by John Masters
'Here?' I said, for I had not noticed anyone in the cave. The man with the tommy gun nodded, grinning. 'How long have you been here?' I asked curiously, expecting him to answer something like, since dawn. 'Three days,' the other said.
We went on down, I shaking my head. The Guardia Civil, to which care of the frontiers had recently also been awarded, was created a century earlier, to fulfil in Spain much the same duties as the Royal North West Mounted Police used to in Canada. The good and had points of the two forces reflect the different characteristics of man and government; but this internal and self-regulated discipline of the Guardia Civil is something special in Latin countries. (The only other similar case I have met is the Carabineros of Chile.) For fourteen years I had served as an officer of a magnificent volunteer army. We had a hard time getting the men to keep their arms and accoutrements in that sort of condition, and stay fully alert on two-hour sentry shifts, even with the men in large bodies and shoals of sergeants and corporals to keep discipline taut. How the Guardia Civil did it, working always without supervision, in twos and threes, in conditions made for idleness and corruption, I don't know. We had seen already that they were not popular in Spain, but then nor was General Franco. In both cases the word was not 'popular' but 'essential', and this most Spaniards glumly recognized as a fact, as long as Spain remained rural, poor, violent... and Spanish.
From the Ordesa we went east. The train, an occasional express, hurried through a station whose name I just managed to catch. I told Barbara that we had just passed through Retrete. The next station was also called Retrete, and I asked our neighbour whether there were two stations in the town. After some repetitions and double takes he burst out laughing and said, No, senor, nor in Caballeros, either!' He explained that in Spain retrete, not escusado or chicago, was the most commonly used word for 'toilet'; the place was also called the W.C. or water (pronouced "Vattair').
After three days in Andorra we returned to Barcelona. Here we experienced our first corrida de toros. We had not learned that the farther away you sit the more the cruelty of the performances obscures the courage and the colour; for when you are close those horns menace you too, those bright blades flying through the air could slice into you, the dust and blood and sweat are acrid in your nostrils, and it is in your ears that the bull grunts as he strikes at the cape, and the running banderillero pants and gasps as he hurls himself over the fence. From farther back it is impersonal, antiseptic, and unpleasant. We had done our homework and knew what we were going to see, and we saw it. Our impressions were predictable and not worth recording, except perhaps that nothing prepares one for the combined strength and lightness of foot of the bulls. They run like cats on hoofs tiny for their size, turn and toss their great heads like a woman her hair.
Compared with them the beef bull is like an overloaded farm cart alongside a tank. The power of the fighting muscles on the neck is fantastic. One of the bulls was noticeably larger than the others, with a correspondingly large hump of muscle. When the picador came on, this bull charged the horse with a certain deliberation, not hurrying, and not jabbing. Ignoring the picador's lance now in his withers he carefully planted his forelegs, snuggled his horns in place against the horse's belly rug, and very slowly, like a circus strong man doing a stunt with barbells, lifted horse and rider over his head to land them in a tumbled mess behind him. Then he walked away. The load his neck muscles had lifted without a snatch or pause must have been about 1,600 lb.
From Barcelona we went to Lloret de Mar on the Costa Brava, and I confirmed what I was already beginning to suspect. Those strange white things, rather chicken-like to the taste, which I kept meeting in my paellas and often ate at bars, were squid. I had never felt better; so what of my allergy? I had to give it up, the only one I ever possessed. (I learned later that what I had suffered from during those days of the flaking skin was scarlet fever.)
From Lloret we went to Gerona and so back to England; and we saw many lovely things and met many wonderful people, but formed an opinion that Cataluna was not our personal dish. The people were noticeably more anti-Franco, as Sergeant Manolo had said, but also noticeably less Spanish, less possessed of those remarkable qualities and traits which had enamoured us of Aragon. Nor were their mountains to be compared with the central Pyrenees, and as for the Costa Brava! Busloads of echt Deutsch direct from Stuttgart goose-stepped down the water-front at midnight singing beer-hall songs; bars were full of alcoholic British expatriates, who hadn't learned a word of Castilian in ten years, complaining about Spanish laziness and inefficiency; the fearful promise of these phenomena being multiplied a hundredfold come summer... but after all, we were never going to know all Spain. We already had a little part firm in our grasp and there would be others. We could leave Cataluna.
So the panting engine bore us at last to Port Bou and the frontier. The black maw of a tunnel gaped at the northern end of the platform. Through the tunnel lay France, England, and Rockland County. But here we had found a second home and a second folk-family, a family of amazing diversity in music, outlook, background, culture, food, yet one in generosity and independence. The laws their temporal and spiritual rulers set for them were brutal (and sometimes so were they) — but seldom put into literal effect. More usually, with a wink and a finger set beside the nose, it was Se obedece, pero no se cumple.' (We obey, but the thing doesn't get done.) Everything about Spain was a matter of form, of inherent shape, not of decoration. It was the quality of the fish that mattered, not the sauce, for there often was none. The land was stark and uncompromising, set in unadorned architectural masses under the snow and sun, and the people stood as severe and hard-edged against it. The cities rose like exclamations from the rocks and ended as suddenly, with no echo. It was a country that showed a hostile face to strangers, but oh, the rewards of going on, with love: the thyme on the moorland wind, the lavender and the ice-cold spring hidden in the rocks, the fat partridges in the wheat, the girl singing by the well, the stone-like clarity of Castilian heard in a lonely place, and jotas sung in the market place, wine drunk in the whitewashed cellar...
The train jerked into motion and the spring sun vanished as we bored into the mountain. We said to each other, Volveremos. We will return.'
Chapter Twelve
Laurence Pollinger told me that Sir Alexander Korda wanted to discuss some film ideas with me. I went to 146 Piccadilly and a retired captain, Royal Navy, ushered me into the presence. Korda's office was long and gracious, with french windows at the end opening on to a walled garden. Beyond, the traffic hummed and growled up Park Lane. Korda, who resembled a taller and more worldly Einstein, came forward to greet me. We shook hands, beginning a friendship which lasted till his death. He was everything a movie producer is supposed not to be — highly educated, polite, intelligent, and sensitive. He could charm money out of backers as easily as he could charm Winston Churchill, King George VI, Marcel Pagnol, and Laurence Olivier — to name a few of his personal friends. The only 'movie' thing about him was his strong Hungarian accent, of which he was ashamed, though proud of his Hungarian origins. He told me that his favourite among his own films was The Scarlet Pimpernel; 'Everybody to do with that was Hungarian,' he said, his eyes gleaming behind his glasses, 'The writer — Baroness Orczy. The producer — myself. The director — my brother Zoltan. The art director — my other brother, Vincent. And the star...'
'The star?' I said, puzzled. 'I thought Leslie Howard was the star.'
'He was! Alex crowed, 'And Leslie Howard was Hungarian! You didn't know that, did you?'
He talked of growing up in a place that sounded like Purtarol Poparol (I never did find out how it was spelled), where his father was agent of a great estate, and the family were the only Jews in the village. He told me why he became English: 'I came from Europe,' he said. 'There was the depression, and Hitler rising. No one in Europe trusted anything any more — not their governments, nor their banks, nor their leaders, nor themselves. Then I came here, and I was buying ci
gars at a little shop off Piccadilly — I still buy my cigars there — and, while I was paying for them, I asked the man what he thought about the depression, the chance of devaluation, or of the banks failing... I was very nervous very jumpy, myself, I tell you, Jack. And the man said, 'Well, I don't know much about that, sir, but there's one thing certain. The pound will always be worth 240 pennies.'
I walked out in a daze. How could anyone be so stupid?
Yet these people had beaten the Germans, and the French over and over. This was the most stable country in the world. Gradually I began to feel better. If everyone really had such confidence, then the pound really would always be worth 240 pennies. I stopped being nervous, and began to try to think like an Englishman.' He was very proud and grateful for his British citizenship, and his knighthood.
He told me his favourite Hungarian proverb: if you have a Hungarian for a friend you don't need any enemies. But if anyone, except perhaps Merle Oberon, ever applied that one to Alex himself, I never heard of it.
He wanted me to write a successor to The Thief of Baghdad, an enormously successful film he had made before the war, with Sabu as star. He said, 'There are hundreds more stories in the Arabian Nights than we used in that film, than most people have ever heard of. Take this —' he gave me a complete set of the Mardrous-Mather edition of The Thousand Nights and a Night — 'Go away, read it, mark the stories that interest you, and that you think you can link into a continuous new one, then come back and we'll have another talk. I'll fix the money with your agent. And your expenses. About a hundred pounds a week, I should think.' He was showing me to the front door. He opened it, shook my hand and then muttered, 'My God, look at that!'
I turned, and began to laugh. Korda was staring at a lean, stooped old man standing outside on Piccadilly. He was wearing an off-black suit of 1880 cut, the tight trousers strapped under black boots, the coat long‑frocked. Instead of a collar and tie he wore a white hunting stock with gold pin. His hat was a curly-brimmed grey bowler, and his long face was screwed up double while he tried to read something on a bit of paper held an inch from his eye, through a monocle held on a thick black ribbon.
'He looks as though he's escaped from Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities,' Alex said.
I said, 'Left over from them. That's Ned Haines, squire of Wilsford, near Devizes. I ate sixteen sausage rolls at a children's Christmas party at his house when I was twelve.' I said goodbye to Korda and went down to greet Ned.
He had been visiting Apsley House (the Duke of Wellington's London house, now also a museum) almost next door, and was trying to read instructions someone had written down as to how he was to reach his next destination. He was almost blind and as I read the instructions for him I noticed that nearly everyone who passed us stared, gaped, and giggled at the caricature figure beside me, neighing away in his high old-fashioned accent with plenty of doncherknows and dear old chappies; but none of them knew that on the wall of his study there hung a cowboy hat, chaps, spurs, lariat and a full set of Western tack. He had spent two years as a wrangler in Wyoming, as a young man. Since he was incapable of speaking or acting any other way than he always did, my imagination had always boggled — and still does — at the picture of him in those days. I see him in Western gear, monocle in the eye, addressing another cowhand in the Last Chance Saloon: 'I say, old chap, would you awfully mind if I asked that gea-al you're holdin' for a dance...?'
On the writing front, although the Wingates never actually came right out and said so, it was becoming clear that they meant to insist on their right of censorship of any book written about Orde with their assistance, so I abandoned that project. In truth, I already had on my plate all I could manage, for Bhowani Junction now had to share my time with The Thousand Nights and a Night.
All around was England, where the beer was warm, and tasted like horse-piss, ice was doled out grudgingly on a teaspoon, when available, no one knew how to make a decent Martini, and the language and I seemed to have parted company. At one London restaurant the more I complained that the Martinis were not dry enough, and sent them back for treatment, the worse they became. I finally found out that every time I asked for a drier Martini they put in more bitters. In more was I changed than in my garments.
Barbara had a joyful and tearful reunion with Liz and Mike, and arranged to see them again next year, either in England or America. We also visited my father's mother, then aged ninety-two and still bathing every day in the icy English Channel. She was an old gorgon, a devout Roman Catholic who equally despised Frogs, Jews, natives, niggers, and the lower classes. My father hated her, my mother feared her, and I, when aged eleven, had run away from her house during the school holidays, but she had sat unmoved when German bombs hit the cinema she was in, she then eighty-four, and afterwards helped carry out the dead and wounded; and she had raised seven children in Indian jungles and — worse — British suburbs, with little money and less help from her husband. She plainly had guts. I was not to see her again.
Lyme Regis was as pretty as ever, and larks still climbed in ecstasy to the sky on the Dorset Downs. The prehistoric Long Man still proudly waved his outsize instrument over Cerne Abbas, and they still drew good scrumpy in the saloon of the Three Cups, though G. K. Chesterton, whom I had seen there when I was a boy, had gone. The kids regained their English accents and no longer wore their cowboy hats... and we secretly began to calculate how many days were left before our ship sailed for America.
The Arabian Nights tale came along nicely and Alex Korda wanted me to stay an extra month to work on it. He promised he'd send us all back first class on the Caronia instead of cabin class on the Queen Elizabeth. Reluctantly I agreed. Sixty days more, instead of the thirty we had just worked out.
I went to the Chindit reunion dinner and sat at the high table next to Bernard Fergusson, a fellow brigade commander in 1944. I listened glumly while he told the gathering that one of our Chindit heroes was in serious trouble with the law and of course it was all a mistake and the hero's name would soon be cleared: glumly, because my cousin, an army lawyer, had prepared the case and in view of the hero's reputation had cross-checked and triple checked every piece of evidence and every legal nicety. There was in his mind no doubt that the hero had done what he was accused of doing, (as the courts later agreed). I felt glummer yet because Fergusson's speech was precisely not what we ought to be saying to the hero, which was: 'Look, even if you've done this thing, it will make no difference to us, we still admire you, and will help you.' — which some of us were able to do later, when the thunderbolt fell.
I was not in a very good temper when Fergusson, who was never one of my favourite people, sat down and turned to me with a 'witty' anti-Americanism, based, as usual, on a profound antipathy to the American ideal and a profounder ignorance of the American scene. But I should not have been so particularly curt with Fergusson, for the English air was thick with anti-Americanism. The ordinary people didn't particularly love the Yanks (or any other foreigners) but they were reasonable about it, friendly, and good natured. It was the upper class, the old-school-tie brigade, who sniped and snapped in private and to the newspapers, though being perfectly polite to individual Americans. Their feelings also were understandable: on the 'bad' side — envy, ignorance, and a sense that America owed her position to staying out of wars and making money, while England bore the brunt: and on the 'good' side — legitimate doubts raised by such farces as the Caryl Chessman case, Eisenhower's cowardice in the face of McCarthy, wide support for MacArthur's messianic delusions, Jim Crow redivivus. When all this is festering under the skin of people who have ruled the world for a century and a half, and who believe in the deepest recesses of their being that everything British is best, the resultant emotions can be quite strong, and bitter. Since I spoke English-English and occasionally wore a Gurkha Brigade or Old Wellingtonian tie, the evidence of my Brooks Brothers suit was not correctly read, and I received several lectures on the horrors of America. No, the speakers had never been
there, thank God! I.ife in America, where American achievements and motives were questioned to an extent then unusual in other countries, had made me consider the nature of patriotism. I graded it into three categories: a boy could be proud of his country's things — its Rolls-Royces and Golden Gate Bridges: a youth could be proud of his country's men — its Nelsons, Napoleons, Lincolns: but for a grown man the only proper object of pride was his country's ideas; what, of value, it had given to mankind. Most British newspapers were still in the 'things' stage, and fate played a ghastly trick on them in this year of 1952.
The first commercial jet to fly was the British De Havilland Comet. By 1952 one or two examples were flying on B.O.A.C.'s routes, but the plane had not been certified by the U.S. Federal Aviation Agency, without which it could not fly to America or be bought by American airlines. The nation was very proud of the Comet — a genuine first — and the newspapers dropped hints and made accusations to the effect that the dirty Yanks were delaying certification until an American jet was ready, in about a year, in order to do Britain out of dollar sales. I pointed out, when the subject was raised that the Comets I and II, then flying, were not intended to cross the Atlantic and indeed could not do so; it was the Mark II that was going to be used trans-Atlantic. As the Mark III had not yet flown at all, the F.A.A. could hardly be expected to certify it. In vain: the outcry continued... until a fatal flaw in the Comet I's construction resulted in aerial break-up of three of them in quick succession, with great loss of life. The 'dirty Yank' theme ended, without apology, but only until another suitable grudge arose. Given the chauvinism of many newspapers., these were not hard to find. Attacks on 'Americanization' of the language were popular; no one pointed out that, powerful the U.S.A. was, it could not compel Englishmen to speak American unless they wanted to. If American words and phrases were coming into common use it was because English people found them good, and because the genius of the English language will take and absorb anything it needs, and (unlike the Daily Express) considers no source unclean — but then the Daily Express's contacts with the English language were always minimal.
