~
One year at Easter the four of us went to Ronda, to witness the Semana Santa parades of religious figures. Semana Santa is when the men of Spain wear those uniforms we associate with the American Klu-Klux-Klan: a robe with a pointed hood that hides the whole face. I’m sure these one-colour burkas must have come out of the Inquisition. The ‘Brotherhoods’ who wear them carry heavy, ornate platforms on which sits a statue of Mary or Jesus, or both. Or they follow behind with chains or crosses. I confess to a certain ignorance of the details. The statues are carried from the church and through the streets, sometimes by sixty or more men, the platforms being fashioned of heavy metals and hardwoods. Sometimes the parade is silent and at other times a band or simply a drum is used to time the slow march through the town. Some parades are made up of hundreds of men, and perhaps women, wearing their mono-coloured pointy-hooded gowns with slitted eyeholes.
Ronda is located on a plateau and the two parts of the town are separated by a chasm several hundred feet deep. A bridge joins the two halves under which falcons glide and choughs have their nests. We have had the excitement of witnessing a Bonelli’s eagle soaring above and through through the gorge. On the darker side, we’ve been told that during the Spanish Civil War one side or the other tossed their enemies off that bridge into the chasm. It is not an image I like to dwell on, quite apart from being bewildered by the inhumanity of the act.
Rob, Sarah, Annette and I watched the evening Semana Santa parade through the streets, then went to our hotel thinking all the religious festivities were over for the day. We said goodnight around 11 o’clock and I climbed into the hotel bed and fell fast asleep.
At around one o’clock I was woken by an excited wife.
‘Go to the window.’
‘What?’
‘Look out of the window.’
I did as I was asked and there below was a completely silent Semana Santa parade filing past the hotel: a long, colourful snake of hooded marchers swathed in robes. There were those wearing chains and those carrying heavy crosses. It was a very sinister scene, with hundreds of figures solemnly treading through the night streets. They all looked down or straight ahead, neither glancing to the right nor to the left, nor up at the buildings or sky. The sight sent a shiver down my spine. I was witnessing a ritual that had been going on for centuries, which to my understanding was steeped in secret rites and cryptic practices.
Annette picked up the phone and said, ‘I’ll ring and tell Sarah and Rob to look out of their window.’
The next morning I heard the tale of a half-asleep Rob, who had stumbled to the window and whipped back brass-ringed curtains along a hollow brass rail, thereby creating a great deal of noise. Down in the street several hundred people in hoods indignantly jerked their heads up to stare at the man who had created the disturbance. There, spotlighted by the hotel’s bedside lamp, was a naked science fiction writer.
~
On another visit to the same town we took Rob and Sarah to the Pileta cave, ten miles north of Ronda. This site is rarely visited by tourists, being off the beaten track and poorly advertised. It’s owned by a local farmer who has fitted an iron grill over the entrance and he alone holds the key to the rusty padlock. A telephone call is necessary to ask the farmer to meet you at the cave and when you enter you are in for a real experience. I have never been to Lascaux but I have recently seen Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams a film of the Chauvet cave and its astonishing hoard of prehistoric paintings.
The pictures on the walls of Pileta are not as rich and numerous as those in Chauvet, but they are amazing none the less. The cave is narrow most of the way and one is uncomfortably close to the walls that wind through the side of the limestone mountain. Annette and I had been there once before and were not disappointed with Rob’s expression and reaction when he saw the finger-paintings of bison, goats, horses and other creatures in black, ochre or red, accompanied by one giant fish. The walk through the cave, walls still drizzling with water and pools every so often, takes around an hour to cover a half-mile. The farmer’s colourful English adds to the experience as he explains:
‘This painting five-times more old than Egypt pyramids.’
Some of these Paleolithic pictures were indeed painted over 20,000 years years ago.
‘This is terrific,’ Rob told us, his eyes alive with interest. ‘What a place!’
I believe Sarah was just as impressed, but there probably weren’t any story-lines beginning to buzz around in her head.
~
Granada is of course home to the Alhambra, the Big Red, which is one of the world’s most beautiful buildings. We also went to Cordoba and Seville together, both cities with amazing architecture. Sarah drove within the city limits both times, since I am now extremely wary of Spanish towns. The narrow streets, often two-way, mean backing into tight alleys to allow traffic to pass. Once, I drove down a street the width of a motorway hardshoulder in a mountain village and before long the walls of the houses were brushing my wing mirrors. I had to ask a woman to open her front door so that I could edge the car back round and escape. All the occupants of the houses came out to watch and give advice as the sweat rolled down my brow. I hate driving in Spain. You need to be born there to be able to do it without losing your head. On the other hand, if your name is Sarah, you could be a gifted driver.
In 1998 we had a furious storm in Spain. Annette and I were lying in bed listening to the hurricane blowing tiles off the roofs and hurling loose bins and other material at the walls of houses. Whenever an object struck our apartment wall Annette would say, ‘Is that something we ought to investigate?’ and I, from under my sheets would answer, ‘No, that’s just a dustbin,’ or whatever. Suddenly, around one o’clock there was a huge crash and the whole room shuddered. ‘Is that . . .?’ Annette began. ‘Yes,’ I interrupted. We got up and looked out of the window. A huge pine tree which stood on the bank between our house and that of our Spanish neighbour, Señor Carasco, had come crashing down. It had missed our bedroom by inches but had crushed Señor Carasco’s kitchen extension and part of his bedroom. Luckily he was not in residence at the time, though he did come down the next day and wailed.
At the previous Community Meeting, we had been informed that the insurance company wanted several of the trees removed from the property because they were considered dangerous. The tree outside my apartment, the giant pine that had fallen on the Granadan’s holiday home, was one of those which had needed to come down. However, the persuasive Señor Carasco alone had argued against removing the pine, as he said he loved the natural world.
‘You extranjeros,’ he said at the meeting, ‘have lots of wonderful trees in your home countries and we have very few in Andalusia, so we need to keep what we’ve got.’
Everyone appreciated his point of view and the tree was given a reprieve.
Naturally the insurance company gave poor Señor Carasco the finger.
That’s what you get for loving the environment.
~
In 1997 I was contacted by a guy called Mike Stone. Now, there have been a few Mike Stones around, one of them being a convicted murderer, so naturally I was slightly wary about answering his unsolicited letter. However, other prisoners who’ve written to me have always had to use headed notepaper bearing the words Her Majesty’s Prison and there were no such words on Mike’s notepaper. He turned out to be one of the nicest guys I’ve met and selflessly offered to assist me in getting my books read by a wider readership. Mike was interested in becoming a writer himself and liked my own approach to the imaginative genres. He began producing and editing a fanzine which centred around my work. It was called Spiral Words, after my story and novel, Spiral Winds. Over the next few years twelve of these very well produced little magazines came out and if they didn’t expand my readership, which they may very well have done, they certainly boosted my confidence and helped translate enthusiasm into energy.
Today, Mike (along with a hugely energetic man
called Lloyd Butler) helps in managing my website. Mike is now a published writer himself and going on to great things. His first collection of four novellas Fourtold (neat title that, eh? You get it – ‘Foretold’?) is an excellent debut for a young man immersed in the mysterious waters that I have swum in for most of my life, that of supernatural genre writing. He will go far and no one deserves it more.
~
In the late 1990s I was contacted by Stephen Baxter and Ian Watson, two science fiction writers. They had been asked to produce a book by a zoo guy named John Regan who was intent on raising awareness regarding the fact that the Asian elephant was heading for extinction. There are quite a few Asian elephants alive today, it’s true, but they live for up to eighty years and many of them are elderly. Asian elephants need to be in a herd before they will breed and most of them are single, being used for work on moving felled trees and similar labour. Chester Zoo was building a new elephant house which they intended to populate with a small herd of Asian elephants, hoping that the females would produce young.
Steve and Ian asked me to join them and we devised a plan for publishing an anthology of elephant stories, the proceeds of which we would put towards the elephant experiment. Each of us wrote an elephant story and then we tried selling the idea to publishers, who almost to a body rejected the project. We continued to pursue the idea, Ian and Steve doing far more work than me, without any tangible results. John Regan was appreciative of the effort though and was instrumental in getting us invited on a private tour of parliament by a sympathetic MP.
It was evening when we went, the place being virtually empty, and we were shown over the nation’s political engine room. I couldn’t believe how small the rooms were, both the Commons and the Lords. They must have crammed the MPs into those Houses. Clearly you have to be thin to be in politics. (There must be a special dispensation for Ann Widdecombe.)
When the new elephant house was ready, we three and our families were invited to the opening day. Ian unfortunately couldn’t come but I went along and met with Steve, taking my son’s family, including of course two of my grandchildren. Alex and Chloe had a fine time being treated like VIPs, the highlight of which was a buffet lunch, the sort of meal that Alex dreamed of as a teenager.
Since then the zoo’s breeding herd of eight elephants have produced five calves: Tunga, Sundara, Raman, Nayan and Jamilah. Quite a success story. Ian, Steve and I were also sent copies of a volume entitled The Great Indian Elephant Book – An Anthology of Writings on Elephants in the Raj edited by Dhriti K Lahiri-Choudhury. It’s a lovely looking work and I’m only sorry that we three did not have the same success in producing our own elephant book, though I have since sold my individual story and have hopes the other two did the same.
~
The late nineties was a bit of a whirl. Not already mentioned are the week-long visits in which we went to Jordan and saw the amazing rock-carved city of Petra and swam in the Dead Sea, went to the Oberammergau passion play with Trish and John Spiers, and returned to Cyprus for the first time since our RAF days only to find that the house we lived in during the 1960s, which was then on the wasteland at the edge of Limassol, was now in the centre of town. We also returned to Malaysia couple of times and visited Brunei. There might have been one or two other brief visits, but these are those that stood out.
~
The telephone rang at 3 o’clock in the morning. It had rung around that time on three or four occasions in my life before then. A call in the small hours is never, ever good news. I picked up the phone and said, ‘Yes,’ my mind still fogged with sleep, waiting to find out whether the news was just bad, very bad or terrible. On such occasions I just prayed it was not a grandchild or one of my kids in trouble.
‘Garry, it’s Ted. Your mother died an hour ago.’
I stood there still doped with sleep. I had seen my mother just a few hours before and had left her at about nine in the evening. She had been labouring for breath in a hospital bed, reaching for the nebuliser every ten minutes. Mum had smoked heavily all her life, until three years ago, then when the doctor told her she was killing herself, she stopped. Her stopping smoking did not arrest the emphysema and her air passages had been closing down slowly ever since. I had thought she would make it through the night, perhaps another week, or even a month, since we had been through a stage like this a couple of times before.
‘Thanks, Ted,’ I said, after a long while. ‘Thanks for telling me. I’ll be round in the morning. Are you okay?’
‘I’ll be all right, now. She went peacefully. I was holding her hand. She told me she loved me.’
Dear old Ted. He had always come second to my father and I don’t think she had told him many times that she loved him. Perhaps this was even a first? My father died of cancer and a year after mum married Ted, he developed cancer himself and after an operation had lost the ability to give her anything but a celibate marriage. He was only in his thirties at the time, my mum in her forties. It must have been hard for both of them but they remained together. There must have been love for that to happen and a lot of it but my mother had lost a young husband and son within a short period of time and that had damaged her. Now she had gone to join her first husband and I know Ted was quietly jealous of what my mother and father had shared, because he did not want them to share the same grave. He had said as much to me.
I miss my mum, a great deal. I still went to her on occasion for advice and she always made me feel special. A son remains a boy to his mother. I had an enormous amount to thank her for. When I was growing up she instilled in me the idea that no one was better than me. That I could do anything if I put my mind to it. Exams. A good job. Fame and fortune. She never measured my ability and calculated my expected achievements by it. She just perceived a glow that without a doubt was not there. Certainly I was pretty poor at school and showed little promise of doing anything of note. Yet my mum made me believe I was capable of all things and was as worthy as any man that walked the Earth. Praise was showered on me, for not very much actually, but heck, such treatment fills you with confidence in yourself and you really do think you’re a prince. When we were kids, my brothers and I used to pick wild flowers for her, buy her presents when we had any money, brush her hair for her standing behind her chair. We did it purely to see her eyes sparkle with delight. She received things from her sons that made her know she was treasured and she gave as good as she got. She had a white-hot temper, was like an avenging witch at times, was not a great cuddler or even hugger and she wacked us hard when we were bad. But all three boys, Derek, Ray and me, we loved the heck out of her.
I hate crematoriums. They are soulless, dark cells of misery which give mourners nothing in the way of comfort. A bonfire out in the open would be much better. Throw the corpse on a pile of flaming wood and send it off in the natural world. I hope I die in the open countryside, in a green field on a warm summer’s day. That would be a good death. Then I will be gone and you can do whatever you like with the rest, because its purpose will be over and nothing of me will remain. Play Ashokan Farewell for me and then bury or burn the rest without anyone there, though I’d like a memorial service in a Quaker Meeting House. I won’t have gone anywhere, because there’s nowhere to go, but it’s nice now to think that I’ll get some good reviews after I’ve left the world. Nobody would dare to give an author a bad review at his own funeral.
24. Tattingstone, Suffolk
By 2001 I had had enough of mowing two acres of grass and digging out blocked ditches. Annette too was ready for a move, being close to retirement. I had spent several years in Felixstowe as a child and had fond memories of it, despite being flooded out. Annette had a friend, Mary Jones, who lived on the Shotley Peninsula between the Orwell and Stour rivers and we had visited her many times. We loved the area – Mesopotamia I called it – and decided to move there. Shaney and Mark were now in Canada. Rick’s family had gone to live in the West Country. Annette’s brother and his wife Valerie had bought a derel
ict farmhouse in the Catalan region of Spain and had transformed it into a beautiful residence with olive and carob trees. They moved there permanently. Annette was close to retirement, so it was a good time to move. We sold Wychwater and bought a small flat in Rochford and a house in Tattingstone village, Suffolk. The three-storey terraced house was perfect for our needs. One of 30-odd in a refurbished hospital that had started out life as a workhouse in 1766. It was a lock-up and leave home, just right for travellers.
The old, unconsecrated graveyard containing paupers’ plots, are opposite the building across a narrow road. The ground there now belongs to the Suffolk Wildlife Trust and is a small wood where hundreds of daffodils appear in the Spring. Here lie the unmarked graves of the residents of the workhouse who had died in poverty and whose relatives were unable to afford a churchyard tomb. Remembering that my grandfather was born in a workhouse in Dorset I have often wondered what happened to my great-grandmother. Perhaps she ended up in such a grave, which though distressful enough to believers in former centuries, seems now a pleasant, peaceful resting place and one I would not mind myself when the time comes to find a spot.
Our gated community numbered just over 30 homes. We had come from a detached cottage with two wild acres. In Tattingstone we were in a terraced house with a small front garden and a postage stamp back garden surrounded by a six-foot high wall. There are formal gardens around a fountain in the common square. However, outside our back door lies the long narrow reservoir called Alton Water, a lake surrounded by beautiful countryside. The sea is ten miles away at Felixstowe, Ipswich four miles to the north, and the pretty town of Woodbridge on the Deben River just twenty minutes away.
The village itself is a friendly place and we were welcomed almost the moment we set foot in it. There are incomers and incumbents here. Some villagers live in the houses in which they were born. Many of the former have come from the USA, Holland, Germany, South Africa, Norway and all over the UK. It’s a mixture of cosmopolitan and firmly-rooted residents who for the most part love the place. We made friends straight away with Ben and Ruth Connor, also new to the village. Ben is an expert with any practical building work, while Ruth is one of those personal assistants that keep men like Alan Sugar sane.
On My Way to Samarkand: Memoirs of a Travelling Writer Page 37
