A Long Walk in the High Hills

by A Long Walk in the High Hills- The Story of a House, a Dog

  There’s even a small bath house erected by the Moors a millennia ago, the Banys Arabs, which like a button in a button box lies pressed in the Old Quarter of Palma, jumbled amongst so many other glorious remains. The appeal of these baths, like so much else here, is how easy it is to imagine myself a Moor in need of peace and relaxation. I’d start with the steam bath (the calderium) before hopping into a warm one (a tepidarium) and lie there, under the vaulted roof supported by twelve stone pillars, now a thousand years old. The best bit is up aloft. Skylights in the roof allow in just enough sun to warm me below but I’m afraid, no matter how tempting, I haven’t time to daydream today. I need to find somewhere quiet and contemplative to think through the vital questions I need to ask Juan Carlos as this will be my last opportunity.

  So much has cropped up in the course of filming I want to be clear what’s still needed to finish the project. Near the Real Club Náutico there’s a car park surrounded by pink and white oleander bushes where warm sea air will help me concentrate. I haven’t yet talked about the Olympics, Mallorca, or bullfighting with the King, or what I would dearly love him to address, but know he won’t: the Franco years.

  Mallorca suffered badly under the dictator. The island was an attack base for Franco’s forces striking out against their countrymen on the mainland. There were blockades and food shortages and worse. Thousands were tortured and murdered on Mallorca as were thousands more on mainland Spain but today it’s only old men in bars who dare pass on the whispered secrets. The killing fields,’ they say of Santa Ponsa, a holiday resort in the south-west of the island. Could that really be true? In the 1970s politicians from all parties signed up to omertà – silence – there would be no witch-hunt. No one would be held accountable for what happened during and after the civil war. But life, memories and hatred don’t always conform to good intent. Franco is in the past, and I will have to do as I agreed and not task Juan Carlos to recollect the man who made him King.

  From my car I can see and hear young men who have arrived from all over Europe for the big yacht race. Most, of course, don’t give a fig about Franco. There’s a buzz in the making ready of fast boats for action, last-minute checks on equipment, ropes and tackle for the Copa del Rey Juan Carlos will skipper the midnight-blue Bribon, gleaming on the quayside.

  Towards the end of a long filming session there comes a time when the crew get a sense of whether the movie is going to work or not and behave accordingly. By the time I reach the Marivent the cameras have been rigged, the cream leather sofa for the interview positioned and cables for lights woven round every table and ornate chair. The crew are in an exuberant mood, not helped by some odd, colourful bonnets that have appeared and are being passed around, tried on and taken off, by the Royal family. Somehow in this air of end-of-term recklessness I have to concentrate on finishing the film. We sit down, Juan Carlos and I, side by side on the sofa, with the ocean glittering behind us, and talk about achievement, pride and heritage. Juan Carlos tackles bullfighting by comparing it with fox hunting in the UK. Your country chases foxes, there’s no difference, he opines. At least the fox has a chance to escape, I rally, but he is, of course, not about to enter into argument. His political antennae are too keen. As a Spanish male monarch his role is to fervently support the insupportable, or at least to be seen to.

  Our talk ends on a high with Juan Carlos acknowledging his remarkable year and how Spain faces a dynamic, gilded future – then Nacho moves in. As Paloma unclips Juan Carlos’s microphone, I manage to head off Nacho, telling him under no circumstances is this film going to be spoiled by asking for an interview that was never on the agenda from the outset and certainly is not on now. He looks murderous. Paloma steps in to lighten the moment. She’s brought a camera, she says, and isn’t going to leave until someone takes a picture of her with ‘her’ king. She then gives Juan Carlos her best toothy smile and brazenly suggests he sit next to her on the sofa. Juan Carlos demurely does as he is told, but Paloma, wanting the full works, snuggles closer, then a touch more, until he finally gives in, conceding defeat with a big grin and a royal bear hug.

  This snapshot is the last. After Nacho informs his bosses that there will be no King speaking Spanish, in a grand Latino flourish they pull out of the deal and order the crew home. I’m sorry to see them depart and a bit perplexed at the strop but I’ve got what I want: the film is complete. It will now be down to Grampian in Scotland to parley with the Spaniards in Madrid over how much money they’ll get back.

  It is an anti-climax in so many other ways as well. I’ve spent the year in a bubble pressed against privilege, wealth and glamour, one minute filming delicious buildings of great age in a hidden Spain, the next pitched into the dynamic of a nation’s coming-of-age party. Now I am back at my unfinished house in the unlit hills wrapping up the memory. The warm calm of the valley is beyond welcome after the filming but it takes a while to come to terms with what I’ve seen and the way things actually are.

  Across Spain, Europe’s money is deluging new roads, bridges, tunnels. Whole cities are being re-developed with the aim of social equality. Human rights are prerequisite but Europe’s attitude towards animals is, to say the least, arbitrary. The EC could have insisted its new members adopt a statutory animal welfare programme before any cash got handed out. It would have saved a ton of grief. As it is, Mallorca, soon to be one of the wealthiest islands in the world, gives precious little to the creatures in its midst and, as I will discover in the years ahead, fights bitterly anyone who dares attempt it.

  I had planned to spend the rest of the summer relaxing in the Mediterranean before returning to the UK to cut the Juan Carlos film but with no electric light and no prospect of getting any, with Kendi out of sight and no sound from Nico, I am beginning to get edgy.

  It was the start button, stuck, that did it. The generator had been running for a couple of hours and I could sense something was wrong because the thing was steaming. When I reached in to shut it down, the button jammed again. On and on it groaned and revved. I knew I had to find a way to stop fuel getting to the engine but was terrified I’d pull out the wrong piece of kit and cause an explosion. It was the middle of a hot afternoon, siesta time, with no one around. The engine droned on.

  I decided the best solution was to turn my back and leave it until it ran out of fuel, but the machine wasn’t having any of it. Half an hour later, smoke billowed out. If the generator caught fire the whole valley would go up in these dry conditions. Me too. I ran into the kitchen, soaked a towel and rushed back. To get at the petrol supply I had to prise open the hot metal cover juddering over the engine. As the lid clanked to the floor the revs thickened but I could just make out a tiny lever under the tank. I reached in and pressed. In a second or two there was a cough. Then another. Finally and unbelievably the machine croaked.

  How did Joe know? The phone rang just as the generator came out with its hands up. He laughed when I told him of my panic in the heat. It would be something simple, he said. He’d be able to see to it. Could I manage without power until he could fix a flight? Could I? I’d haul buckets of water out of the cisterna till eternity if it meant I never had to use the generator again.

  With Joe and his boys on the way Jake and I had to fix the beds, dig out some mosquito nets and check for creepy-crawlies. A pink setting sun was sugar-coating a few fluffy clouds by the time I had shooed off the gecko lurking incognito on the window ledge and plumped up the beds. Clouds in a summer Mediterranean sky mean change is on the way. Jake closed his eyes, rolled over on the pressed linen sheet with his paws above his head and purred.

  Sancho has sent a message: there are some strange men in his bar asking questions about me. He thinks they are paparazzi and ordered them out. They want to know where my house is and he certainly isn’t about to tell them.

  The Spanish newspapers have seen a blonde on the Fortuna and are after me. I’ve always laid low in August, a dangerous month for anyone in the public eye who wants privacy. With ever
yone on holiday the paparazzi decamp too. Some relish the experience more than others although it’s hard to avoid photographers if you have a glossy home on a honeypot island. Michael Douglas and his Mallorquín wife Diandra are a hot ticket in their cliff-top retreat in the north near Deia. Their restoration of the romantic home of Archduke Salvatore, who fell in love with the island over a hundred years ago, is now a summer pit stop for Hollywood stars such as Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty, who seem happy to pump up the action for photographers, intoxicated as they all are with fun in the European sun.

  Deia is quite a hike from me. Built against a steep mountainside, it is a village of enchanting stone homes reached by a precipitous road wound tight round the west coast. Deia was made famous by the poet Robert Graves, who was encouraged to come to Mallorca by his friend and mentor Gertrude Stein in the 1930s. ‘So you suggest Mallorca as a place to settle down?’ he asked her. ‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘it’s paradise – if you can stand it.’

  When I first arrived on the island, Robert Graves’ widow Beryl still lived in their low modern house on the edge of Deia. I remember she had a thing about Earl Grey tea, which I once dropped off for her when Deia was having a late-afternoon snooze. I walked half a mile to the tiny cobbled bay below her house, down the steep road Robert Graves built so he might bathe more easily in the ocean. Deia I thought a bit overwhelming with its vertiginous mountainscape of trees and rock. A little too closed in for my taste.

  At my end of the gentler Sierra Tramuntana ridge, Joe and his sons, seven-year-old Jack and nine-year-old Ben, have come out in big red blobs from mosquito bites. They’ve decided the nets I’ve rigged from a hook in an old beam above their beds are like frilly skirts ‘cissies’ wear, so they tied them up like wigwams, leaving them wide open to night bites. Every bit of them, it seems, has been munched but it doesn’t deter them. They’ve come on an adventure their mates would die for, they say. Within a day they’ve hired mountain bikes and set off, coated in factor 50, along the pine-needled path on to the high range. They’ve dumped their rucksacks and left me to get on with taking care of business. Which means food. I’ve hit on lighting a charcoal fire in the old bread oven and cooking supper in what is in effect a little cave. It means kicking out the almond rats and spiders but once the fire gets going it stays hot for hours, a novelty which keeps everyone interested and amused.

  Amid the day’s snorkelling and bicycling their father trails oily nuts and bolts from the cannibalsed generator and manages to find a small second-hand, friendly looking substitute from a local builder as a back-up. It will soon become my mainstay, because, with the red genny still lying in bits, Joe succumbs after a week to some particularly venal bugs. It’s his own fault. I don’t know what kind of beasts have done the damage, but I reckon he’s picked them up in the long grass walking in his shorts through the sheep fields higher up the valley. From his ankles to his thighs, purple weals have begun to ooze and the antiseptic cream I’ve got from the farmada in Andratx is unfortunately not working. On the morning his legs turn septic I spot the glint of a camera lens in a pine tree on the hill.

  I had opened the shutters to let in the morning light. In August, the sun takes its time to stride the high pines on the eastern hill before shafting strong, intermittent rays across the valley. It was one of these early, searching rays that caught the camera hidden in a tree on the opposite side. I have developed an instinct for lenses of the long-range persuasion but this time, when I glanced again, I thought I saw a hammock too. It was unbelievable. A hammock was definitely strung between two pine trees; whoever was in it must have been up there all night. I quickly closed the window. If there was one photographer out there, there’d be more and I had no intention of letting any of them steal pictures of me. What I wanted to know was were they all perched up pine trees? And if so, I hope the poisonous caterpillars had marched in and got each and every one of them on the way down.

  When I tumble downstairs to tell everyone we are surrounded, Joe is screwed up at the breakfast table in pain. His legs, he moans, are on fire. Ben and Jack, agog with the drama of grown men climbing trees to stake out their quarry, want the low-down. How high up are they? Can they go and look? Joe decides he’s had enough. He’s going home on the first plane out, otherwise he’ll end up in hospital. And, under no circumstances, he growls as he crawls up the stairs to pack, is he going to be seen hobbling to a car with me in front of the world’s press. He doesn’t want his picture in the papers. No thanks. He doesn’t know who might see it. It could lead to all kinds of trouble. And would I phone for a taxi?

  As the boys shuffle off to gather their belongings, I beg the man who runs the local taxi to come up the hill to collect them. If you drive very slowly, I implore, you won’t damage your car – at all – on the rocks. Eventually he relents saying he’s already heard there are plenty of nasty people up my road. Am I going to be all right? I tell him, gracias, I will be.

  Once Joe and the boys have gone I phone Boris. Can he come up and check out the place? I’m not sure what my next move should be. Should I try and leave or stay? It isn’t fun being spied on. I’m not sure how many photographers are hanging around and what they’ll do if I make an appearance. Having a black lens the size of a dinner plate pointed at you from the bushes is a bit like being kicked in the stomach. And I, of course, am not the kind of person to take this calmly. How dare they come here and do this to me in my un-glam place, which I have deliberately chosen miles away from their usual glitzy haunts?

  Through the slats in the shutters I can see Boris bouncing up the road, reversing his car right up against the back door. He’s brought Bruce. Both are wearing large, khaki, wide-brimmed hats with toggles under their chin, to hide their faces, they say. Why, like Joe, they should want to disguise themselves is odd but I am grateful to have their practical if rather self-regarding support. They tell me Gunther had woken from his slumbers and counted six Spanish photographers and reporters lurking in the valley, so they’ve cleared the back of the car for me to get away without anyone knowing, adding that Gunther is now on guard, fully charged to counter any fresh invasion. He will, they tell me, keep an eye on the place.

  After all this, I feel I can’t very well let them down, so I scramble into the boot hoping no one will spot me. Bumping down the road, curled up under a blanket, I miss what happens next but suddenly from further up the hill a massive boulder comes rolling down, crashing against Boris’s car before settling on the road in front. Two hefty men jump out of the bushes but Boris is quicker. ‘Oh, shit,’ he mutters as he dodges round the rock and speeds away, with me jolting up and down in the back.

  I suppose, in retrospect, it was wrong to attempt evasion. Soon word spread that things were turning nasty. The encounter with the boulder had been relayed round the village and posses of folk were being despatched to investigate and report back.

  Later, someone confirms the paparazzi have gone, they’ve been seen driving out of the village so it is, I am assured, all clear for me to return. I don’t need much of an excuse, and in any case, Jake needs feeding and I am sick of the disruption.

  I walk right into it, of course, or more precisely, into Gunther, who is in the middle of the track in khaki fatigues getting agitated. He has a red and white bandanna round his blond curls and a pair of tightly laced army boots up to his kneecaps. A white car with a man and woman is lurching slowly towards him. Gunther’s got his hand up, like a policeman, calling them to stop, but the guy in the car has a camera and is reeling off frame after frame of an angry Gunther, now bawling something unmentionable in Spanish. What takes place next happens as if in slow motion: the guy with the camera is laughing, the next moment he’s bellowing as Gunther grabs a huge rock from the side of the road, hoists it above his head and lobs it with a wonderful force straight at the car. I shut my eyes as the rock leaves Gunther’s grip. When I look again, the car is in fast reverse, its windscreen shattered, the boulder wedged like an unwelcome passenger between the car’s
two front seats. It had been close.

  Later that night, I’m getting ready for bed and hear something rustling in the field outside. There’s a full moon. Creeping to the window, opening it ever so carefully, through the crack in the shutters I can just make out Gunther’s bandanna crawling through the undergrowth. ‘Gunther?’ I call in a loud whisper.

  Back from out of the grass comes ‘Shhh . . .’

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m patrolling,’ he growls.

  ‘Gunther, come here.’ Gunther springs up glancing right and left.

  I’m have had a good idea,’ he calls up to my bedroom window.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I vill hoot like an owl to let you know it’s me. Too vit too vit,’ he demonstrates, ‘and you will respond so that I know it’s you’ – and at this he cups his hands to his mouth and warbles – ‘Too voo too voo.’

  ‘But Gunther,’ I try reasoning, ‘wouldn’t it be more straightforward if I simply asked, “Is that you, Gunther?” And you can say, “Yes it is.”’

  The next day, after all the excitement, nothing of any consequence appears in the Spanish press except a grainy black-and-white photo taken of me in shorts and sandals striding down the road. A female reporter notes that for my age it’s surprising I haven’t any cellulite.

  Now that the press have discovered me, however, they begin to stake me out. After a particularly bad bout of fast car chases down one-way streets and the desperate ploy of taking someone else’s plane ticket to get back to the UK quickly I began to think Gunther’s ‘Too wit Too woo’ was not so daft after all.

  six

  I adore getting hot, so hot the only way to cool off is to roll into the ocean from a pebbled beach and swim. Most mornings I’ll walk through the woods with towels, a bottle of water, goggles and a book and reach the coast by nine, my skin nicely toasted. Swimming with the sun on my back out to a headland and round into the next bay is always a joy, even though an occasional troublesome jellyfish crawls alongside me too. Jellyfish usually turn up in their thousands early in the season, pulsating their purple tentacles in the tide, but with a bit of encouragement and an offshore wind, they soon buzz off. For a creature so small they do a deal of damage. I carry a tube of anti-jellyfish cream in case I’m stung. Others swear by urine and all sorts of other contortionist remedies, none easy to administer on a crowded public beach and definitely not an option if, like me, you’re concerned about being caught out on camera.