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Authors: George Melly

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #General, #Music, #Genres & Styles, #Jazz

Owning Up: The Trilogy (52 page)

BOOK: Owning Up: The Trilogy
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Tom’s bus had visited a different factory, which had given them just as much to drink and nothing at all to eat and, although he carried on from where the other rating had left off, it wasn’t enough to settle the sherry and he was violently sick afterwards.

After lunch I wandered through the town like a somnambulist Pied Piper pursued by a great number of children, for I had foolishly given one of them a small coin. They were dressed in rags, pitifully thin, and their hair was shaved close to their skulls, which were covered with scabs and bald patches. On returning to the coaches, Felix took a photograph of Tom and me surrounded by these waifs – all of them, I must admit, grinning like demons.

Between Jerez and Seville we slept. In a letter to my mother I explained that this was because ‘the country was flat and dull’. I suspect that even if we had been crossing the most dramatic and romantic terrain in Europe, we would have slept just the same. In the suburbs, passing a San Francisco convent, Peter suddenly and uncharacteristically burst into song:

San Francisco,

Open your golden gates,

Never a stranger waits,

Outside your door!

I took this to be a sign that he was mellowing. Felix did too. He gave me a conspiratorial wink. I was right, and with Felix and me acting as buffer states, Peter and Tom found it just about possible to co-exist for the rest of the tour.

The Spanish authorities did us pretty well for our six pounds. They put us up in Seville at the Hotel Madrid, which I found enchanting. There was a courtyard full of plants and weathered statues. The floors were tiled. Very old maids tottered about their duties wearing uniforms of an Edwardian formality, and in the corridors, on the darkly papered walls, were huge elaborately framed nineteenth-century academic pictures: lionesses suckled their young, seas of treacle crashed on cardboard rocks, paper flowers burgeoned, wooden parrots preened. Over the reception desk was the official photograph of the Generalissimo, and here and there, about the passages, statues of saints and many examples of what I had learnt to think of as ‘cet
objet-là’ –
the crucifix.

The reason I called the crucifix
‘cet objet-là’
was the result of a story Edouard had told me about a quarrel between Breton and Magritte just before Magritte returned to Brussels from Paris at the beginning of the 1930s. Magritte and his wife Georgette went to a Surrealist seance in a Montmartre café and Georgette (possibly put up to it by René, who was by no means devoid of mischief) was wearing a crucifix which had belonged to her mother. On seeing this, Breton, whose atheism was of a religious intensity, started back like a vampire in the same situation, demanding to know why and by what right Madame Magritte should come to a Surrealist meeting wearing (and he pointed towards it)
cet objet-là
! Magritte took it very coolly. It was her mother’s. What did it matter? She was fond of it. Breton persisted in his indignation. The Magrittes left the café. René’s independence of spirit was too real to yield to Breton. He remained a Surrealist certainly, but at a distance.

I loved this story and made Mesens tell me it many times but, as a convinced atheist and having no love for the sadomasochistic symbol of Christianity, I found it very amusing to refer to the crucifix at all times as
‘cet objet-là’,
although not without awareness that there was, within Breton, a certain pedantic exactitude bordering on the absurd, and that this was part of the joke.

Some time before dinner Felix and the mollified Peter came to our room and we drank lots of brandy out oftooth mugs. Things went smoothly enough for us to eat together and we discussed sexual deviation. Tom took no part in the conversation – he was sulking because he’d been forced to wear a tie – but Peter adopted the duty stallion attitude: screwing girls was all right, anything else perfectly disgusting. Felix and I spoke up for inclination. If a man falls in love with a stag that is his (and the stag’s) affair; the only wrong was to believe there was anything superior about it. What we were really doing of course was talking about our own feelings under the cover of a theoretical discussion. Not that in my case stags came into it, but the young waiter did.

By the end of the dinner we were quite drunk again and Peter’s heterosexuality had won us round sufficiently to produce general enthusiasm at the idea of a visit to a brothel. He had quite a lot of money, he said, and would stake us. We could pay him back later. We looked up the Spanish for brothel in Felix’s handy phrasebook where, rather to our surprise, it was listed, and we tumbled out into the street. After asking several men who looked as if they might visit brothels but who in fact rejected our enquiry quite crossly, we got into a taxi. The man, leering at us intermittently, drove dangerously down several tortuous side streets and dropped us outside a considerable house. We were let in by an old woman dressed in rusty black and wearing a silver
‘cet objet-là’
round her wrinkled neck. She showed us into a room with stuffed bull’s heads on the dark green walls. Around the table sat the girls, all quite pretty and chattering away like budgies. With them sat the boss, a mild-looking old man wearing a beret. He greeted us ceremoniously. The old woman quoted her prices, scribbling them down on a piece of paper to make certain we understood. Suddenly Peter announced that, after all, he had no money and the rest of us burst into relieved giggles. I suppose we would have gone through with it, but I remember being secretly delighted we didn’t have to. It took some time to convince madame that we were not, after all, punters; she clearly thought we were simply haggling and kept making reductions on her piece of paper; but finally she understood. Everyone took it quite calmly, the girls asked for cigarettes. We sat smiling at them for some time and then, with noisy bravado, left. Out in the street we all turned on Peter, hypocritically pretending to be frightfully disappointed, but soon after we found ourselves in a bar, Peter’s money mysteriously rematerialised and we drank ourselves legless on Spanish brandy.

I have no recollection of going back to the hotel but woke, with a monster hangover, to find a basin full of vomit on the surface of which floated a cigar stub and a dead carnation. While I was trying to unblock the sink with the stalk of the flower, the phone rang. ‘This is the manager,’ it said. ‘Your be’aviour last night was hay disgrace. I shall ‘ave to hask you to leave the ‘otel.’ With visions of court martial if this were to become known, I barked back with all the authority I could muster that he must be mistaken, and asked him to come and see me in my room in ten minutes. There was a giggle on the other end of the line. It was Felix. Later he confessed that he, in his turn, had been worried. So convincing was my bluster that he feared he might have got on to a Lieutenant Commander’s room by mistake.

The drain unblocked and rinsed, I took a bath and tottered down to breakfast feeling as fragile as a piece of Dresden.

‘Is this all we get?’ growled a Lieutenant at the next table as they served us coffee and rolls in the pale sunlight of the courtyard. I allowed myself a world-weary smile. The Mesens had taught me to accept the idea of continental breakfast. I didn’t even admit to myself that, like the Lieutenant, I’d much sooner have tucked into bacon and eggs.

Two sailors, looking very much the worse for wear, staggered in off the street and sat down. I knew one of them slightly and asked what he’d been up to. He leered triumphantly and slapped the back of his neck several times; a Lower Deck piece of mime representing sexual congress. The surrounding officers glared at him like figures in an H M Bateman cartoon. He suddenly realised where he was and, blushing furiously, mumbled an apology.

Tom hadn’t surfaced for breakfast but as I was on my way upstairs to pack, the Lieutenant who had complained about his breakfast called me over. I felt very worried for a moment, believing that perhaps after all Felix’s joke had some basis in reality, but it was all right.

‘Would you pass it on to the chaps,’ he said, ‘not to get so drunk today. The point is they think you’re all naval officers so don’t let the side down. We want to get the most out of it of course and have a jolly good time and all that, but yesterday several people passed out and that’s really not on. So pass it on eh, there’s a good chap.’

I said I would, having no intention of doing so. I resented his assumption that, just because I’d been to a public school, I was prepared to act as prefect to his house master. In the hall, under the photograph of the Generalissimo, I wrote postcards to Edouard and Reggie and stuck smaller versions of the same image on each of them. I’ve always been puzzled that dictators,
or
come to that kings and presidents, choose to have their portrait on stamps to be licked with the tongues and banged into place with the fists of their subjects. It doesn’t do them any harm of course, but nor is it very respectful. I gave Franco a good double thumping.

It was time to sight-see. Tom was unwashed, stale-pissed and very irritating. Peter was at his most affable. It had begun to drizzle. The orange trees glowed in the damp air. José, the guide, said we must wait for the Father who was to show us over the cathedral. I was delighted he was late, plump, and very short of breath. As soon as he was on the bus Tom announced he had to go for a piss.

‘Hurry up,’ hissed Peter, seething with irritation. I was disloyally pleased by Tom’s angry discomfiture.

When he did get back the bus wouldn’t start anyway, so we had to walk through the fine rain. Seville seemed more austere than I’d imagined, but there were statues and fountains, tiled pavements and palm trees – we were abroad all right.

Given my intransigent atheism it may come as a surprise that I was prepared to enter a cathedral, but I had rationalised that some time before, and even tried out my solution on ELT, who had given me an official (Surrealist) dispensation. Church parades apart, and I was soon to do something about that, I swore I would never go into a church for an overt act of worship; a resolution I kept until my father died in 1961 when, unlike Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, I broke my vow for my mother’s sake and, having done it once without shaking my non-faith, have been to several weddings and funerals since. At the time, I argued that churches were also museums and the repositories of treasure. To treat them as such and nothing else was no betrayal. One didn’t after all concede anything to their spiritual claims. With this rubric to still my conscience, I followed the plump little priest into the great early-Gothic edifice.

No nave leading up to the high altar, I noted with the disapproval of an ex-Protestant communicant. Private chapels all round the walls and a great cluster of them in the centre, each with a saint or
‘cet objet-là’
illuminated by a plantation of candles flickering and guttering. The statues varied a great deal; some were like Victorian wax dolls, others like Gothic carvings. There was one larger chapel in High Baroque, marble and gilt with Doric columns.

‘Here hall the ’igh class people his married,’ said the Father, showing his bad teeth. ‘General Franco’s daughter his married here.’

There were pictures in some of the chapels, but coated with heavy brown varnish and difficult to see through the railings. There was a Murillo, a painter I’ve always disliked anyway: a saint rolling up his eyes to heaven at a cherub as vulgar as Disney. Here and there were huge pop-eyed figures used in carnivals which secretly, as an ex-C of E worshipper, I found rather a shocking idea. The same was true of the information, handed out by the priest in the most casual way, that on certain feast days the choirboys, dressed in scarlet surplices, danced, accompanying themselves on castanets, on the steps of the altars. Nothing like that ever happened in Christ Church, Linnet Lane, Liverpool 17, or in the chapel at Stowe School, Bucks. It sounded extremely frivolous.

I was reassured when a bell rang, and the old cleaning women stopped scrubbing the pavements, crossed themselves and prayed devoutly until another bell released them to continue their work with renewed vigour. There was proof of Pavlovian conditioning and holy brainwashing. Despite the dancing and pop-eyed carnival grotesques there was power here and religio–political horse trading. Franco was a devout Catholic and, in exchange, the Church were good Fascists. It had stopped raining when I came out, with a keen sense of release, into the Cathedral Square. I asked Felix if I was right and he reassured me that I was. The Church, he said in his measured and considered way, was perhaps the strongest factor in winning the war for the Falangists. Peter looked irritated and puzzled. Church for him was where you went in the country or, if in London, for baptisms, weddings, funerals and memorial services. What were we making such a fuss about?

We went over to the Alcazar, built by the Moorish Emirs and later taken over by the Spanish king, who added a second storey. No crisis of conscience here. I walked confidently through the court and rooms proclaiming it self-evident that such fine proportions, such restrained and refined intricacy, could only be the fruits of an advanced civilisation. I chose to ignore, or perhaps at that time didn’t even know, that the most hideous atrocities of the Spanish Civil War had been perpetrated, admittedly in the service of Christian Franco, by his Moorish troops. The Spanish floor was a splendid junkshop of many periods. The pictures in – particular were deliciously bad. There was one enormous painting of a solemn nineteenth-century couple looking at a fountain representing a pissing horse. There was also an ornate billiard room presented by Edward VII and preserved intact.

Franco, the guide told us, had helped with the restoration of the exterior. ‘Franco, he come. He say: “What’s be’ind this wall?” They say: “Hay Moorish wall, sir.” He say: “Take down this wall”.’ I tried to find something discreditable in the story but failed.

It was nearly lunch time and Felix and I went off together to have an apéritif, This was not difficult as Tom wasn’t speaking to anyone, and Peter was still irritated by my hysteria and Felix’s don-like analysis of the links between Fascism and Catholicism. We had sat down in a square, sipping white wine, nibbling olives and little bits of raw fish, when some men approached and offered us a shoe-shine. We accepted. The sun shone. We were content. Before we were aware of it, the shoe-shine men had pulled off our heels, replaced them with new ones, and were demanding the equivalent of eight shillings each. How did the Anarchist and Socialist react to this? Did we accept it, even welcome it as a sign of the ability to revolt even under the most oppressive regime? We did not! Pretending that he had to change a note Felix hurried off to look for José. I remained, trying to appear impassive under the suspicious eyes of our opponents. It took Felix twenty long minutes to locate the guide but when he did there was an almighty rumpus, involving not only our assailants and our champion but swelling rapidly to include many passers-by, some of our party, some of theirs. Eventually José reached a compromise. We must pay four shillings each. With bad and blimpish grace we did so. On the way to lunch José launched into another of his worryingly neutral stories.

BOOK: Owning Up: The Trilogy
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