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Time and again, as I sat shivering with fever by the fire, or
gazed over barren fields or down muddy lanes, or saw the same
dull, good-natured faces sitting about some dinner table, or
ranked in Church with their scrubbed and fidgeting children about
them, my memories of Spain came before my mind. It was not the
Spain of dusty olive groves that I saw, where bare mountains
rear up in air that trembles with the weight of its own heat,
nor the Spain of black monks and gold-encrusted toreadors and
ladies tossing flowers. No, it was not Wellington's Spain at
all. Rather I thought of the small, comfortable smells and noises
of my life in San Sebastian after the War: the tarry, salty scent
of ships and wharves, the chatter of the girls as they washed
and dressed and compared the night's takings, the cry of a water-carrier
in the street, a hundred church bells tolling high and low for
the Mass, a whining beggar, the squawk of seagulls and the flap
of clean, wet washing in the sea wind. But I would not go back
to San Sebastian. That time was past, and besides, only the simplest
of its recollected sounds and smells were innocent: the place
as a whole carried for me all the pain that I would not allow
my memories of Bera to bear.
No, I would not go back to Spain. But I could seek out those
same comfortable things elsewhere: the faces of travellers; printshops,
jewellers and coffee houses; hawkers crying ribbons and ballads
and hot pies; constables and lamp-lighters; the clatter of foreign
tongues; the rattle of coaches on paved streets; the converse
with men that knew the world and women that did not shrink from
it. These things I longed for, I realised slowly as Spring crept
over my acres, as a banished man longs for the food of his homeland,
and even the welfare of that land which I must now call home
could not weigh more heavily, than my yearning for that former
life.
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