South from Ronda
Simon Courtauld
Andalucia Nicholas Luard (Century £9.95)
buring the early 1920s, Gerald Brenan
vi • lived for four years in the mountain llage of Yegen in the AlMiarra region of southern Spain, and recorded the time he sp
ent there in his enchanting book South fikr"? Granada. Nicholas Luard's book is result of eight years, in the 1960s, living In. a house he built above the Straits of Gibraltar, between Algeciras and Tarifa.. , e cover of South from Granada is 11- !ustrated with a painting by Dora Carr- ington of 'A Hill Town in Andalusia'; the cover of Mr Luard's book has a Photogra...L. Ila hoillfsidae. similar white-walled Pueblo onlj Jrf Had Mr Luard called his account South .°47 Ronda he might' have risked closer ehorriparison with Gerald Brenan — and yet heis "uld more accurately have described book. It is not a survey or a history of ,Aridalusia (like almost every English writer '.1.1. SPain, I prefer the anglicised spelling). It atells nothing of the latifundia of Andalusia i!td its landless agricultural proletariat; and _r saYs little of the effects of the Civil War ;_ill the Andalusians. (Mr Luard writes that i‘le asnever asked people about the Civil War h I knew they seldom spoke about le; A°wever, the inhabitants of the northern 41,_ ndalusian village of Lora del Rio were quite h ___
al-Ty to speak about it in the recent
ITV series on the war. And in another town in the Sierra Morena last year a local was willing to point out to me and tell me about a man — still a member of the casino, the gentlemen's club of the town — who during the war had acted as hired assassin for the nationalists and had killed 70 people of the town.) As it is pretentious and misleading to call the book Andalucia, so is the supplement- ary title, 'A Portrait of Southern Spain', equally inappropriate. It is a portrait, as Mr Luard acknowledges, of Andalusian life as he saw it — which was confined, in effect, to two provinces (Cadiz and Malaga) of the eight which comprise Andalusia. Of course, Mr Luard visits and writes about Granada, Seville, Jerez, Cordoba; but he is not a good guide, and the visitor to those places would do better to turn to H. V. Morton or to Jan Morris. No more than passing reference is made to Huelva and Almeria; and Jaen, with its extraordinary cathedral, escapes mention altogether (Mr Luard does not appear terribly interested in churches).
All that having been said, Mr Luard's book, within the limits which he ought to have set himself and accepted, has much to recommend it. Ronda is clearly his favourite town, and the account of his journeys there, from the valley where he liv- ed through the villages of the sierra, is most enjoyable. He is perceptive, too, when writing of the pueblo, of its clannish and often classless structure. While Gerald Brenan's sojourn in the Sierra Nevada was occasionally interrupted by visits from Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf, Nicholas Luard had his family, and from time to time the company (much more amusing than Strachey's) of Dominic Elwes — aptly described by Kenneth Tynan, also a visitor to Mr Luard's house, as 'past master of the post-mortem'. The local in- habitants of the Guadelmesi valley provide Mr Luard with some fascinating glimpses of peasant Andalusian life: there is the white witch, Curra, who took to the hills in 1975, on the death of Franco, fearing another movimiento: a boy named Toni who would catch swifts in flight, using a kite to which was attached a piece of string, baited with grass and forming a noose; Pepe, who would walk for miles every day through the forest to atone for the death of Christ; the smugglers who used dogs to carry con- traceptives from the coast into the hills; and tireless Manolo, the dustman, who made a great deal of money by doing er- rands for, and selling produce to, the peo- ple of the valley. (As an infrequent summer visitor to the valley, my memory of Manolo is of a man of great warmth and generosity who would often call with a present of half a dozen eggs or one of his delicious pollos de campo.)
Domingo, who was employed as servant to another of the foreign residents, and used to go missing for a few days every month at the time of the full moon, taught Mr Luard about the abundant wild life of the valley. He is at his best when writing of the flora and fauna — there is a delightful story of a wounded eagle owl which Mr Luard looks after and which is freed by a mongoose the night before it is due to be sent to the zoo in Madrid — and the chapter on bullfighting is one of the best brief ex- positions of the subject I have read. And for those with equally strong prejudices against Spanish food, I would also endorse Mr Luard's description of the wonderful variety of meat, fish, vegetables, fruit and spices available in the market of any An- dalusian town.
One of the less enjoyable things about living in the Guadalmesi valley is the weather. Sometimes, for days on end, the
east wind (called levante, similar to a mistral) blows, carrying cloud across the
hills above the cork trees. It can have a ter- rible effect, and I wonder what it may have done to Mr Luard's writing. There are too many cliches to be found in this book, and a tiresome tendency to employ the language of urgency and exaggeration which is quite unsuited to the normally leisurely pace of life in Andalusia. Pastures are 'flooded' by wild flowers 'overnight'; Algeciras acquires a professional middle class `almost over- night' after 'the investment boom triggered' by the closure of Gibraltar. The sounds of flamenco in Seville 'arrow impulsively into the air'; songs and dances `cascade' over the city of Cordoba; metalled roads 'spear through the trees'; the character of a village `blazes into life'; one day the rain is 'impenetrable'. And one night a guest in Mr
Luard's house, confronted by the injured eagle owl in a cupboard, is described by one of the co-founders of Private Eye as being, like Ron Knee, 'ashen-faced'.
This book is charmingly illustrated by Mr Luard's wife, though one is struck — and not pleasantly — by the drawing of the house which they built. It appears to consist of a row of tall, glass-fronted boxes, design- ed by Jon Bannenberg to resemble 'a great white bird at rest beneath the trees but with its wings poised for flight'. It is odd that Mr Luard, who is evidently not drawn to that part of Andalusia which has been spoiled by modern tourism, should have chosen to deface the Civadelmesi valley with such a building. Perhaps he imagined it to repre- sent the paloma blanca, the white dove of peace which is said to preside over the an- nual feria of Rocio, often attended by the Luard family, in the marshes south of Seville. But it is not a very convincing likeness.
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