Wintering in the Algarve

I once had a friend in London - although he wasn't a friend really, more a failed writer - whose dark and dusty house, reminiscent of the Victorian age, contained an extensive private library. On one small shelf were books about "Wintering Abroad". These had mainly been written in the Edwardian era or the 1920s, and reassured anxious rentiers of both sexes that neither Nice nor Bordighera, nor their rival places of resort, presented perils in winter for English gentlefolk.

Times had changed when I used to go to lunch with The Aesthete, as I called him. Bordighera was no longer in fashion, and neither he nor I were rentiers, although we might as well have been, since we were both funding our lifestyles by running up enormous debts. Mine were all to the Royal Bank of Scotland in the form of mortgage, overdraft, credit card and loan. But he had a whole stack of plastic which he sometimes used to flip through with his fingers, as if shuffling a pack of playing-cards.

We used to joke that he would be the first debt millionaire. But he couldn't winter abroad because he had to be in London for many days of each month to find out how much he owed and pay off something on each card. So he had to content himself with brief but triumphant gastronomic tours of northern France, with the Riviera at Christmas. Things were only so good in London before the crash.

I regarded my unloved host with a certain amount of foreboding, and the idea of wintering abroad didn't appeal to me, because I still hoped, as he did not, for some great literary success in London. But time brings in its revenges, and while the aesthete is still, as far as I know, tending the vines in his stony town garden, I am occupying a house for this winter with peach and lemon trees in the extreme south of Europe. I haven't stayed at my house for the whole winter before, and intend to shelter here in Altura for a couple more months before I venture towards more rigorous climes.

The Algarve isn't fashionable either - another friend of mine, not a writer, calls it "the Al-grave" - but my circle of elderly companions here is expanding, my mad druggy companion Joaquim intermittently performs his capers as we wander the streets, the supply of lemons in the garden for my almond liquers (have I spelt that correctly?) is holding out, and I have engaged the services of a local shrink who, for the moment, is treating me entirely free.

After lunch I retire to bed for rest, or to my table in the garden for study of the Gospels. Meanwhile, a Spanish woman neighbour, Josefa, who was the only person in Altura to help my mother when she was desperately ill - and who also keeps a restaurant with her husband where I often take lunch - has offered to do my washing for the same price I would pay if I went to the launderette. Oh, and the sun shines brightly every day, although it is a little cold.

In moments not filled with rest, meals, Christian Study or Joaquim clinging to my neck, I am devoting myself to my genealogy, as elderly rentiers have often done when they themselves were about to turn into a tree. There are mysteries on both sides of my family. I wrote about the one on my mother's side in my last post. I have made absolutely no progress in finding out any more about that.

On my father's side, there are stories, told to me by three ancient women who knew my mother at the time of my conception and birth, and who are remembering what she said to them, that my Dad was a German or Pole. According to one of the women, my mother met my father on a London tube train, when she got her finger stuck in the door, and I also very vaguely remember Mum telling me this story.  She was naturally in great pain and distress, and the gallant gentleman sprang to her aid, took her to the hospital and, at a later date, having obtained her phone number, made further urgent advances.

But the man who brought me up, to whom my mother was legally married, an Englishman (it seems) called Arthur Ernest Hills, always told me that he had first met my mother at the Lyceum Ballroom in the Strand. It was a dance to which Mum had gone with her sister Augusta. As far as I can remember, Arthur never mentioned the story about having met Mum on the tube train. It therefore looks as if my real father was not the fanatically English person my mother met at the dance, but the gallant gentleman who came to her aid on the train, the one who really loved her, the mysterious Pole or German.

Will I ever know whether my Dad was a German or a Pole, if the station was Charing Cross or Cockfosters? Perhaps not, but as I sip my almond liqueur in the garden in the sunny afternoon, and read the Gospel of John and then the Gospel of Mark, and contemplate the peach and the lemon tree, I love the gallant gentleman who once lived in London and now winters abroad.

Portugal, my love and hate for it

At present I am in Porto, the chief city of the northern Portugal, on a mini-grand tour of those regions. Up to now I had only passed through the glancingly, although I know Lisbon, the Algarve and parts of the centre well. But this coming to know Portugal has not been a happy experience. I have long tended to share the slightly dismissive attitude about it that is common in England and, although I am part of Portugal by blood, and felt deeply attached to it in childhood, I have latterly experienced so much unhappiness and negativity here that I long to leave the slightly cursed country for good.

But I have been startled this time by the beauty and interest of what I have seen, and today have enjoyed an almost rapturous tour of Porto in the company of a knowledgeable friend. At last I have realised that this is a beautiful land, not just one that I have to be interested in because my mother came from here. It is so full of sights which, if they were in Italy, would be packed with tourists, but here attract only a ghostly few.

As far as I always knew when I was young, my mother was entirely of Portuguese peasant origin, from near the town of Mafra north of Lisbon, the daughter of a man called Cesário dos Reis, who seems likely to have been her father because she was deeply fond of him, and of his wife, Marcelina de Jesus.

For many years I was puzzled by the fact that, although my mother apparently spoke native Neapolitan Italian, her Portuguese seemed to be imperfect. She also appeared to know almost nothing about the region she was ostensibly from and when I drove there once with her, seemed totally lost. Since I have been living in Altura, the beach resort in the Algarve that was her last home, many people there have confirmed that her Portuguese was that of a foreigner. And a young Italian that I met in prison, from the region of Naples, once told me that he personally happened to know that my mother had been born in Italy and that I should believe this because it was true.

Last year I was staying with some cousins in the region near Mafra, and they mentioned to me for the first time a woman known only as Ana das Meias, or "Ana of the Stockings", because she spent her days walking around the countryside selling those and other items. She lived in the family farmhouse with Cesário dos Reis, his wife and daughters, did no work there, and terrorised the household with a gun. She was uneducated, but  knew many languages. It was, however, difficult apparently to understand what she said in Portuguese.

Ana das Meias was also a smuggler and faith-healer (sometimes unkindly described as a witch). She had children by various men, to only one of whom she was married. She smoked. She had a daughter with the man to whom she was married, a guitar-playing bohemian who lived in a thieves' warren in Lisbon, and at sixteen the girl was still playing with dolls. But Ana das Meias wanted to marry her to a policeman, so she locked her daughter into the house with him, he raped Cecilia, and then they had to wed. Ana, if that was her real name, was an evil woman.

I commissioned a researcher to try and find out about her, but it was impossible to discover anything, because her name did not appear on the birth certificate of the daughter who was later to be raped. The reports of her various children and grandchildren by various other men did not tally and it was difficult to determine the number or true lineage of these supposed descendants.

Ana das Meias sounds much more like the mother of my mother than the timid and deeply religious wife of Cesário dos Reis, for whom Mum had little feeling.

I hope to move from Portugal, if I can sell my house here, and live in Italy. The two countries have equally class-bound, oppressive and unjust social and legal systems, and equally fearsome bureaucracies, but in Italy they adjust themselves to their problems with a smile and in Portugal they endure them with a frown.

However, my mother, a patriotic Portuguese, rarely mentioned Naples, had little feeling for Italy and showed no great familiarity with Italian custom. And because my deepest attachment was to my mother, I have a certain coldness for the land where the lemon trees grow (they grow in Portugal as well).

Before I move to Italy, therefore - if I do - I feel I should find out for certain that Ana das Meias was my grandmother, that she originally came from Naples or somewhere near there, that the presence of her family in or near Naples was substantial and not just a fleeting connection, that my mother was born in or grew up in or had some significant link with that beautiful but troubled city of the south, in short that her connection to Italy amounted to more than native fluency in the language.

Because I believe that it is only if you are connected with a country by blood that you will ever be happy living there, or even that it is only in that case that you really have the right to live there. For blood is thicker than water, and the relationship between a people and a land is among the most important of all. And it does not make you a Hitler or a Goebbels to believe these things.

Almost on the eve of my television programme

The cursor is shaking as I write this, and my hatred of computers is almost uncontrollable, and the Chinese woman at the screen near me in the Salerno Mailboxes seems to be going mad, but I have to go on writing this blog because the television programme about me and my mother is soon to be shown: on Crime and Investigation Network, at 9p.m. next Tuesday, 13th September 2011.

Oddly enough, that is the ninth anniversary of my mother's death, which seems appropriate, because this programme - which is called "The Last Will of Maria Hills" - is about her almost as much about her as about me. How strange that, after many postponements, they have fixed it for her death day.

And it may be my death day if I have to stay much longer in this modern hell of an internet and phone agency. The Chinese woman is alternately shouting and crying to someone across her headphones, someone has just sat down too close to me, and a vast multiracial crowd was only recently at the counter waiting hopelessly to be served. Italy is a beautiful country, but in its modern incarnation it is among the most pressurised of European states.

Nevertheless, it can be so beautiful. This morning I went to Paestum where the three Greek temples rise from the ruins of the ancient city. Once you pass through the walls in the sunshine you are in a different world, and the serenity is wonderful.

Most moving of all, in the museum, are the paintings from the Tomb of the Diver, unique Greek pictorial art of the fifth century BC. One shows young men making love to each other at a symposium and another the guys following a flute girl, but most significant of all is the diver aiming for what is usually called the pool of death. And because of the reference the other paintings make to the joys of life, I believe it to be so. And we cannot doubt as we look at this wonderful work that the diver will come up to the surface with joy, a fuller understanding of things and a life in union with the infinite.

But before I myself aim for that pool, I am going to be a television star. It is with great hope and only a little fear that I contemplate seeing myself on the screen. Millions of others will be able to watch in HD and perhaps they will notice every chance stain on the colourful shirt and smart trousers I acquired in Otranto on the day of the filming to face the camera. What will they think of me? More important, will it encourage them to read the things I write, which to me are like the children I never had?

I will say no more about my writings. They have to make their own way, and I must let them go. But if watching the programme stimulates you to explore what I have published under the name of C.A.R. Hills, and to welcome further works of mine, it will have more than fulfilled the hopes I repose in it.

Half Way Through My Latest Grand Tour

Well, here I am in beautiful Amsterdam, and the crowds in the alleys are munching their chips to to the smell of pot, and nobody cares much about anything, and the hoteliers are making a fortune.

 
The news from London is of more riots, echoing those of thirty years ago that I remember from my youth. That is the difference between the two cities. The Dutch capital is similar to London in being a highly interesting and historic rip-off. But all they do here is smoke weed. Tension and threat are almost  absent. Whether this has anything to do with Amsterdam being quite a lot less extravagantly multiracial than London it would of course be unacceptable to say.

This is the third of my grand tours of the Schengen area, and while it was beautiful at first to make for Italy, and know that prosaic Ventimiglia was only the first of the places that lay ahead, now I am becoming a little tired of the new places succeeding each other in my tired mind and faltering memory. Sometimes, in Italy or France, Germany or Spain, I arrive at one city in the evening and have the curious sensation that I have arrived back at the one I left in the morning.

Amsterdam appeals to me less than Berlin, where I was before. The emptiness and tragedy that clings to that place, mingled with the pleasantness of all the young people flooding down the otherwise ghostly streets on their skateboards, did something to move my cold heart.

Nevertheless, I mustn't criticise Amsterdam too much. My ferociously expensive hotel doesn't offer a laundry service, but the breakfast is OK when you can finally get to the coffee machine, and, really, the free Internet service is a delight which has finally made me overcome my laziness and add a sixth post to my blog.

And I took my washing to a hugely overcrowded launderette, but I could escape it very quickly because the generous man in the turban wrote down my washing as fit for one machine and therefore it only cost eight Euros. I am writing this blog during the hour I have to wait for the washing to be returned.

No doubt it will be a complete mess, like everything else here, but at that price you really can't complain. Back in bankrupt Portugal the local laundry does my washing beautifully but weighs it with precision and charges me more than double this. And no smiles either. In this predicament I'd rather be in Amsterdam than Altura.

After Amsterdam I'm moving on to Zurich, as I have a perverse wish to experience German-speaking Switzerland, and hope that a belligerent local will artistically beat the shit out of me. But the hotel prices are likely to be even more terrifying, so I'll stay three days before escaping towards Italy. Then on to pricey Rome and criminal Naples before a quick and snooty tour of Spain and landing back in Portugal and my dilapidated house one autumn morning with what will probably be a sigh of relief.

Still, I can now say that I know Europe, and only wish I had experienced it in the days when there was something to know. But I am reading the first volume of Olivia Manning's Balkan Trilogy in the evenings in the restaurants, and her writing in far more beautiful than anything that would or could be produced now. But she depicts a Europe of such casual brutality, inequality and horror at the opening of the war that it makes my complaints about the modern world of laziness, corruption, decline  and comfort look silly.

Let us pray that the wheel of fortune does not turn too soon and bring us back to a situation where such things are practised as Olivia Manning knew. It could happen overnight, at the onset of some catastrophe. What goodwill exists in Europe or elsewhere would not stop it for one moment.

Increasing happiness in the Algarve

In order to continue my blog, I must reveal what I've been coy about before, my exact whereabouts. I live in a place called Altura, which is a featureless modern beach resort near Portugal's southern border with Spain. I've known the place for almost thirty years without ever once liking it or the people here.

It was the resort in which my mother chose to build her last home, for reasons unknown to me. Her ostensible place of origin was far away, in a rural region between Mafra and Ericeira, and her sisters lived in Lisbon. She explained it by saying she wanted to remain in touch with English tourists by letting out the upstairs flat in her house to them. But why this particular place rather than any other in the Algarve?

I have no idea. Anyway, I managed to win back her large and ugly house from the man she had left it to, by usufruct, seven years after her death, in 2009. In the interim I had tried to have him murdered, served a prison sentence and then skipped my licence.

I recently spoke on the phone to my relation Brian Streeter in England, and he told me what he'd not made clear before, that the British police never issued the international arrest warrant that they threatened. It seems I was too small a criminal to be worth their while. What good sense on their part!

Whether I can thus truly be described as being "on the run" is a moot question. If I tried to re-enter England, I would possibly be arrested, but they are very unlikely to seek me in Portugal. Perhaps I'm On The Walk, or even, On the Totter.

Meanwhile, and rather surprisingly, I can report that I am increasingly happy in Altura, with its million barking dogs in the otherwise ghostly streets. My house is the usual misshapen white Algarve box with red roof tiles and decorative chimney. But I keep it cool inside by never opening the shutters, and I love to sit naked at the stone table in the back garden writing my private diary, looking at the peach and rose and jacaranda and lemon trees, and sipping at a Spanish apple liqueur.

I'm also gradually becoming more part of the local community, in so far as this is possible. I have two clients for small doles of one or two Euros: an alcoholic old woman, and a somewhat younger ex-druggy who is now more an alcoholic. The latter is an amusing character whom I like more than the rapacious oldie.

I repair to the Central Sports Café morning, afternoon and evening to check my emails, revise my blog and surf the Internet. The morning also sees me at the paper-shop to peruse the international press and occasionally buy an item, to justify my browsing. In the early afternoon I often sleep, but when I finally feel like milky coffee and cake, it's smart to take these at the Broadway establishment.

Then, if I've got the energy, it's a visit to the supermarket. But sometimes I don't go there, because I must take the long way to avoid the old woman, who sits outside Snack-Bar Piri-Piri, off the main street.

Finally, it's back home, exhausted, to lie on my bed for a while. Then I take a bath with the CD playing. Then perhaps a snifter. Or I might have one before the bath, in the bird-haunted evening garden.

Then out again for a meal at a restaurant, where I try to keep the price under twenty Euros and get angry if they charge more. Then, energy returning, perhaps a phone call to England from the phone-box by the ocean, and I might visit a bar to go on with the novel I'm reading. Then it's back to my house for a final drink and perhaps a record and the longed-for tumble into bed.

Despite these supine ecstasies, I'm planning my third grand tour of Europe, commencing shortly. As I walked out one midsummer morning....

Home Thoughts from Abroad

I just went down to the windy beach and phoned my friend Stephen in England, and he told me that, although he himself had not seen my blog, another acquaintance of ours had read it and found it funny. That has encouraged me to write a new post. I only have one follower who leaves comments, and she hasn't been in touch recently. But I now realise that perhaps a reasonable number of people are reading my blog and for one reason or another do not leave a comment. So this is for them.

I hear that the weather in England is marvellous. It is strange how these sudden intensely warm spells seem to hit England in April, or sometimes even in March, again and again. The poet Browning was on to something when he wrote. "Oh, to be in England/ Now that April's there." Do I long now to be in my native land?

In the place where I am, as it happens, we are in an uncharacteristically wet and windy spell. It is a seaside resort, and in this weather it resembles a small place south of the Humber. I pass whole days here when I talk to no one, except those engaged in the formal business of serving me with coffee or meals, newspapers or telephone cards.

In Central Sports Cafe they are too busy with the endless passing of drugs to say thank you, but if you can pay for it, human contact is always available in this unfriendly place, and the interchange with a witty newsagent is often as satisfying and certainly more trouble-free than if  a random person had offered conversation without charge.

Life in the Algarve reminds me of when I was in prison. There too all contact was behind a pay-wall. The discipline and rehabilitation workers viewed you functionally, and  they spoke to you for only so long as they judged it necessary to attain their ends. And the prisoners only communicated because they wanted to get a laugh or a sachet of Horlicks, or hoped you might pass sugar under their doors.

Whether your interlocutors hope to make as much as possible from you, earnestly seeks your reform, or is just desperate for sugar, the effect is more or less the same. I think of my fellow prisoners with more affection than the beady-eyed prison social workers or the  Algarve newspaper-sellers. But that may only be because those butch men in prison were often quite sexy.

And now I am in Central Sports again, and the piratical guy with the greasy ringlets who runs the place is approaching in a threatening manner, and my credit is approaching its end, so I will post my blog now and hope that Max reads this one and finds it amusing.

Biding My Time

I had a bit of bad news last week. It seems the television programme about me, which I was expecting to happen soon, has been postponed until the autumn. There is no date for it to be shown. Sky apparently needs more time to think about publicising the Battle of Wills series, so I suppose that means the programme might have a bigger impact when it finally comes. But this is the third time they have postponed, and I am beginning to get tired of living in anticipation.

Meanwhile, as if fate were offering me a small consolation prize - I always remember that saying of Maria von Trapp, "When God closes a door, he opens a window" - I have been journalised by a gentleman called Len Port, who stood me a nice alcoholic lunch. He is about to publish an article about me on his blog, and from there hopes to sell the story to various papers, for one of which, The Daily Mail, he is a stringer.

Anyway, he is apparently a senior and respected journalist. I suppose it is unconventional for a criminal on the run to be giving his story to all and sundry, but my chief interest is in becoming known as a writer, and for that publicity, nowadays, is essential. I take myself less seriously as a criminal, and only hope the police share the same attitude. They are very short of money now, I am told, so they can only afford to go after the Mr Bigs. I am a Mr Small.

So I sit here in the internet cafe of this dull but noisy corner of southern Europe, blogging into the blue, checking lulu.com to see if anyone has ordered "The Olinda Angel" (no one has yet), checking the blog itself for any comments (there are none).

My feet are hurting terribly, and I am told I may have gout. Well, I can try anti-inflammatory tablets. They may do good, and cannot cause harm. One must not complain, or repine, and one is safe in the arms of God. Whether I write a blog or no blog, he is leading us thankfully to the land where no blogs are. Or might there be a Great Blogger in the Sky?