Life Without Armour (28 page)

The wooden door was closed but, with so many people smoking the American cigarettes we had handed out, the chief of the group had to let in some air. Rain drummed down, but we were well protected and dry. In the Civil War both fascists and communists had massacred many gypsies, though now they danced, as did we after a while, stamping and clapping to a guitar, their faces reminding me, in the dim and changing light, of Tamils in Malaya.

In December I finished the 200 pages of
The General's Dilemma
, then let it lie while working at various essays for a future book on Spain. I eventually sent the new novel to Ilse Steinhoff in Paris, but that too was turned down. Rereading the Book of Nehemiah I for some reason pencilled a mark against the verse: ‘And I arose in the night, I and some few men with me; neither told I any man what my God had put in my heart to do at Jerusalem: neither was there any beast with me, save the beast that I rode upon.'

Lottery booths erected in the streets at Christmas raised funds for charity, prizes ranging from a motor car to a few bars of soap. Many stalls sold
ximbombas
, a percussion instrument shaped like a plant pot, with skin stretched tight across the top, and a hollow cane thrust through, so that moistening the palm to rub up and down produced a loud unearthly grunting. They were also common in Majorca at fiesta time, varying in size from full blown to tiny ones for an infant.

Illuminated cafés were crowded on Christmas Eve, stalls along the pavements overflowing with fruits, cigarettes and bread rolls, while the blind wailed among the throng trying to sell lottery tickets. Taxis and horsedrawn carriages could hardly get through the mob, the crack of whips not quite overwhelmed by people working glassy-eyed at
ximbombas
with wine-soaked hands. When thousands of drunks played them in the streets the effect was haunting and ghostly. Chapman-Mortimer, Mike and myself pushed our way from bar to bar, getting back to the flat at six in the morning for a breakfast of bacon and eggs.

Mike was occasionally visited at the flat by beautiful, well educated, and totally
déclassé
Maricarmen. Cut off by her family, she had been, or perhaps still was in her life of rather free love, the mistress of a writer and journalist called Pedro who had served in Russia with the Blue Division during the war. He had written about his experiences in such a negative way, however, that a militant fascist one day came into his office and put a hand-grenade with the pin out on his desk. Pedro had time to take cover, and was only slightly injured. He had the sense of humour you would expect from a man with a thin and drawn face: it was not always funny. Maricarmen told us he could never go to bed unless a bag of eatables hung from the rail by his head, for if he chanced to wake in the night he had to put something into his mouth, otherwise the horrors of starvation in Russia came back.

For some reason Pedro assumed that Maricarmen was calling at the flat to see me, and I was told at Thomas Cook's office, on collecting my mail, that he was looking for me with a knife, intending to cut my throat. I sought one of his friends and, knowing that the message would be relayed, informed him that I had no designs on Maricarmen, that she only came to the flat to practise her English. I also said that being a British ex-serviceman who had spent two years fighting communist bandits in the Malayan jungle had made me more than capable of looking after myself. This seemed to calm the situation, and we even became reasonably friendly.

As soon as Maricarmen entered our flat the first thing she did was go into the bathroom and clean Mike's razor, which seemed strange, considering her libertarian beliefs. She told me that a Spanish countrywoman who wanted to entice a young man into bed would sprinkle a few drops of her menstrual blood on to his food, which sometimes worked so well that it could send him into a sexual frenzy and take some time to wear off. She also informed us that the common contraceptive for women in Spain was a small ball of cotton wool soaked in Vaseline and inserted into the neck of the womb. A more scarifying piece of intelligence was that any woman who went into hospital as the result of a botched abortion was operated on without anaesthetic.

After my farewell to Pauline in December there seemed little reason to stay in that part of Spain, except to finish various pieces of work. Feeling no liking for Malaga, thus hardly expecting Malaga to like me, my intention was to go back to Majorca at the end of February in the hope that Ruth would come down from England and live with me again, for my letters continued to inveigle, persuade and encourage her to that end. To help me through the winter she sent a parcel of clothes and two packets of books. Meanwhile I wrote an account of my visit to the gypsy caves, printed in
Scribe
magazine the following year.

One day a coating of snow lay on the streets, though it did not surprise me, having long since learned to distrust Mediterranean winters. This made it impossible to work in the flat, so Mike and I would go to the bars in the morning and drink rough
coñac
at a penny a shot, and in the afternoon call at a brothel, with sweets or a bottle of wine to offer. One of the girls suggested I marry her, an unacceptable proposal, though my knowledge of Spanish became much more colloquial.

In the middle of February 1954 I was ordered to Gibraltar for a medical board, which meant X-rays, blood and sputum tests at the Military Hospital. On my way there I opened, and then sealed again, the letter from my Spanish doctor, to learn that ‘Señor Sillitoe has ulcerated tuberculosis which is not yet cured'. This stark summary gave something of a shock, though perhaps he exaggerated my condition in order to do me a favour after I had mentioned the advantage of a pension to an indigent writer.

Noreen Harbord, a hotel keeper from Soller, came with me, wanting to buy a Ford Popular car and take it back to the hotel she owned in Majorca. Being resident in Spain, and unable therefore to get it over the frontier without paying a heavy tax, she proposed purchasing it in my name, and obtaining notarized permission from me to use it. I was glad to do this, even though it meant pursuing the complicated formalities of somewhat fraudulently establishing my residence in the Colony, going from one bureaucratic den to another, to obtain a Rock Ape passport. This travel document was to last me well into the 1960s, until it ran out and I was, luckily I suppose, able to become fully British again.

It took almost a week while living at the Winter Garden Hotel to go through these procedures and get the papers for the car, as well as a Spanish visa for my new passport. During the intervening weekend we stayed in Ronda and visited the famous bridge. The bus ride back to Algeciras, on an unpaved pot-holed and winding descent that went under the name of a road, left hardly any bones that were not sore, but resulted in a bump by bump addition to my collection of travel pieces on Spain – none of which was ever published.

Prior to the Queen's planned visit to Gibraltar I stumbled into a mob one night that was throwing stones at the British Consulate in Malaga. When a couple of young men asked my opinion on the matter I told them that if they wanted the place back for Spain all they had to do was march a hundred kilometres along the coast and take it, though I had to admit to myself that the existence of Gibraltar under British sovereignty was as if France or Germany had a permanent duty-free military base at Land's End. Fortunately they had a sense of humour, and told me, when we went to a bar for a drink, that Franco only urged people to protest about the Colony when things were bad inside the country.

We also discussed Lorca, for I had been reading his poems and plays in the original. Until then it had only been possible to find editions printed in the Argentine, but his books were now coming back into shops in Spain, which country at last seemed to be loosening up from the tight fascism of previous years, albeit very slowly. An item in the newspaper said that a synagogue had been opened in Madrid, the first for worship since the Jews were expelled in 1492. Part of the United States Mediterranean Fleet was anchored in the harbour, bearing much appreciated gifts for the poor, and when Mike talked to a couple of marines in a bar they arranged for us to join a conducted tour on their aircraft-carrier.

In February a friend asked me to pick up some money from a bank in Tangier and carry it back into Spain without declaring it, there being a strict limit on the amount of pesetas that could be brought in from abroad. I stayed a couple of days, and was glad to be speaking French at my hotel in the Zocco Chico, in spite of the landlady replying: ‘
Oui, mon enfant!
' whenever I asked a question.

In a restaurant Mike and I went to for lunch a buxom pale-faced waitress, with thin lips and a mass of black ringlets going down her back, demanded very belligerently in Spanish to know – a delicious tear on her cheek – why I had delayed so long before coming back? She as good as threw my plate of pasta on the table, and the more I denied having seen her before the angrier she became. Finally Mike talked to her at the bar, and found that she took me for her Swedish boyfriend, and even by the end of the meal she thought I still might be him.

In February I wrote ‘Once in a Weekend', the story of a young Nottingham factory worker enjoying himself in a pub on Saturday night, and waking up on Sunday morning in bed with his absent workmate's wife. The beginning went: ‘With eleven pints of beer and seven small gins inside him Arthur fell from the top of the stairs to the bottom.' To save paper I used the reverse pages of the bound copy of
The Deserters
, which novel had been out three times already and rejected, and was now put aside as unpublishable. The story of Arthur's weekend was sent to magazines in the next few months, but always came back without comment, so it was later used as the first chapter of
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
.

I felt some affection for Malaga on my last day, but was glad all the same to be leaving, having a date with Ruth in Barcelona. I arrived there early, after changing trains in Madrid, on 17th February. Unshaven and tired, having deposited my cases at the left luggage, I walked along the Paseo de Colon, turned right up the tree lined Rambla, feeling almost home again, since I had been there before, and in a narrow street of the Old Town enquired at the reception desk of a cheap hotel if they had a room.

The clerk looked wary, as if a leper stood before him. Two men in trilby hats and raincoats came up from behind and told me to come with them. On asking what they wanted one of them flashed an embossed Technicolor badge and said I was under arrest.

They walked me through the streets, then by a sentry into a grey-stoned fortress-like police station, and led me into a room to be questioned. My passport and French identity card were looked at and taken away, and an elderly man, who invited me to sit down, asked what I was doing in Spain. I told him I was a writer, and in any case was there for my health, which was candid enough, for it was plain I had done nothing they could hold me for, though at the same time I speculated on what soft of an article could be made out of the experience, or whether it would be of any use in a novel.

The only possible reason for my detention was that in the crowded night train from Madrid I had said, or perhaps only agreed with, uncomplimentary remarks about General Franco. Some coppers' nark must have reported me as soon as the train arrived at the station, and I had been followed to the hotel. No other explanation made sense, and I cursed myself for not keeping my mouth shut, having now to face the worry of being deported to the French frontier a hundred miles away.

Arrangements to meet Ruth had been going on for some weeks, both of us scraping up money to live on once we were together, though I already knew that my pension would be paid at its full rate for another year or so. She was on her way, and would expect me to meet her at the station the following day. What would happen if I wasn't there? She was coming on a single ticket, and I wasn't sure whether the money she had would cover a night in a hotel and the return fare to England.

Time went by in seemingly inconsequential talk which I suppose – looking back on it – some would call an interrogation. I was tired after several sleepless nights, and also hungry, but lost neither patience nor sense of humour, playing the ordinary tourist who was fascinated by all to do with the inexhaustibly interesting country of Spain. To a certain extent this was true, but my typewriter, which they opened and looked at closely, as well as my fluency in the language, would have made me suspect in any totalitarian country. Nor could my Colony of Gibraltar passport have endeared me to them, and acquiring it merely for the sake of Noreen's car now seemed an act of rashness. Even so, I implicitly believed that ‘The Governor of the Colony of Gibraltar requires, in the name of Her Majesty, all those whom it may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance etc' would keep me safe.

Lights came on when it grew dark outside, and there had been silence between me and my questioner for some time. I imagined that a wireless operator in a far-off room near the top of the building (aerials had been noted on glancing up at the entrance) had been told to tap out a telegram to Madrid for confirmation that my visa wasn't forged. Eventually, the reply must have arrived, for one of the men who had detained me came in with my passport and said I was free to go.

There was a slight shade of disappointment in his otherwise neutral politeness, and when I asked for my French
carte de séjour
he denied all knowledge of it. I persisted for a while, as did he with his lie, but then it seemed best to forget the matter. It was unlikely that I would live in France during the next few years, and the loss of a bit of cardboard was a small price to pay for my liberty, though I had liked the idea of having a French identity card.

Next day at the station Ruth came with the news that my story ‘The Match' had been taken by Carrefour. Ilse Steinhoff had met her at the Gare du Nord and given her twelve pounds to bring me, which more than paid for the two days we spent in Barcelona.