The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue

Even over the Christmas break, my father had made plain that, at seventeen and three months, I would have no chance of getting into the Royal Air Force when the permissible age was eighteen. I would be wise to wait until I was at least seventeen and a half before trying.

He also made plain he was not having me mooning about the house doing nothing. Some activity had to be found to fill in the first three months of 1956. We made a study of the terms of the scholarship I had won five years earlier to Tonbridge. Founded by the long-gone Mr. Knightly, the Knightly Scholarship involved a large sum of deposited money that, with sound investment, should (and did) generate enough to create one bursary per year. But if there was a surplus, it would be lodged in a separate fund.

This extra fund could, with the permission of the governors, be used to allow a student to study an extra language during his last year at school. It did not insist that he must be at the school to do this. I made an application to be allowed to take a course in Spanish, with costs paid for by the fund.

The bemused governors, who had never received such an application, found the fund was brimming from so many years of non-use and needed depleting. A little more research disclosed that Granada University in Andalusia, in southern Spain, offered a three-month spring course for foreigners to study Spanish language and culture. Again, the governors conceded the point and paid the course fee, plus a personal allowance of six pounds per week while away from home. In early January, I left for Spain.

The course was not actually held in Granada, but at Málaga, on the coast. Back then the sprawling city of modern Málaga was just a seaside town famous for two things. Before the war (the Spanish Civil War, the conflict that still consumed Spain), the matador Carlos Arruza had performed in the Málaga ring, while suffering from flu and a raging temperature, a corrida so spectacular that he had been awarded two ears, the tail, and one hoof from the dead bull, a feat never matched since.

And Pablo Picasso, who was still alive and painting, but in exile in France after bitterly opposing Franco and painting Guernica, had been born there. If it had an airport, it must have been a small municipal field and not on any international route. I flew to Gibraltar, hefted my suitcase across the border on foot, and took the wheezing old coastal bus from La Linea to Málaga. In Gibraltar, I exchanged all the sterling pounds I had into pesetas at the remarkable rate of two hundred to one pound. I did not know enough to realize that I had become a wealthy young man by Spanish standards.

What today is the sprawling Costa del Sol chain of tourist resorts did not exist. Between Málaga and La Linea were four small fishing villages: Torremolinos, Fuengirola, Marbella, and Estepona. T

oday’s huge motorway was a narrow track, with one lane on each side. But as the verges were very pitted, every driver rode the center line, swerving at the last minute with much hooting, shouting, and gestures. I was entering a very different and fascinating new culture.

At Málaga, I reported to the local branch of Granada University and met the course director, Don Andres Oliva. He was truly cultivated, a real traditional caballero, a gent. I quickly learned that the fifty or so students on the course were all to be lodged in one communal hostel. It became also rapidly plain that as they were Americans, Canadians, British, Germans, Danes, Swedes, and others, they would all have one common language—English. And that was what would be used in the hostel. But that was not what I had come for. I wanted to lodge with a Spanish family that spoke no English, and took my problem to Don Andres.

He considered it with quiet but surprised approval, remarked that no one had ever requested this before, but promised to ask around. Twenty-four hours later, he told me he had found a family content to take in a paying guest.

The lady concerned was Doña Concha Lamotte, Viuda de Morales. When deciphered, that meant Madame Concepcion (or Conchita or Concha) Lamotte, Viuda (widow) of the late Señor Morales. It transpired she was French by birth but in the thirties had married Señor Morales. He had been executed by the Communists during the civil war, and his widow had raised her two children alone.

Not surprisingly, she loathed the Communists and adored General Franco, who in 1936 had landed with his Moroccan troops just down the coast to start the civil war as the Republic fell into Communist hands. Franco, of course, was by 1956 dictator of Spain, running a pretty extreme right-wing government.

I took my grip and walked from the hostel to the Lamotte apartment beside the old Miramar Hotel, and introduced myself. My lodging was three pounds per week, but Spain then was so extraordinarily cheap that the other three pounds of my weekly allowance would be more than enough pocket money. I would have a room of my own and eat all meals with the family.

Madame’s children were her son, at seventeen the same age as me while also awaiting his call-up into the armed forces, and her daughter, two years older and engaged to be married. They spoke not a word of English and had never seen an Englishman, let alone a Protestant. I spoke no Spanish, but I had a grammar primer, and mercifully Madame could just remember her native French and help me out when we got really stuck.

Málaga back then was still a sleepy, quaint, and intensely traditional community. Each evening, the girls of the respectable classes not yet “spoken for” would slowly parade the length of the palm-lined paseo, duly chaperoned by a mother or aunt. From the sidelines, they could be observed by the young men not yet engaged. It was a marriage market of great decorum.

The girls would have high ivory combs in their hair, draped with a black lace shawl, the mantilla. The young men often wore the short jacket, the traje corto, and the wide-brimmed black or dove-gray hat known as the cordobés.

If or when a young man saw a girl he really fancied, he would ask around for her name. When he had it, he would go to his father, who would then inquire about the girl’s own father, and if he was also of a respectable family in a good house and with a worthy profession, the two fathers would meet to confer over a possible union of their offspring. There was no question of the youngsters meeting for a chat.

The girl’s father would then invite the young man to his house for tea. As tea was served, the girl’s mother and possibly a bevy of aunts, all agog with curiosity, would sit with the girl on one side of the room, and the young guest and his father on the other. It must have been a very stilted occasion, with all sides pretending it was just a cup of neighborly tea.

In fact, both sides were sizing up the other. Courtship was carried on with the eyes. The young people never touched. If impressions were favorable, the father would later consult with his wife and invite the boy to join them for Mass the following Sunday.

While he had seen her during the paseo when she caught his eye, that first stilted cup of tea would be for the girl her first sight of her new admirer. Her curiosity must have been immense. My new friend Miguel Morales told me all this because he had been through it via his sister.

As chastity was total, there had to be some release valve, and this was the bordello, of which there were many. At the top of the range, these were also pretty dignified establishments. It was far from impossible for the mayor and the chief of police to take a glass of sherry with a leading madam, who was also a pillar of the community (not to consort with wives, of course) and a donor to good causes such as the church and the orphanage, to which her girls, if they were careless, might one day contribute.

From a vantage point sixty years later, it is hard to imagine all this, but that was the way it was. The chief of police was not run ragged by overwork, because crime was very rare and violent crime just about unheard of. The occasional knife fight might take place among the Gypsies, or gitanos, who lived in a camp out of town and who made a living either tending horses or giving demonstrations of flamenco at private soirées, or in cafés with a hat passed round. And that was before the gawping tourists arrived.

To get in trouble with the police, a troublemaker would really have to work at it, but political opposition was a serious concern, and police tolerance was nonexistent. But that seemed to be the way the people liked it. They had experienced four years of war and cruelty in the late thirties when the Phalangists (Fascists) fought the Communists, and they did not want it back.

Life was cheap, the prices minimal. For ten pesetas, one could have two large schooners of fine sherry, attended by enough free tapas to constitute a good dinner.

The scholastic course was 160 lectures. I attended the first in January and the last at the end of March. I would have missed that as well, but for the fact that a foreign student peered at me nursing a large bumper of amontillado at a café table on the day before and asked me if I was the missing English student. Then she told me about the final exam the following day.

Without a hope of passing it, I showed up and met an amused and sardonic Don Andres Oliva. I noticed something quite quickly. The hostel students spoke a grammatically perfect but stilted and awfully accented Spanish. I was rattling away in torrents of street Spanish with an Andalusian accent. Don Andres had to exercise all his self-control not to burst out laughing.

The examination turned out to be one single essay in Spanish on a subject of the student’s choosing, drawn from the five headings of the language, literature, culture, geography, and history of Spain. And there I had a problem. I did not know anything about any of them. So I chose history.

But that proposed a further problem. Recalling our history lessons at school, it appeared that every time British and Spanish history made contact, we were fighting each other, especially in 1588. That was when King Philip II sent his Armada up the English Channel to invade and subdue the heretical Protestant English. The Devonian sea dog Francis Drake, a former pirate along the Spanish Main off Central America, was instrumental in the Spanish fleet’s destruction. It was not very diplomatic, but it was the only story I knew that involved a bit of Spanish history. If only I could have stuck to the conquistadors.

Legend has it that when the sails of the Armada hove over the horizon, Drake was on the expanse of greensward outside Plymouth known as Plymouth Hoe playing bowls. He is supposed to have told those who came to warn him that he would finish his game before taking on the might of Spain.

Then arose the third problem. They play boules in France, virtually the same thing, but no bowls in Spain. So, despite all the Spanish I had learned, I did not know how to say “bowls.” The exam markers must have been somewhat bewildered to be told that when the Armada appeared, Francis Drake was playing with his balls.