Life Without Armour (27 page)

At the same time as sending the book to Heinemann, never a believer in penny packets, I posted ‘Big John and the Stars' to the BBC. This was a children's story set in a prosperous kingdom of the Valley of Gold, a sort of Utopia much like Soller, which lacked only stars in the sky to make it perfect. The king promises his daughter in marriage to any man who can remedy this, while those who try but fail will be put to death. A blacksmith known as Big John accepts the challenge and, after many tribulations, succeeds.

A copy of the story ‘Saturday Night', sent to my brother Brian, now a corporal on National Service with the army, came back with the comment that in his opinion ‘When you have the waiter fetch an order of eight pints, three glasses, two gins and oranges, one rum, a whisky, and three packets of Woodbines from the bar, it is wrong, because he wouldn't be able to get all that on one tray' – as indeed he wouldn't.

Jim Donovan went back to London, and Mike Edmonds departed for Malaga, leaving all twelve rooms of the house for myself and Jup. My weight was down again, but more from debauchery than misery, which seemed much improvement. Having begun an affair, and wanting more privacy, I rented a room in a furnished house belonging to the friendly Nadal brothers. Every day Maria and Catalina, the folklore dancers who worked as waitresses at the Bar Nadal, came to make the large double bed, which had the graven image of a crucified man on the wall behind.

Working at a small table under the window, with a view of neighbouring house tops, I began writing about my childhood, contrasting the anguish and shortages of home life in the 1930s with the haven of the Burtons' cottage, and recalling the idiosyncrasies of my blacksmith grandfather, about whom I hadn't thought since his death in 1946. With the name of Brian Seaton for the main character, I tried to give the narrative an aspect of fiction, my imagination creating the life of his mother and father from the time before their marriage.

The story was satisfying to write, material seeming to come as much from my subconscious as from what was actually known about such people. In 50,000 words I took Brian to the age of thirteen, when the cottage, called The Nook, was bulldozed for redevelopment. After the handwritten draft was typed and put away I sat down to a steady rewriting of
The Green Hills of Malaya
, turning that also, as much as I was able, into fiction. I would break off from my work to eat a lunch of bread and salami, then open a bottle of wine and wait for the afternoon visit of my mistress, if she had been able to get away from her husband.

Her name was Pauline, and we had fallen in love on meeting at a table outside a café in the plaza one morning after she had done her shopping. For a while she was reluctant to come to bed, though eventually gave in, and our intense affair began. She was in her thirties, as handsome and beautiful as a Russian princess, and her husband had brought his family to Europe for a year so that he could write the Great American Novel undisturbed. They lived in a rented villa on the outskirts of the town, and I was friendly enough to read ‘Big John and the Stars' to their seven-year-old daughter. Pauline would leave her playing in the garden, or the husband might have taken her by tram to the beach, and find some reason to come into town and be with me.

Bartolomeu Ferra, the postmaster, wrote articles for
Ecos de Soller
, the weekly newspaper of the town run off in a back room at the stationer's. We met in the Bar Palacio one afternoon so that he could interview me, the piece appearing shortly before my departure for Malaga in late September. My name, in half-inch black letters, was spread across the page, part of a series called
THOSE WHO VISIT
us, in which I was said to be ‘
un propogandista de Mallorca' –
after explaining my reasons for living on the island, and telling him that my journalism had always given a good impression of Soller.

Bartolomeu went on to describe me as a young bohemian with the soul of a child, but a person also who was full of experience and candour. I had no university degree, he wrote, only my pen and my talent, as well as an extensive knowledge gained from living in many countries of the Far East where I had worked as a wireless telegraphist. He also said that I occasionally made notes in an exercise book with my left hand, and stuffed black tobacco into a large curved pipe with the other. As a journalist and writer of fiction I had contributed to numerous magazines, as well as being such a friend of the Muses that success was sure to come in the hard fight to establish a position in the world of letters.

It wasn't a matter of my believing or not. In one way I would have been happy to know that all he said was perfectly true, but the greater part of me discounted such eulogisms. The only person to know whether or not I was any good as a writer was myself, and a permanently underlying optimism allowed me to think so at times of rejection, such as when someone at Heinemann's informed me that they were unable to make an offer for
The Deserters
, though would like to see
Man Without a Home
, which had been mentioned in a covering note. I posted a letter immediately to Ilse Steinhoff in Paris, asking her to send it from there.

My life had reached a balance between work and pleasure which was hardly to be achieved again. The affair with Pauline was in full and delectable spate and, as if to give even more time for it, my typewriter broke down and had to be left a week in Palma for repair.

I packed a picnic basket and walked ten kilometres to Deya with Elizabeth Trocchi, who wanted to meet Robert Graves. He was his usual gracious self and, inviting us to go for a swim, lent me a pair of – necessarily baggy – trunks. We descended the winding track 600 feet down between the olive trees to the beach, and after tea at the house later, walked the same way back to Soller.

Whenever I called at Elizabeth's flat her four-year-old daughter Margo would run up and put her arms around my neck crying: ‘Daddy!', so I was glad when Alex came at the end of September to see his family. He also wanted to have an issue of
Merlin
printed in Palma, since it was cheaper there than in Paris. Tall, thin and untidy, he had eyes which could change quickly from fanatical to vulnerable, or from dead to flashing a kind of uncertain fire. He spent one evening trying to contact people who might supply him with hash, but it seemed not to exist in a small town like Soller.

Over brandy in the plaza one night he told me he had earned 75,000 francs writing a pornographic novel for the Olympia Press series. By the end of our session he was merry enough to start advising me how to write, at which, being equally drunk, I could only reply that he didn't know what he was talking about. We went on with our carouse until, about midnight, he got up and tottered across the square intending to tear down a poster of General Franco. Not wanting him given over to any rough treatment from the
Guardias Civiles
, I diverted him from this, and made sure he went home safe to bed. On leaving for Paris a few weeks later he neglected to pay the 7,000 pesetas printing bill for
Merlin
, and whether he ever did settle it, I don't know.

When the two novels came back from Heinemann they were sent out again straight away. Hope, like energy, rose and fell, then lifted once more, much as we were taught at Radio School that the electromotive force of an alternating current goes through the positive and negative phases of an oscillatory circuit – in other words, something like my spirit, up and down in its various swings, whenever I sent work out and it was returned as unsuitable. Flipping the Holy Scriptures in my room one day while waiting for Pauline, my finger pressed on a verse from chapter nine of the First Book of Samuel, much like my mother's old system, if system it could be called, though I was sure she still used it, an image which flashed to mind and stayed there strongly for a moment, as when she closed her eyes and, holding a pin, pricked the page of a racing paper to choose a horse on which to place sixpence or a shilling at the local bookie's: ‘And they cut off his head, and stripped off his armour, and sent it into the land of the Philistines round about, to publish it in the house of their idols, and among the people.'

I asked Pauline to leave her husband and come away with me, and though she spent a few days considering the matter, she was finally more flattered than attracted by the proposal. In my heart I couldn't blame her, though the disappointment did nothing to daunt my love, for I must have known it was inconceivable for her to run away with someone who had no more than an RAF pension to live on.

At the end of September she and her husband left to spend the winter in Malaga. Mike Edmonds was already there, and had written suggesting we take a flat together and share the rent. All in all, this seemed to fit in well with my hopes and intentions.

Chapter Twenty-nine

Since my birthday early in the year, celebrated for the first time with champagne, I was consciously glad of being twenty-five, as if some vital watershed in life had been crossed. Expanding confidence suggested that a more adventurous maturity could not be far off and, no longer (as I wrote in a letter to Ruth) the unblemished blue-eyed young man who had embarked for Menton nearly two years ago, I set out by the overnight boat and arrived in Valencia on 9th October. My luggage in the taxi to the Estacion del Norte was much less bulky: I had sold some of my belongings, given various things away, sent a few items to Ruth, parked the cat with an acquaintance, and left odds and ends for Elizabeth Trocchi to look after until my return to the island, whenever that might be.

The
correos
train took seventeen hours to travel the 500 kilometres to Granada, and went through such scenery as occasionally kept me from a pocket edition of Cellini's
Autobiography
. The
pension
chosen in Granada stank worse than a brothel, so after one night I moved to a clean place used by students. There were prominent exhortations over the walls of the town for Franco to live for ever, but I spent a few days peacefully roaming the Generalife and Alhambra, guided by plans and text in my Baedeker, while at the same time trying to fight down a heavy cold.

Mike rented a ground-floor flat on the Carreteria, adequate for the two of us, except that a few days after I got there the place was burgled. Mine was the only room from which things were taken, since it was on the street, and though there were bars at the window some clever rat had fished objects out with a long stick while I slept. Apart from three pounds in cash (a real loss, however) I was deprived of my demob mackintosh, smart jacket, trousers, pyjamas, underwear, woollen waistcoat and, worst of all, my pen. There were so many people at the police station notifying similar thefts that I walked out, convinced that Malaga was a city of thieves.

With foresight I had arranged to collect my quarter's pension in Gibraltar, and one of Mike's Australian friends drove me through whitewashed picturesque villages joined by the ribbon of an execrable road. The blackmarket exchange rate was several pesetas to the pound more than at a Spanish bank and, undeterred by the prospect of smuggling money over the frontier, I made enough extra cash to buy English tobacco, a pipe, a couple of paperbacks and a new pen.

A better appointed and safer flat on the Calle Mariblanca, for a pound a week each, had five rooms, kitchen and bathroom, the only disadvantage being that with so much street noise it wasn't always easy to sleep.

During dinner with Pauline and her husband, at their somewhat posher place in the centre of town, I sensed that he knew of our liaison, or at least was justifiably suspicious, so decided that we had to be careful in seeing each other. Pauline agreed, and Mike helpfully vacated the flat whenever a visit from her was possible, which arrangement worked well until her departure.

I read
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
sent by Ruth, and
From Here to Eternity
which Mike lent me. Rose Macaulay in
Fabled Shore
wrote that Richard Ford, author of the famous
Hand Book of Spain
for the John Murray guide series, had given his opinion that Malaga merited only one day of the traveller's time, which she herself found to be true. The all-pervading poverty reminded me too forcefully of former days, with so many derelicts and beggars on the streets that I began to feel more threatened than sympathetic. Maybe this was because of my own precarious financial situation, in which it was hard to see far ahead with any sense of security. At times the impulse to go back to England had some appeal, having been away nearly two years, until I realized that there could be no kind of life in a place where one would be expected to have a job.

Cold weather made it difficult to sit in the unheated flat, but in November, after work on a long poem which Trocchi had asked for but later rejected, I began turning ‘The General's Dilemma' into a novel.
Man Without a Home
and
The Deserters
, returned to me from London, were tried with another firm, which was also to send them back. An English novelist, Charles Chapman-Mortimer, lived in the same building. He was forty-six years old, and had recently won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his book
Father Goose
, published in 1951. After looking through some of my writings he thought them sufficiently promising to put me in touch with his agent Rosica Colin, which favour was to be particularly helpful.

One night Chapman-Mortimer, Mike and myself went to the gypsy caves outside the town. Frederick Thon, an American playwright, and his wife Harriet also came with us. They had been in Majorca with their two children, and were taking in Malaga as part of a European tour.

Street lights no longer visible, our party stumbled over holes and gullies of a plateau, the black shape of Malaga's unfinished cathedral looming behind. Coming to a low escarpment Mike shouted someone's name, a nick of light showed at the cliff face, and we were led to one of many openings.

One compartment housed a white donkey, another a row of sleeping children. The floor was tiled and the walls whitewashed, flame from a lit wick waving in a shallow bowl of oil. The only furniture was a couple of quilt-covered boxes for us to sit on. Dark faces returned our greetings, and uncorked wine soon set everyone singing and dancing – men and women, and even children who came out of their sleeping places at the noise. A humpbacked girl of about fifteen, with large breasts and arms folded on them, leaned against the wall as if she would capsize on moving away. Jokes were made about when an old woman addressed as grandmother was going to die, but she gave back a toothless smile as if to say she would outlive the lot of us.