Last Days of the Bus Club (23 page)

N
OT SO LONG AGO THE IDEA
of a book group in Andalucía would have seemed about as likely as an orchid in a peat bog. But times have changed and it seems that a whole generation who would not have thought of picking up a book are now avid readers and eager to meet authors at readings and literary festivals. And it’s not a pursuit limited to the young, either, for whom Harry Potter opened the magic door. All ages are at it, and there are book groups everywhere, from the fabled cities to the humblest of
pueblos
.

When my books were first published in Spain, the invitations came in thick and fast – and, of course, at the start I went along to them all, delighted at this acceptance of my writing in my adopted home. But as any author will tell you, book events demand a whole lot of time, for not very much return. You do them for love and duty, or because something catches your eye. And so it was with the invitation from the reading group of Domingo Pérez,
a village hidden amongst the cornfields to the north of Granada. Their letter reached me at one of those times when I was casting around – as I do from time to time – for an excuse to down tools and take the day off. I looked idly at the map and realised that Domingo Pérez was near Fuente Vaqueros, the birthplace of Federico García Lorca, the great poet and dramatist murdered by Franco’s henchmen in the civil war. I could make a pilgrimage of it, turn it into something of a literary trip.

So, in the fierce heat of August, with a hot wind pouring through the open windows, I pulled out of Santa Fe and drove between fields of tobacco, maize and asparagus towards Fuente Vaqueros. The rutted road was laced by channels of the most unappetising and evil-smelling grey water in which a few frogs croaked. Very occasionally another car passed by, but it was getting on for lunchtime and nobody with any sense was out under that bleached white sky. There were some tobacco-drying sheds gathered in a huddle round the edge of the town, then some houses, not that different from the tobacco sheds, and finally the town itself.

My talk to the book group was not due to start till six, and Domingo Pérez was only an hour’s drive away. The afternoon hours stretched out ahead of me. How best, then, to honour the great poet?

I parked beneath the shade of a plane tree in the square, put my hat on and climbed out of the car. A couple of bars were doing no business; there was nobody about. There were hamburgers and pizzas on offer but it
was just too darn hot to eat, and a pizza seemed a poor way to mark a visit to Lorca’s town. I set off walking down the road, heading to nowhere in particular, ducking in and out of the shade of the plane trees. On and on I walked, beyond the main street and past a scattering of deserted tobacco sheds. Tobacco, it seemed, was the thing in Fuente Vaqueros. The sun beat harshly down on my hat and shoulders; a fly kept station with me and settled from time to time on my nose. I screwed up my eyes against the glare and trudged doggedly on. As I neared the poplar grove outside town, I turned along a track, intending to make a square of my walk back into town, but the track petered out in a farmyard and I had to go all the way back and retrace my steps. With the best will in the world, this was hardly the sort of walk to conjure up poetry.

Coming back into town, I finally came upon Lorca’s house. It was closed, predictably enough, and nearby was a bar with a woman stacking chairs and taking them inside. She told me that times were hard and there was not much custom. I could have told her that. She said she would serve me a drink, but I didn’t really fancy sitting there on my own while the chairs were stacked up around me. I thanked her and returned to the car.

Fuente Vaqueros was as dead as towns get in the Spanish summer – and I knew its neighbours would be no different. But there is something about these one-horse towns, deserted in the afternoon sun, that is oddly appealing, and I set off for the nearby Dehesas Viejas, with the idea of lunching there. I had been there many years ago with Domingo to buy barley straw and had not imagined that I might return. Domingo told me later that
his sheep wouldn’t touch the stuff. He reckoned the straw had been stored downwind of a dung-heap and been tainted with the smell. We’d been had, he said, although my sheep tucked into the straw enthusiastically – or, at least, as enthusiastically as one might tuck into a meal of barley straw.

In the bar in the plaza, a short man and his son, who had an arm in plaster, sat on stools and half-heartedly watched a huge television at top volume.

‘Do you want a
menu del día
?’ shouted the youth behind the bar.

‘Just a
ración
of something, nothing too substantial.’

‘We’ve got
carne en salsa
,’ he said.

So I had meat in sauce, and a
clara
, a shandy, and went to sit beneath an awning in the deserted plaza in order to avoid the moronic drama on the telly. As I sat down, in an excess of consideration, the youth behind the bar switched the sound through to the external speakers, in case I felt lonely eating out there all on my own with nothing to listen to.

It was the hottest hour of the day and the meat was salty and the bread like cardboard, but the
clara
was cool and sweet. I took a notebook out and thought about what I might say to the book group, but it was difficult to think straight. A dog slunk down the street; a cock crowed; a fly settled on the remains of my meat in sauce; the sun burnt through the thin awning. Sleep came stealing down upon me.

I managed to fight it off; I had some way to drive and then I would need to summon up the energy for my talk. So I left Dehesas Viejas and drove east along a minor road that wound through the cornfields. The harvest was
almost ready, the oats and barley in ear and casting that wispy sheen across the folds of the hills. In the distance on all sides were mountains, barely visible in the heat haze. The sun, still almost vertically overhead, blazed down, so that the wind that blew through the windows was laden with the scent of herbs and hot corn. Occasionally the blank whiteness of the fields was relieved by silvery green olive groves, but there was no sign as far as the eye could see of towns or villages.

I ought to come upon Domingo Pérez soon, I thought, and then suddenly there it was, hidden in a hollow, a little red-roofed town gathered along a dry river flanked by ilexes. I cruised slowly through the empty streets. It was five in the afternoon and I still had an hour to spare, so I headed up the river in search of a spot for a siesta. There was a blanket in the back of the car, and a cushion, kept there for just such eventualities and, after a few unpromising starts amongst the thistles and the burrs and thorns, I established a base in the shade beneath some willows. I lay down on my back and slipped straight into a deep hot sleep.

When I came to, I experienced one of those glorious moments of nothingness and unknowing, when for an infinitesimal span of time you are utterly liberated from your earthly identity and have no idea who or where you are. Above me there were willows, and the whispering of a warm breeze in their leaves. I squinted up at them, wondering what I was supposed to be doing here, and all too soon remembered … and, oh lawd, it was nearly six o’clock and time for the talk to the readers of Domingo Pérez. I hauled myself to my feet, brushed the burrs and thorns from my shirt and trousers, splashed my face with
a bottle of spring water, hot from the car, and headed off to do my turn.

I reflected a little on the literary life as I wound slowly among the ruts and potholes of the country road. Here I was, a writer driving through a summer afternoon in Andalucía to give a talk to a reading group. The notion seemed bizarre; I had lived for most of my life from manual work and I still find it hard to think of writing as ‘proper work’. And yet, books have played a huge part in my life. At school I rarely read more than was required, but because Margie, the love of my teenage years, lived in rural Dorset, I developed a passion for Thomas Hardy. Together, Margie and I would moon around the beautiful Wessex countryside with blanket and books, steeped in glorious adolescent lust and doomed bucolic romance. It might not be too far-fetched to think that Hardy steered me towards becoming a shepherd; modelling myself, in the way that one does when one is young, on Gabriel Oak in
Far from the Madding Crowd
. And, perhaps because I was so steeped in rural romances, I did not read any political stuff until much later. So when my contemporaries were manning the barricades in Paris in 1968, I was lolling in the long grass with Margie on the chalky downs of Cranborne Chase. I couldn’t help it; I didn’t know … and you have to read the books to know.

And then came the book that cast the die for me: Laurie Lee’s
As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning
, his irresistibly romantic account of walking through Spain in the summer of 1935, in fierce heat and on the eve of war. From
then on my path was set. I would become a bohemian, write poetry, go wandering in strange lands – and most specifically Spain. I wasn’t the only one. Laurie Lee had that effect on probably hundreds of young people back in the 1960s and 1970s.

I owed my fascination with Spain to two other books, too: Gertrude and Muirhead Bone’s
Old Spain
and Gerald Brenan’s
South from Granada
. The latter, at least in part, directed me to the Alpujarras. Brenan settled in 1919 in the village of Yegen – then several days’ mule ride from Granada – accompanied by a library of two thousand books. There he read and wrote feverishly, and entertained the likes of Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey from far off Bloomsbury.

Old Spain
I came upon by chance in Guildford, when I was labouring on a nearby farm. The town had an antiquarian bookseller called Traylens – one of those bookshops that was not obviously open to the public, with a bell you had to ring to seek entrance. As I passed by, my eye was drawn to a huge leather-bound book, propped open to show a pen-and-ink drawing of a courtyard in the Alhambra. I rang the bell and, after a respectable lapse of time, the owner opened the door and peered at me without enthusiasm. I told him I wished to look at the book in the window.

The book, which I leafed through while the antiquarian hovered by my elbow, was the travel diary of two artists wandering through Spain in the 1920s. The drawings were exquisite, both in subject and execution. So this was Spain, the land south of the Pyrenees. I had to go there and see it for myself. I turned over a few more pages, and then made a decision. ‘I’ll have it,’ I said.

‘I’m afraid this a very rare limited edition and rather expensive,’ the bookseller whispered gravely. ‘I cannot offer it for less than one hundred and twenty pounds.’ It was a staggering amount, but I was smitten. I asked if I might put down a deposit of five pounds and pay the rest in instalments over the ensuing months.

And that’s what I did. I saved all the money I could over the next six months and then returned to Traylens to claim my book. I have it to this day, and the spell it cast upon me sent me south after the harvest was in, hitch-hiking first to Dover, then Paris, then working the
vendange
down in Cognac to help pay for the journey, and finally slipping across the border at Roncesvalles and making my way down onto the plains of Navarra. That was more than forty years ago. The power of books: they have made me think what I think, live where I live, and be who I am.

Ana, too, I reflected. In fact, it may have been her declaiming poetry by the fireside in a pub in the wintry Surrey countryside on our first date that made me think she might be the right sort of girl for me.

Then, before we left for Spain, we both agonised over how we were going to support our thirst for reading in the out-of-the-way corner we’d found. This of course was long before the days of online book-buying. Our lucky break came just a few days before we set out, when we came upon the Crawley Lions’ Club fundraiser. They had stuffed a church hall with books and, wandering in, Ana and I were like kids in a sweetshop, pouncing on new titles and old favourites, tottering to and fro with stacks wedged under our chins, until at the end of the morning we had amassed a couple of hundred books. The whole lot cost
us less than twenty pounds and we loaded them into our trailer, throwing out extraneous pots and pans and lamp stands to make room.