A Long Walk in the High Hills Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  A Long Walk in the High Hills

  Chapter one

  Chapter two

  Chapter three

  Chapter four

  Chapter five

  Chapter six

  Chapter seven

  Chapter eight

  Chapter nine

  Chapter ten

  Chapter eleven

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  Published in 2009 by Ebury Press, an imprint of Ebury Publishing

  A Random House Group Company

  Copyright © Selina Scott 2009

  Selina Scott has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner

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  For my father, whose encouragement, sense of humour and love of all things Mallorquín made this book possible

  This is a true story but, where appropriate, some names, personal details, geography and chronology have been altered to help preserve the anonymity of those involved.

  Introduction

  Iguess it was the smudges under my eyes that sparked my first encounter with Mallorca. What I needed was a blissful week in the sun, a break from a regime of rising at three in the morning back in Britain.

  I was the first woman to anchor BBC’s Breakfast Time, a concept so innovative every squeak, it seemed, had to be recorded by a competitive tabloid press hungry for the slightest slip. Each day I’d wake to find my face, my every move, plastered over almost every newspaper across the nation. It was part of the job, of course, but even so it wasn’t tremendous fun and then a friend in the fashion business noticed the dark circles and the way I gravitated to wearing frocks of black and grey on the show and phoned to offer me sunshine. She and her husband had a house in Spain, not wanting to admit, at first, it was Mallorca, and ‘it’s yours for as long as you need it’, she told me. I glanced in the mirror and a month later I was heading to the Balearics.

  Mallorca has a strange smell in high summer. Like cat pee. It clobbers you the moment the plane lands and the doors open. It’s a herb, apparently, whose pheromones are released under intense heat. So this was okay, I told myself on that first visit. A bit of warmth might do the same for me and, anyway, I didn’t intend to stay for long. I had never really fancied Mallorca, imagining a package holiday kind of place with high-rises on wrecked beaches; bus trips, fish and chips and jolly Brits packing pubs all along the coast from Magaluff to Palma Nova.

  My first night on the island, however, was revelatory. A clear dark sky pierced with stars, sheep bells tinkling in the hills and the scent of wild lavender, jasmine and thyme coating the warm enveloping air with exotic sweetness. I was still waking early, hardly believing that instead of a dingy trip in a dark cab to an old tram shed (Lime Grove) in West London where the BBC celebrates its Breakfast, I was gladly greeting a different dawn in a quiet Mallorquín village. From my friend’s house the view over the valley to the distant hills was almost medieval; nothing stirred as cockbirds began calling one another through a fragile morning mist.

  Unable to resist, I set off in the coolness to walk to the coast about three miles away, guessing if I followed an old cart track at the edge of the village I would miss the main road and find my way through the pine trees to the fishing port of San Telm. Then I could leap into the Mediterranean and swim and swim.

  The track began gently, winding through a cluster of whitewashed village houses where fat black grapes draped over each backyard before veering off, getting steeper, leading up through a rocky gully. As I began to climb, a flash of brilliance, a hoopoe bird suddenly darted out of a bush, racing ahead, beating me to the top. I just caught its brightness as it descended into a valley of almond and olive trees in the middle of which sat an ancient farmhouse.

  The place was deserted. Intrigued, I stepped off the path, wading through a field knee high with wild fennel to take a closer look. At the front of the house an old vine propped on a gnarled branch of holm oak, sprawled across canes, offering shade, sheltering a simple wooden table and a couple of stick chairs. A gaudy splash of purple bougainvillea clung to the periphery, struggling. All around were old stone walls, beginning to slip.

  The shuttered house had two arched doors, made of massive pine planks whose primitive nails and blackened ringed handles gave the place an air of working antiquity. A stone bread oven, perfectly crafted and still in use, leaned against the side of the house, its smooth floor at waist height. The oven must have baked a mountain of bread over the years. I was so absorbed in the peace of this early Mediterranean morning that a raucous squawk from the hoopoe as it rocketed out of the bougainvillea startled me. I suddenly realised I was a little too close to someone’s home in this completely unexpected pocket of Mallorca. Any minute whoever owned this place might turn up and find me. Reluctantly I left.

  That brief holiday spent in the sun and sea of Mallorca was the beginning, luring me to look again. A few months later and I was back, to meet an English couple who owned the farmhouse in the enchanting valley. I’d been told they had to sell because they needed to return to the UK, so on impulse I agreed to see them, with no intention, of course, of actually making an offer. It was March, a damp, grey day in Britain when I reacquainted myself with the island having been warned by all those who knew me well that to take on a project like this was madness when I was so immersed in TV.

  Sheila and Johnny were waiting, sitting at the old table under the makeshift pergola when I showed up, desultorily proffering a glass of rain water from an old earthenware jug. Obviously I wasn’t what they considered a serious contender. The water tasted peculiar.

  Sheila and Johnny were middle-aged and also, it struck me, a little defeated. While Johnny untangled a strand of stray tobacco from his pipe it was left to Sheila, slim and blonde and slightly defensive, to make a tentative sales pitch as a shaft of sun caught a spider in mid-spin tumbling from the v
ine above.

  Would I like to see the house? Of course. Sheila got up and walked to the arched front door. Pushing hard, the door swung with a creak against a whitewashed wall to reveal an enormous quarry-tiled room, where a traditional Mallorquín fireplace took up a whole corner. I had never seen anything like it. Its massive canopy constructed from cane and horsehair plaster was supported by a large branch of olive. Under its embrace whole families would congregate to eat and cook and keep warm in winter. It was remarkable that it had survived so long.

  Next door was another large room. It too had a corner fireplace, framed with hanging bundles of dried herbs. Sheila had collected English chairs and pictures, which had been haphazardly arranged around the rough walls. From the ground floor, a steep tiled staircase divided the house in two and led to bedrooms under the eaves. The bathroom was downstairs attached to the house with a low sloping roof.

  It was all very simple and basic but when I admired it she told me the house was about two hundred years old, built by the family who once owned the entire valley. Sheila and Johnny had bought it many years back, when it had long been empty, restoring it with the little money they had, but there was still much that needed doing, she said.

  We stood in silence, contemplating just how much needed to be done as dust rose, rallying in the air. Johnny came into the room, settling into what I took to be his favourite sofa covered in tartan throws under the window as I perched in my pretty frock on an upright chair opposite. Did I realise, he said, that there isn’t any electricity here? Johnny chewed at his pipe, gazing at the wet end of it as he extracted it from his lips. My eyes rested on the porcelain shades above the wall lights. ‘We run everything on gas which comes in bottles which have to be carried from the village,’ he continued, ‘and our only other source of power is . . .’ he paused. I felt oddly unsuited for what was coming next. ‘A genny,’ he announced. ‘It’s in the dunny’ The dunny.

  We all trooped outside, to the remnants of an old pig sty. It was filled with Johnny’s tools and petrol cans and right at the back there it was: the genny. I peered into the gloom not realising then that this thing would be the first in a long line of temperamental generators that would test me and my sunny nature to the limit.

  At that moment, the three of us in silence outside the dunny, Johnny rightly decided I was a no-hoper. If I couldn’t show enthusiasm for his genny, his most essential bit of kit, how could I possibly begin to cope with this piece of hard work in the sun? I felt what little interest he had in me as a prospective buyer suddenly drain away. Sheila, however, was not for giving up so easily. Her hopes rose when she realised I hadn’t quite clocked the water problem. I believed her when she told me a water tanker came with fresh spring water to fill up the ‘deposito’, an underground concrete construction at the back of the house. Certainly, I had seen the tanker doing its rounds in the village but of course she wasn’t about to tell me that the road was so bad the tanker had pretty much given up on them and instead they relied on a kindly Mallorquín with a tractor dragging a water bowser behind him.

  We had pretty much come to the end of our conversation when into the field in front of the house trotted a mule and a plough. Attached to the plough was a chunky fellow with a mass of golden curls. ‘Oh, that’s Gunther,’ Sheila announced. ‘He’s our neighbour. We let him have access across our fields so the drilling machine, which was too big to negotiate his road, could bore for water. In return, he’s promised us a supply if ever we need it. You won’t be stuck.’ She pointed to a black polythene pipe that reared defiantly out of the hedge. It had been cut off. Someone had bent the pipe back and tied it with string to stop what I guessed must be water leaking out. It lay floppily within walking distance, tantalisingly close. I was idly wondering why Gunther hadn’t brought the pipe right up to the house when the braying mule rounded the corner. Sheila and Johnny glanced at one another, bracing themselves, it seemed, for an encounter they hadn’t anticipated.

  Close up Gunther must have been in his fifties, with clear blue eyes and a smile like a car crash. Gunther was from Düsseldorf and spoke English fluently, if a little erratically. He had apparently arrived on the island after the war and had settled into an old farmstead further up the valley with his partner Francine at around the same time as Johnny and Sheila. After the usual introductions, Gunther’s first words to me were: ‘I know Sheila and Johnny. I don’t know you. I am not giving you any water.’

  It puzzled me why Gunther found it necessary to burst in with his welcoming words when Sheila and Johnny were so desperate to sell, but as I was to later discover, this was Gunther being Gunther at his best. The truth was, at that moment I had as much desire to know this man as he had to know me.

  I’d come to Mallorca again out of curiosity, to perhaps find somewhere that might allow me to evade prying eyes and get away from the demands of a high-profile television career. I was not interested in neighbourly inquisitiveness, and Gunther not showing any only added to the appeal of the place. As Sheila and Johnny squirmed beside me and Gunther stood square with his hands in his dungarees, I made up my mind.

  If these three could live here full time without electricity why couldn’t I? The more basic the better, as far as I was concerned. It was to be my hideaway, a downbeat to the frenetic. And anyway, candles are romantic, aren’t they? Sheila and Johnny couldn’t envisage their old age in the valley and wanted to return to the UK; I needed to make my escape from Britain when I wanted. I hadn’t been desperately looking for a home in the sun but suddenly I was on the verge of buying one. In the gentle air of a March morning, the deal was almost done.

  It fell to a sombre lawyer in Palma to actually close it. His office was up three flights of stairs in a back street of the city, a slumbering city then, which shut down at three in the afternoon and did business in the morning and early evening hours behind the most grandiose of doors, it seemed to me, in the most palatial of buildings. The wealth brought to Mallorca over the centuries by mercantile activity under both the Arabs and Christians was still discernible in the decaying mansions, and distressed magnificent churches packed tight in its city centre. What was pleasing about Palma was its diversity and colour. Its poor had not yet been siphoned off to the outskirts, their apartments in the older streets had grass in the gutters, peeling paintwork and washing hung in tiers from once glamorous, wrought-iron balconies. Commerce rubbed up against near destitution, so a walk through the city had a frisson, window-shopping one minute, a little on alert the next. Glitz traded alongside gypsies, down-and-outs, drug dealers and prostitutes. Palma was like a faded, expressionistic Spanish work of art.

  Straight out of an El Greco was Luis Rodriguez. A small brass plate above a great brass doorknob announced my lawyer who spoke not a word of English and I no Spanish that made any sense to him. Luis had straight, black hair, swept high off his head, which gave him an oddly elongated appearance. Luis spoke slowly to me at first, out of politeness that I might understand better the maze I was about to enter. ‘Señora Selina, comprende?’

  ‘Er, un poco!

  In this courteous manner we conducted our mighty affair of purchasing the property for what seemed like months.

  Finally, the day came when I took possession of the house, but it was a day I would never wish to repeat. Marching from Luis’s office to a notario in a downtown backstreet to file final papers I didn’t have a clue about nearly broke my resolve. The one unpalatable fact I had managed to grasp was that although I paid the full asking price for the house this wasn’t the figure that was going to be put in the Escritura. A tiny sum had to be entered for the benefit of the sellers, normal practice in those days. It meant Johnny and Sheila wouldn’t have to pay a large tax bill. I didn’t have the words to instruct Luis to do otherwise. That was the way it worked in Spain. And that was that. There was now no turning back.

  one

  Something clatters on the roof, falling and bouncing down the tiles. It is hot. A humid heat on an August night, my f
irst in a ruined house in a secluded valley in the south-west corner of Mallorca I so recklessly decided would be perfect for me just six months before. The noise above my bed gains speed and volume. It’s obviously an animal of some kind – the kind I don’t want to contemplate. Rats? What else comes out to play on a steaming Mediterranean night? I pull the mosquito net closer and hope that whatever it is won’t hop in through the open window as I eventually, somehow, manage to drift off to sleep.

  I am awake. Whatever had been hammering on the roof overnight has gone. The grey morning light encourages me to rise before the cicadas begin to saw in the pines close by. The heat won’t be here for another hour or more so there is just time to sweep the thick stone slabs at the front of the house and wash my T-shirts and shorts, which will be dry before noon. I manage to rig up a mirror from a box shipped from Britain, hang it on a prickly branch of pomegranate and, with warm water in an old enamel bowl, bathe in the open air.

  Life suddenly seems easy on this August morning even though I still have a pile of furniture to sort out. Sheila and Johnny had scarpered with all theirs, leaving me only the genny ‘on loan’ and, in the bathroom downstairs, three bulky orange gas bottles lined up like bouncers outside a nightclub.

  Standing in the sun, however, under the pomegranate tree, I’m in no hurry. It can all wait. Yesterday had been a marathon. I’d hired a massive pantechnicon back home and filled it with what essential household gear I could muster. It had then set off, trundling across Europe to rendezvous with a smaller van at the bottom of the track which then ferried the lot in little loads up to the house. It had taken all day in blistering heat, but by night I was fully installed with a wad of paperwork – an inventory that catalogued knives, forks, a pot hoopoe bird made into a lamp that a friend had given me as a joke . . . the list ran to six pages which would have to be sent to immigration along with a deposit, refunded to me three years down the line. Don’t for one minute ask me why.