TRAVEL
Holiday in Spain
BY ISABEL QUIGLY PEPE was barefoot, shaven headed, and twelve years old, his sister fourteen and much like my idea of a Canterbury pilgrim. On the first of last August, under a Spanish ..Midday sun, she wore for working in the fields a long serge dress and a hat with a woollen wimple, thick knitted stockings and oots and gloves. We, unable somehow to adopt this sensible abit of keeping out the sun, sat as lightly dressed as possible and a good deal hotter than she was in the shade of the most adequate olive-tree, drawing their father's windmill. Pepe nd his sister and a cow looked at us long and silently. Then , uite out of the blue Pepe said : " Would you like to see it 'Working ? I'll fix it and then you can climb up and see it too." It wasn't Don Quixote's sort of windmill, with sails, but round and rather like a sunflower, with slats you pulled into position after climbing up the stalk. Like Jack up the beanstalk or a ionkey on a date palm Pepe shot up it in an instant, running at it as if he had spikes on his feet, or at least some sort of magical magnetism that let him lean horizontally out and stick :0Y the soles of them. Pleased, grave, explanatory but not xpansive, he called out orders and his sister showed us how he water went up and down below. Things like that—sudden. Pasmodic bits of friendliness—kept happening. , " It's all very well," said our motoring friends, " if you go In leather shorts with a pack on your back. Then you can sleep in the hedge• and who bothers ? Or else settle down at the seaside. But to wander around with suitcases," they said scornfully., " with hats, with typewriters," they said swelling.... l,lt with motorcars, we thought, though we didn't like to say it, (31.1 are like a snail carrying your house around with you. lis all very comfortable, or the seaside is very delightful, but What about Pepe and the rest of them—all that practical rather than chatty kindness, that grave and formal aristocracy of Manners, high and low, north and south, peasant and townsman ?—the sexton at Avila and the tombstone-maker at Barcelona, the orphans at Salamanca and the cripple at Valladolid ? What if you want to see the Prado and it happens to be the wrong season ? Often in. Spain, we thought (though We didn't dare say it to people so obviously better organised than we were, who would very properly have thought Madrid 111, August impossible) it's a choice between comfort and fun, or even between, if you like, immediate and retrospective Pleasure. comfort you want you can get it royally. In one of the few countries left where service is plentiful and cheap, the luxury, when you get it, is enough to widen English eyes. It is just, I am trying to say, that with a bit of discomfort you often find all sorts of incidental pleasures. And somehow Spain encourages the incidental. Unprepared and ill-organised though we were, with only the vaguest notions about the map of Spain and none at all about where we would end on it, a magical luck kept us arriving at places—often just because we had missed a bus somewhere else—when things were happening there. Ibiza, that most lotus-eating and African- looking of islands, was rejoicing over the expulsion of the Arabs, and Valldemosa over its local saint in four days of frenzied piety and conjurors and brass bands and fireworks. We got to Toledo with the gipsies for a week of fiesta and to Segovia tangled up with the circus procession. Madrid had a fair and San Sebastian the last bull-fight of the season, and with the smallest excuse there were revolutionary-sounding fireworks (you judge a Spanish firework by its noise, not its brilliance) at three in the morning. And once we were serenaded with ' Loch Lomond '—two guitars and a fiddle and that extraordinary moon out in the narrow street; and I wished I had had a flower to throw through the window, but somehow hadn't gone to bed prepared to be serenaded, and Scottishly serenaded at that.
Away from islands and idleness and seafood and the sunburnt Mediterranean rest of it we took a month to reach the other coast in a sweep round the burning centre of Spain, that huge, barren, beautiful expanse of geometrical ochres and browns, and the glittering cities that across the plain look what they almost are, oases in a desert; and at last, for all our haphazard- ness, since even the longest, and the loveliest of summers is over at the end of it, we rattled to the Pyrenees in a tram. It felt like rattling to much more than just a frontier, because beyond Hendaye was the world, the outside, the great beyond of all things Spanish. French' and foreign are synonymous in the simpler villages, and comment allez-vous the children's greeting to anything with an alien look to it. Crawling in the night up the interminable piney wastes of the Landes it felt as if Spain was a million miles off already, a place with so personal a magic even memories could hardly conjure it up again, so private and particular a moon, so much its own noises and smells and so strangely and unforgettably its own touch and taste in everything that it mocks you when you try to pin it down; and Paris at seven next morning looked homely as Piccadilly.
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