Two Middle-Aged Ladies in Andalucia

Acknowledgements

MY THANKS ARE due first and foremost to the Duke of Wellington for providing me with my companion, the other middle-aged lady; then to Bill and Annie Davis for a thousand kindnesses and above all for selecting such an exciting district for us to explore; to Eudo and Rosemary Tonsen-Rye for invaluable help and advice and to their lovely daughter Rohaise for photographing the two middle-aged ladies together; to Don Antonio Navarrete, Mayor of Quesada, for permission to publish his poem on page 82 and to Gamel Woolsey for her superb translation of it; to Mr Mervyn Scott for much patient instruction in the mechanics of photography; to my husband John Betjeman and my friend Patsy Ward for pestering me relentlessly to overcome my natural sloth and edit my diaries to produce this book; to another old and loyal friend, Karen Lancaster, for tireless work on the typescript and proofs; and last of all to the Reverend Mother Abbess and the community at Goodings Convent for providing the perfect atmosphere in which to write.

In quoting the spoken word I have followed the colloquial custom in Andalusia of clipping the final consonants.

GOODINGS

FEAST OF ST MARK 1963

IT WAS THE horse that brought me to Spain. For years enthusiastic friends had tried in vain to make me go there. I pointed out that two countries, Italy and India, were enough for ten lifetimes. How, in middle age, could I be expected to mug up the history, language and architecture of a country about which I knew next to nothing? I had not even read a line of Don Quixote. I knew Italian fairly well and if I now tried to learn Spanish I should inevitably confuse the two and end by speaking neither. I dug in my toes and obstinately refused to be lured to the peninsula by ardent hispanophiles.

Then, in a Sunday paper, I read about conducted riding tours in Andalusia. My resistance suddenly broke down and I booked to go in late October.

St Thomas says you cannot love a horse because it cannot love you back.¹ This statement proved a serious obstacle to my entering the Holy Roman Church in 1948. Then Evelyn Waugh pointed out that St Thomas was an Italian accustomed to seeing his father’s old chargers sent along to the local salami factory in Aquino. Had he been an English theologian he would never have written like that: his father’s chargers would have been pensioned off in the park. Now I was going to a Latin country where old horses ended their lives in the bull-ring. Could I stand such an attitude to animals? I who had always been full of the traditional English sentimentality towards them? This racial antipathy was well illustrated some years ago when I brought my daughter’s pony into the kitchen and kissed it in front of Gina, our Calabrian maid: ‘In Italia bacciamo uomini!’ (In Italy we kiss men) she had said in utter scorn.

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When I first arrived at Alora, the starting-point of the conducted tour, and saw the wiry little horses of the sierras, I got rather a shock. Standing between fourteen and fifteen hands high they were so much narrower than our own mountain and moorland breeds, and their conformation was decidedly odd: they had ewe necks, cow hocks and unusually straight pasterns. Nevertheless they turned out to be extremely fit, and were surprisingly good rides. They walked out well, never stumbled down the stoniest mountain paths, and had armchair canters. The soles of their feet must have been an inch thick as they never bruised them on the roughest going nor went lame from any other cause. Their narrowness would have been tiring on long rides but the Andalusian saddles provided the width which the animals lacked. They were high fore and aft, had soft sheepskin seats and were almost impossible to fall out of. Beautifully embroidered leather alforjas (saddle-bags) were hung over the cantles at the back and it was astounding what a lot one could cram into them.

The feeding of horses in southern Spain is extremely interesting because it is so different from our own. They get neither oats nor hay but paja y cebada, which is chopped barley straw chaff and barley corn fed dry. According to Richard Ford² 8 lb barley is equal in feeding value to 10 lb oats because it contains less husk. The manger is first filled with straw chaff then the corn is mixed well into it. In the morning, before giving the first feed, any chaff that remains and any dust in the manger are scooped out onto the floor to form the deep litter on which the animals are bedded. In the posada stables this is a muck mystic’s dream, with the droppings of horses, mules, donkeys, pigs, goats, hens and human beings perfectly composted with chopped barley straw, wood ash, onion and other vegetable peelings. It is sweet-smelling, as all the best deep litter should be; nor did I ever notice any sign of thrush in the animal’s feet. Greenmeat is provided by lucerne cut and fed in the manger, or by grass when it can be found by people with no land of their own on which to grow lucerne. The animals are also taken out to graze when work and time allow, usually along streams or irrigation canals where there is always a bit of grass, or up on the mountains where there are several plants which are eaten with great relish. When grazing they are either hobbled or put in charge of a boy. Morning and evening they are led out to water at the fuente (a trough sometimes fed by a spring, sometimes by piped supply) and when on a journey they are encouraged to drink at every stream they ford.

In England I would despise a conducted riding tour because English is my language and I am a one-inch map maniac and a lot of my delight lies in working out routes on my maps beforehand and in poring over them afterwards. But going to Spain for the first time with next to no Spanish and very poor maps, I decided that the best preparation for a solo ride (my avowed ambition) was to go on a preliminary one with people who knew the ropes: thus I hoped to learn about Spanish blacksmiths, feeding methods, inns, and cross-country navigation. I would also mug up a stable vocabulary.

I chose one of the cheap tours run by Antonio Llomelini Tabarca which was wonderful value for money, costing only £28 for a fortnight, full board and lodging of horse and rider included. Antonio is a young Sevillian whose chief delight has been to explore the sierras of his native Andalusia on a horse and now he has made a business of it and established an excellent riding centre in the hills at Alora, 12½ miles inland from Torremolinos.

Antonio’s enthusiasm, seriousness of purpose and delightful manners do not answer to the description given of his countrymen 120 years ago by George Borrow: ‘The higher class of Andalusians are probably upon the whole the most vain and foolish of human beings with a taste for nothing but sensual amusements, foppery in dress, and ribald discourse.’³

Discourse in any case was limited by ignorance of one another’s languages. On the first evening at dinner (excellent gazpacho followed by a very good curry, his cook having spent two years with an Indian family) I attempted to talk about foxhunting. Antonio made, or rather I thought that he made, the astonishing remark that in this part of Spain vixen were milked and their milk was made into cheese. What he actually said was that poisoned cheese was put out on the hills to kill foxes. I tried to warn him against indulging in such practices when he went to work in the Cottesmore Hunt Kennels where he had arranged to go during the winter in order to learn English. Do foxes really eat cheese?

Antonio had a little rough-haired terrier on short legs, the shape of a small corgi, of which he was as fond as the most ardent English dog-lover. It always slept on his bed and was very friendly with his guests. One night I went to evening devotions in the big church across the plaza. I arrived late and fell flat across the corner of a confessional, which set a whole pew of children off into a fit of giggles. Then Chico came in, singled me out as his master’s friend and came and lay down at my feet. The Blessed Sacrament was exposed and instead of letting a sleeping dog lie quite innocently in the Divine Presence I got up and carried him out. On returning to my place I again fell flat over the confessional. I soon learned that it was the usual thing for dogs to wander in and out of church in Spain and that nobody minded. Many priests have dogs who regularly hear Mass sitting motionless in an aisle with apparent devotion.

The day after the fox-milking incident Antonio had to go to Seville to get his papers in order for England. Having spent a couple of days hacking through the orange groves round Alora and getting used to our saddles and horses, we set off on our ride to Ronda. Our guide was a remarkable English girl, Vicki Sumner, one of the finest types our island produces: beautiful and tough, an excellent horsewoman, she speaks fluent Andaluz and, like Ivan Petrutski Skivar, can perform on the Spanish guitar. She has a deep-rooted passion for Spain and knows the Serrania de Ronda like the inside of her pocket.

Pitirri, the gypsy groom, also came with us. He rode a pack-horse with large panniers into which we could put the overflow from our saddle-bags and the great black oilskin riding capes which formed part of our equipment. Pitirri is a man of parts; there is little he doesn’t know about a horse and he acts as middleman in many a deal in and round his pueblo. He can also sing and dance flamenco with great skill and feeling. On our rides he sang endless verses in cante jondo, the haunting eastern type of singing in quarter tones which is common all over Andalusia. Gerald Brenan thinks it antedates the Moorish occupation and derives from a primitive type of Mediterranean music.⁴ All I can say is that it reminded me of Indian singing with no beginning and no end: it is the music of eternity and you never get tired of it.

Besides myself there were four other clients on this tour, all of us women, and we got along splendidly. My friend Mary Clive and her daughter Alice (neither of whom are experienced riders) rode for six-hour stretches without once complaining of fatigue; Frances Bell MacDonald, a professional photographer, helped me to put new films into my camera, and her friend Celia Irving carried a tape recorder for two hundred miles in her alforjas on which she recorded sheep bells, nightingales, Pitirri singing and hooves clattering on cobbles for a BBC travel programme. The tragedy was that the musical evenings at the inns described by all the nineteenth-century travellers such as Washington Irving, Cook, Ford, Borrow and Street had now been replaced by flamenco music broadcast from Seville, so poor Celia, who had hoped to record some live guitar playing, was done in by the very institution for which she was so diligently toiling.

The first evening out from Alora was magical: we arrived at our destination, Ardales, by the light of the full moon. The electricity had failed and the pueblo stood out, an unearthly white against a drop curtain of black rock. Not a glimmer was to be seen and it appeared as a city of the dead. As we rode into the outskirts, all the lights went on again and the children, till then completely silent, started shrieking with delight.

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Lest the tourist trade be adversely affected by what is to follow I must explain that there are excellent hotels in all the great sight-seeing centres and coastal resorts of modern Spain. The exchange being so much in our favour (autumn 1961), you can stay in a first-class hotel for the same en pension rates as in a third-class hotel in Italy.

The name parador which used to denote a large caravanserai for horses, mules, wagons and their drivers, is now given to special government-run hotels (though a few of the old type still survive) usually consisting of beautiful renaissance palaces or convents brought up to American standards of comfort.

On the other hand the rural inns of the pueblos have altered little since Ford’s time and, according to him, since classical times. Thank God the end of all Spanish things has not yet come as the great man prophesied it would. The remoter corners of the peninsula are still ‘not to be enjoyed by the over fastidious in the fleshly comforts’.⁵

There is still the fonda, a brand of hotel which is found in the larger pueblos and which caters for people only, not horses. The bedrooms contain from one to four beds apiece which are tolerably comfortable, though the mattresses and pillows often appear to be filled with walnuts (actually lumpy flock).⁶ The eiderdown is unknown, so is the bedside mat. One pleasant respect in which these inns do differ from Ford’s time lies in the complete absence of small bed-fellows. In six weeks touring I did not meet with a single bug or flea and not because ‘Quien duerme bien no le pican pulgas’ (He who sleeps well is not bitten by fleas). Due to over-excitement and indigestion I often slept very badly.

The bedrooms of the fonda sometimes lead one into the other and at Almargen a strange gentleman occupied an inside one giving onto the corridor and having no windows, and I came next with one door leading into the gentleman’s and the other into Mary’s. The floors are of stone or rough cement and there is sometimes a spy-hole in one of them, or in the floor of the landing, about four inches in diameter, through which you get an excellent view of the room below and of its occupants.

The furniture consists of a couple of chairs, a tall chest-of-drawers, a distorting mirror, a few pegs fitting into some trellis work high up on the wall (one of which never fails to crash to the ground with whatever you hang on it) and an ingeniously designed washstand leaning well over to one side. This has an enamel basin resting in a crooked wooden frame, so that the water often spills onto the floor. Projecting from the frame on either side is some ornamental scroll work on which you may try in vain to perch your sponge and soap and toothbrush: within a matter of seconds they have fallen through the scroll work onto the floor.

The posada is an inn with stables attached, the animals being often better housed and better fed than the human beings. Both enter by the same front door, which in the smaller posadas leads directly into the living-room. Your horse is led through this into the great cavernous stables beyond, which are cool in summer and warm in winter. In the larger posadas there are big double doors, open during the day, which lead into a covered cobbled yard where the muleteers and the donkey boys sleep on straw palliasses. At the far end are the stables with rows of mangers, sometimes over a hundred, all along the walls with pegs above them (often the thigh bones of animals cemented in between the stones) to which you tie your halter rope. Borrow was fond of sleeping in mangers but if they were anything like the ones I saw, he must have curled up like a dog.⁷

On either side of the cobbled yard are the kitchen and dining-room and stairs leading up to the bedroom. The furnishing is similar to that of the fonda but in the more remote districts there is no chest-of-drawers, so that you have to keep your