Going abroad

I first went abroad at 12. In the cool, watery summer of 1965, my school took 120 of us to the Rhineland. We spent ten days walking in the hills around the river and visiting the cities along it: Cologne, Koblenz, Boppard, and so on. And we didn't care: all that mattered to us was that greatest of all mysteries, the Opposite Sex--the twelve-year-old English opposite sex, that is. But, lacking practice we were hopeless at forming relationships. I latched on to Susan Woods, who was in my class and appeared to be a very self-possessed girl, but, though I just about had the courage to put my arm around her shoulders, I hadn't got the nerve to kiss her. And I suppose she hadn't got the courage to take the initiative either. So that relationship died a quick but agonising death (she did, in the end, have the guts to slap me nice and hard in the face, albeit somewhat gratuitously). We came back to England none the wiser about the greatest of all mysteries. How did our parents ever manage to get engaged and married?
I next went abroad at 17. This time I went with five school-friends, two of whom were American and one, not American, was my girlfriend. The opportunity presented itself because a friend called Anne wanted some company and her parents had a new camper van and were willing to take a gaggle of us around Europe for a couple of weeks. Anne was an odd sort of girl. She was not unattractive but she had had contact lenses since an early age, and then cosmetic plastic surgery and cosmetic dentistry. In addition she liked to wear plenty of makeup. Hence she was physically perfect but totally lacking in character.
The same could not be said for her parents. Her father had fought in the jungles of Burma in the 1940s and had had his stomach shot away. Her mother had a chronic thyroid complaint that had left her fat, bald and possessed of a furious temper. Normally, those two drove like maniacs (they had a high-powered sports car), but fortunately the camper would not do more than 100 km/hr and had weak acceleration. So these two compensated by arguing, and they had a turn of phrase that was oddly hypocritical and menacing at the same time. He would accelerate across a road junction somewhere in rural France and she would say "You drove through a red light, didn't you darling?" He would reply, "Rubbish, of course I didn't, sweetheart!" She would add, "Yes you did, light-of-my-life", and he would say, "You're talking nonsense, dearest", and so it would go on. After they had prolonged their "drop dead, darling" arguments through eight countries in 14 days, I came back to England with the decidedly warped idea that marital relations--holy deadlock--were about saying the opposite to what you meant.
After a Christmas studying rock formations on the Costa del Sol of Spain, I had the opportunity, aged 20, to spend part of a summer in the Alpujarras Mountains of the Province of Granada, assisting the research of my Professor, the legendary John Thornes. In London we loaded his car with field equipment and drove down through France, across the Pyrenees and into northern Spain. Then we went straight down the middle of the country in the searing heat of July. The plains of La Mancha and Valdepe as wavered and shimmered like mirages in the boiling weather. Whether we turned the engine of the car off or kept it running, the radiator boiled over.
Eventually, we drove up into cooler climes in the Sierra Nevada, and reached Jaén, a town in which the girls were more beautiful than I had ever seen before: the gipsy and Moorish blood mingled in their veins, they had dark hair and dark eyes and were proud and wildly handsome. For a while, Professor Thornes's driving was decidedly erratic, for he could not keep his eyes on the road.
And so we arrived at Ugijar in the Alpujarras. The town was picturesque in a typically heavy, southern Spanish way. It was stiflingly hot there, solidly provincial and, for the inhabitants, boring as hell. We livened it up, the first foreigners to stay in Ugijar since the 1930s, when Bertrand Russell rented a cottage there and Virginia Wolf was his guest. We bedded down in the Pension Linares. My room had green shutters which, when raised, gave a panoramic view of the kitchen with all its attendant smells. Every time I went out to stroll around town, forty or fifty children followed me in a turbulent wake of small humanity laughing and commenting in the robust dialect of the Province of Granada. It was a form of celebrity that, aged 20, I could comfortably have done without
The peasants of Ugijar got up before dawn and went to the local bar for a negrito coffee, a couple of magdalenas cakes and a shot of Fundador brandy. On the wall of this rudimentary spit-and-sawdust hostelry was a picture of a broad-shouldered, block-headed Spaniard advertising Fundador, and it must have been placed there in the 1950s when they invented pictures that changed as you looked at them from different angles. His eyes followed you around the room, relentlessly staring at you out of his impassive face. After a couple of Fundadors the effect was decidedly unnerving.
We made field measurements from 6 a.m. until the early afternoon, when the temperature reached a steady 42 degrees. Then we came back to the Pension Linares for a tortilla, the leaden omelet of the Alpujarras, and a plate of cocido stew with chickpeas floating in it. After a siesta we went back to work at 5 p.m. when the tarantulas came out to enjoy the cool of the evening. These giant spiders, larger than one of my hands, were either green and red striped or yellow and brown, but they never did me any harm. However, I managed to get sunstroke, which made me feel awful for a day.
When meals were taken at the Pension Linares the television was always on. There was only one channel in Spain at the time and that was pretty diabolical. The main entertainment of the evening would be something like Maurice Chevalier's film 'The Lady Dances' (1935 vintage), all in black and white, with fuzzy cotton-wool sound and a dusty, frayed copy of the celluloid. It would be interspersed with the same mineral water advertisement over and over again: Es unico! Insuperabile! Once in a while, however, the regional television studio would provide an exhibition of Andalusian singing. Pedro, el de la Luna, would appear, screw up his round, peanut face and howl an agonising lament for five minutes. The Ugijarians in the room would murmur appreciatively, rather as if they were watching a sword swallower's act. On Sundays a bullfight would be televised from one of the big arenas in Toledo, Madrid or Seville. If anything went wrong with this elaborate ritual there would be a slow-motion action replay, chronicling the way the bull's horn ripped open the matador's chest and played havoc with his gold braid. It would be accompanied by a learned commentary from some Madrile o bullfighting buff.
The only time I have ever actually seen a bullfight was in Malaga and it was a pathetic affair, for the bulls refused to die, even with the swords deep between their shoulder blades and blood spurting in fountains from their noses. They had to have their jugular veins ignominiously cut. My companions were disgusted by this spectacle, but I felt merely numb and indifferent. I could not connect with it in any way at all.
As in the rest of Spain, in Ugijar the evening meal was taken very late at night. By 1 a.m. we were asleep. One night at 2 a.m. the light of my room came on abruptly and I woke to see a man in an olive-green uniform wearing impenetrable sunglasses and black leather gloves peering intensely at me while the proprietor of the Pension Linares flapped around behind his shoulders in an agitated manner. It was the Guardia Civil and our man had seen too many Hollywood films about what an intimidating secret policeman was supposed to look like. This was still the era of General Franco (who appeared on television occasionally, frail and supported by his minions). The policeman checked our papers, snarled and abruptly departed, leaving us to sleep.
So next morning we decided we had to cultivate the friendship of the Guardia Civil. There was one of them at a table outside the bar, reading El Pais. As he had a red stripe around his peaked cap he looked important, so for a week we chatted him up and bought him cups of coffee, glasses of beer and newspapers. Then we discovered why he had the red stripe around his hat: he was the chauffeur, the one who drove the car for the big-wigs!
The sanitary arrangements of the Pension Linares were somewhat rudimentary. There was a triangular bathroom which had a seatless toilet in one corner, a shower pipe in another and a washbasin in the third corner. The sewers could not cope with much, so all paper had to be thrown into a waste basket. In the summer heat it began to smell unsavoury and so someone tipped the lot down the loo and pulled the chain, which completely blocked the drains. Unfortunately, the wife of Pablo Linares, our landlord, had decided to give us a treat and had made a potato salad. As this had a greyish-green tinge I did not eat any of it, but Professor Thornes ate the lot and was violently ill during the night. Next morning the loo was full. Jim, the other assistant, and I woke up at 5 a.m. surprised at not being called to go to work. John lay in his room clutching his stomach and groaning. When we saw the state of the triangular bathroom we realised that something had to be done. So we disengaged one of the canes from the raspberry plants on the balcony and ran into the bathroom like picadors charging a bull in the arena. Jim prodded while I hung on the loo chain and all of a sudden there was a tremendous sucking noise and... a brown fountain came out of the shower tray. Jim and I looked at each other like two chemists whose elaborate experiment has backfired with potentially fatal consequences. Jim grabbed the keys to John's car and in a very few minutes we were five kilometres out of town trying to relax in the shade of an olive tree. When we finally coasted back into town and crept silently into the Pension Linares it had all been put right, presumably by the long-suffering wife of Pablo Linares.
But that was not the most traumatic episode of the trip. It was overshadowed by what happened at the town fiesta, late one night. The girls of Ugijar were spectacularly beautiful in an odd sort of way. They had the classic southern Spanish glossy manes of black hair and limpid dark eyes, but ophthalmic goitre was endemic in the area due to something about the water supply. It caused their eyes to protrude, which was attractive, but somewhat surreal. I had an uncomfortably close encounter with one of them.
At the fiesta, music began in the late evening and went on until the small hours. It started with the town's brass band, which puffed and oompah'ed its way through a series of standard works until it was drowned out by the local rock group. Fortunately, the group knew some flamenco and, such is national patriotism, they could hardly avoid playing it after they had gone through all the international pop standards. At the time, 20 years old, I was as thin as a rake. My clothes hung loosely on me. The Spartan diet of the Pension Linares had not helped either. Then the local teenagers decided to play a trick on me. I found myself thrust into a ring of people and forced to do a flamenco dance in front of a curvaceous, dark haired girl with gleaming, bulbous eyes and a rose firmly clasped between her teeth. Nearer and nearer to me she gyrated, waving her arms and clicking her fingers. I froze in embarrassment. Well, I tried to dance, but the worst of it was that I simply couldn't keep my pants up. I shall never know how I avoided outright disaster and humiliation, but it seems to me that flamenco dancing needs either a very tight belt or a good pair of braces, and I had neither.
I have been back to Spain several times since and I must admit I like the people, brusque though they are, the cuisine, heavy though it is, and the awe-inspiring landscapes. But no subsequent trip can match the one to Ugijar, for who in later life can regain what they had at 20 years of age?