handouts, as to be completely unreliable. Before the Allies landed in Egypt they quoted Arab sources in Beirut as saying that British troops had disembarked in Haifa to join Israeli forces on the Suez Canal. For me to believe in collusion between the Allies and Israel would have been wishful thinking, though the hope was there, since such co-operation would have made cultural and geopolitical sense.
My pencil ran across the pages to get down another radio news message beginning: ‘ITEM LONDON TWENTY PEOPLE FINED BETWEEN TEN SHILLINGS AND THIRTY SHILLINGS FOR OFFENCES AGAINST …’ telling about riots in Whitehall against the landing, as well as opposition from the Labour Party, and suggesting, which I found hard to believe, that most people in England disagreed with what was happening.
About the same time the Hungarian people rebelled against the communist rulers of their country, and were fighting the tanks of the Red Army. When I tuned in to a wireless telegraph station communicating with insurgent garrisons in Budapest the Russians were so adept at jamming that it was hardly possible to receive more than a word or two at a time. Diverting my faculties even further from the exploits of Arthur Seaton I wrote an 800-word ‘Plan for the Liberation of Hungary’, a strategical design delineating the armed forces necessary, their training and armaments, the places suitable for landing on the Baltic coast, and the main lines of advance towards the Carpathians. Those nations were listed which might be amenable to the scheme, with an analysis of political attitudes necessary to inveigle them into it if they were not. It was a highly satisfactory game of ‘Foreign Office’, but the wish was there, all the same, that such fantasy could become reality so as to help the Hungarians.
My opinions are from notebooks of the time (as are the Morse transcripts) though other people in Majorca, especially Americans, thought them foolish, or at least misguided when I expressed them. Israel was compelled by the United States to withdraw its forces from the Sinai, the British and French to pull out of the Canal Zone, which disasters were to leave the Russians with the illusion of having been victorious in both places.
Enough pieces had now been written on Majorca to make a book and, arranging them into the four seasons of the year, I typed the final draft into A Stay of Some Time, the title taken from Baedeker’s Spain and Portugal, in which it is stated that ‘Soller is suitable for a stay of some time’, which I knew to be true enough. The book, together with The Bandstand, went off to loyal and long-suffering Rosica in the autumn.
The supply of books had almost dried up, so we joined the British Council library in Barcelona, and were sent a form on which was to be specified the authors or subjects of interest to us. The books were then packed into a large carton and sent monthly on the boat, to be collected by us in Palma.
It’s hard to remember why I asked for books on criminology, but a score or so of titles came, dealing with prisons, borstals and their recidivist inmates, some analysing and commenting on the penalties handed out to anti-social elements of the British population, books written from every point of view except that of the criminal. The human and certainly intelligent authors, all of whom I read with interest, looked on the lawbreaker as little more than a statistic, giving only cursory attention to individual psychology and social conditions.
Towards the end of 1956, Letters from Malaya failed once more to find a publisher. I had worked on it to the utmost, and felt so discouraged that I decided not to have it sent out again. A Stay of Some Time, written with equal care and attention, also came back, together with The Bandstand. Short stories such as ‘The Fishing Boat Picture’, ‘Uncle Ernest’, ‘The Match’ and ‘Mr Raynor, the Schoolteacher’ were turned down regularly by magazine editors.
Though I had been writing for eight years, and had lived out of England for nearly five, it seemed as if I might have to go on for some time yet. Doom and gloom occasionally had me in their grip, though rarely for long, because I was rewriting Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and decided to stake everything on that. A small sign of encouragement came in a copy of Outposts, which contained a poem showing something of my state of mind during those years of exile and rejection. Under the title of ‘Anthem’ it goes:
Ruth and I joked about a time in the future when we would have to erect barbed wire around the grand house we lived in so as to keep biographers at bay. We were also amused to recall Joseph Grand in The Plague by Albert Camus, who had spent years writing and rewriting the first sentence of what he hoped would be a great novel. In the middle of plague-stricken Oran he says to his friend Doctor Rieux: ‘What I really want, doctor, is this. On the day when the manuscript of my novel reaches the publisher, I want him to stand up — after he’s read it through, of course — and say to his staff: “Gentlemen, hats off!”’
The year ended on a hopeful and not ungenerous note, for I received nearly two hundred pounds from Constantine Films of Stuttgart, as advance payment on The Bandstand. The covering letter declared that I was to turn the book into a script if and when the company decided to continue with the project as a film in which Ulla Jacobsson would play the main part. Nothing further was to come of it, and the typescript may well be mouldering away in some company archive. I only hope it stays there.
Chapter Thirty-three
The new year of 1957, helped by the cash from Germany, brought a little ease with regard to money. For one exhilarating month there was adequate to buy a primitive small house in a nearby village, but we didn’t give such a sensible idea much consideration, perhaps because further money couldn’t be guaranteed to furnish it to the standard of a rented place. Instead we decided to go to London and find out whether or not we could get something published by making ourselves known. I would be able to read ‘Kedah Peak’ on the BBC which had been accepted three years ago, and show someone the first six chapters of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. The rest of the novel, needing more work, would stay in Majorca, for I was in no hurry, and not in the mood for taking chances.
The least commercially-minded people, we were told it was possible to sublet the flat, and ask a rent that would seem more than reasonable to a family from England, yet give us a small profit. At the end of January Beryl and Robert Graves took us and our luggage in the family Landrover to Palma, treated us to a meal at a restaurant near the waterfront, and wished us luck before waving us off on the boat to Barcelona. In France a bottle of our Spanish brandy smashed on the floor of the compartment, which reeked so strongly up and down the corridor that no one else came in, leaving space for us to stretch out and sleep.