by A Long Walk in the High Hills- The Story of a House, a Dog
I have been hearing about this young builder, who has started his own construction firm, employing local craftsmen to service a flood of Germans desperate to spend cash fast on high-quality homes in the sun. Ignacio is getting quite a reputation for work built to last, as demands for only the best push up local standards. The attraction Germany feels for Spain is not only mutual but mirrored. A rigorous, driven energy emanating from the north reflects in a warm, laissez-faire approach to life here in Mallorca, which lends each an appreciation of the opposite qualities of the other. Spain, with its hands on the money, has gone mad for Mercs and Volkswagens and all things Deutsch. Germany, dishing out the readies, has bought into the dreamy glow of a long Mediterranean embrace demanding, on the way, perfection. Ignacio, who has just returned from Granada in mainland Spain with a psychology degree, obviously feels equipped for the challenge so after a while I decide he might be just the man to build a pool, against all the odds, for me.
Ignacio is like a little black charger. I phone to make an appointment or as he calls it ‘a meet’ and on the dot of the hour, I can hear his jeep careering up the track. This is very unusual in Mallorca but Ignacio is determined to be different and show his new clients he doesn’t buy bad Spanish timekeeping. His King, Juan Carlos, would be proud of him.
Ignacio strides over the parched earth in his Timberland boots taking the steps to the patio in one bound, locking his big brown eyes on the business deal ahead. He’s wearing chinos and a polo shirt, dressed ruggedly, pumping my hand as he asks, seriously, after my health. He speaks English fluently, so my Spanish pronunciation and exaggerated hand gestures – as though I’m talking to a Chinese waiter who doesn’t understand – are for once superfluous. He is quick to agree that the area defined by the walls has to be made lovely and affirms that a pool couldn’t be put in a better place. He will need to get a licence and work out dimensions but he is enthusiastic. As we investigate the cracks in the wall, however, he starts tutting, shaking his head, saying he wouldn’t have been allowed to build walls in the ‘backside’ like this, with no foundations. ‘No foundations? Surely not.’
Ignacio, sensing my mood, quickly backtracks. Not to worry, he blithely reassures, it can be fixed. No problemas.
No foundations. No problemas. I feel sick. To think all this work over all these months and I’ve been so stupid I didn’t notice or question. I might have guessed the walls were going up too damned fast. And here I am with another building project. A swimming pool, which will end up who knows where, built by another cast of characters of who knows what ability.
Cedric is not in a helpful frame of mind. He’s loyal to Boris, of course, but his plaster cast is slowing him down and he is bad-tempered. It was one of the dogs he rescued off the roadside that led to his downfall. It, Bozo, was lying on top of the stairs when Cedric got up in the night to go to the downstairs loo. Dottie had been on at Cedric for ages to fix a handrail to the stairs but Cedric, being Cedric, didn’t. Next thing, he’d stumbled out of bed and, not seeing a recumbent hound lying on the top stair, tripped and fallen badly down to the stone floor below. He moaned and groaned for hours but Dottie, thinking she was hearing the dogs mumbling in their sleep, didn’t get up. Cedric was lucky he lived. Dottie reckons it was the vino in the bar earlier that night that saved him, made him so relaxed he bounced rather than crashed.
Cedric’s house is a bit like Steptoe’s but with a wonderful view. It looks out over the valley as an eagle might, except Cedric’s nest is in a rare state of decrepitude. His kitchen has been rigged up outside under a tarpaulin because he has no electricity. A rusty cooker, fridge and barbecue entertain in all weathers Cedric’s happy band of guitar-playing brothers – his mates down the pub – who gather under the stars for al fresco nights. All around a fine collection of old sinks, doors, windows, tin sheets, taps and scrap motorbikes spill out up and over the hill because Cedric is also an inveterate rounder-upper of stuff other people have thrown out.
Tuesday, being bin day in the village, is rich in old bits and bobs locals don’t rate. They pile it all up by the big green plastic bins on the verge, which is then carted off on the back of a lorry to the tip down the road. In fact, nothing ever gets moved that far because most is recycled by sharp-eyed locals. I’ve picked up a large Indian rug and a mahogany wardrobe, which took some shifting, but with a bit of cleaning and polishing now adorns my house. Cedric goes round the bins with his seven-year-old son Jim in an old pick-up truck. It must be a great education for a youngster.
Cedric doesn’t have social security so the encounter with his dog is costing him. It is a real worry for once carefree fellows like him who now have families to look after. Cedric, however, has another emporium in a backstreet in Andratx, where he trades second-hand gear, electrical and plumbing equipment for DIYers or boat owners. Dottie, of course, has to pitch in and help sometimes as a grumpy plumber’s mate. I daren’t contemplate how long the pool is going to take to build if my chief electrician remains off his legs for long.
Kendi, at least, is a joyful distraction to the ongoing dramas of village life. There can’t be a day when I’m in residence that she doesn’t come with me. In any case, she now knows my footfall and gets into a frenzy if she hears I’m heading her way. The thought of her anchored to a chain galvanises me to walk long distances. She’s getting better at meeting people and is now on her doggy best behaviour when we slope off to look in folks’ back gardens. She knows if she spots another dog behind a fence she has to appear superior and not engage in rough brawls. Her ears go awry as she quickly determines if the mutt making the noise in a yard is worth a put-down woof or not. She has now learned that a dog wagging a tail heading in our direction is usually of the friendly persuasion.
On one of my first trips in the village with Kendi, a cuddly golden retriever ambled up and she nearly took his head off, thinking, I guess, he was about to attack me. Now she knows the drill I take her regularly into the tapestry of orchards and vegetable plots, snooping round the little village houses in the back lanes. Linking these houses are tiny footpaths that meander through almond groves tripping over old stone walls before emerging in someone’s front garden. This is where the older people of the village live, where vines smother pergolas and cobbled paths are weeded. Hanging bunches of luscious grapes are wrapped and tied in newspaper, and cotton curtaining that protects olive wood front doors bleaches in the sun. Most of the village houses are lived in by local people who regularly lime-wash their arched front doors and windows to keep out insects. And always they sport the same bright green shutters. There are lots of small, bug-eyed dogs living in pet heaven here, lurking behind well-stacked piles of logs along with the occasional parrot screeching from its cage hung in the open air.
There’s an old stone water trough down one of the side streets which will once have been the hub of village life, now most gardens have their own cisternas, filled with spring water that gets poured on lemons and oranges and beans and tomatoes in the hot months. Late in the year, before the rains come, mounds of rich red earth are scraped back from the base of every plant and tree so that nothing misses out on a good soak. Orange trees are worth every ounce of effort. Their scent envelops the valley and hangs in the air for weeks at blossom time.
To the north of the village the land gets mountainous, inhabited mainly by hippies and artists and a few local people who spend weekends repairing family smallholdings. To the south and west is a richer, flatter landscape where a different kind of folk altogether, the Village Raj, have taken up residence in kitted-out homes with plentiful underground water. Most of these ex-pats arrived in the 1950s at the end of the Second World War, fleeing the austerity of a post-war Europe but unable to entirely forgo an English way of life where Radio 4, Earl Grey tea, dinner parties and periodicals sent from Britain still bolster a sunnier existence. Bristling in the middle of these ex-naval commanders, minor aristocrats and code breakers from Bletchley, are some old Nazis and a scattering of Cold War spies.
A single-track road ventures through this wonderland teeming with wild flowers, orchids, poppies, buttercups, shepherd’s purse and tightly guarded houses, patrolled by dogs and lived in by people who keep to themselves. Kendi is always a bit skittish accompanying me on this walk. She has never encountered such menacing hounds before, like the Dobermans who bare their teeth, spraying spittles of slaver through the mesh of the high wire fence shielding who knows what clandestine affair.
There must be at least six radio masts in the garden of this house, poking out from behind cypress trees, reaching to the heavens. I imagine an SS commandant once stationed on the icy Russian Front, in there, somewhere, communicating from his sunny garden across the globe to his pals in the southern hemisphere. I bet he hasn’t the foggiest that one of his near neighbours, an ex-Wren once based at Bletchley, is a whizz at cracking radio signals. She and her ex-navy husband live a richly retired life only a few doors away. She was so expert at deciphering German battle codes she relayed them directly to Winston Churchill. I’d be very tempted to keep my hand in if I were her, doing a bit of eavesdropping on the side.
Further down the road and adding joie de vivre to all the intrigue is a beautiful painterly garden, which might have graced an aristocratic summer house in the south of France in the 1930s. A finca washed in ochre looks out on to planting which reflects the colours of the sun and sky. Kendi once went wandering down its open driveway to see what she could see and came across a sliver of paradise teeming with roses and geranium and jasmine. Eight magnificent cypress trees led the eye to an horizon greened with a perfectly trimmed lawn, but a little black cat suddenly spat from its sunny perch on a low wall and Kendi didn’t hang around.
It’s fascinating how attractive island life is to operatives of one sort or another. Anthony, a tall middle-aged American, Harvard educated and a former CIA agent, lives here with his wife Jen in a quietly distinguished house. He naturally has a fondness for a fine Scotch malt, preferably Laphroig, and when I asked him once in the bar what brought him to live permanently in this tiny village he said he didn’t know what on earth possessed him to come to this ‘one-horse town’, but ‘all I know is I don’t want to be anywhere else’.
Greville Wynne, the British spy who was imprisioned in the infamous Lubyanka prison in the Soviet Union, and was finally released at the Berlin Wall in exchange for the Soviet spy, Gordon Lonsdale, had a yearning for the Mediterranean and ended up in Palma growing roses.
These twists to the end of a life that has witnessed turbulence and brutality appeal to both the journalist and romantic in me. To think of Greville Wynne desiring to purge the sickness of a Soviet gaol with the scent of flowers in Mallorca makes my own small quest for a bit of peace here unquestionably tame.
As Kendi and I are intent on having breakfast in the port we have to leave this valley in all its subterfuge and climb a track worn to the rock with the cartwheels of old. It is a bit of an effort but the view from the first set of hills encircling the village is magical. A haze has settled over the valley but through it you can make out the houses and gardens we’ve just walked past as if they’ve been swathed in silk. I could spend hours with a pair of binoculars here, but a dog – and particularly Kendi – isn’t up for something as boring as this. We have to keep moving.
The track goes on to the coast but Kendi and I set off on a diversion, its location takes some remembering. To miss it means we’ll spend hours lost in scratchy scrub but today we get it right, boulders mark our way, so that soon we’re climbing almost vertically to a grass ledge to finally rest a little under a mighty, overhanging cliff face, the mountains and coast spread before us. Like so many paths in Mallorca this one turns out not to be as daunting as it looks. There’s a chasm in the rock face and through it, innocently, the path takes us on to another level, a high plateau where we join a well-defined track all the way to the port. Kendi leaps along easily with the new-found strength in her legs, the village shimmering on our left, the sea shining on our right.
Soon we’re near our destination, dropping through a forest of pine trees, past virgin land being cleared for building plots, down to the marina. The boat brigade are hurrying to pick up fresh baguettes for breakfast, the quay is crammed with ocean-going cruisers, rarely used to go further than the next bay but in constant need of attention. The yacht club is buzzing, there’s an excitement which Kendi picks up, she has a smile on her face as we hasten to the café on the harbour, nimbly leaping the bundled fishing nets hauled in overnight and now laid out, awaiting repair.
After we have finished our ensaimadas, and said adios to a couple of coiffed poodles reclining under the next table, there’s just time to get back to the house to meet up with Ignacio who has arrived with a tape measure and his ‘top man’, Pepe. Pepe is muscular and bald and he and his boss are discussing which bits of the wall need to come down. They want to get a digger in, so a large chunk will have to be demolished. I am now fixated on foundations. How are they going to make sure the pool will last for ever? And while we’re at it, how is he going to cope with Cedric and his broken leg? Pepe looks bemused at hearing a woman spout such nonsense.
Ignacio however makes a fist of at least considering this seriously. Yes, he will of course make sure the pool is the very best he can build but, as I will be away for a while, had I considered putting a new roof on the house because the old one doesn’t look good? Pepe, Ignacio and I look to the roof for signs of its imminent collapse. ‘I can give you a new super roof and have it done before you get back and then we can discuss the pool again.’ No problemas.
Now I know why he got that psychology degree. ‘All right,’ I can’t believe I’m hearing myself say this, ‘but how much is it going to cost?’
Ignacio says he’ll be back with his presupuesta, which is Spanish, he tells me, for an estimate for the work which we will agree before he begins. I ask if he has heard an English phrase ‘sharpen your pencil’. Ignacio says certainly he has. So I said, well you’d better sharpen it then.
Impulsively giving Ignacio the go-ahead for the new roof means I have to carry all my stuff – beds, bedding, chairs, chest of drawers, the odd fat spider and a dried-up mouse Jake left behind – downstairs and cover it all with dust sheets before I leave for Greece. I can well imagine what’s in store when I get back from my filming trip. It hasn’t helped that on my last night under the old roof I was woken from a delicious sleep by a rumpus in the kitchen. When I staggered downstairs the old stove was rattling. Whatever was in it was impatient to be out, so I tentatively opened the door and found, sitting in the ashes, a little owl black from beak to claw. A strangled squawk was all he could muster but once I had his tiny body in my hand, the soot dusted off easily. He soon got his act together, pecking at my finger, wanting to be off.
This little fellow must be a Scops owl, tiny enough to fall headlong down a stove pipe, the same one who keeps me awake at night. I carried him out and threw him to the stars but he flew straight into the pomegranate where he tooted all night long.
Blearily next morning, in a rush to get to the airport, I just have time to grab the ladder out of the shed and discover, as I suspected, that Boris hadn’t put mesh over the stove pipe in the roof, so the owl, thinking he’d found a dark hidey-hole, had taken quite a tumble. Luckily I was around to extricate him and even luckier that Ignacio, about to start on the roof, will fix the pipe. I leave a hasty note asking him to check the stove just in case my little owl doesn’t wise up and takes another header down it again.
By the time I get to Luton to board the private jet taking the Greek Royals on their secret mission to Thessaloniki I am in need of a long rest, relieved to be at last heading to the enchanting Greek islands after the Mallorquín disaster zone I’ve left behind.
Happily, the Greek filming trip looked as if it might be less manic. No chaos there, yet. Everything had been planned, as if in a military operation, to perfection. Our plane carrying the King, Queen Anne Marie and their five childr
en, touched down in the northern port of Thessaloniki right on schedule but shortly afterwards, as news got out that the King was on board, Greece went bananas. Crowds arrive in their thousands to welcome the family and an angry government, outsmarted, sent emissary after emissary to try and get the King to turn back. But no, Constantine had chartered two small cruisers and was determined to plough on with us in tow.
As King Constantine wanted to make a pilgrimage to one of Greece’s most holy sites before he began his adventure we sailed towards ancient Mount Athos, which sits with its monks miles away from the world. One of these monks came with a fast boat to ferry Constantine and his sons to the monastery. He hadn’t washed for weeks, which probably explains why no women are ever allowed – or want – to go near.
Soon after the religious stopover we all set off again on a long sail south, agreeing to rendezvous at the Bridge of Halkiva at midnight. The Royals took the lead, steaming ahead as we chugged behind through a narrow, treacherous strait of deep water under an unbelievably starry sky I was busily entranced with flickering lights on the far shore when suddenly our own lights went out and the engine stalled. The boat began rolling and then drifting. As the skipper tried to re-start the engine, it occurred to me that it was an awful long way to swim to safety. The water, which a moment before had seemed darkly glamorous, became, just as quickly, inky and unwelcoming, not helped by our radio link going on the blink.
Eventually, as we all shivered and shook in the cold night air, the boat carrying the Royals came back and hauled us all on board. Here we stayed for the fortnight. Our boat never got fixed so we all had to bunk down in very cramped conditions, seven Royals and a crew of five. Queen Anne Marie on her first traumatic trip back to Greece now had her privacy compromised, as morning after morning she looked across her breakfast table at a couple of baseball hats eating a full English of sausage, egg and bacon, while she endeavoured to keep up standards, sipping Earl Grey tea from a porcelain cup. She never flinched. The poor cook below deck, meanwhile, was having a tough time having to feed so many extra mouths. He came up with the brilliant idea of dishing up meatballs every meal, every day of our trip.