In Tortosa, their progress was impeded by a ‘shocking assembly of carts: tiny donkey carts; carts drawn by one or two mules tandem – even three or one horse and a donkey in front: carts with barrels slung deep, carts with hoods and bodies made of wickerwork and carpet, all milling slowly about Tortosa.’
Nor did the Guardia Civil please Patrick: ‘nasty, impudent, overdressed, over-armed fellows, with a tin-god expression all over their faces’. However, as Patrick tended to view the British police with almost comparable distaste, his disparagement need perhaps not be taken over-literally. In any case, before long he encountered cause to moderate his view: ‘The Guardia Civil are strange souls: one whom we asked the way grew excited: he had the appearance of a man about to have a fit. Others seem normal enough, and even cheerful.’
Although largely apolitical by nature, Patrick, like many young people in the Thirties, had nurtured sympathy for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War, and corresponding distaste for the regime of General Franco. While he never altered this view, he was frequently obliged to adjust his condemnation of the regime to the languid realities of everyday life in contemporary Spain.
He was greatly intrigued by remarkable contrasts with France, which struck them at almost every turn of their exploration. It used to be said that ‘Europe stops at the Pyrenees’, a dramatic contrast which both frustrated and intrigued Patrick:
I have not mentioned the countryside at all. There hardly is any, properly speaking. The country and the village are English inventions. Here there are plantations, barren stretches, small towns. There is something wrong with it all. I wish I could put my finger on it. The little towns and their inhabitants are shockingly rude, hard and brutal.
At the same time, Patrick admired the ‘vast plantations of olives (magnificent ancient trees on pink and grey soil) and carobs, and there are charming orange groves – much lower bushes than I had expected, much closer together and carrying twenty times as much fruit – as well as patches of good-looking plough.’
The people likewise appeared to belong to a distinct, all but timeless world. Stephen Maturin’s Catalan homeland would not be difficult to evoke, after glimpsing such vignettes as when they encountered ‘between Tortosa and Vinaróz the two old tall men in blue knee breeches, one smoking a pipe, with a black handkerchief round his head and white stockings, the other in blue stockings: Catalan espadrilles worn as far as here … gipsies, barefoot, with long gold earrings.’
Continuing southwards, it became apparent how few houses in the country possessed piped water: ‘We have found the reason for the amphorae. They are for taking water to houses, and they have no bottoms because they never stand up – always in baskets or stands. A terrible number of houses have no water. There is a cart with a barrel and a great many cruches: that is the mains.’
At Sorbas they came upon a community apparently living in caves tunnelled out of the soft rock. It being Sunday, thousands of them were moving along the road in their best clothes, ‘girls (some of them) with flowers in their hair, a young man bicycling with a guitar’.
Undisguised curiosity evinced by crowds in the town at the strangers’ arrival in their midst predictably angered Patrick, but the kingdom of Granada delighted him, with its exotic Moorish castles and ‘charming little red houses with red tiled roofs’.
Patrick’s childhood fascination with the exploration of exotic lands was constantly gratified. Arrived at the summit of a pass south of Valencia, ‘we could see an enormous moon-like country bare light green-gray rock in dusty white soil, jagged, arbitrary mountains in all directions, and below us a deep valley, terraced in swirling curves.’
Now, on the coast east of Malaga, they came upon Motril:
with its Moorish castle, perhaps the finest we have ever seen. And the backward view of Motril and the great headland beyond it, with the sky and the sea (lateen sails upon it) bluer than one can describe, with bits of the Sierra Nevada in the lefthand corner of the field of vision, that is a view, all right.
At Gibraltar they were briefly separated from Buddug, who was placed in quarantine in kennels at the end of the town. The friendly policeman who escorted them there also showed them HMS Vanguard lying in dock, and then took them to a pleasant hotel: ‘That evening we walked about until we were quite done up. It is an astonishing place: Spain still predominates, in spite of a very strong element of pre-war England with a dash of India.’
Unconscious seeds of Patrick’s future literary creations were being sown. He found Vanguard ‘very rosy and youthful’, admired the Georgian houses, and noted with approbation ‘Cheap Jack and Cheap John’s Stores’, together with Oxford marmalade.
While staying on the Rock, Patrick and my mother paid a brief visit to Tangiers. Crossing the strait, they saw dolphins, while ‘A kind mariner pointed out Cape Trafalgar.’ On disembarking, they found themselves in a world still more enticingly exotic than Spain: ‘We wandered up a street where everybody seemed to be going, a crowded street. But crowded with such people. Moors in djellabahs and slippers, pale Moors like Europeans but with fezzes, slim veiled women veiled [sic], blue or white …’
Delighted with their brief but memorable visit, they returned to be regaled by affectionate dolphins: ‘Not only did they skip and play, but they came right into the ship and swam immediately along the cutwater, having immense fun with the rush of the water. They kept pace effortlessly, turning, rolling, jostling one another.’
Details of these and other curious encounters are frequently accompanied by Patrick’s sketches in the margins of his journal. Back in Gibraltar they spent a whole afternoon searching for a birthday present for the growing Richard, before they eventually succeeded in hunting down a leather-cased shaving kit. At dusk they climbed the Rock to view the apes, and next morning set off for Cadiz – which regrettably proved ‘the rudest town so far, the ugliest and the dirtiest’. Patrick’s resolve to drink sherry at Jerez was frustrated, when a café could only provide him with ‘something just as good’. In fact the mysterious beverage proved ‘quite good’, while an awkward confrontation was narrowly avoided:
While we were drinking it up – precious little there was – I had my back to the street, facing M. She told me afterwards that all the time there were men, respectably dressed men, leering at her from behind my back, and making gestures of invitation. Perhaps it was as well that I did not see them, because I was feeling profoundly depressed and bloody-minded, and there would have been a scene.
After exploring the region around Malaga, they returned to Motril. By then they decided they had endured all they needed of Spain: ‘It is impossible to say how agreeable Collioure appeared in the sordid brutality of Motril.’
Patrick invariably grew restless and ill-at-ease when away from their snug home for long, but buoyed up by the prospect of return ‘we began to hope that we were mistaken and that the inland Andalusian was a decent creature’. A visit to the Alhambra aroused Patrick’s ‘surprise at the extraordinary good taste of the Spanish authorities’. Crossing the mountains en route for Cordoba, he enthused over the presence of a number of magnificent red kite, noting too that: ‘Here the little irises began all along the side of the road, on the hill leading out of Jaen, and for hundreds of miles after.’ Cordoba’s mosque ‘was utterly dull from outside … but inside – dear Lord, what grandeur’.
Even this splendour was eclipsed on their return to Seville:
We did see the Cathedral at once, and that was a glorious sight: it seemed to me profoundly religious, and very, very much more important than Córdoba. The severe, clean austerity of what we might call the furnishings was intensely gratifying. No geegaws at all, except Columbus’ tomb. (And that, being alone, was impressive too, in its way).
After a night in ‘the cheapest (and rudest)’ hotel in town, they revisited the cathedral, where Patrick observed the