 
THE TRANSLATOR'S TALE

Published by Stephen Howell at Smashwords

Copyright 2013 Stephen Howell

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THE TRANSLATOR'S TALE

Prologue

On June 8th 1917, the day after the assault on the Messines ridge, Joseph Patrick Burke was sitting outside the dressing station in a line of injured soldiers that stretched back some four hundred yards. A bullet had creased his left hand and he was waiting in the queue to have it bandaged. For the first time in a long while there was some banter amongst the wounded, despite the two hour wait for treatment. The mood amongst the soldiers had lifted.

For once, the battle had been a clear-cut British victory. It had devastated the forces of the German Fourth Army. The offensive had been painstakingly planned and well executed, achieving all of its main objectives in less than twelve hours. The success of the operation had been largely attributable to the 455 tons of high explosives that the British and Anzac tunnellers had quietly buried beneath the German lines over the period of the previous year; when the detonation had come at 3.10 am it had produced the greatest and loudest man-made explosion ever heard; so terrible was the noise that it had caused panic in the city of Lille some 25 miles away; in Switzerland it had registered on seismographs as an earthquake or a volcanic eruption. Seven minutes after it had begun, the sound wave had reached the Kent coast where it had woken people in their beds and another seven minutes after that Lloyd George had heard it in his study in London. It is even said that about 3.45 am a faint series of distant thuds had been noticed by an insomniac student in Dublin, the home city of Joseph Patrick Burke, the soldier who now sat sunning himself outside the dressing station while he waited to see the nurse.

Joseph was a young man with a naturally jocular and optimistic leaning, although the experience of the trenches had tested his sportive temperament to the limit. Nevertheless, the achievements of the day had restored his sunny disposition and he was now buoyed up by the ill-considered but widely held belief that the imminent advance on Passchendaele would be equally as triumphant as the taking of the Messines ridge.

Like many of his friends, he had volunteered for the British Army to help bring a speedy end to the war. He was a man of his word and he expected Lloyd George to honour the Liberal Party's promise to grant Home Rule for the South of Ireland just as soon as the British victory was declared. Like his fellow volunteers, he did not approve of the Prime Minister's intention to keep six of the counties of Ulster under British rule but he was prepared to accept this as a temporary measure while the Protestants could be reassured of the benefits of joining a united Ireland.

And like most of the other soldiers in the British Army who had joined up in 1914, he had no formal schooling in either German or French. Only a handful of troops had any knowledge of a foreign language and most had enlisted without the slightest consideration of the need to make themselves understood in anything other than English. What would have been the point? After all, the British had made their intentions plain to the subjects of Empire for the past two hundred years without having to go native. Anyway, the time for talking with Jerry was all over. If he wouldn't understand plain English then he'd just have to be taught a lesson in the only language that he really understood. As for learning French, why would anyone bother? Everybody knew it would all be over by Christmas.

So it was that to begin with, most of the soldiers conducted their occasional contacts with the local population using a few basic words, a handful of common gestures and a smattering of slang and phrases of what they supposed to be double-entendre: the ribald refrains of popular songs such as the 'Hinky-dinky parlez vous' of 'Mademoiselle de Armentières'.

But the war had dragged on so much longer than expected and some of the British servicemen had started to get by in French. Of course, some clearly had more of an aptitude than others. Joseph, for example, proved to have a greater interest and ability in the language than the majority of his companions in arms. After three years in military service he had become quite a linguist. He had the assistance of a phrasebook: "What a British Soldier wants to say in French and how to pronounce it." Perhaps, when it was produced, before life in the trenches, there had been no intended irony in the title. Who knows? It was subtitled, "An English French booklet for the use of the Expeditionary Forces". The price was 3d but Joseph had acquired it for free. Or nearly at the cost of his life. It depends on how you look at it. On his first engagement with the enemy, when he had gone over the top in an attack that had already caused the deaths of several hundred men, he had thrown himself flat on the ground in a desperate attempt to avoid the sweep of a German machine gun which was plotting a swift route towards him through the bodies of his comrades to the left. As he hit the earth his hand had closed around the abandoned paperback.

What he was thinking when he stuffed the small, muddied booklet into his ammunition pouch he had no idea. In the subsequent terror he had forgotten about it entirely, but three days later he chanced upon it when he was going through his various pockets in search of a smoke. He imagined then that he had found a lucky charm and in gratitude for his deliverance from the German guns he took to pronouncing the book's strange, stilted phrases as if they constituted the catechisms of his own private Church of Protection. He tried out his beginner's French on whoever would listen and he embellished the simple sentences with as many new words as he could acquire.

As a result of his endeavours he had become a proficient conversationalist. And, not surprisingly, in a world that was starved of feminine company, a large number of his opening gambits were locutions that complimented the delights of the female form.

For two hours Joseph had sat waiting in the dressing station queue, never taking his eyes off the pretty Belgian nurse as she worked her way through the long line of soldiers who required attention to their wounds. He noted that she performed her tasks with speed and efficiency without being at all dour and officious. Indeed, she smiled and she seemed elated. Occasionally she would give a small laugh when one of the lads flirted with her in his rudimentary French. When it was Joseph's turn he did exactly the same thing, only more proficiently, writing down his address in Dublin and telling her she was gorgeous and that he would marry her straight away if only she cared to look him up in Ireland after the war was over.

He was not actually expecting her when she knocked on his front door in the spring of 1919 and said she was ready for the wedding. But, being a man of his word, not betrothed to another and having more than a tendency to make rash decisions, Joseph kept his promise, knowing little more about his future bride than she had a pretty face and was as reckless as himself when it came to making lifetime commitments. So it was that Joseph Patrick Burke and Marie Estee Maréchal were married within the month.

Maybe it was also the social rejection that Joseph was experiencing back home in Dublin that had prompted him to make the impetuous choice of marrying this most unexpected of wives. Ever since the survivors of the 16th Irish Division had returned from the front they had been given the cold shoulder and for some time Joseph had felt desperately in need of a little love and affection. Public opinion in Ireland had changed considerably during the four years of the Great War. The executions and repression that had followed the Easter Rebellion of 1916 had turned Irish public opinion against the British Government's condescending plans for limited independence. Many in Dublin now found it unforgiveable that Irish volunteers should have taken it into their heads to go fighting the cause of the British Army while that same army had been so violently suppressing the legitimate aspirations of their own people.

Joseph, of course, didn't see it quite like that. Having risked his life for his beliefs in Home Rule and seen thousands of his comrades die in the fight against a totalitarian militaristic dictatorship he now felt forsaken and shunned by his own people.

At first, everything went surprisingly well with the newly-weds and the unexpected joys of his extempore marriage insulate Joseph from outside hostility. But it wasn't possible for long to ignore the bitter animosity that surrounded him. He found it difficult to find work and there had been two occasions when somebody had picked a fight with him in the pub.

Joseph had no chance of keeping a low profile; his new foreign wife was a constant reminder to everyone of where he had been for the past four years and that he had fought on the side of the Crown. She was also an attractive, exotic figure and no doubt there was an element of jealousy that prompted the men to feel he didn't deserve such a reward; the women identified her straight away as a hussy. Marie felt leered at, pointed out and disapproved of. This life was not the romantic Irish adventure that she had imagined and Joseph often arrived home to find her shut in the bedroom, her face streaked with tears. When she informed him in the Spring of 1920 that she was pregnant Joseph made a quick decision that they should up sticks and make a new life across the water in Liverpool where he had an aunt and several cousins who promised to find him work on the docks.

Chapter One

My father was born four months after Joseph and Marie Burke arrived in Liverpool and he was delivered in the front bedroom of the two-up, two-down they rented in Bootle. They christened him Conan. When the name was pronounced in Joseph's Dublinese the last two letters were rarely discernible by the average English listener. At best, people heard 'Cone'. More often than not they simply called him Con and it was by this abbreviated form of his name that he came to be known throughout his life.

Dad's full name is Conan Thomas Leo Aloysius Burke. My grandfather would have been content with just Conan. The name is Celtic and although there is some slight disagreement about what it means exactly, there is a general acceptance that it is associated with the wolf and signifies a sagacious and swift-footed warrior. My grandmother had not been so sure about the choice. She had consulted the Lives of The Saints and had discovered that the name of Saint Conan was conspicuous by its absence. Although grandfather reassured her that it was the given name of several minor Irish saints, not to mention a seventh century Bishop of the Isle of Man, she could find no written confirmation of this assertion and she didn't trust her sacrilegious socialist husband when it came to the spiritual welfare of their son and what such a baptismal name might mean for the prospects of his eventual entry into the Kingdom of Heaven.

Marie had heard of Saints Thomas, Leo and Aloysius and she insisted on the inclusion of their names as auxiliaries in Conan's title in the expectation that their presence might help to allay any suspicion by the Catholic Church that hers was a pagan child. Dad was therefore baptised with these supplementary Christian names so that, when his time came, he could be recognised more readily at the Pearly Gates as a bona fide recipient of eternal life. Hopefully, Saint Peter would acknowledge her pious intentions, take no notice of any of that heathen nonsense about wolves and let him through to Paradise on the nod.

Such future planning was unusual in my paternal grandmother's short life.

As for the qualities that his parents hoped that they had endowed upon him by naming him in this way, I don't know who was more disappointed when they failed to appear. He never embodied the vulpine traits that were foreshadowed in his father's choice of a first name. If he was a wolf he was certainly a lone wolf, and an odd one at that. Dad did turn out to be clever all right, but even that has to be tempered with the proviso that his intelligence tended to fixate on certain subjects. He did eventually fulfil the worst fears of his mother and develop into a heathen but at least she was spared the anxiety of this realisation as she didn't live long enough to know exactly how godless he would become. But I'm getting too far ahead. Let's get back to the chronological order of things.

Initially, the move away from Dublin seemed to suit Marie. Until Conan was a year old they were happy again and she managed very well, but soon after the boy's first birthday she became inexplicably sad and took to her bed. Indeed, she was so poorly that the doctor was called. He declared that she was suffering from neurasthenia and needed a long-term rest, including a break from caring for her son. Marie would not hear of any of her husband's relatives looking after Conan and made it plain that she would only feel safe enough to relax and get better if he was cared for by her widowed mother in Brussels.

So it was that Conan was dispatched to his grandmother's house in Belgium, his father accompanying him on the tiring sixteen-hour rail and ferry journey from Lime Street to Brussels Central Station where they were met by his maternal grandmother, Mamie Louise.

Eventually Marie did recover from her misery, but she had been well for no more than a week when she entered a period of nervous exhilaration during which she demanded the immediate return of Conan from abroad. Joseph was disconcerted by her agitation but wanted to please her nevertheless, and he was quickly on the train to make the long round trip to retrieve his son.

But in another six months Marie was once again unable to cope. A pattern began that saw her oscillate between the two extremes of sadness and euphoria. With each swing, the depressions seemed to deepen and the manicity become more intense. When she was flying high nothing was beyond her but when she sank to her lowest point she took to her bed, ate very little and became so pale that it was no exaggeration to say that it was difficult to tell where her complexion ended and the grey-white sheets began.

It was during these annual descents into the depths of despair that Conan was returned to the care of Mamie Louise. What with the increasing duration of his mother's illnesses, the financial cost of the journey and the exertion of getting him to and fro, whenever Conan arrived in Belgium he was pretty sure of staying there for several months. And that was how it began, the alternation of his childhood between Bootle and Brussels.

The emergence of Conan's speech was slightly delayed, as if he had been silently calculating how he might commence his parlance with the world. When he made that initial journey to Belgium at the age of fourteen months he was yet to utter a word. It was only during his second stay there, when he had just turned two, that he spoke for the first time, dispensing with single syllable utterances and addressing all and sundry with the same short sentence in both English and French: "Where do you come from?" or «D'ou venez vous?». Thereafter, it was always the same blunt interrogation whenever he met anyone new. Maybe it was his way of orienting himself in a world that for him was constantly changing. Maybe it was just something he had in him.

Most small children would have baulked at the whole idea of such a regular long journey between two distant poles of existence; during each repetition of the trek they would have moaned continuously and asked repeatedly how much longer it would be before they were due to arrive. But not Conan. He relished the long migration and he especially enjoyed the switch from one language code to another. Over the years he became equally at home in both cultures, just as much a native Bruxelloise as he was a born and bred Liverpudlian. Later in life he used to say that he was brought up speaking four languages, French, Flemish, English and Scouse.

The days of his childhood that Conan passed in Liverpool provided him with plenty of raw material for his primitive investigations into the provenance of those around him. He busied himself with a relentless survey of the Scouse speaking world; it became his one and only preoccupation: an all consuming and never ending task. When he felt that this was complete he showed a particular interest in anyone he apprehended from outside this linguistic enclave and he would return home excited and energised if he'd managed a conversation with someone say from Preston, Bolton or Bury.

To the perpetual amazement of his second cousins he wasn't in the slightest bit interested in joining in their play. He couldn't have cared less about hanging off the back of trams, keeping pet mice or playing footie in the street. When Everton won on a Saturday afternoon and joy and celebration spread throughout the neighbourhood Conan stared blankly at the euphoria generated by the team's success and listened unimpressed as all the other boys basked in the reflected glory of the goal scoring feats of Dixie Dean.

But they weren't spiteful children and they didn't reject him for all that; they sniggered sometimes at his absurd preoccupation with people's talk, they teased him by claiming to have heard little green men from Mars chattering in the street and they all joined in with copying his school work word for word. The latter was fair trade. He mimicked others and they copied him. It was a mutually beneficial relationship, a symbiosis. On the many occasions when he turned up for school without his sandwiches they shared their lunch with him, and on games afternoons they always picked him for their team even though he was, in the words of Jimmy McKenna, "about as much use as a one-legged bloke at an arse-kicking party." And if they were with him in the street he was neither baited nor bullied.

Of course, if he went out without any of his young bodyguards he did so at his own risk and several times when he ventured forth alone he came home with a bloody nose. On one typical occasion he found himself in Scottie Road conducting his street by street survey of passers-by when he was cornered by a gang of boys who asked him for his considered opinion of the players of Liverpool Football Club. Unable to see where the conversation might be leading he said that he didn't have a view of his own as he was not much interested in the sport but his cousin Patrick had assured him that they were all a bunch of shite.

Even so, it wasn't a warm sense of belonging that Conan obtained from being part of such a protective tribe. For him, the huge benefit of such an extended family was that it brought him into contact with a wide variety of diction. The irony was, that however much argot, jargon and slang he consumed, he never acquired the savvy attitude that accompanied the mastery of these street-wise forms. He couldn't do the snappy come-backs, he never learnt the gift of the gab and he struggled to find the common touch.

In the crowded houses of Joseph's relatives, on the busy streets of the city or amongst his fellow pupils at school, Conan met any number of people from every part of Ireland and his gift of mimicry was such, that by the age of six he was quite capable of passing himself off as a Corkonian, a Kerryman or a Dubliner. But for all his close association with the Irish there was nothing of the blarney about him.

By the same age he could demonstrate the difference between Glaswegian and Midlothian just on the basis of the exposure he got to native speakers when the family had gone on a fortnight's holiday to stay with relatives in Scotland during one of Marie's more robust interludes.

And that was the genesis of Conan's obsession with geolinguistics, although as yet he couldn't give it a name. At first, as an infant, he made a rough separation of accents and they appeared like dots on his mental map, resembling nothing more than a random distribution of spot heights scattered mainly over Ireland, the North Country and Belgium. Later, as more and more people responded to his question, the dots became increasingly congested. He began to draw lines between them and around them as he discerned the linguistic contours that obtained between regional differences in speech, the isoglosses, another term he would only know in a few years' time.

Chapter Two

As each year passed there was a constant and dramatic increase in his skill of speech recognition and of his ability to replicate whatever he might hear. Every time that Joseph accompanied him to Belgium he never failed to be amazed at Conan's swift progress in French; such was his fluency in the language that even before he was of school age he could pass for a native speaker. As in his use of English, he had forsaken childish expressions and had adopted a more adult register. When visitors came to her quiet house in the Rue de Bordeaux, Mamie Louise swelled with pride when they remarked upon how grown up was her strange little English grandson and how well he spoke.

Although both sides of Conan's family were Catholic, Mamie Louise considered the English to be lightweights in any form of religion and suspected them all of being heretics as well as adherents to the theory of evolution. In her kitchen, just above the plate rack, she had placed a full-page cartoon of Charles Darwin that she had cut out of the Revue Catholique and framed. He was depicted as a seedy, grey-haired macaque, trying for all its worth to shrug off the large frock coat in which it had been dressed, a long simian appendage emerging from between the coat tails at the back.

Mamie Louise was full of superstition. She believed that you could catch leprosy from bananas, that if you accepted a knife which was proffered blade first you would be seriously stabbed within the year and if you should be so unlucky as to tread upon a needle and you failed to dislodge it from your foot then it would inexorably work its way up the inside of your body and find its way into your heart. Conan listened carefully to all his grandmother's superstitions and even before he could speak he suspected that much of what she had to say contained no sense at all.

Mamie Louise was aided and abetted in her obscurantism by Father Bertrand, the Sunday school priest, a short, emphysematous man with dark yellow teeth and a cassock that stank of stale tobacco. Father Bertrand's main method of instruction was to insist upon the completion of a long series of religious workbooks. As all twenty-five in his class were of different ages and mixed abilities, the lessons progressed at the pace of the least capable child.

Each workbook began life as a blank volume with an empty rectangular box at the top of every page. After the priest had led a laboured and breathless discussion about whatever they were studying that day – The Story of Jesus, The Lives of the Saints, The Journeys of the Apostles or The Stations of the Cross – the children were issued with a chrome stamp depicting the Sacred Heart, St Francis with a Lamb, St Paul arriving in Rome, or Christ wearing the Crown of Thorns. Each picture they dutifully pasted into the appropriate empty square. Beneath the black outline of the box there was sufficient space to write an informative caption, although the substance of the legend was never left to the students' initiative, the approved version being dictated by Father Bertrand in a series of slow asthmatic gasps.

Mamie Louise was mortified when Conan confronted her about the credibility of these classes. She didn't know what to do when he declared that he never wanted to go again. Evidently the strength of British blasphemy had already blighted his immortal soul. She rued the day that her daughter had moved to England. No matter that she had married an Irishman. The boy had been born in England and that was proof enough of his contamination by all manner of profanity.

She thought long and hard about how she might arrest the development of fully developed disbelief. Eventually she hit upon a plan which might at least delay an early onset of atheism. She countered Conan's demand to be exempted from Father Bertrand's classes by promising him a bicycle for his birthday if, in exchange, he would agree to continue to attend the ten o'clock mass and the Sunday school that followed.

Conan accepted the deal, but every Sunday after he had listened once again to Father Bertrand's breathless Bible stories he put a packed lunch in his panniers and cycled off to explore what he might see and hear beyond the bounds of Brussels. His escape from the city was easiest to the south and this was the direction in which he went. Walloon was still widely used thereabouts and he would it hear it in his wanderings around the towns of Wavre, Waterloo and Namur. Occasionally he would chance upon speakers from further afield and he would contrast the sounds of Liège, Nivelles or Bastogne. He learnt what was Picard and what was Lorrain. He named his excursions his missions de reconnaissance. When he learnt to associate a sound with a city he would experience a feeling of satisfaction and he would say to himself, Ça y est, je me reconnais maintenant, that's it, I know where I am now.

It wasn't just French. Conan's linguistic education in Belgium had the added fascination of being undertaken at the nodal point of various languages. When, for example, Mamie Louise took him on the train to Antwerp Zoo, he was obliged to speak Flemish as the town professed little public enthusiasm for French. On the occasions when the pair of them travelled a few kilometres further on to visit her sister in Bergen op Zoom, Conan was delighted to discover that Flemish had subtly metamorphosed into Dutch.

One year, his great uncle Maximilian took him across the German border to see the Grand Prix being held on the brand new motor racing track at Nurburg, a breathtaking circuit that had recently been built as a rigorous test bed to evaluate the efficiency of the vehicles being produced by the rising German car industry. It was an astounding twenty eight kilometres of snaking road surface that weaved in and out of the enchanting Eifel Mountains, a twisting, tortuous trail in which the Audis and Mercedes Benz trounced Bugattis and Maseratis in thrilling chases at breakneck speed. But to his uncle's great disappointment Conan paid no heed to the circuit or to the race and spent all his time at the track wide-eyed and listening to the crowd.

On the basis of the success of his reconnaissance missions in Belgium he planned to repeat them in England. As soon as he arrived back in Liverpool he began badgering his father until he also bought him a bike. Joseph resisted for a while, but such was Conan's insistence that it wasn't long before he got what he wanted. Joseph wasn't entirely surprised when, instead of riding it around the backstreets of Bootle with all the other kids, Conan chose to put his bicycle to more ambitious use, making investigative field trips into the hinterland of industrial Lancashire.

Now, instead of chancing upon out-of-town visitors to Liverpool he could pedal off to listen to people in their native surroundings. He soon worked his way as far as Manchester, copying in his head the sounds of the settlements that bordered the East Lancs road, tracking the progress of diphthongs and the evolution of vowels all the way from Croxteth to Salford. It fascinated him that in the course of only thirty miles the sound of a voice could change so dramatically. Likewise, he explored the Cheshire route to Manchester, looping southwards through Widnes and Warrington before approaching the metropolis through the posh accents of Wilmslow and Knutsford.

That September Conan started at the secondary school and in an unexpected and unprecedented stand of principle Joseph finally put his foot down and insisted that there was no further need for the boy to be fostered by his grandmother. Amongst his reasons for ending the arrangement with Mamie Louise he mentioned the need for Conan to have a schooling that was uninterrupted by absences of several months at a time. He also said that he was in and out of work and could not afford to risk making his employment prospects any worse by not being available when a job came up. Neither could he afford the continual trips to Belgium. Conan was growing up and it was time for him to understand the realities of life. All three members of the family would face the next attack of depression together.

But there was to be no such united front. At the end of November, when Marie next noticed that her mood was beginning to slide, she turned the tables on the arrangement that had lasted a whole decade and took herself off to the care of her mother. The difference was that she never came back. In Brussels she did what she always did: she took to her bed. The psychiatrist who visited from the asylum changed her diagnosis to one of cyclothymie. It may have been a term which more accurately described her ups and downs but to be told you had a personality that regularly veered between two extremes was of little therapeutic help when there was no cure for the condition. Mamie Louise, to her credit, refused to allow her daughter to be taken away to the mental hospital and Marie remained at home in her old bed. There she lay for two months in an increasingly debilitated state. In her long absence from her native region she'd lost her herd immunity to the airborne pathogens endogenous to the Brussels night air and she was prey to any illness that blew in from the cold. In a piece of supreme ill fortune she succumbed to an aggressive bacterial infection and rapidly developed an acute pneumonia which whisked her away to the grave.

Joseph and Conan made the trip to Belgium one more time. The funeral was sparsely attended. Mamie Louise's husband had died long before the war and Marie was her only child. Two of Marie's uncles had been killed in the fighting and Maximilian was the sole survivor. Mamie Louise used all her savings to lay her poor shrivelled daughter to rest in the beautiful cemetery in the pleasant suburb of Ixelles, a twenty minute walk from the house. Afterwards there was a small wake at the Rue de Bordeaux. Joseph and Conan didn't stay.

During the long journey home Joseph was tearful but wasn't sure why. It might have seemed obvious to an outsider that a man who had just buried his wife should cry but Joseph was confused by a welter of sad feelings. He felt guilty for things. He was conscience-stricken that he should have robbed Mamie Louise of her only child, her sole consolation after all the dreadful bereavements of the war. At the same time he was cross that Marie should have left him and gone back to her mother. Did she return home knowing in the back of her mind that this was it and she was going to die? Did she deliberately exclude him?

What further surprised him on the long way home was the realisation of how much he had fallen in love with the journey itself. The tribulation of the twice yearly odyssey had been replaced by feelings of romance. He always felt a thrill arriving at the railway station in Oostende, boarding the ferry for England and crossing London on the tube. He couldn't immediately understand how he had grown to love the thing which initially he had hated. Was that why he had announced he wasn't going to take Conan to his grandmother's house anymore; because he felt guilty that he was using Marie's illness as a vehicle for his own self indulgence? Did his refusal to go on that last occasion really have anything to do with money? In the past he'd always found the cash from somewhere. Did it really have anything to do with education? The truth was that Joseph hadn't any faith in the English education system that told so many lies about Ireland and he would have been quite happy for the boy to muddle through at schools whatever country he was in at the time. He couldn't make any sense of what he was feeling. All he knew was that it was going to be a terrible wrench not to make the journey ever again. Then he felt ashamed that he was lamenting the loss of a bloody railway excursion just as much as he was grieving for the death of his wife.

He told himself he shouldn't feel like this, certainly not any more. The temper of the voyage should have changed. It had lost its reason for being. It used to be undertaken because Marie was unwell and hurrying the boy away was deemed to be an aid to her recovery. Now she was gone the trajectory was futile. Despite telling himself all this, Joseph still found himself experiencing the familiar excitement of the return journey. He knew he couldn't excuse the emotion by putting it down to his urgent need to get back as soon as possible to see how Marie was faring. He reasoned with himself that the thrill of the journey was just misplaced emotion that had got tangled up with his previous desire to see Marie. After all, was he not always optimistic on the train? Yes, that was the explanation. Some of that fervour must have adhered to the journey. Every time he delivered Conan to his granny he always hoped that when he got back to Bootle Marie would be miraculously on the mend. When he got to Lime Street did he not open the carriage door while the train was still in motion and hit the platform running?

But there was something else. What about how Conan was feeling? He looked at him across the railway carriage where he sat in his little black jacket and tie, wearing his spindly wire spectacles and reading the early edition of De Telegraaf that he'd bought at the newspaper kiosk on the station platform that morning in Brussels. Joseph saw that he was absorbed in making a list of all the nouns, pronouncing each one silently, making a little twist of the mouth before moving on to the next. One of the most shocking things for Joseph about the death of his wife was not that she was suddenly gone for ever, but that Conan did not seem unduly perturbed by her loss. It seemed to Joseph that what Conan was going to miss more than his mother was his annual stay in the Low Countries. And that troubled Joseph. To be sure, it wasn't normal for a child not to be upset by the death of a parent.

Chapter Three

Conan wasn't indifferent to the death of his mother. He was simply being supremely rational. He accepted her demise as an inevitable consequence of the illness that had pursued her all her short life. As he had spent at least half of his childhood without her, he reasoned that he could cope with her absence if he just imagined it to be the taking of a more prolonged leave. Some might have interpreted this as a cold and heartless reaction in a child. But, if you were hard enough to ask him directly whether or not he missed his mother he would look away and say yes. He just didn't show it much; that was all.

In contrast to Conan's muted response to the death of his mother, Joseph became depressed after they returned to Liverpool. Initially he had been shocked and confused by Marie's sudden passing. Later he became inconsolable, agonising over the fact that he hadn't been with her at the end. Finally, he just felt empty.

He did go back to work but he was no longer concerned with superficial matters such as smart dress, school attendance or tidiness around the house. As a consequence Conan found himself released from many of the traditional restrictions of social convention. Joseph spared him the bother of wasting his time on trivial matters such as making his bed, sitting up for dinner or shining his shoes. His attitude gave Conan licence to do as he pleased, and in Conan's case what he did with his liberty was to take to the road.

His teenage years were spent on his bike exploring the further reaches of the north of Britain. Now that he was older and stronger he could be there and back to Rochdale in a day. With his tent on the rear carrier, his sleeping bag slung across his back and his panniers full of doorstep sandwiches and a couple of cold meat pies, he could spend a weekend in Wakefield, take a short break to Harrogate or even have a holiday in the Dales. He once spent three days in Anglesey wondering whether he would ever speak Welsh.

In the course of what he called his 'reconnaissance missions' he shared the roads with others who wheeled around with much less serious intent. Cycling was a popular recreation on The Long Weekend between the wars. Hundreds of thousands belonged to the Cyclists' Touring Club. Maybe as many as another million regularly took to their bikes. The local club was the best introduction agency going and young men and women joined in their droves. Courting couples rode together. It wasn't unusual for cycling clubs to have tandem sections sixty or even seventy strong. In the summer they toured the countryside, meeting in cafes and staying in Youth Hostels for a shilling a night. Men and women in open-necked shirts and khaki shorts thronged the roads in cheery groups. In picturesque parts they blocked the lanes. Cows had to stop to let them pass.

But Conan didn't do it for the purposes of sight-seeing, amusement or diversion. Cycling was not an end in itself, not a sport, nor a means of exercise. He got on his bike to hear the varied sounds of the human voice. It was a way of crossing consonants, visiting relative vowels, or plotting precisely the parameters of the velar nasal articulation so prominent in regions such as Yorkshire or the West Midlands, where the ŋ sound has a particular emphasis in the voicing of gerunds like longing, hanging or singing. Conan traversed the audible landscape. He chased an aspirated h from one end of its being to another, he positively pursued plosives and he would follow a glottal stop until it ceased altogether.

For a short while he became famous. There was an article about him in the Cycling magazine: 'Have you seen the Boy on the Bike?' People wrote in saying that they'd spotted him in Scarborough or Leamington Spa. A monthly column was begun which listed the places he'd been seen and what he was wearing. Most of the sightings were apocryphal. The rule was you could only count them as verified if you had spoken to the boy and he had asked you the question that he invariably put to everyone he met: 'Where do you come from?' He might even have become more widely known if something hadn't happened to curtail his freewheeling career.

On his missions he paid scant attention to anything unrelated to his obsession and this single-mindedness sometimes got him into scrapes. Improbable as it might seem today, cycling was seriously policed in the 1930s. Children whom the police apprehended riding on the pavement were boxed soundly around the ears, and any boy who was caught hitching a ride on a lorry by tagging along on the back had his bike impounded and was lucky if he ever saw it again. Conan didn't get into trouble for using the pavement or holding on to the tailgate of a lorry; he was too physically uncoordinated to risk that. But he did fall foul of the law because he could rarely afford a new battery for the front light. The Law stated that during the hours of darkness it was an offence punishable by a fine or imprisonment to ride a pedal bicycle without an adequate headlight in efficient working order. If the magistrate found you guilty he offered you a stark choice: a fine of five shillings or five nights in jail.

When Conan was apprehended by a policeman one dark night in Cleckheaton and informed that his machine did not fulfil the lighting requirements of the law, namely, that it should carry a lamp showing to the front a white light visible from a reasonable distance, he was shocked to discover the consequences of his neglect. And they would have charged him straight away if he hadn't been so profusely apologetic and so strangely interested in the way the policeman announced his intention to book him.

Their reticence to invoke the law might also have been based upon a report they had received earlier in the day and hadn't done anything about. There had been a phone call from the Westgate Tea Rooms, a cafe on the edge of town popular with groups of cyclists from all over the North of England. According to the owner, an unaccompanied young lad fitting Conan's description had arrived at the cafe shortly after breakfast, asked for a glass of water and then sat there half the morning, gawping at groups of riders, eavesdropping on their conversation and asking where they came from. When a chap asked him where he was from he had replied Bootle.

So, instead of sending him for a hearing at the magistrates' court the sergeant chose to exercise his discretion, keeping him in protective custody while his father was summoned from Liverpool to collect him from the cells.

Joseph did not have a car of his own and he had to prevail upon the kindness of a friend to pick up Conan and his bike. He was not amused at having to borrow a van, miss a day's wages and drive practically all the way to Bradford, only to be threatened by the police with a charge of neglect. When they got home he imposed a rule, a thing he rarely did. He restricted Conan's cycling to within a disappointing radius of ten miles from the Pier Head.

Despite his eccentricities Conan was obedient and he accepted this new limitation on his freedom, even though he believed it to be absurd. But he stickled for detail and he wanted to know, if he took his bike on the ferry to Birkenhead or Wallasey, could the width of the Mersey be discounted for the purposes of the ten mile rule? After all he wouldn't actually be cycling during the twenty minute crossing. He reasoned that if the distance across the river was disregarded, his missions could reach the far side of the Wirral and still be within bounds.

It was some months further on, in late 1936, while he was out one Sunday morning cycling in West Kirby, using his milometer to test the limits of his newly reduced territory, that he met Mum, or Mary Rhiannon Pritchard, as she was then known. Normally, Conan didn't have much luck with girls and he wouldn't have met her at all if he hadn't been knocked off his bike while he was trying to overhear the conversation of two old men on the corner outside St Andrew's church.

He had stopped at the T junction where Graham Road meets the A540 Meols Drive and he was standing at the halt sign feigning alertness to the danger of approaching traffic while he listened to the speech patterns of the old men. So intent was he on their dialogue that when he could no longer loiter in the middle of the road without arousing suspicion and felt impelled to move on, he failed to observe the van that was turning into his path. He wasn't seriously hurt by the resulting collision but the rear wheel of his bicycle was buckled beyond repair.

Mary witnessed the whole episode as she came out of church. She ran up the path and out of the churchyard, grasped the unfortunate cyclist by the arm and led him to the grass verge. When he had recovered from the shock of what had happened and his shaking had subsided to a tremble, she escorted him to her family's new three-storey red brick house on Victoria Drive where she sat him down at the kitchen table while she tightly bandaged the cut he had sustained to his left hand.

Her parents had been delayed at church talking to the vicar and it was a further half an hour before they arrived home. When she opened the kitchen door Mary's mother Idris was nonplussed by the unexpected and unwelcome presence of a boy with a bandaged hand. "Who are you?" was how she greeted him. Mary spoke for him and explained what had happened.

Idris was implacable. "I'm sorry about your hand but I've got the dinner to put on. I expect your mother will want you home for your dinner as well." She had heard Mary's explanation of how he had hurt his hand, but she seemed to interpret the accident as his just desert for not paying attention to the traffic. She just wanted him to hurry up and leave. Mervyn, Mary's father, took a more compassionate attitude. He had noticed the damaged bike in the front garden and he offered to give Con a lift home. In the end Mary went along for the ride and the three of them left Idris to do the cooking. As they left the house, Idris raised her voice. "I want you back here by twelve forty-five. I'm not having good food ruined because of a boy who fell off his bike because he was poking his ears in where they were not invited."

Mervyn carefully unbolted the front and rear wheels and concertinaed the bike into the back of the car, telling Conan to hop in to the front seat.

Sharing the back seat with the dislocated cycle, Mary listened attentively to the conversation taking place between the two men. She was fascinated by such a strange young man who averted his gaze but listened so intensely to everything that he was told and, as if by magic, successfully divined the birthplace of her mother and father as somewhere near Bangor in North Wales. She was flattered by the interest he showed in her ability to speak Welsh and how he implored her to help him learn the language. Indeed she was so captivated by his enthusiasm that she agreed to his request and every Sunday throughout the seasons, whatever the weather, he would appear on her doorstep after lunch and they would spend the whole of the afternoon conversing in Welsh.

Right from the start Mary noticed how he related to others; how he would slowly and imperceptibly slip into the speech of the person he was with. At the beginning she was often concerned that one day somebody might think he was sneering at them and demonstrate their resentment by punching him in the face. But nobody ever did. His ability to copy other peoples' speech patterns was remarkable. It also tended to be obsessive and it was part of what drove her away in the end, although that was a still long while in the future.

Chapter Four

When war broke out and he was called up Conan and Mary made a snap decision to get married. Their only impediment was that neither of them had reached the age of majority and they both needed parental permission to wed. Idris tut-tutted and used the opportunity to admonish her daughter to do better for herself. But in the end she gave up. She had enough sense to realise that if she refused she might drive away her only child.

Joseph on the other hand was pleased to see his son settled. He had made up his mind that this time he was not going to volunteer for the British Army; he was returning to Ireland. As he had no other dependents it didn't matter that he had no job. He was prepared to turn his hand to anything that kept body and soul together. He had an aunt who farmed near Lisdoonvarna on the west coast in County Clare and if all else failed she would give him a room in exchange for turning the thin soil, looking after the livestock and taking the boat out to sea. The land was poor and stony but the fishing was good. There were crabs for the taking simply by lifting the smooth stones at the edge of the strand and nobody would miss the odd salmon when the river bailiff was looking the other way.

Joseph would never come back to England and for the rest of his life he kept in touch with Dad by writing long letters that took several days to arrive. They didn't see each for six years but after the war was over, Con would make an occasional journey to see him, taking the ferry from Liverpool to Dublin, the train to Ennis and the bus from there to Lisdoonvarna, walking the final mile to the farm, striding along lanes that were as straight as the wind as it blasted in from the Atlantic and scythed across the high, barren landscape. The day-long journey put him in mind of his childhood shuttle across the English Channel, two long railway journeys punctuated by the crossing of the sea.

The war had unexpected benefits for Con. It brought him into contact with an endless stream of servicemen from every corner of Britain and the British Empire, all of whom he vocally categorised, assessed and mimicked, afterwards placing them carefully in their correct position on his mental map. Whereas to most English soldiers, the Welsh and the Scots were simply Taffies or Jocks, to Con they were all shades of speech and nuances of sound, their voices containing subtle inflections which gave clues to their origin. Barrack room impressionists might ridicule their country cousins with the sort of all-purpose rural accent that you might hear nowadays in a Radio Four Afternoon Play, but Con was capable of such precision that he could tell his Herefordshire from his Worcestershire, his Merioneth from his Montgomery and his Bucks from his Berks.

When Con's linguistic abilities were discovered they were put to good use in the Intelligence Corps where he was employed by the army in counter espionage. His idiosyncratic ordinance survey was pressed into active military service. He interviewed suspected enemy agents, listening for alien inflexions in the pronunciation of towns. He would be alert for German spies masquerading as Dutchmen by looking for underlying Teutonic traces in the articulation of Scheveningen and Hellevoetsluis. If, on the other hand, they were trying to pass themselves off as British he would try them out on place names like Newton-le-willows, Kirby Muxloe, or Ashby-de-la-Zouch.

I must have been conceived on home leave sometime around the beginning of December 1943 but I didn't meet my father until after the end of the war. After D-Day he was parachuted into Belgium and spent months behind enemy lines. Towards the end of his mission he was captured and narrowly avoided execution. He spent the winter of 1945 as a prisoner of war in a camp somewhere near the German Danish border. I remember him telling me about it on my sixth birthday. "Weren't you afraid? I asked him. "No, not really Jennie," he replied. "If you've no imagination you can't be afraid". At that time I had no idea of what he meant.

At the end of hostilities Dad pushed aside all offers of military advancement and chose to be demobbed, taking the opportunity open to bright ex servicemen of being fast-tracked into university. Unexpectedly, he spurned courses in pure linguistics, and went straight for a degree in Spanish. He selected Spanish not because it was looked upon as exotic by everybody in the 1950s and you could get maximum allure and kudos for the minimum amount of work ; Con was entirely free of personal vanity and was not interested in such simple self glorification. He chose Spanish because he said he wanted a fresh and comprehensive challenge. Yes, Spanish was easy to get into and it did promise rapid progress but its main attraction was that it was a gateway. He studied it as a way in, a path to a planned investigation of the whole geolinguistic map of the Iberian Peninsula. He knew that he could use a Spanish template as a guide to the understanding of the remaining vernaculars, the variously sized but not dissimilar languages that were distributed unevenly between Lisbon and the Pyrenees. Once he had achieved Portuguese, Galician and Catalan he could look forward to their provincial variants. Then he could follow the route of the conquistadores and experience the dialects that had grown up in Latin America; finally he could explore the many native tongues of Central and South America that had enriched the Iberian lexicon with its cornucopia of exotic vocabulary. Ironically, his first great capture was Basque which owed none of its origins to Rome.

During his undergraduacy he attended language courses wherever they were offered, mainly in safe conservative cities such as Salamanca, Burgos or Valladolid, but for his PhD thesis he struck out on his own and chose to make an examination of the mutual pronunciational influences of Spanish and Basque in the province of Vizcaya, a contentious topic in Francoist Spain as Basque was proscribed in public and not considered by State authorities to be a respectable language. Con received no official academic encouragement in Spain although his research did arouse a lot of informal interest in and around the University of Deusto in Bilbao. Many of the people he met were a little disappointed that Con's project was not a more overt gesture of solidarity with the downtrodden language of the Basque country and that he was only pursuing it out of his interest in multilingualism. Later in his career, he expanded his doctoral thesis and published his famous academic work, "Phonetic Convergence in the Languages of Northern Spain", now of course a standard text for all students of the linguistics of the Iberian Peninsula.

In parallel with the progress of his academic career, his cerebro-linguistic mapping of North West Europe continued unabated. It became more and more detailed. Whereas, prior to the war, the inside of his head was one inch to the mile it was now two and a half inches to the mile. He got better. Or as Mary saw it, he got worse.

When we went on holiday in Britain in the 1950s we never went to the same place twice. Not that Mum and I wanted sameness. We didn't really mind where we went. We liked going to Bridlington. It was just that we didn't want to be marooned there all week while Dad went off to research the dialects of Grimsby, Scunthorpe and Hull. Walking in the Yorkshire Dales was great but we preferred to eat the cheese in Wensleydale rather than to stomach a discussion about the subtleties of the valley's vocalic variance from its neighbouring Swaledale. Mum and Dad didn't ever have a nice quiet pint together in a pub. You only had to turn your back on him and he would have cornered some old-timer and be listening to him blethering on about ferreting in Hawes before the First World War. And I'm sure that it is interesting that Yorkshire dialects retain many Viking influences and that there are phrases that they still have in common with modern Norwegian, but Mum did not entirely share Dad's fascination with this lingering similarity. While Dad did his research in the public bar of some God-forsaken pub in a rainy village at the back of beyond, Mum and I were relegated to a damp settee in a doorless lean-to at the side of the pub, in what was euphemistically known as the family room. We sat juggling our crisps and our drinks, my ginger beer and her half of shandy, while Dad sat in the bar and loosened the tongues of the locals by plying them with pints. Slowly from inside the bar we would discern his voice settling into the local speech, mimicking the language code of his interlocutors. In such circumstances Mum no longer felt protective towards Dad. Indeed many times I recall her saying things like, "I hope someone clocks him one for taking the piss". But nobody ever did. He was that good. His reproduction of others' speech was pitch perfect. Mum and I used to call him Professor Challenger. When Mum had finally had enough of waiting for him it would be my job to extricate him from the bar: "Go and get the Prof before the natives get restless. It's time we got back to reality."

By the late 1950s not only could he tell the difference between counties but also he could locate within five or six miles the vocal origins of anybody in Britain or Francophone Europe. He knew the difference between Stourport and Bewdley just as well as he could tell apart the residents of Charleroi and Mons. Not only could he tell how Sunderland differed from Newcastle but also he knew the difference between the north and south banks of the River Wear. He refined his knowledge of South Walian so that he could tell where Newport finished and Cardiff began. In the Tees Valley he knew what distinguished Darlo from Barny Castle. In Scotland he could tell a Fifer from a Dundonian. He could ascend a line of longitude drawn upwards through the length of England and he could inform you what you could expect to hear at any point on the journey from Bournemouth to Berwick-upon-Tweed. He knew every morphological and syntactical variation going and when it came to phonetics he was never foiled.

He was a one-man global positioning system half a century before the invention of the first satellite. When he developed his own uncanny skill at knowing precisely where he was, it did not depend upon an unobstructed line of sight to four or more GPS satellites, all developed and maintained at an annual cost of billions of dollars by the government of the United States. It was all in his head. Agreed, his knowledge of the surface of the Earth was exceedingly partial, but in the regions of Europe with which he was familiar his mental mapping never failed. If he had been kidnapped, blindfolded and driven in the boot of a car for a day and a half and then left in the middle of an unnamed village in rural France he would still have been able to pinpoint his exact whereabouts by sampling the indigenous conversation. In all probability, the locals would have told him where he was anyway, but that's not the point.

And of course he couldn't keep a mental record of a nation's speech without acquiring a vast collection of regional dialect words. In Britain he knew he wouldn't want a kick up the bahookie in Dunfermline, he knew better than to accuse someone in Merseyside of being a tonkey burst and he was sure that once his Somerset ruckle of mumps had dried out they would keep his fire going all day and night.

Chapter Five

Promotion wasn't slow in coming. By 1963 he was a senior lecturer in Romance Linguistics attached to a Department of Spanish at a university in the North of England, the name of which I do not wish to recall. Dad's colleagues smoked pipes, sported tie pins with the college motif and wore flannel trousers and tweed jackets with leather elbow patches. Some of the younger members of staff dispensed entirely with the tie pins and resorted to v-necked sweaters although Jeremy Clevere was always the exception and used a cravat. The v-necked sweater brigade wore their jumpers beneath grey suits that had seen better days. On the whole they resembled impoverished bank clerks more than anything else. But, in their favour, they were nowhere near as venomously competitive as their modern-day academic counterparts. Instead, they seemed to preserve something of the wartime spirit. They were all in it together.

That's not to say there was no point scoring. Bernard Russett used to boast that he knew all the component parts of a Morris 1000 engine in Spanish (he was particularly proud of "upper cylinder lubricant") and the elfish Lance Hopkins, an ex RAF man and the department's top linguist, could spot the difference between a direct and indirect object at a range of several kilometres. Little tubby Emma Prout had won an award from Pembrokeshire University for her translation into Spanish of Isabel Carrington's fiendishly difficult autobiography, "Can You Hear The Horses As Well?". Well, she didn't have much else to do, bless her. She had taught the same neo-classical text to second year students every year for the last fifteen years and she could relate its dull uninteresting themes in her sleep. Jeremy Clevere lectured exclusively on the Quixote and freely admitted he had never read any other Spanish Classics as they weren't any good. Iris Dunderdale had the broad-brush responsibility of introducing students to the main features of Latin American history, politics and literature and she spoke Spanish with a beautifully clear but unmodified rural Lancashire accent. "Accrington," said Dad, by way of a greeting, when they were introduced. By that time he'd gone past asking people where they came from. Instead he just pronounced their provenance. When he met the Head of the brand new Department of Sociology he said, "Orpington, pretending to be Bermondsey", thus causing a very awkward silence for several seconds.

The only native speaker on the whole academic staff was the up-and-coming Rodolfo Castillo from Venezuela, an assistant professor in his late thirties. Rodolfo was looked upon as a radical firebrand in the Department ever since he had declared the Spanish Empire innocent of the destruction of the indigenous peoples of South America. Indeed, he opined that the Spanish invasion had been the most fortunate event in the whole history of the continent. Rodolfo had been to Oxford where he had acquired an impeccable upper-class accent and he spoke the most flawless English in the Department. He rarely referred to his origins, although at the Faculty social after a couple of dry sherries he could be heard to declare that his country was the most beautiful in the world. Nevertheless, nobody could ever remember the last time he had ever been back. So it was that every year the smiling Rodolfo lost a little more of his vestigial Caribbean tan and gained a touch more northern pallor. Just like the rest of the staff he never delivered any of his lectures or seminars in anything other than English. All the teaching staff were more than happy to go along with the Department's embargo on the use of Spanish as a medium of education, a prohibition that was based upon the maxim that students might not grasp some of the complexities of the subject if they did not address them in their native tongue.

Rodolfo had married a fellow Catholic student from Oxford, Monica Grill, known affectionately to all as Mocky, and they had eight children, four of them under the age of five. Dad said they didn't see a great deal of Mocky around college whereas Rodolfo spent a lot of time at the university, faithfully attending all the optional evening functions of the Department. He was even seen at the weekly Spanish Circle, an offshoot of the classes run by the Adult Education Department of the local authority.

As far as I could see the only authentic Spanish that the students ever heard was during a one hour a fortnight conversation class led by Pilar, the language assistant from Saragossa, a neurotic girl who spent many hours in the Student Health Service baffling the underworked doctors with something she called sell-you-lee-teece. Despite her imagined affliction she was a very pretty girl, a fact not lost on Doctor Tony, as he was known to staff and students alike. Pilar spent hours in his office pouring out her heart and baring her thighs, and on many occasions the good doctor could be seen bravely continuing his consultations with her well into the evening, listening to her laments in the twilight of the back bar of the Flying Dutchman.

As with all publicly funded institutions most of the essential day-to-day organisation was undertaken by the lowly-paid secretary. In this case it was Joan, the wife of the professor of Physics, a formidable elderly lady in a tweed suit who would always help you out with a problem if you spoke to her politely. Joan, I remember, had a brazen part-time assistant called Kathy. Whenever Joan was 'on an errand for the Prof' nobody could get through to the Department on the phone as Kathy monopolised it to talk candidly to all of her inner circle, usually about what she would be wearing at the Top Rank that night or what she believed were the necessary and unnecessary features of a good marriage. When I was looking for Dad one day she didn't hear me come into the office. I gathered from what I overheard of her conversation that she was not in favour of breast feeding when she announced to one of her confidantes, "I'm not letting any kids of mine ruin my body by sucking on MY tits."

Despite Dad's promotion, or maybe because of it, things were not going well at home. One Friday afternoon ( I remember it was a Friday because it was the only day that Mum worked afternoons in her job at Marks and Spencer) Mum arrived home to find various members of the Languages Faculty sitting around our kitchen table. It was the middle of June so there was nothing much to do until October and they were beginning their summer break by discussing the stuffiness of the official Spanish dictionary and the reluctance of the Spanish Royal Academy to allow any words that did not have a lengthy and thoroughbred pedigree. Justine Slowley and Larry Strange were there from French. Rodolfo, of course, was there and for some reason, Barry Building from Russian. Pilar had popped in to say goodbye as she was the only one who wasn't paid during the holidays and she was on route back home to work for the next three months as a waitress in her brother's restaurant in Saragossa. Larry had brought round a bottle of Noilly Prat and even Dad, who drank only rarely, had been tempted to a small glass. Things had become a little heated as linguistic purity was a subject close to the hearts of both France and Spain. Dad had enraged both parties with his assertion that it was legitimate to include Philippine nouns within the Spanish lexicon if they had passed into common Castilian usage during the 300 year occupation of those islands. When Larry objected, Rodolfo pointed out the number of loan words that French had taken from Africa and Latin America. Larry had already had a couple in the pub before he arrived and he took exception to Rodolfo's "smarmy tone", calling him "a wanker". Rodolfo retorted in his characteristic controlled and straitlaced manner by saying, "Larry, I can assure you that is not the case. I always deposit my semen in the only place deemed correct by the Roman Catholic Church".

It was at this moment that Mum poked her head around the door.

After that, the rest of the month just seemed to go downhill, however much I tried to make things better between Mum and Dad. On one occasion I planned a diversionary outing to the pictures to see the film Lawrence of Arabia which had been released to great critical acclaim the previous year, winning no less than seven Academy Awards. It had been a real blockbuster and everybody in our street had been to see it, although (for reasons I should have guessed) I had been the only representative of our family at the local cinema. The film was no longer on general release but every so often it would still make a sporadic appearance somewhere in the north of England. When I saw that it was showing one Saturday in Scarborough I convinced Mum and Dad that we should go and see the film and make a day of it. We could arrive at lunchtime, get some fish and chips and have a stroll up to the castle before the 6.15 performance. Mum loved Omar Sharif and had always wanted to see the picture so she wasn't difficult to convince. Dad was impressed that Lawrence had got a first in History at Jesus College, Oxford but his real interest was captured when I told him that Lawrence had spent two summers touring France by bicycle while he researched his undergraduate thesis. Dad was further intrigued that after his graduation, Lawrence had journeyed extensively in the Middle East perfecting his fluency in Arabic.

It was a long trip in the car but, for once, everyone was on their best behaviour and we got off to an excellent start. The fish and chips were good and when we got back from our walk up to the castle we all took off our shoes and socks and had a refreshing paddle in the freezing cold sea. At the cinema Dad forked out for expensive seats in the middle of the front row of the grand circle and we settled back to watch this four hour epic. The house was packed.

I thought I was on to a winner. The subject was real and the story line was not difficult to follow: after the outbreak of the First World War Lawrence is recruited by the War Office as an advisor on Arab affairs and posted to Cairo where his lack of interest in military protocol is interpreted as insubordination, whereas the audience are encouraged to see his inappropriate and awkward behaviour as the charming and unworldly bumbling of an academic genius who is unused to having to display respect for someone merely on the basis of his rank. So far, so good.

It all went wrong in the cinema at the point when Lawrence meets the Arabs, goes native, takes to wearing a dishdasha, and rides a camel into battle. Throughout all this, Lawrence speaks the same impeccable English that he has been employing since the outset of the film, whereas the Arabs all signify their use of English as a second language with the silver screen's ubiquitous foreign accent, uttering sentences such as, "I wheel keel you" or "you are not feet to kiss my feet", an accent which all the members of the cast employ to a greater or lesser extent, according to the social position of the character they are portraying. This was too much for Dad to bear and he could not resist commenting loudly on the fact that he had been deceived into parting with good money to witness a linguistic outrage. He groaned loudly into Mum's ear that this was a farcical misrepresentation of the truth and that the film should have been made with authentic English, Arabic and Turkish dialogue and thereafter subtitled as appropriate. Mum of course hissed back at him that he was bloody mentally ill and should shut up.

It wasn't long before the people around us were reminding us that they too had paid top prices for their seats and wanted to watch the film and linguistic authenticity wasn't high on their list of priorities. Dad couldn't let such sloppy thinking pass and it was when he began to remonstrate full-mouthed with all and sundry that he was asked by the manager to leave. Mum stayed put to watch the rest of the film but I followed Dad down to the lobby as I knew what was likely to happen. When I got there I found him continuing to protest to the manager that this was not what he expected from a film which had received an Academy Award for The Best Film of the Year. Didn't the manager agree that Peter O'Toole should have made the effort to bring some reality to his portrayal of Lawrence by at least learning some Arabic? Didn't he see that the mere assembly of a few swarthy actors who were Arabs today but who might be Mexicans tomorrow or Greeks the next month was not good enough? His money had been obtained under false pretences and he wanted it back. That he succeeded in recovering the cost of his admission was more of a credit to the diplomatic skills of the manager than a triumph of reason over ignorance as Dad liked to portray the reimbursement.

The next day Mum proclaimed that she had had enough and announced that she would be returning to live at her parents' house on the Wirral. Dad disguised his upset very well but it showed in a similar desire to get away. So, in true Hispanic style, he issued a counter proclamation, declaring that he would also be leaving. He was going to spend the summer driving to Santiago de Compostela in his new Ford Prefect and he asked me if I would like to go along.

Mum said it was alright with her. She wouldn't see it as taking sides. She even agreed to take our dog, Lampshade, with her, a well-endowed basset hound that had acquired his name as a puppy when he had spent four weeks resembling a broken bedside light after being fitted with an anti-scratch collar to prevent him from pulling out the stitches from an operation that had been necessary in order to remove a golf ball that was causing a blockage in his small intestine.

Chapter Six

There were a number of reasons why I agreed to go with Dad on his trip. It wasn't just one thing. To begin with, I was at a bit of a loose end myself. There wasn't much to keep me at home. I only had a holiday job in a car wash and a boyfriend whom I was not going to miss. John Gates and I had met doing A levels and we were still carrying on like a hangover from sixth form. I certainly seemed to have a headache whenever he was around. I had begun going out with him after I had heard him speak at the school debating society. He was making a heated defence of the recent revolution in Cuba. I suppose I had been impressed with his single-mindedness and strength of conviction. He was committed and I liked that. He was a member of the Young Socialists and he had been to a conference in Filey AND he had shaken Harold Wilson's hand. And he used words like ersatz, dialectic and cabal, which I didn't understand. I was a sucker for words.

When I mentioned the possibility of a trip with my father to Spain I thought, in my own muddled and politically uninformed fashion, that the prospect of having a girlfriend who was making a visit to a time-warped fascist dictatorship would intrigue him. Instead, he disapproved of the whole idea. "Spain isn't the sort of place you go on holiday, Jennie," he said. He then proceeded to do what I was beginning to recognise as a bullying tactic, something which made me realise that there was no future for our faltering romance. He harangued me in a didactic fashion, giving me a lecture on the state of contemporary Spain. He solemnly informed me that only a few weeks earlier a man who had served as a Spanish Communist Party official during the Civil War had been captured, tortured, handcuffed and thrown from a second floor window, fracturing his skull and his wrists, before being found guilty in a show trial and promptly executed. On Franco's insistence he had been put before a firing squad comprised of boys doing their National Service. So poor had been their aim that twenty seven bullets failed to kill the condemned man and he had to be finished off by the lieutenant in charge who walked forward and shot him twice in the head. In a further bizarre and sinister twist to the case the State prosecutor was later unmasked as an imposter, being shown to have no legal qualifications whatsoever.

When I said I was probably going to go anyway John called me naive and frivolous and stormed out of the house, slamming the door.

I also went along with Dad in order to assist with the driving; to do what I could to prevent him from running somebody over. His motoring skills were atrocious and he appeared to have little awareness of pedestrians or other road users. He seemed unable to connect the images that he saw through the windscreen with the fact that he was steering half a ton of metal at thirty miles an hour through streets full of people. He drove serenely and unconcerned as if he was at the controls of a simulator and he seemed to survive by sheer good fortune.

It was partly in the interests of my own survival that I had been learning to drive since I was fifteen. There was a disused Second World War airfield just on the edge of the moor and Dad and I would go there on weekends so that he could teach me the rudiments of guiding the internal combustion engine. He knew how to do it all right; he could drive like the best of them but he just couldn't do it in traffic. He might have been alright on long straight French roads provided he remembered not to start off on the left. But he was dangerous in towns where he blithely slipped from one lane to another without the slightest suspicion that there might be other vehicles in the vicinity. On those many occasions when he had cut up another motorist he would be genuinely nonplussed by the screech of brakes, the blaring horn and the two fingers in the air. There was one famous episode in which he had filtered left at fifty miles an hour into a line of stationary cars and had written off fourteen vehicles, excluding his own. Ever since then his insurance premiums had been sky high. It was only on his sixth attempt that he ever passed his test. Even then, he must have had an examiner who held a grudge against human kind.

But the main reason why I went with him had nothing to do with road safety or any ghoulish fascination I might have felt for the sordid Spanish dictatorship; what I most wanted was just to be with Dad. I realised that there was nobody else with whom he might go. I considered that he could probably look after his personal needs adequately, but I felt that he needed company. On his own, he would eat and sleep tolerably well and he would interest himself in the things that he observed. But left to his own psychological devices, nothing would change. He would probably have little genuine interaction with others and would return home just the same as he had left. In the innocence of my youth, I wanted him to come back home having understood how he had to alter his behaviour so that he might get back together with Mum.

Dad was a contradictory character. As a linguist you might have expected him to have good interpersonal skills but this was definitely not the case. For all his effective analysis of the words with which others communicated; for all his conversations with unknown people in out-of-the-way pubs he didn't actually have any enduring relationships. He was clever alright, but he didn't have what you or I might call friends. He was very good at initial contact with people but if he had to meet them for a second time it wasn't long before there was a sense of unease on both sides. It was difficult to put your finger on exactly what happened, even though I'd seen it occur on hundreds of occasions. The genesis of the mutual disquiet seemed to begin when Dad's interviewee made one or two swift glances at his mouth where they seemed to divine a singleness of purpose. There was a twist in his lower lip which led them, not to doubt his sincere interest, but to make them think that somehow that they were being regarded as specimens, examples of something, rather than being considered as properly rounded human beings. And that unnerved people, made them want to distance themselves.

Another thing he used to do was to stand one pace to the right of the person he was addressing and, as he spoke, his eyes would flicker over that person's left shoulder and fix on a point in the middle distance. I knew that this simply meant that Dad was concentrating on the content of the person's speech but it was a gesture that created a suspicion that there was something more interesting going on in the background. The more paranoid of Dad's interlocutors would even spin around to follow his gaze, expecting there to be an accomplice bearing down on him while his attention was being diverted. When the person discovered that there was nothing of note in the direction of Dad's gaze, he merely felt devalued and thought he was not being taken seriously.

It wasn't as if Dad didn't know what he called the rules of human engagement. Once when he thought everybody else was out of the house I overheard him reciting them in the spare room. He was either reading them from a book or repeating them to himself from memory. It was like a mantra: "You have thirty seconds to create a positive impression. Always smile and look the person in eye, call him by his first name and say something positive about him while the meeting is still fresh and the comment seems spontaneous."

Don't get me wrong. He wasn't lonely or sorry for himself. He was quite self-contained. In fact, it was this ability to be almost entirely independent and single-minded that used to drive my mother wild. I think in the end she just got lonely and decided that once I was grown up she would go and make a more social kind of life for herself.

With his university work colleagues Dad mainly got on alright, although to me they seemed to coexist rather than relate. Normally, they didn't mix much. They occupied places on the same timetable as him but they would pass like ships in the night, entering a lecture room just as he was leaving. They did attend staff meetings together. One or two of them even shared some of Dad's almost obsessive characteristics, but that didn't imply comradeship. They acted more like fellow train spotters on a platform or stamp collectors going around the stalls at the autumn fair.

Although Dad was really disheartened when Mum walked out he just didn't want to show it at the time. Later on I realised that he felt that he had failed. But he didn't seem to know how to avoid what had happened. He headed for the end of the relationship just as unwittingly as drove the car, erratically heading somewhere, getting lost but not thinking to ask the way.

He knew vaguely that he had made mistakes but he didn't rightly know what they were. He judged that he had probably misread Mum, failed to see things from her point of view. When I was a child he often used to confide in me that he couldn't imagine what she might be thinking; he just couldn't put himself in her shoes. In those days I might have agreed with him about that, but today I think I would beg to differ slightly. Looking back now on their whole uncomfortable marriage, I'm not entirely sure that there was always such a vast gulf between them. It would probably be more accurate to say that he often did understood Mum's feelings but he didn't always react to events in the way that she might have liked.

There were occasions when she was upset and wanted a hug and instead all she got was an intellectual sympathy born of logic. The time that she dropped the roast chicken on to the dining table and smashed the new dinner service from John Lewis and burst into floods of tears, all she wanted was for him to hold her tight and tell her that everything was all right; she didn't want him to reason with her that it could have happened to anyone because the handle on the roasting tray had unexpectedly worked its way loose.

After Mum had taken herself off to Granny's house on the Wirral, Dad had tried hard to make a fresh analysis of why things had gone wrong. He did what he always did. He approached the matter with investigative concern. He took to kicking over the traces of his other unresolved psychological difficulties in the hope that he might find some clues as to what might have contributed towards Mum's estrangement from him. That's how he worked. He looked for parallel problems and parallel solutions. Not that these parallels were easy to discern. It stood to reason that if they had been more obvious then he would have uncovered them long ago and ergo he would not have been confounded in the way that he was.

While he was involved in this inner search for explanations of why things had gone wrong he would sit and ruminate for hours. The truth was that such sedentary abstraction rarely provided him with any answers and he ended up more bewildered than he began.

When he was at his wit's end he would give up and comfort himself by studying and absorbing lists of words. He extracted these from foreign handbooks, atlases, timetables and gazetteers, endless volumes that he had picked up cheaply in second hand emporia. To the booksellers they were the inconsequential and unprofitable dross they obtained in job lots and house clearances. To Mum they were untidy shelves of ragged, broken-backed, and mismatched embarrassment. To Dad they were the interpreter's jewels, the wordsmith's sharp tools essential for the correct performance of specialist tasks, the translator's stock in trade. It was not unusual to stumble upon him late at night in the kitchen, seated at the table examining a Catalan guide to bee-keeping in the Pyrenees, or poring over a Barcelona bus schedule, or puzzling over the diagrams of the compressed-air braking systems detailed in the French railway engineers' manual for the maintenance of SNCF rolling stock, or even trying to decipher the arcane terminology of a nineteenth-century Portuguese cotton buyers' guide subtitled, "A Handbook for the Understanding of the Different Modalities Employed in the Countries of India, Angola and Brazil". When he was short of fresh material he resorted to reading through a recently acquired Rumanian dictionary in which he had reached the letter M.

It was his way of feeling more secure. If he could tidy away a fresh sequence of newly discovered words he knew that he would feel more in control. The danger was that he would get so far into this inner world of tidying things away into synapses that he would not do anything else. Like eat. Or drink. For hours on end he would sit hunched over these printed pages, assimilating their content, systematising them, committing them to memory.

When I judged that this had gone too far I would take it upon myself to interrupt his reverie. I would take him a cup of tea and a plate of custard creams and he would fall on them like they were a like a newfangled delicacy. He would look up and I would see his pale face and his strained eyes. Mum used to unkindly call him 'all white and spiteful' when he got like this. When I interrupted him I had learnt that the very last thing to do was to ask him what he was up to. He would then feel impelled to explain all the ins and outs of whatever he was reading at the present. If it was twills I would get a lecture on denims, serges, drills and gabardines. If it was flags I might be asked if I knew the Italian for the pointed tip of a flagpole. Or he might enlighten me on the debt that the Philippine numerical system owed to three hundred years of rule from Madrid.

One day when I also had had just about enough of his crazy escapism, I told him that, as interesting as these snippets might be, he didn't have to puzzle very hard to resolve the riddle of why Mum had left: all he needed to do to sort things out with her was to show a bit more imagination. As a piece of advice it was a bit vapid, but I didn't know what else to say. Normally he didn't take advice but he must have been made temporarily more suggestible by the severity of the situation. My simplistic admonition stirred something inside him. He sat straight up and said that was it. He needed to unblock his imagination. It was his lack of creative thought that was holding him back. Why hadn't he realised it before? His want of lack of imagination had been the main bugbear of his life. He said it was why he had never been able to get his head around fiction.

To most people it might have seemed a curious thing for a lecturer in Romance linguistics to say but he knew it to be true. One of his main bugbears in life had always been that he simply couldn't deal with a plot. The details of a story all seemed to bunch up in his head, to form knots; he didn't seem to know which details he should hang on to and which he should discard. He was a collector, a hoarder; he didn't like to throw anything away. I remember him telling me once that he knew fifty eight words for drizzle in fourteen languages. What he couldn't do was to understand words when they were put into story order. And the more poetic the prose the more difficult it was for him to fathom.

He could put on the right voice; he could employ the appropriate local idioms. He could make all the right noises. He could make a faithful copy, but when it came to original thinking he was a bit stumped. He was tormented by what he could not understand. He was endlessly frustrated by his inability to comprehend literary and linguistic invention. Realism he found difficult enough. Fantasy was beyond him. He was factual and not fanciful. He could not suspend disbelief. His problem, he decided, was imagination, or lack thereof.

During his own undergraduate Spanish studies he had always avoided literature modules, or whatever they were called in his day. While he was studying for his degree he had been very grateful for the nascent trend in realism amongst Spanish writers of the 1950s. When the syllabus forced him to look to South America he sought out writers who described the life of the gauchos or the story of the Incas. At the same time he had great difficulty with the surrealistic prose that was beginning to emanate from there, notably from Argentina. He had tried on repeated occasions to read the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar but he had always given up bemused and confused, closing their books before he was no more than a quarter of the way through.

Now, suddenly, as a result of my casual remark he was behaving as if the clouds had parted and the truth had been handed down from on high. My words about a more imaginative approach to Mum had unexpectedly shown him his parallel problem. If he could find the key to the secret of understanding literature, particularly this new modern fiction known as magical realism and he could grasp what these authors had to say, he felt that somehow they might unlock the door behind which was waiting his own emotional inventiveness. He figured that if he could understand their minds he might become that rhapsodic creature that he longed to be. That was when he came up with the idea of spending the summer vacation in Buenos Aires, hoping that a visit to the haunts of these new surrealists might inspire some new creativity in him.

The problem was that his salary wasn't sufficient to support such a long sojourn in South America. Instead, after a discussion with Iris Dunderdale, he had decided he was going to visit Galicia, a far-flung part of Northern Spain. In those days the place was nowhere near as well known as it is today. Dad had chosen it as an alternative because Iris believed it to be a cradle of surrealist story-telling; the site of magical realism in its nascent state. Furthermore, it was the birthplace of many who had emigrated to Argentina and had carried with them this narrative tradition as part of their psychological baggage. Thus it was that she considered Galicia to be the historical wellspring of many Latin American tales of mystery and imagination. She was also convinced that there were still writers in Galicia who had continued to develop the genre for themselves. However, the works of these indigenous authors were not available in England and often only published in the local vernacular. If you wanted to read them you had to go there and buy them.

Dad took it all very seriously. It was going to be an expedition to discover a lost imagination. "Sometimes, Jennie," he remarked, "I feel as if I have a very well disguised lacuna in my thinking process. Instead of trying to close this gap I tend to try and hide it behind a hedge of technical expertise." As if I didn't realise. And I didn't always behave entirely sympathetically when he stated the blindingly obvious as if it was an astounding realisation.

"A lacuna, Dad? Do you mean, Dad, like a mysterious lagoon in the South American jungle that has lain undiscovered since the beginning of time and only now in the late nineteenth century has Professor Challenger stumbled upon it, always suspecting, of course, that it was there but never being able to prove it until one day in December 1899, disregarding the scoffing and the mockery of the London Science Society, he leads an unlikely but intrepid team of master geographers, veteran adventurers and eccentric aristocrats in a crazy canoe expedition up the piranha infested waters of an uncharted tributary of the River Amazon where they chance upon the fleeting form of a fleeing native who they follow through the crocodile infested swamp until he leads them to where they part the curtain of a dense thicket of mangroves and lianas and come face to face with the uncannily still black waters of a hitherto uncharted lake the size of an inland sea which contains in its deceptively tranquil depths the living forms of prehistoric submarine creatures that were previously thought to be extinct? Do you mean that kind of lake, Dad? Is that the kind of adventure that we're going on?"

"Don't take the Michael, my girl."

"Dad, I was only joking. It was a joke. J-O-K-E, joke."

You could be sarcastic with Dad, without the sensation that you had hurt him in some way, providing he could be properly reassured that you meant it in a playful way. He wasn't always red hot at spotting what was spoken in jest.

So it was that we journeyed, not as honest-to-God pilgrims on the road to the cathedral city of Santiago de Compostela, but rather as those in search of a remedy for the unimaginative or inexpressive soul, Dad desperately looking for a way back from the edge of divorce.

We loaded up our bags into the back of his little Ford Prefect and off we went.

Chapter Seven

We drove through France in record time. I did the towns and the fiddly bits when we got to junctions in the road. I didn't want Dad going the wrong way around any French roundabouts. He drove on the long stretches between urban areas. By the end of the second day we were in Hendaye where we stopped overnight, ready to cross into Spain the following morning.

Dad was anxious to get to Santiago well in advance of July 25th, Galicia's national day, when the narrow streets would be thronged with tens of thousands of jostling visitors. I had witnessed before how unregulated crowds produced in him something akin to hysteria. Years ago, when we were inadvertently overwhelmed by a rush of disaffected spectators disgorging from the United ground after a home pasting by a minor team in the third round of the FA Cup, he became so agitated that we had to take refuge in a nearby ladies hairdressers, where the manageress was alarmed by the eruption into her peaceful emporium of a sweaty and wild-eyed man accompanied by an earnest little fourteen year old girl in pigtails. When she demanded to know what we meant by bursting in like this I couldn't admit to her the embarrassing and unmanly truth that my dad was having a panic attack so I pretended instead that I was tired of my Judy Garland plaits and I was bursting for a with-it hairdo. I explained that Dad was only in a state because he couldn't bear the thought of me losing my baby locks. For ten minutes while we waited for the multitude outside to disperse I hummed and hah-d over a catalogue of high maintenance curls, finally settling for something in the short swept-back style of Patti Page. We made a bogus appointment for the following week and left the shop, the manageress eyeing us suspiciously from the window as we made our escape up the street.

By the time we made our fateful trip, Dad had learnt to anticipate crowds and avoid them whenever possible, although I was forever surprised at his apparent nonchalance when he faced a lecture theatre full of a hundred staring faces.

We wasted no time in Hendaye and directly after breakfast the next day we set off for the border at Irun. Typically, Dad failed to notice all the other cars that were waiting at the frontier and motored straight to the head of the queue.

I don't know why we had such a grilling at passport control but it may have been that Dad was unwelcome in Spain ever since he had published his book on the Basque language. It was also very possible that his name was present on a long list of undesirables following an incident in February the previous year when he was mistakenly accused of inciting a student demonstration in Bilbao. On that occasion he had been told to leave the country by the local Chief of Police. Whatever the reason for the delay, the Guards finally gave their grudging acceptance of the story that ours was a trip of purely religious significance and that we were solely interested in visiting the holy city of Santiago in order to pay homage at the tomb of St James. The barrier was raised and we were allowed across the frontier, whereupon we immediately disappeared into the nearest hostelry to celebrate our admission with a drink. Dad declined the offer of coffee laced with brandy and settled instead for a cold glass of tiger-nut milk. We sat and chatted quietly, all the while contemplating the first and most obvious of all Spanish bar-room habits, that of throwing absolutely everything unwanted onto the floor. Unlike the fastidious French, the Spanish casually dropped their used paper serviettes, cigarette ash, dog ends, empty packets and olive stones on the floor. The only exception were the sunflower husks which they spat on the floor, the whole detritus being swept up just twice a day, once after lunch and once just before closing time.

We stayed our first night in Spain near the Athletic football stadium in Bilbao, in a cheap hostal with a shower under which only dwarves could possibly fit. It had the tiniest, most threadbare towels I have ever seen and blankets that were so thin that not even the bed bugs could have been warm enough in winter.

Apart from the big cities on our way such as Burgos and León none of the places through which we passed could have been described as truly prosperous. In many villages the women still drew water from the pump in the main street. There was little tourism and we met no other British people on our travels. Our fellow countrymen still holidayed at domestic seaside resorts and only a few of the more well-off travelled to the exotic destinations of Jersey or Brittany. Package holidays to Spain had barely begun and the first charter flights from Luton Airport were destined for the beaches of the Mediterranean, not the mountains of the north of the country. Furthermore, it would be another quarter of a century before the pilgrimage route to Santiago was revived as the ultimate cheap walking holiday that it is today. At that time, the route of the Camino was unmarked and backpackers were practically unknown.

As a consequence of all this, there weren't many decent guide books to the northern provinces. Instead, Dad preferred to have with him an ancient copy of The Bible in Spain, George Borrow's melodramatic account of his extravagant ramblings in western Spain in the late 1830s. Borrow had obtained employment with the Bible Society in London who charged him with selling their tracts and scriptures in Spain, in the fatuous and arrogant belief that their promulgation would help arrest the spread of popery. Borrow carried out his task well but he embellished his literary account of his progress with a picaresque narrative, full of narrow escapes and self inflation. Part of Dad's fascination with Borrow was that he too was a gifted linguist, although there were few other respects in which they enjoyed any resemblance. Dad wished he could have been adventurous and outgoing like Borrow and perhaps he thought that following in his steps might give him some clue as to how he could make himself a more expressive and empathetic human being, involving himself in an emotional apprenticeship chock full of close calls and heady adventures of his own.

So, instead of a small Lonely Planet or a Rough Guide, as the reader might take with him nowadays, we had with us a leather-bound quarto size volume published at some time around the turn of the century. Apart from not telling us anything about contemporary Spain it was heavy and unwieldy and was not the sort of tome that you could easily take out and about.

Borrow entered Galicia through the narrow mountain pass that leads through the Sierra de Ancares, ascending the same rough track followed by the medieval pilgrims to Santiago. He noted that before the path reached the summit it narrowed to a defile which was bordered by the most precipitous of all pastures:

"Everything here is wild, strange and beautiful: the hill up which winds the path towers above on the right, whilst on the farther side of a profound ravine rises an immense mountain, to whose extreme altitudes the eye is scarcely able to attain, but the most singular feature of this pass are the hanging fields or meadows which cover its sides."

In the subsequent one hundred and thirty years since our illustrious predecessor had trodden in the footsteps of those feudal, trailblazing pilgrims, the road had only improved to become a single carriageway, or what the Americans might call a two-lane blacktop. Nevertheless, it had been grandiloquently classified by the Spanish Government as the N-VI, one of the top six highways of the land, the main road from Madrid to Corunna. We followed exactly the same route that Borrow had taken, our little car whirring up the narrow mountain pass from Villafranca del Bierzo, the ineffectual windscreen wipers of the little Ford Prefect sliding slowly and uselessly across the windscreen. The road surface may have been tarmacked since Borrow's time but the thoroughfare was still no more than a steep-sided country lane. From time to time we drove past a little string of houses where the dwellings were lined up alongside the route, looking for all the world like spectators at a cycle race, toeing the white line and waiting for the competitors to speed by.

Once we had passed through this narrow breach in the mountain range we made our slow descent into the hinterland of Galicia. It was beautiful. It was something like Wales, only warmer and not quite as wet. The countryside was a green and lush patchwork of small fields, some no bigger than municipal allotments. Occasionally we would see people hoeing or watering. Other times a small child would have a cow on a rope, making sure that the valuable family ruminant didn't waste any of these little oblongs of pasture, eating up every last blade of grass, grazing right up to the line of the neighbour's adjoining plot. Along the muddy tracks there trundled ox carts the size of English haywains but of a more solid construction, vehicles that were built for a more rugged terrain, with thicker beams and solid wooden wheels. On the day that we finally reached the sea we discovered vast deserted beaches where cattle grazed right down to the shore. It was as if we'd travelled back through time to an ancient and beautiful peasant kingdom.

The population that we could observe seemed very evenly scattered. Every half a mile the road wound through another hamlet of a dozen or so buildings. The people lived in two-storey granite houses. The ground floor was a byre in which they kept the animals, a cow or two, a couple of pigs and a few chickens. At night the warmth from the animals drifted upwards and provided a sweet-smelling central heating for the human beings who lived above, their upper floor being reached from the yard by an external stone staircase.

The inhabitants were smallholders who never starved but never prospered. Even during the Civil War this backwater had survived pretty much as it had done before the conflict. But when the fighting was over the young people had not been prepared to go on scratching a living and many had emigrated. Everybody we met seemed to have a brother in Buenos Aires or an uncle in Caracas. People were starting to leave for Europe to work in the factories of Germany, France and Switzerland. They were even going to London and the better off parts of Spain.

In the taverns where we ate our meals there was a constant and unabashed single-dish menu of a thin watery stew containing turnip tops, potatoes and gristly lumps of pork. Occasionally there would be a piece of sausage that lurked unseen, like a peppery depth charge suspended in the more glutinous liquid towards the bottom of the broth. On one or two special occasions when the proprietor sensed the presence of people whom he could legitimately overcharge we were proudly presented with half a pig's head. Our host would then stand beaming over us while we puzzled out how we should slice the porker's face in order to obtain the best meat. It was on one such occasion in a taberna off the main road that we met Claudio and his wife Encarnación, a couple in their fifties who were genuinely bemused when we demonstrated our ignorance of the pig's much prized fleshy chaps. Our incredible lack of gastronomic knowledge aroused their curiosity and in everyone's best Castilian we had quite a conversation about local habits. It seemed that the place was only open for lunch for an hour each day and the business only represented a tiny part of their day's activities. Its main function was to bring a little extra cash into a life that was otherwise a herculean task of self sufficiency. The couple were up at five each morning and went to bed straight after their evening meal. In the meantime they worked solidly throughout the day. In the course of the year the two of them planted ten acres of maize, potatoes, wheat and cabbage in small plots scattered around the neighbourhood. Encarnación told us how grateful she was to General Franco for sending experts to the region to arbitrate on how the ancient patchwork of fields might be swopped around and the families' land concentrated in one area. Claudio explained that they also had a small orchard in which they grew apples, lemons and soft fruit, a kitchen garden with root vegetables, cabbage and herbs, as well as enough pasture for the three cattle that provided them with an income from the sale of milk and beef. For their own meat and for the lunches at the homely little taberna they slaughtered three pigs a year. The hens were for laying although they would occasionally kill one for the table. The couple made their own sausages, cheese and soap. They usually bartered for the only things they didn't produce, mainly oil, wine and aguardiente. Salt and pepper were among the few things they had to buy.

As we left Dad whispered excitedly to me. "Did you hear what they called a fox? They called it un golpe, 'a blow'. Isn't that just what you'd expect in a peasant country where they come out of the house one morning and the fox has killed three of their chickens in the night, doing it just out of malice, not out of need?"

Back on the road and slightly fuddled from drinking too much local wine, served in little white china cups not dissimilar from the ones in which the Chinese take their jasmine tea, I stopped to ask directions from two elderly women dressed from head to toe in black, the only exception to their funereal garb being the broad-brimmed straw hats with which they protected their weathered faces from the worst effects of the midsummer sun. When they looked up we could see they were perhaps only in their mid forties. They spoke to us in a sing-song language which even Dad, just like Borrow, seemed to have difficulty in deciphering, although it was clear that in saying farewell they bade us go with God. Then they returned to their task of guiding a pair of cows, using them to pull an old wooden plough with a single blade along a patch of ground not much bigger than a medieval strip lynchet. One of the women walked in front of the animals holding the halter and the other walked behind, paying close attention to direction of the share. As we drove off I watched them in the rear view mirror. Where they had come from I had no idea. There were no houses around and I supposed that they must have lived some way up one of those muddy tracks, hidden away from the likes of us in our fancy motorised transport.

Chapter Eight

We came upon Santiago all of a sudden, for there were no straggling suburbs. The countryside came right up to the gates of this small labyrinthine city huddled around its vast, imposing cathedral. Once again, it felt as if we had journeyed back to the Middle Ages. I would not have been surprised to turn a corner and see bear baiting or to witness a public garrotting.

Dad did not rush straight off to see the cathedral. Contrary to the heartfelt profession of Catholicism with which I had regaled the two border guards, Dad had little interest in religion, other than to deny it. Dad's Catholicism had lapsed almost before it had begun and he took great pleasure in telling everyone that the bones of St James contained in the cathedral crypt were nothing more than a fake. Mamie Louise and Father Bertrand had instructed him in the lives of the saints and he was fully aware of the story of St James. To Dad, it was a preposterous myth that a stone boat which possessed neither sails nor rudder could have sped the Saint's body from The Holy Land to Spain. To anyone who would listen he dismissed it all as twaddle.

What he did find easier to accept was the importance that the counterfeit remains of an apostle could lend to the prestige of a city. He was even more impressed that Santiago had got its saint by simple assertion. When the contemporaneous Venetians had risked their lives in bravely bagging the bones of St Mark from their burial place in Alexandria, the Galicians had been able to achieve third place in the list of Christianity's most pilgrimageable sites by simply telling a tale. To Dad this meant that Galicians must be first-class fabulists, folk who knew a thing or two about the employment of prevarication for political ends. It followed that even he might learn something from them with regard to the art of speculation.

Dad would also tell all and sundry, and at great length, that he, for one, did not swallow the popular romantic explanation that Compostela was a contraction of the Latin, campus stellae, a field of stars. He preferred the less fanciful interpretation offered by lexicographers, etymologists and students of ancient history who were of the contrary opinion that Compostela was simply an old Roman word for cemetery. I consulted Borrow but he was silent on the issue, limiting himself to one of his favourite devices, a partial translation, bestowing upon the city the half English title of "St James of Compostella".

So we paced ourselves. We sat in the shade of the awning outside a bar in the Plaza de la Universidad where we drank a beer and ate tapas. Unknowingly, I had ordered a dish which turned out to be pigs lips minced up with lentils. Maybe if I had known what it was it wouldn't have tasted so good. Dad tried a pig's ear but he said it was too tough and salty so he got up and sauntered over to a bookshop where he disappeared into the gloomy interior. I sat and had another beer and leafed through Borrow's book of boastings which Dad had insisted on lugging out of the car. I pondered what Dad would have been like if he'd been born in a pre-scientific age and lived a rural medieval life where nothing ever changed.

Half an hour or so later Dad emerged from the bookshop beaming. He walked quickly across the small square towards the cafe, waving a thin volume that he had evidently just purchased. "Guess what I've found."

"It's a recipe book for pig."

"No, look."

Dad had made an unlikely purchase. He had bought a small book of short stories written in the local language: a series of vignettes of barefoot psychotherapists who roamed the countryside employing inventive techniques to correct psychological disorders; literary sketches of characters the author had met as a boy when they visited his father's apothecary shop in the 1920s; case histories that revealed the idiosyncrasies of both the healer and the healed.

The stories suited Dad on all levels. They were so succinct that he didn't have to hold a welter of intrigue in his head and his understanding was never subverted by sub-plots or complicated digressions. They were all jam-packed with the kind of local vocabulary that was a treasure trove for Dad. What was more, the techniques of some of these rural healers seemed to have a special relevance to his own mental tribulations. He pointed to the author's account of the work of Borallo, a medicine man from the village of Lagoa, who had cured a man of depression by the power of suggestion, using the local mania for emigration to the New World as a vehicle to enhance the persuasiveness of his proposition. Dad read it aloud:

"The first thing he would do with a madman was to change his name. For instance, he said to a chap called Secundino: 'You are Pepito and nothing else. Answer only to Pepito'.

Then, starting from Pepito, he would invent a new life for Secundino. For someone who had never left the village of Bretoña, he would make him believe that he had lived in Havana, where his neighbours were so-and-so and so-and-so, and that he had owned a coal-yard or a wine-cellar, and had had his picture taken at 31 Santa Clara Street next to a car wash by a photographer who had emigrated from Ribadeo, etc., etc. And he even showed him a photograph, and the madman recognised himself. I suppose he stopped ruminating stubbornly and obsessively about his own fixations and got to thinking about the fictitious Pepito and what was happening to him in the somewhat more distant events of his life."

Well, it was interesting. This was no modern non-directive psychological technique which took care not to signpost any particular path to recovery, and never prescribed what the patient should do. This was no Freudian consultation in which the doctor tried to prompt the patient to reflect upon his own condition or to encourage him to expatiate on his woes, as he lay on a couch every week, enduring a treatment that might last a period of several years. Instead, the author was describing a directive, commanding therapy suitable for people who were used to being told what to do, appropriate for simple, straightforward, trusting folk who wanted to be guided as to how to they could get better. This was an instructional approach in which the healer used the spoken word to go straight in through the ear to reach the thalamus and the neocortex in order to deliver a sudden therapeutic blow which would stimulate those areas of the brain most used in the process of imagination.

"All I can say, Dad, is that it sounds like something you ought to try yourself. You know, pretend you're someone else for a while and see what happens. God knows, you spend enough time mimicking the sound of somebody else. Why don't you try being somebody else? I'll play along. You never know, if you did a bit of role play, a spot of lying, if you could bear false witness once in a while, indulge in a little chicanery or straightforward bunkum, your brain might just get into the habit of thinking more fancifully; it might more readily engage in the fabulous or the absurd. You might begin to feel that you've found what's missing. You know, fill that hole in your consciousness that you keep going on about."

"I don't think so."

Eventually, I managed to drag his attention away from his new find and we ambled off towards the cathedral, sidling along the Rua Nova, idly inspecting the contents of the shop windows as we dawdled through the thick-set granite colonnades that line the street. When we reached the cathedral square we climbed the great ambassadorial staircase and straightway entered the basilica through the famous Pórtico de la Gloria. Dad paid scant attention to the witty 12th Century carving of the apostles above the entrance and proceeded to walk dutifully around the nave where he gazed fleetingly at the sinister all-seeing eye in the triangle that stares down intimidatingly from its position mounted on the central boss of the main dome. We paraded past the Stations of the Cross, we took our turn in the queue to file past the remains of the saint, we glanced at the great brass censer and we hauled ourselves up the staircase to the outside gallery. This latter stands at a height of some forty feet and directly overlooks the square. Leaning on the parapet you can look straight down onto the busy pavement beneath. Dad grudgingly closed his new book and opened up the tome he held in his other hand. "Let's see what old Borrow has got to say about this place. I can tell you he wasn't impressed".

Needless to say, Borrow considered the cathedral to be a monument to the graven image of a next-to-useless saint. Dad pronounced Borrow's verdict:

"What availeth kneeling before that grand altar of silver, surmounted by that figure with its silver hat and breast-plate, the emblem of one who, though an apostle and confessor, was at best an unprofitable servant?"

Dad lowered the text.

What happened next I should have seen coming, but the lunchtime alcohol had taken its soporific toll and I was more interested in staring at the view from the balcony than watching out for Dad. Immediately below us in the cathedral square were two Civil Guards. Seen directly from above, their patent leather three-cornered hats, with the glint of the sun in their centre, reminded me of the eye of Providence that we had just seen lurking in the roof of the cathedral and, for reasons only attributable to the lasting effects of the three glasses of beer, unattenuated by an insubstantial plate of minced pigs lips and lentils, I laughed out loud at this odd concatenation. At the same moment, an obese Dutch tourist elbowed Dad in the chest so that he dropped his new book onto the floor of the gallery. As he lunged to stop his latest prized possession being trodden underfoot, Dad's other hand, which was holding the thick volume containing the thoughts of the impious Borrow, shot upwards and came into collision with the Dutchman's face, causing him instinctively to defend himself by thrusting out one of his fat arms, the resultant collision propelling Borrow out of Dad's hand and over the parapet where he hurtled downwards, flapping open like some avenging angel, towards the two Civil Guards who were now looking up to see who was laughing at them. They dodged out of the way but the book was evil and at the last moment it took advantage of a gust of air and suddenly shifted its trajectory to one side, catching one of the guards on the wrist.

By the time I had realised what had happened they had run up the stairs. They had their pistols drawn and were clearly in no mood for excuses.

"Hands in the air! Show me your papers!"

As these two commands made demands that were mutually exclusive, I thought it best to shut up and let Dad do the talking. He looked straight at them and spoke the most correct Spanish although he did it with the strongest of Dutch inflections:

"I am most sorry, señor. My name is Pieter Van Dyck and I am a book dealer from Hilversum in Holland. I am so sorry that one of my latest acquisitions toppled over the ledge. By the way, may I please introduce you to my English niece, Jennifer?"

Then he worked in some complimentary talk about Andalucia as he had spotted that they were both from Seville or thereabouts: "During our recent tour of the bookshops of the South we were particularly impressed with the great city of Betis". Here he got lucky as they were both aficionados of the football club of that very same name. All the while I gazed open-mouthed at this unexpected but accomplished display of trickery and I wondered, gratefully, as I saw the facial muscles of the two Guards unknot, and their belligerent attitudes slowly abate, how it was that he had managed to get them to holster their guns and to calm down so completely. The one that the book had grazed on the wrist was quite good looking when he was angry and I was a little disappointed when he regained his composure. Dad apologised profusely for our stupid foreign habit of not carrying with us our papers and promised that before the afternoon was out we would present ourselves at the police station and identify ourselves correctly, according to the laws of Spain, even if we were, at this moment, unfortunately, in the most backward and untrustworthy of her provinces. This seemed to chime readily with the underlying resentment of a pair of lads from the south who had been posted to the friendless north and it wasn't long before they were saying that there was no need for us to attend the comisaría. Even so, they had their dignity to uphold and they obviously felt that, in taking their leave, they should demonstrate their authority by admonishing us, in the future, to always carry with us our documents of identity. Pieter promised faithfully that we would never forget this lesson. And so, with a salute and once more with the wish, or as a command as it appeared in this case, that we should go with God, they bade us farewell, although I do swear that the good looking one winked at me as well.

"Shit, Dad, that was bloody phenomenal," I said as soon as they were out of hearing.

"Just call me Pepito," Dad said. "And nothing else. I answer only to Pepito."

Chapter Nine

The following day we left Santiago and drove all the way to Finisterre. It was a traditional extension of the pilgrimage to Santiago; a prolongation of the trip to see one of the wonders of the medieval world – a visit to the end of the Earth. Dad said he was exhausted from his efforts of the previous day and so I agreed to drive. It was only about fifty miles as the crow flies but the local topography imposed a circuitous route which took us most of the day. The lanes were narrow and livestock regularly blocked our route.

At lunchtime we stopped at a market in Noya where Dad relapsed into asking the name of every item on sale; he went into a sort of vocabularian feeding frenzy. He gorged on the nomenclature of all the many and varied farm instruments. Tirelessly, he tested the patience of the vendors, enquiring of them all the names of the different sorts of long-handled scythe and small sickle, every woodworking tool, every bladed implement on sale. Then he went on to the cooking utensils to ask the denomination of every cup, every beaker, every earthenware recipient, and every pot and pan. I saw him approaching the comestibles: the cheeses, the vegetables, the pies, the tarts, the sausages, the breads. It wore me out just listening. I retired to the octopus stall where a pair of stocky women in aprons and wellington boots were doing a brisk trade. One by one they hauled the boiled creatures out of large cooking vats and with a pair of kitchen scissors quickly snipped their tentacles into bite-size chunks, dropping the pieces straight on to wooden platters, sprinkling them with paprika and handing them out to the clamorous throng, all in exchange for a few pesetas. They could hardly keep up with demand. I was eating a plate of these lumps of white flesh and pink suckers and thinking that the texture and taste was something like fish-flavoured chewing gum when, through the noise and the jabber, I heard Dad asking one of the women for the name of the tongs with which she was handling the octopodes. She pretended she hadn't heard.

Yesterday's hope gave way to a feeling of despondency and I decided to leave Dad to his own devices. I returned to the car where I found Borrow boldly lying splayed out on the front passenger seat. I looked at the page at which the book had fallen open. Sure enough, our companion had passed this way although he had approached Finisterre via an eccentric overland itinerary in the company of a deranged guide who freely admitted that he had never been this far from home. Their roundabout route had taken them past the tiny cliff-top hamlet of Duyo. When Borrow had asked of a local woman the name of the village that they were in she had responded that Duyo was not a village but the remains of a city that had vanished beneath the waves, a fact which he did not call into doubt. Instead, he looked down the cliffs into the wild abyss of the sea and recorded that, "upon this beach had once stood an immense, commercial city the proudest of all Spain," and that, "these huts were all the roaring sea and the tooth of time had left of Duyo, the great city."

Borrow was at his least assertive on geological matters or human landmarks, either passively accepting what people might claim, such as he did with this woman in Duyo, or failing to show an interest in the wonders that he must have seen on his travels, as might be gauged from his complete lack of mention of the marvellous Roman remains at Mérida or the great mosque of Cordoba.

At Finisterre Borrow and his hapless guide were arrested by a gang of rough fisherman, one of whom proved to be the local mayor or alcalde. The latter was convinced that there was no earthly reason for anyone, let alone this odd couple, to be making a casual visit to Finisterre, and he had leapt to the unlikely conclusion that Borrow must be Carlos, the hunch-backed pretender to the Spanish throne, and the strange looking guide his similarly afflicted nephew, prince Sebastian. Moreover, he believed the pair of them must have been surveying the area as a potential site for a military invasion. Despite his imminent peril Borrow wrote humorously of his bizarre interchange with the deluded mayor:

"Myself: 'I have nothing of the appearance of a Spaniard, and I am nearly a foot taller than the pretender.'

Alcalde: 'That makes no difference; you of course carry many waistcoats about you, by means of which you disguise yourself, and appear tall or low according to your pleasure.'

This last was so conclusive an argument that I had of course nothing to reply to it."

Borrow goes on to imply that the mayor would have had them shot without further ado, if it had not been for the timely intervention of the self-styled Antonio The Brave, a drunken braggart anglophile who claimed to have served aboard the Victory and witnessed the death of Nelson. His conviction that Borrow resembled the British Admiral, coupled with Antonio's familiarity with the English words knife and fork, was sufficient to convince the fishermen that they should commend their prisoners to the mercy of the more educated mayor of Corcubión some thirteen kilometres along the coast. They therefore entrusted Antonio to deliver Borrow and his guide to their place of judgement; but such was Antonio's craving for alcohol that he stopped at so many inns on the way and drank such an inordinate quantity of wine while he was there, that he was thoroughly inebriated by the time he handed over the prisoners. Nevertheless, throughout the episode Borrow remained undismayed by his situation, knowing that, as an Englishman and a Christian, he had nothing to fear. In Corcubión his faith was rewarded and the pair were set free by the mayor, another anglophile and a devotee of the wisdom of Jeremy Bentham.

Eventually Dad returned from the fair looking pleased, I put the book down and we set off on the road once again. By the time we left I was very glad that we had not arrived early enough in the morning to visit the daily fish auction. Fish, I had already learnt, don't seem to have the same appellations anywhere on earth; the names of the finny tribe are legion. Besides, if Borrow was anything to go by, I didn't want to risk an altercation with any fishermen.

Two more hours winding northwards along the cornice and we finally arrived at the little town of Finisterre. We found we could drive right up to the lighthouse at the end of the cape. As we approached the large whitewashed granite building upon which it stood, I got the impression of an impenetrable citadel that faced away to sea. The doors and windows were all locked and the edifice seemed completely mute. Ironic, I thought, that a tower whose purpose was to communicate should be so single-mindedly cut off from the visitors that gathered at its base. Or maybe it was appropriate that it should pay no attention and simply stay on task, gazing out to sea, doing its job, not distracted by the idle chit-chat of others. Now, who did that remind me of?

We sat on the rocky cliff top and ate the packed lunch that we had prepared from the fruit, corn bread and cheese that we had bought at the market. I found somebody to take our photograph, I put my arm round Dad and he stared innocently into the camera. When he heard the click of the shutter he turned to me and said,

"Do you know, I love this place. I've learnt so much in such a short time. Do you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to go back home and get your mother. She'll be really interested. It's a bit like Wales: own language, old fashioned, a bit damp, same size, great vocabulary. We might even settle down here for a while."

"Dad!"

"What?"

Chapter Ten

From Finisterre we drove north-east following the barbed edge of the Costa de la Muerte: the jagged, splintery shore of the Atlantic corner of Spain, which for thousands of years has proved a place of watery sacrifice for countless terrified ships which are lifted out of the sea by huge rollers as if they are nothing more than toys in a child's bath tub and then flung on to the submerged rocks, smashed against the cliffs and impaled upon points of needle sharp granite.

It was a coastline that had almost claimed the life of Borrow. While he was on his way to begin his mission to Portugal and Spain the engines failed on the paddle steamer that was transporting him from London to Lisbon just as the vessel was rounding the dangerous Galician shore and the passengers were only saved from the rocks by a dramatic last minute variation in the direction of the wind. When Borrow made his similarly near fatal visit to Finisterre he was only doing so in order to see from the landward side the site where his ship had very nearly been wrecked.

Up on the cliffs on a still day it all seems surprisingly different. Between the headlands there are peaceful bays where fishing villages overlook gently curving beaches of white gold. Even that is deceptive. If you clamber down to the dunes and lie prostrate on their warm surface and let the sand trickle slowly through your fingers you will find that it is tinted a delicate powdery blue, tinged azure by the crushed mica of countless mussel shells.

In one of these idyllic hollows we decided to rest for the night. It was already nine in the evening by the time we arrived in the small town of Malpica. I drew the car up carefully onto the sandy verge which ran alongside the strand. Behind us there was a row of two-storey houses with gently sloping tiled roofs. At the first floor level the houses had white wooden balconies entirely enclosed by casement windows.

In front of us the water looked inviting. It had been a hot day and our journey from Santiago had been tortuous and tiring. In the evening light the sea looked inviting and refreshing. I changed under a towel and walked towards the great frothing waves that were pummelling the shore. The beach was almost empty apart from what I took to be a small group of youngsters huddled together at the far end. I walked to the edge of the water but before I could reach the waves a young man detached himself from the group and ran towards me frantically waving his arms as if to warn of some impending danger.

As he drew near I could hear him shouting above the roar of the waves. "Be careful, the undertow is really treacherous. You shouldn't get out of your depth."

I thanked him and took his advice. There was indeed a terrific pull as the waves receded and it took all my strength to prevent myself being dragged back into the surf.

When I emerged after a short dip he was still standing there, smiling as if he was glad to see me emerge from the sort of unnecessary peril to which only an innocent tourist girl would have had the naivety to subject herself. He introduced himself as Manolo. His mother had a small guesthouse and he conjectured that we might require somewhere to stay. For our part, we were pleased to accept his invitation.

Manolo introduced us to his mother, Rosario, a short, almost round woman who wore an apron that extended to the floor. When she spoke Spanish it came out all mixed up with her own language, but she articulated slowly and I could follow if I tried hard. When she had shown us to a small twin-bedded room she invited us to come and eat in the front parlour where the table was laid for supper.

Rosario served us plates of what she called percebes which Dad translated as goose barnacles. They were, she said, at the height of their season, although to me they looked wholly unappetising, having the appearance of small, scaly, conjoined trotters that might have been excised from some sort of grotesque primeval creature that clacked and crawled beneath the rocks. Neither Dad nor I had the slightest idea that they were a prized local delicacy and how much we were honoured to be presented with such a feast. I only began to realise the truth when Manolo explained the amount of effort that went into their harvest. They grew on the rocks just beneath the waves and could only be reached by teams of young men who used a rope to let down one of their number onto the boulders that were revealed at low tide. While the chap at the business end of the rope used a sharp metal prod to prise the creatures free, his colleagues kept a lookout for the giant breakers that could sweep him off the rock face and drown him in seconds. The men worked fully clothed as a precaution against having their skin shredded if they ever had the ill fortune to be caught by the swell and keelhauled beneath the rocks. The disadvantage of being thus attired was that the weight of the wet garments impeded the picker's movement and made it difficult to yank him back to safety whenever a large breaker was spotted. Although the gangs erred on the side of caution and started to withdraw their man from the water at the slightest hint of danger, many youngsters had lost their lives in the effort to harvest these small crustaceans. Nevertheless, the gangs continued to take the risk as the goose barnacles commanded a good price in the restaurants of Madrid; packed in ice along with the rest of the day's catch and then driven to the capital overnight, they would be served as expensive hors d'oeuvres the following day. That was, providing there was no unexpected hold-up on the narrow country lane which served as the main arterial route through the mountains, along which we had already travelled on our way into the region.

I didn't much like the goose barnacles but I joined in the palaver of eating them, biting through the grey sleeve of the peduncle and sucking away the sweet pink inside. Dad declared that he didn't fancy them at all and wasn't going to eat them, but at least he said it in English so that nobody understood. Nevertheless, I was cross with him.

"Listen, Dad. Shut up and look like you're enjoying them. Don't you realise the trouble that they've gone to provide us with these things? Eat them, engage with these people and, while you're getting them down your ungrateful throat, why don't you indulge yourself in a feast of new words?"

I shouldn't have snapped at him but I was hungry and bad tempered. I said it in order to hit him where it hurts but even as I was uttering the words I understood the folly of what I was doing. As was often the case, he was blissfully unaware of my attempt at a scolding. Instead, he interpreted the outburst as a blast of encouragement and without further ado he switched into his enquiry mode.

"Tell me, Rosario, what do you call the implements and the pouch utilised in the gathering of these sea creatures."

He was off. He learnt the name for these barnacle pickers and the long sharp stick that they used to dislodge the creatures from the rock, the types of boat that sailed from the harbour, the sails they employed, the ropes and the rigging, the terms for the wind and the swell of the sea. I thought then as I saw him engrossed in quizzing Rosario that he had a prodigious memory. He never used a pen and paper. He never took notes. He just seemed to store everything in his head. He didn't even have to go through the process of repeating words for the time necessary for them to lodge in his long-term memory. I was wrong to make an analogy with feasting. Dad was never full. He never gorged himself to the extent that he needed to visit a verbal vomitorium to make more space for future word guzzling. His appetite knew no limit.

When Rosario's husband Ramón arrived half way through the meal she and Manolo were visibly relieved to see him and he politely rescued them from the torrent of Dad's questions. Unlike Rosario, Ramón only spoke Galician. Dad was delighted. The grammar was Portuguese whereas the phonetics were largely Castilian; and the vocabulary was completely another kettle of fish. Dad was truly getting his head around the local language. I wondered drunkenly why it was that Borrow never managed it. He had boasted of his fluency in Romany and Welsh. So why hadn't he been able to master this latinate country cousin of Castilian? It also struck me that Dad was also a lot more fortunate with his fishermen than Borrow was with his.

Of course Dad didn't stop at all the names of the fish that he had missed the opportunity of enquiring about in Noya when we had chanced upon the fish market too late on the previous day. He also wanted to know the names of the methods of capture, the nets, the lines, the hooks, the bait and the pots. Where did they fish? What were the Sea Areas to which they travelled? How long were they away from home?

Ramón, who had the patience of a saint, told him how the trawlers sailed as far as the fishing grounds in the Irish Sea or off the coast of the Azores. Wherever they went they could keep the location of the shoals a secret amongst themselves. They could radio their positions freely from one vessel to another, for apart from other Galicians, nobody had a clue as to what they might be indicating in their unfamiliar tongue.

I tried to temper Dad's demands by attempting to shift the conversation away from fishing but I eventually realised that I was playing a losing game, so I stopped talking and distanced myself by drinking far too much wine.

I slept like a top and by the time I eventually awoke the next morning Dad had already thrown back the blankets and disappeared out of the room. Well, there was nothing unusual about that. Dad was no lie-a-bed. When I got downstairs he was poring over his motoring Atlas of Spain and didn't look up as I came into the room. I often thought that if he hadn't been a linguist he would have been a cartographer. I only knew that he had registered my presence when he suddenly said,

"St Ives".

"What do you mean, 'St Ives'?"

"It's St Ives"

"What is?"

"Corunna"

"No Dad, I think you're getting confused. It's Corunna, a vast deep-water port from which the Spanish Armada set sail to conquer England in 1588. St Ives is a small fishing town in Cornwall where they sell buckets and spades for kiddies to dig in the sand."

"No, look."

When he finally looked up his expression was serious and intense. "Can't you see? They're exactly the same shape. The isthmuses and headlands are identical. The only difference is the scale. The Corunna peninsula might be four times the size of that of St Ives but the shape is exactly the same. Where St Ives has the Chapel of St Nicholas, Corunna has its lighthouse, the Tower of Hercules. The Porthmeor beach is the beach at Orzán. The position of Quay Street corresponds to that of the fort of San Carlos. Why hasn't anyone ever remarked upon it before?"

I had to admit that he had a point. They did look uncannily similar. I knew then what our next stop would be.

Chapter Eleven

It wasn't far to Corunna and when we arrived it immediately impressed me as an unusual urban enclave in an otherwise rural country; it sprawled in a way that Santiago didn't. A broad new avenue swept into the city and all along either side of the carriageway fresh buildings were taking shape. In the centre it was a more traditional Spanish city than anywhere we had seen recently; a place full of bustle and nightlife, of bars and tapas, with a nightly pre-prandial parade of the well-dressed and the well-to-do. Everywhere you looked there was a mania for 'out with the old and in with the new'. The town planning seemed to consist of pulling down lovely old buildings with the most beautiful three storey wooden verandas and replacing them with flat-faced concrete blocks. The motto of the place should have been something like, "Live for the present" or "Forget the past".

Compared with the medieval maze of Santiago, Corunna was more of a mini Madrid by the sea. It was the regional red tape centre of central government, Franco's capital of Galicia.

Perhaps it was to emphasise its civic status and to give itself a more sophisticated air that the city had adopted the mode of public transport most readily associated with a modern metropolis. It was this we found most extraordinary. Double-decker London trolleybuses not only ran throughout the urban area but also trundled deep into the poorer, unadopted suburbs, their huge shapes looking completely out of proportion with the rural shacks that they passed as they lurched and bumped slowly along the narrow, dusty, unmetalled roads. The buses were forever stopping as the trolley poles were jolted off the overhead electric wires whenever the uneven surface of the road caused the vehicles to suddenly dip, and no journey was complete without the conductor and some helpful passers-by attempting to raise the contacts back into their position.

Like all tourists, we turned our backs on the brash new suburbs and sought accommodation in the nineteenth-century part of the city, taking a small room above a busy bar at a corner of the Calle Nueva, from where we immediately set out to explore our surroundings. We walked the length of the elegant Avenida de la Marina, at the end of which we entered the fortress of San Carlos. It was here that the body of General Moore had been laid to rest during the Peninsula War, the military campaign to rid Spain and Portugal of Napoleon's occupying army. Moore's bedraggled forces had been driven back to the sea and routed by the French at nearby Elviña, the rump of the British army scuttling back to Corunna in the hope of being rescued by the Navy. In the midst of this undignified scramble Moore had been slain, but the victorious French, in a singular gesture of chivalry, had interred his body in a tomb in San Carlos and as we entered the fortress it was this that we beheld.

"Let's see what old Borrow had to say about this place," said Dad.

Old Borrow was looking a little worse for wear. His spread-eagled and vertiginous dive from the parapet of the cathedral and his subsequent crash against the stone flags of the square had left him with a cracked spine and loose stitching. He creaked as I picked him up from where he was resting on the rear seat and I'll swear I heard a faint sigh.

Tired as he was, old Borrow could still be relied upon to have a good low-church opinion of Moore's tomb:

"It is oblong and surmounted by a slab, and on either side bears one of the simple and sublime epitaphs for which our rivals are celebrated, and which stands in such powerful contrast with the bloated and bombastic inscriptions that deform the walls of Westminster Abbey."

From the fortress of San Carlos we strolled through the Plaza de Maria Pita, crossed the Plaza de España, passed the English cemetery, and eventually sauntered out of the city onto the deserted headland where we climbed the Tower of Hercules lighthouse and looked back at the way we had come.

Dad pointed out the only other building nearby, the sinisterly elegant provincial jail, looking strangely exotic with its crimson painted walls and the Italianate appearance of its central panopticon. Neither would it have looked out of place in Istanbul: if it had had a minaret at each corner it would have easily passed muster as a mosque.

We stayed a further day in Corunna while Dad pursued his obsessive comparison. We walked along the beach on the western side of the peninsula, Dad pointing out its geographical equivalence with Porthmeor. At the southern end of the esplanade towered the vast and imposing Riazor football stadium, home of the First Division football club, Deportivo La Coruña.

"Ho, ho, Dad. And to what, I should like to know, do you compare this enormous edifice?"

"Well, its position at the base of the peninsula is roughly analogous to that of the St Ives Bowls Club, right next to the municipal putting green."

"Dad, I've just thought. How come you're such an expert on the geography of Cornwall? I don't remember any family holidays that far west."

"I only went once, ages ago, during the war. I had to interview the three occupants of a small fishing smack who claimed they'd made it all the way from Belgium to St Ives Bay. The suspicion of course was that they were spies. It was extremely unlikely that they could have chugged all the way along the Channel without German connivance. As it was, they were as Belgian as eels in green sauce. It only took a jiffy to authenticate them and I used up the three days I'd been allotted for the investigation by indulging in a little local recce."

On the evening before our departure we took a stroll along the Cantón Pequeño, a main thoroughfare not far from where we were staying. So impressed had I been with Dad's temporary transformation in Santiago that I ducked into the Arenas bookshop to see if there was anything else by the same author who had magicked such a change in his behaviour. Álvaro Cunqueiro was his name.

The only thing I could find by him was a volume of short stories called Merlin y familia and we sat in the Méndez Nuñez gardens, opposite the bookshop, and leafed through the work, a strange and fanciful account of the life of the ancient wizard who has decided to temporarily absent himself from the Court of King Arthur and take a break from the tutelage of the British monarch whom he is finding increasingly difficult and demanding. The book shows a sensitive Merlin who is feeling somewhat slighted by Arthur who has lately become rather sniffy about his old sorcerer's advice. It just so happens that Merlin has chosen to lead his self-imposed exile in the depths of Galicia, in the province of Lugo, and he has taken up residence, as luck would have it, not far from Cunqueiro's own home town of Mondoñedo. It is here that Cunqueiro has set a humorous collection of tales concerning the numerous fantastical beings who make the journey to visit the expatriate Merlin.

Cunqueiro was proving to be a more congenial and helpful companion than Borrow had ever been. It was hard to imagine that he could cause Dad or I any such difficulty as that we had encountered in Santiago while we were solely accompanied by our overblown, gung-ho, Bible-bashing buddy Borrow.

We took a final walk along the Avenida de la Marina, the broad and fashionable boulevard that faces the impressive harbour. Almost on the docks is the solid and square structure of the Columbus cinema built in 1948.

From where we stood, the long poster above the entrance to the cinema was just a blur of white shapes on a red and gold background and we ambled over to take a better look at what was showing. As we drew nearer it became possible to discern the figures depicted in the advertising. First to emerge was a sketch of Alec Guinness with a blacked-up face and an Arab head cover, although even with this he looked more like a Durham miner than a likeness of King Faisal.

"Well, well, Dad, Lawrence de Arabia. Look, the performance hasn't begun yet. We've just got time to fashion ourselves a couple of placards, you know, no pasar and abominación lingüística and then we can form a picket here by the doors and prevent people from going in. Oh, and when we've done that we can nip over to the beach and command the waves to go back. What do you think?"

There was a long queue building up at the box office. English and \American films were popular as there was no need to read the subtitles; they were all carefully dubbed into Spanish.

When it came to cultural imports, Franco took his cue from Philip II. For the forty-two years of his dictatorial reign from 1556 to 1598 the King had imposed strict literary and religious censorship and he had policed it with merciless severity; anyone found guilty of importing and distributing heretical texts would be burnt alive. Franco was no less ruthless, although in the heyday of the mass executions that followed his victory in the Civil War Franco didn't actually order anyone to be burnt at the stake. He simply had them shot.

But once the Generalísimo had put to death all the internal opposition to his regime he recognised, just like the grotesque and obsessed Philip II had done four hundred years before him, that there was an urgent need to limit the fresh arrival of unwelcome ideas from abroad. Amongst the prohibitive measures that Franco enacted was a law which required all foreign films to be dubbed into Spanish. That way, the censor was able to fully control the dialogue and any adverse or damaging remarks could be altered so that nobody would be any the wiser. The only problem was that dubbed films all had the same five or six actors, with the result that if you went to the cinema regularly you could hear queens, cowgirls and Oliver Twist all speaking with the same voice.

I was grateful that we'd seen Lawrence in Scarborough for Dad would have been apoplectic if we had watched the film in Spain. Not only would he not have been able to experience the authentic indigenous language of the characters, he wouldn't even have heard the voices of the original actors. Dubbing would have added insult to injury: an imposition on the film of yet another layer of insincerity.

I suddenly felt irritable and changed the subject. I made a cheap move, calling upon his new obsession.

"And Dad, while we are on the subject of the twin towns of Corunna and St Ives, with what does this huge entertainment complex correspond in St Ives?"

I shouldn't have asked.

"Well, I think it would probably be represented on a smaller scale by the Sloop Inn."

"Oh Dad, give over."

Chapter Twelve

I was quite pleased to see the back of Corunna and I gladly climbed behind the wheel to begin our long drive home.

Two hours into our journey down the N-VI we came across the signs for the city of Lugo. Now it was Dad's turn to indulge me. I had to stop and see the only city in the world which was still completely encircled by a fully intact set of Roman Walls that dated back to the third century AD.

We parked the car and entered the walled city via yet another Calle del General Franco, this one penetrating the Roman Wall on its north-east flank. Immediately inside, we climbed the stone steps to the top of the wall and began a slow anticlockwise stroll along the ramparts.

The ancient city within the Roman Wall is truly a delight, having one of the best proportioned main squares of all Spain. It is "a light, cheerful place" as Borrow remarks. However, the new city, without the wall, proved as depressing a prospect as any of the monstrosities of modern Spain. All around the outside, three-storey blocks of flats were being thrown up. Once it must have been possible to stand atop the impressive Roman remains girdling the medieval streets and gaze out uninterruptedly for twenty miles all around, whereas now we stared into the second floor windows of jerry-built flats where families were eating their meals or taking to their beds for an afternoon nap. In true English style I tried not to look and averted my gaze, although Dad with his usual lack of decorum, stared into the apartments with impunity. This was a philistine place: a product of a poor economy that had disastrously realised the potential of cheap reinforced concrete, its proliferation uninhibited by any suggestion of town and country planning.

In Borrow's day the walls must certainly have been much more visible than when we visited, for Lugo had but 6,000 inhabitants at the time of his visit, less than four per cent of its present population. Even so, the walls seem to have made little impression on Borrow. He wasn't given to gasps of amazement at beauty, either natural or man-made. His was a more of a Boy's Own progress across the Iberian Peninsula. He was always more interested in the character of a people and the individuals that it threw up. His lack of curiosity in the architecture cannot have been helped by his state of health at the time, for as soon as he arrived in Lugo he took to his bed for three days, laid low by the effects of travelling whilst unwell and much dismayed by the endless Galician rain.

Whatever the reasons for Borrow's apparent indifference to his physical surroundings, he arose on the evening of the third day and immediately interested himself in other things. He was greatly diverted by the fate of a numerous family in reduced circumstances that had obtained accommodation at his posada: a father, son, eleven daughters and a male domestic who all slept in one room.

Borrow found the town unexpectedly devout; he sold all thirty of the Testaments he had with him and wished that he had brought more. Soon, Dad and I would discover that there was still an enduring respect for the cloth amongst the ordinary folk of the city.

At a point almost diametrically opposite to where we had begun our circumnavigation of the old town, our attention was drawn to an altercation between a man and a woman that was happening below us in a dim, labyrinthine, run-down area just inside the wall. A dark-skinned woman with a very short skirt and a skimpy blouse, both items of clothing suggesting a complete a lack of undergarments, was berating a middle-aged man who was doing everything in his power to appear unconcerned and walk away with as much dignity as he could manage. As he disappeared around the corner and into the safety of a dark alleyway her invective changed from being a vindictive personal attack to a general public address in which she inveighed against the carnal nature of all men. She didn't mince her words, proclaiming loudly that the source of all evil was "that disgusting thing that hangs between their legs".

"I think this must be the local China Town," said Dad.

I wheeled around but there wasn't a Chinese man in sight.

"Jennifer, it has nothing to do with China, nor a Chinese district, nor even cockney rhyming slang. The Chinatown is the urban district in which there is a proliferation of establishments dedicated to prostitution. The explanation is this. In South America, the Quechua Indians, who occupy a long swathe of the Andean Mountains from Colombia to Chile, call their women chinas. During the years of the Spanish invasion and subjugation of the continent, the conquistadores, most of them little more than criminals and dispossessed jailbirds banished from Spain, used these indigenous women for their sexual gratification. When the men eventually returned to Spain loaded with booty, the criminals purged of their crimes by the volume of their spoils and the formerly destitute now men of substance, they continued to use the expression 'going to chinatown' as a euphemism for visiting what we would call the red light district. Listen to that woman scolding that man. She has to be Colombian with that clear, pre-palatal articulation of the letter 'ch' and the give-away double diminutives. You see, throughout the centuries, the sexual preferences of Spanish men have remained constant. She is the exotic South American prostitute from the Andes. Look carefully and you will observe that she is a half caste, descended from a mixture of Spanish and native blood, a distant relative of conquistadores and village chinas alike. It just goes to show that nothing has changed."

As usual Dad had made no effort to moderate his tone and she must have overheard him. She glanced up at the walls and saw us looking down.

"Who do you think you're staring at?"

"Bogotá."

"Pardon?"

"That's where I think you come from."

"Come here my darling and I'll give you a special price."

"No, I don't want that but I'm coming down anyway."

"Dad! No."

"Jennie, I want to hear her."

He scrambled down the nearest steps and a short while later reappeared in the street below, holding out his arm in order to shake the woman by the hand. The woman smiled and took him by the waist instead. He tried to shake free.

"No, no, I just wanted to talk to you"

"I know my love. You can pay me three hundred pesetas and you can talk to me whatever you like."

"No, I just want a quick word."

By now, two other colleagues of the same profession had been drawn into this odd interchange and they were both trying to clarify the need for Dad to pay up front for whatever he wanted to get off his chest. Dad had now wrenched himself free and was gazing into space trying to make himself understood. The ladies were looking disconcerted and uncomfortable.

"No, it's really not like that. I just couldn't help noticing your consonants and wanted to know where you were from. You know, where you were born."

A small crowd was gathering on the wall as passers-by paused to watch the spectacle. Somebody asked, "Who is the guy with his arms folded, looking up to heaven?"

"I don't know. To me he looks like Father Ignacio, one of the priests from the cathedral. I think he may be working undercover, trying to show them the way."

"I think he's mad," said somebody else.

"Maybe he's a policeman," added another.

Down in the street, the tone of the women was beginning to get excitable and a muscly gentleman in a dirty vest emerged from the grimy bar in the background. He elbowed the women aside and stood facing Dad. He was much shorter than Dad but he was a good deal stockier and the size of his biceps suggested that he could have been a weightlifter. He seemed to be chewing something as if he had been interrupted in the course of his lunch. Whatever it was, he spat it out sideways and it landed in the dust.

"What d'you want?" he demanded in a surly tone.

Anybody else in this situation would have recognised that discretion is the better part of valour and not continued to insist that he had done nothing wrong. Dad, however, tried once more to reason, although his underlying panic was causing his eyes to gyrate wildly.

"I only wanted a short time with this young lady. I'm not paying just to discover her provenance, that's all."

Without leaning back the man brought up a large fist and hit Dad in the face. I screamed "My father" in Spanish but somehow only "Father" came out.

One of the men on the wall shouted, "I'll save you, Father," and hared down the steps to intervene. He was followed by two others who were emboldened by the leadership of the first. The man in the vest proved equal to all three. As the men threw themselves on him he grabbed two by the neck and kicked the third in the groin. The prostitutes all joined in, pulling at the men and scratching with their nails. So it was that the women on the wall felt impelled to go to the rescue of their men. I ran behind them and tried to haul Dad out of the centre of the melee. By the time I got there two other men had intervened on the priest's side and some surly compadres had arrived to assist the malignant dwarf, not that he needed any help. He seemed to relish the uneven odds and to be actively enjoying the fray. He grinned as he crunched heads and broke noses. Dad's face was red and swollen and his nose was streaming with blood. His glasses had been trampled and I could hear the lenses being ground underfoot. He reeled around trying to get his bearings, his eyes staring wildly into the sky. His shirt was torn, his nose was gushing and his front was covered with gore. I grabbed his ripped collar and dragged him towards the gateway in the wall where we exited on to the ring road that ran around the outer perimeter of the walls. It would have been shorter to have tried to escape across the centre of the city but Dad couldn't see where he was going, we didn't know our way through the maze of small streets and I didn't want to run the risk of being pursued. This way was longer but we were protected by our visibility to all and sundry passers-by. Dad and I half ran, half hobbled back to the car, the pair of us causing a spectacle as we careered a kilometre along the circular road before we reached the car. I wrenched open the passenger door, shoved him into the seat and started up the engine. In my agitation I must have stalled at least four or five times but eventually we got away.

Chapter Thirteen

From Lugo we beat a retreat down the N-VI towards Villafranca del Bierzo where we had originally planned to stop for the night but we were forced to a halt some twelve miles short of our destination. An articulated lorry had skidded in the wet and jack-knifed at the difficult bend where the road snakes through the tiny village of Ruitelan. The vehicle had become wedged between two buildings and was completely blocking the carriageway, causing great consternation to the owner of the large house on the bend and creating a traffic jam of almost a mile in both directions. Two tractors from the surrounding fields had been commandeered by the Guardia Civil and harnessed to the front of the vehicle in an attempt to pull it free but the operation was set to take the best part of two hours during which there was no alternative but to sit and wait patiently.

In the end we gave up and halted for the night. Dad was exhausted and a bit shaky after the events of the afternoon. We took a small room above the local bar and the concerned proprietor gave us a jug of iced water with which I bathed Dad's face. Luckily, his nose did not seem to be broken. The bleeding had stopped although he was left with a real shiner. Indeed, his cheek was so swollen that his eye socket was partially closed. We had found his spare glasses – the large ones with the clear plastic frame that I didn't like him wearing as they made him look like Hiram Holiday, a now long forgotten dweeb from a very unfunny US TV show. I had to admit that when he wore them over his black eye he did look comical. The thing about Dad was that he was rarely downcast for long and he smiled at his grotesque reflection in the bathroom mirror.

Later in the bar we sat down to some chorizo in wine, a Spanish omelette and some crusty bread, Dad somewhat farcically trying to restrict his chewing to the left side of his mouth in order to take the pressure off his right cheek. After some painkillers kindly donated by the owner of the bar we both had a surprisingly good night's sleep, aided no doubt by the medicinal effects of a good bottle of Ribeiro.

The following morning we awoke to the aroma that was emanating from downstairs, the characteristic morning fragrance of a Spanish bar, the delicious mix of the smell of roast coffee and the hazy blue smoke of black tobacco. When we staggered down to a late breakfast Dad had obviously been contemplating the distance back to the French border for he said that it had occurred to him that we might break the journey by having a stopover in the Basque Country.

"On the way home we won't be going far out of our way if we call in and see an old colleague of mine who lives in Guernica and commutes in to the university at Bilbao."

"OK, I'd like to see Guernica. I just don't want to feel like a voyeur in the face of all that destruction."

Like most people I knew that this small and defenceless town had been razed to the ground by the Luftwaffe one quiet market day in April 1937, the Nazi Air Force taking the opportunity to experiment with their technique of Blitzkreig. In a few hours they completely flattened half the town and killed fifteen hundred people out of the population of four thousand. Afterwards, the Francoist propaganda machine had blamed the destruction on retreating Republican forces who they claimed had systematically blown up the town in their wake, exploding mines in order to prevent their secret arsenal of guns and ammunition falling in to the hands of Franco's advancing troops.

It was extremely unlikely that Borrow would be able to throw any light upon the events that were a hundred years in his future, but I thought I'd sneak an idle look at his observations on the Basques while we drank our coffee and breakfasted on freshly baked bread spread with home-made blackberry jam. "Pass me Georgie-Porgie a moment, Dad."

Borrow always had something to say about the moral and intellectual stature of the peoples he met and he never shrank from giving his considered opinion of any section of the human race. He commented on the characteristics of the residents of each region through which he passed and he was rarely generous in his appraisal. But in his judgement of the Basques he was unusually positive. He even had the bizarre flight of fancy that they might be descended from the Tartars, such was their fearlessness in battle and their prowess in war. They struck him as "faithful and honest, and capable of much disinterested attachment; kind and hospitable to strangers". But above all, he remarked:

"No people on earth are prouder than the Basques, but theirs is a kind of republican pride. They have no nobility amongst them, and no one will acknowledge a superior."

If Borrow's generalisation was to be believed it was no surprise that Franco had had difficulty with them; not only were they indomitable, but they were also egalitarian. No wonder that he had given the Condor Legion the licence to do their worst. As we drew near the town I readied myself to see the horrific scenes of devastation. So it was that, when we arrived, I was amazed to discover that the town had been rebuilt, albeit in a more Castilian rather than Basque style.

We found our way to the house of Dad's former colleague, an elderly man who was quite alarmed by Dad's appearance. He greeted us open mouthed. "My God, Con, who's been beating you up?"

"He was punched by a pimp in Lugo," I volunteered drolly.

"You must be Jennie. You were only a little girl when your father came here. It's a pleasure to meet you." In the excitement of the moment Dad must have forgotten to introduce me and the elderly man did the presentations himself. His name was Carlos Goicoechea and it turned out that he had been Dad's supervisor during his doctoral research.

Carlos was very courteous and attentive in an old fashioned, formal way and he asked me politely what were my first impressions of the town. He seemed to intuit my surprise at the very few ruins that remained. He explained that the reconstruction had taken place rapidly after the end of the war and was completed within five years, the work being carried out by battalions of political prisoners. The forced labour was officially described as 'an act of atonement', although as a mark of contrition it could hardly have been characterised as voluntary, as the only alternative on offer was execution. As it was, many of the slave labourers died anyway, not of the firing squad but of starvation and illness. The propaganda of the time claimed that the prisoners were learning repentance through 'work, bread and the justice of the Fatherland', remaking with their physical hard labour what they had previously destroyed with dynamite. After the end of the Civil War, as a further act of obfuscation, the new mayor of Guernica had declared Franco an adopted son of the town.

Dad chimed in with the observation that Franco was not universally disliked by ordinary people and cited the evidence of our visit to the taberna in rural Galicia that was run by Claudio and Encarnación. Carlos responded by turning to me.

"As much as I admire your father for what he has done for the standing of the Basque language I have to say that he is a political innocent. Yes, I'm sure that there are Galician peasants who admire Franco. After all, that's where he comes from. What they didn't tell you is that he is obliterating their linguistic and cultural heritage just as much as he is destroying ours. The Galicians may maintain they are a part of Spain, but here we are equally certain that we are not. If I was to be caught saying such a thing in public I could spend the rest of my days rotting in jail. It is a highly seditious thing to say. Yet it's true. This language, this Spanish that we are conversing in now, is not the language of my people. We are not taught to read and write in Basque. We only learn to be literate in Spanish. The state is trying to stifle our identity. When your father comes along and includes us in his studies, in an international textbook no less, he has no idea what he is doing. He doesn't realise why the authorities hate him so much."

He turned towards Dad. "He doesn't seem to understand despite the fact that he seems to take everything so bloody seriously!"

Dad was spurred to say something in his defence. "Well, I am trying to improve." And from the inside pocket of his jacket he took out the book he had bought in Santiago and flourished it in the old man's face. Proudly, I related the incident with the Civil Guards and Dad's unexpected flash of impersonation.

"We're going to call him Pepito from now on," I laughed. Dad smiled too. He wasn't used to being cast in the role of the joker and he was revelling in his new-found recognition. I was so proud of him and I couldn't help smiling at his belief in his baptism into worldliness. So wrapped up were Dad and I in our warm appreciation of his recent achievement that it took a few minutes to realise that Carlos had fallen silent.

"What's the matter, Carlos? You always said I needed a sense of humour. Now I've got one."

The old man spoke slowly and sadly. "What you don't realise is that your handbook of Galician folk medicine was written by a man who is considered to be a traitor by the Basques. During the Civil War he was employed to write for the Nationalist press, to tell lies about how we had destroyed our own town. However great might be Cunqueiro's talent for describing the arcane and quirky ways of our country cousins in Galicia, in the Basque Country he will never be known as anything other than one of Franco's paid fantasists, employed during the Civil War to peddle deleterious propaganda against our alien race.

So much for small talk then, I felt like saying. Carlos continued in his measured fashion. Chastened, we listened dutifully, while he delivered a long political lecture.

"Before the outbreak of the Civil War I understand that Cunqueiro had been mixing in a left wing milieu and when the military uprising came he tried to hide away in an obscure teaching post. But the fascists found him and invited him to write for the Francoist press. He was too frightened not to. But with the rewards of office he warmed to the task and enjoyed the high life, living it up, eating and drinking in San Sebastian, nicely insulated from the nastiness of real life.

"Your man, Cunqueiro, embellished stories of how the retreating Basque militia blew up their towns and murdered their own people. He couched his lies in a playful archaic prose, an overblown pseudo-classical style that passed for literary good taste amongst the philistines who were winning the war. His message was that the Basques were noble but innocent subjects of Spain and had been tragically misled. He went on to be editor of the national newspaper, "The Voice of Spain" and assistant editor of Vértice, the post-war fascist arts magazine, if that's not a contradiction in terms. I am very pleased to say, however, that he fell from grace when he failed to produce some work for the French Ambassador for which he had been handsomely paid in advance. As a result, his journalistic credentials were withdrawn and he returned to lick his wounds in his home town somewhere in the backwoods of the Province of Lugo. I didn't know that he was writing, even less that he was being published. This must be one of his offerings. Whatever he writes it will not be read here. And that book doesn't come inside this house. Please take it back outside to the car."

At this point I decided to keep quiet about Merlin and Family.

"Before, you were just apolitical, Con, but we liked you. It appears that now you're consorting with the enemy as well as brawling with prostitutes. What you also have to understand is that fantasy is a double-edged sword and there is something to be said for just saying things as you see them."

It seemed that the blows, both figurative and literal, were coming thick and fast.

Chapter Fourteen

In the closing scene of 'Lawrence of Arabia' a grim-faced and deflated Lawrence is slumped in the front passenger seat of a British Army Rolls Royce in which he is being driven along the dusty road from Damascus on route for repatriation to the UK; a disillusioned man who has spent the last two years of the First World War fighting in the deserts of the Middle East. His chipper, smiling, cockney driver glances sideways at him and decides his superior officer is in need of a few words of encouragement. He turns towards Lawrence and says in a deliberately encouraging and upbeat tone, "Well, sir! Going home." When Lawrence stares blankly into the distance and says nothing the driver repeats his congratulatory remark: "Home! Sir." Lawrence, who has single-handedly undermined Turkish possession of the Middle East by uniting warring Bedouin tribes and led them on a seemingly impossible journey across the Nefud Desert to capture Aqaba, who has crossed Sinai on a camel to bring the good news to HQ in Cairo, who has been thrashed within an inch of his life by the Turks, who has led the Arab Revolt as far as the taking of Damascus, and who has been made a Colonel by General Allenby in recognition of his service to the British Army, is inconsolable. In Lawrence's mind he has failed. He had wanted to establish a self-governing Arab nation in a liberated land that stretched from the Mediterranean to the Arabian Sea but it had proved impossible for the Arab tribes to cooperate with one another and their disunity had allowed the British and French to effortlessly achieve their political aim of dividing the reconquered territory amongst themselves.

Although Dad's disappointments did not quite match in tragedy the scale of Lawrence's blighted aspirations, I felt that we were quitting Spain in an analogous, if somewhat lesser, state of high dudgeon (low to medium dudgeon, perhaps) with Dad staring out of the passenger window saying nothing while I steered us silently towards the border with France. As we passed along the road from San Sebastian to Irun I simply couldn't resist it. With my arms outstretched in front of me I held the steering wheel firmly in the correct ten-to-two position.

"Well, sir! Going home."

He gave me a bewildered sideways glance.

"Home! Sir," I repeated.

"Sorry?"

"If you had waited until the end of the film, effendi, you would have known what I am talking about."

A little light goading often did the trick. By the time we were in France he was back behind the wheel and very soon we were speeding along the straight road to Bordeaux. We stopped only once on the journey, spending the night in a Les Routiers in the beautiful hilltop town of Angoulême, and on the afternoon of the next day, the last of July, we reached Dieppe and boarded the ferry to Newhaven.

Throughout the crossing I repeatedly forgot that Mum would not be there to welcome us when we got back. I stood on the top deck in the most forward position that the boat would allow, leaning on the rails, looking towards England and fondly imagining our home-coming. I anticipated ringing the doorbell, watching the light come on in the hall and, through the stained-glass panel in the front door, seeing Mum's shimmery shape in her pink dressing gown, as she crossed the parquet flooring with her arms outstretched to lift the latch on the Yale lock and let us in to our nice warm house. I would rush into her open arms and give her the biggest hug of her life. Lampshade would wobble out into the hall wagging his tail and looking pleased, or as pleased as his lugubrious physiognomy would allow.

It wasn't until we arrived at about nine in the evening to find the house in darkness and the front lawn looking like a field of uncut hay that I really understood that she wasn't there. She'd gone back down to Cheshire and taken the dog with her. She gone off to live with her parents just like she had been doing when she was the eighteen year old girl who had run out of the church to help my father when he had been knocked off his bike, only this time she was forty three and there was a sadness about it all that made me want to cry. I didn't because I didn't want to upset Dad.

I turned the key in the lock and leaned my weight against the front door. It opened about eighteen inches but then jammed solid as it slid over the pile of letters that had accumulated over the past six weeks. I squeezed through the gap, retrieved the mail and opened the door wide.

Dad said, "We'll have a look at that lot tomorrow morning after I've rung Mum".

Although Dad always seemed able to draw upon a constant well of self belief which never seemed to run dry even after the most scorching criticism, he had been made to feel uneasy by recent events: the discovery that all was not as it seemed in the realm of fantasy; that there was a side to story tellers that could never be completely trusted; that his new literary hero, his one and only literary hero, was a fraud.

But his lecture from Carlos had not diminished his most cherished conviction, that somehow, if he could get Mum to Galicia, she would start to share his perception of the world and be charmed into accepting him back into her heart. His supposition was undiminished by a night's rest. Early the next morning I heard him get up and go downstairs. I looked at the clock on the bedside table. It was ten past six. I knew he was just waiting for the earliest possible time he could decently phone her. Knowing what he was about to do, I couldn't go back to sleep either. At seven I put on my dressing gown and went downstairs. He was sitting in the front room bay window and staring out at the early morning traffic, although he didn't seem to register anything encompassed by his gaze. Nevertheless, his eyes were moving and he was evidently trying to envisage something. I guessed he was rehearsing his introductory remarks. At the best of times he didn't trust himself to speak spontaneously whenever he was using the phone. I had even seen him write down the opening lines of phone calls and heard him read them out verbatim as soon as he got through, taking no heed whatsoever of what the other person might be trying to respond at the other end of the line. I made us both a cup of tea and we sat there together while he kept glancing at the old wooden framed clock on the mantelpiece.

At five minutes to eight he could bear it no longer. He stood up and shot out his arm to seize the heavy black receiver from its square Bakelite cradle. Unfortunately, in so doing, his foot got tangled with the plaited brown material of the flex and the phone was dashed to the floor. Luckily, no more damage was occasioned other than a crack in the base of the apparatus. However, the incident did not improve his already precarious composure and this shaky start did not auger well. He had started to sweat and the receiver twisted slightly as he held it in his damp, nervous grip.

"Hello. It's me, Con. I want you to come away with me. I love you and we can get back together. We're going to Galicia, I know you've never heard of it but it's just like Wales and..."

I was standing next to Dad and I could hear the tinny little voice of my grandfather at the other end of the line. "Is that you, Con, bach? Listen, I don't want to come away with you but I'll go and fetch Mary although I have to advise you to go a little slower with her."

There was now a wait of a good three or four minutes. With foreboding I realised that grandfather had had to go and wake her up. While he was doing this he had laid the receiver down on the table at the foot of the stairs. The empty wooden hallway amplified the sounds and the telephone picked up the slow tread of his feet as he ascended the stairs. There was a distant knocking on my mother's door and a muffled conversation. Then she must have got out of bed and put on her dressing gown. Soon after that we could discern her hurried pace as she padded downstairs in her slippers. There was a final loud clunk as she retrieved the abandoned handset.

"What's all this about Con and what time do you think this is, calling me at this hour of the morning when you know I work late at the Telephone Exchange? If it's about a place that's so good it's like Wales then don't bother because I can go to Wales and see the real thing any time I like. And if it's rocky promontories you're on about, well, I can go to Penmaenmawr or Llandudno whenever I want.

"You're not the man I met. You've changed. You only wanted me for my language. You're obsessed. I'll tell you what you're like. You're like a bloody great big parrot, you are, learning all the words you can. Nothing else matters. You eat words like parrots eat all the nuts and seeds they can find, cracking them open and shitting out the shells. I was just another seed pod on the way. You know, you give a whole new meaning to that saying about anything with a pulse. Once you had emptied me of my kernel I was nothing to you but a linguistic husk. I was as empty as all you bloody linguists. You're all accent and no content. You can forget it." She slammed down the phone.

Dad was beaten before he started. The whole phone call was over in less than five minutes and I got the distinct impression that he had not advanced his cause a great deal.

He sat forlornly at the foot of our stairs.

Chapter Fifteen

"Come on Dad, let's have a look at the post. Perhaps you've won the Premium Bonds. Maybe Ernie has sent you a little present."

I looked at the mountain of mail. I was awaiting a letter from the school with the results of my A levels but they weren't due for another couple of weeks. At the end of September, in less than two months, I would be off to university, providing I could achieve the required grades. I really wanted to read Spanish and Portuguese Studies at Hampshire University but I needed two As to get in. I know it sounds like going in to the family business but that's what I knew and that's what I was good at. Dad had promised to help me with the move, transport all my stuff and see that I was comfortably installed.

While we were away in Spain I hadn't thought about the timescale but I now experienced a sudden feeling of panic. I couldn't leave Dad the way he was. He wasn't safe on his own. He couldn't shop. He certainly couldn't cook. As yet, in only the second decade after the war, it was still uncommon for wives to walk out of a marriage. The first of the men who came fresh to this new phenomenon of being left unexpectedly on their own found that they were inadequately prepared for self catering. Not only were they innocents in the kitchen but they were condemned to struggle in an age in which every meal still had to be made from scratch. Ready meals for abandoned and incompetent husbands were still the stuff of science fiction. There were only one or two instant products on the grocer's shelf. There was a brand of dried peas called 'Surprise' which was the subject of a famous playground joke: Q: What do you get with Surprise Peas. A: Wet pants. There was also a powdered curry that you shook out of a sachet and which resembled the sweepings off the factory floor: a brown dust speckled with crumbs and funny little cubes of desiccated meat that you rehydrated by heating them up in a measured cupful of boiling water. Of course there was corned beef and tins of Spam, but in the matter of frozen food we were light years behind the Americans. In England, the idea of a bag of frozen fish in parsley sauce that you could reheat to an edible standard by boiling it in a saucepan of water was known to only a few and remained an experimental procedure, and when it came to it, an extremely hazardous activity as you held the scalding hot bag in one hand while you wielded a pair of scissors with the other, trying all the while to cut the corner off the floppy plastic sack and release the lava flow of boiling piscine liquid somewhere in the direction of the plate.

The ten-shilling Bargain Frozen Lasagne was still the mad futuristic dream of a crazed, sleepless visionary. It was an age in which few people had fridges, let alone freezers, and domestic microwave ovens hadn't even been heard of. Fast food was still fish and chips and mushy peas, too regular recourse to which could cause a great deal of flatulence and intestinal distress. Not that Dad ever seemed to mind about that.

The first supermarkets had arrived but they were not much bigger than the old fashioned grocer's shops they replaced. They were often no more than two shop fronts knocked together, the dividing wall replaced with a rolled steel joist. These new supermarkets may not have been huge but the impact they had on the everyday rules of social interaction was enormous. They obviated the need to exercise patience as you didn't have to wait to be served. You didn't have to ask for everything individually and then pause, brandishing your list in expectation, while the shop assistant climbed a step ladder to retrieve items from the high shelves. The shoppers with more legible writing handed their list directly to the assistant who laid it flat on the counter where she would return to consult it with a crane of the neck and a mutter of recognition in between her expeditions to collect the items from the four corners of the store. The whole business of buying groceries was an exercise in forbearance, especially on a Friday afternoon or a busy Saturday morning. Now, with the advent of the supermarket there was no waiting, except at the checkout. The procedure of purchasing was not regulated by the rules of waiting your turn, requesting your goods and standing still while the assistant totted up what you owed. You could be in and out of the supermarket in a fraction of the time it used to take in the corner shop. There was no need to engage in courtesies and civility was reduced to a quick thank you to the girl on the till when she handed you your change.

The new system of self service did not play to Dad's strengths nor did it encourage him to consider the needs of others. Whereas before he was capable of calculating his place in the queue and was forced to bide his time waiting to be served, now he was ungoverned by any system of priority and he would dash around the aisles grabbing what he wanted, stand in front of people obscuring their view and reach across them to remove things from the shelf. Sometimes he would surprise a couple by thrusting an arm in between them, fasten his hand around a tin and withdraw the product so quickly they hardly had time to believe what had happened.

Sometimes I would cringe as I saw him reaching in front of an old lady. Then I would step in and make a show of scolding him: "I'm SO sorry! Dad, look where you're going for goodness sake, have some manners, please!" Thus I would excuse him to the elderly customer, implying that this was an isolated episode of poor vision, whereas in the back of my mind I was fully aware that his obliviousness of other people could not be satisfactorily explained as a one-off event, the result of being temporarily unsighted.

Neither did the early supermarkets do anything to discourage his bad eating habits. They sold a disproportionate amount of biscuits and tinned food. Since Mum left I had noticed that there had been a steady rise in his reliance on bourbon biscuits and baked beans.

Chapter Sixteen

Amongst the pile of correspondence there was a letter from the producer of the radio panel game, Beat the Brains, with details of the next series. In the winter, Dad had begun a second career as a successful radio personality. His newfound fame annoyed Mum intensely as it seemed to reward all the aspects of his character that she disliked the most.

I remembered the day the previous year when he got the invitation to join the show. He bounced into the dining room with the letter in his hand. "You'll never guess what's happened. I've been asked to take part in the wireless programme, 'Beat the Brains'". He slipped into a Warrington accent. "That's what I call proper fun."

This infuriated mum beyond belief. She was 'fed up to the back teeth' with all his silly voices and what she called 'the inane remarks' that went with them. She even invented a word to describe what he did. She blended wittering with shit and used it in sentences such as, "For Christ's sake will you never stop your ceaseless shittering?" The irony was that Dad just smiled; he was impressed with such neologisms and although he eventually realised it was a put-down he still marvelled at her inventive sarcasm.

He was also honoured to be invited to appear on the wireless (Dad always used the word wireless instead of the widespread post-war preference for 'radio'). Beat the Brains was a new programme described in the Radio Digest of the time as, "A nation-wide contest concerning the origins of popular sayings in which members of the public are invited to pose questions to an assembled panel of distinguished word buffs. The listener who succeeds in confounding the experts will receive a signed letter of congratulation from the Director General. The panel consists of the novelist Kelvin Yeargood with his unforgettable catchphrase, 'I just don't know where the listeners get some of these questions!', Sir Hugh Wesley Forbes, the Emeritus Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Cranfield College Oxford, Nancy France, that tireless compiler of the Directory of English Folk Music and, of course, that genius of dialect from 'oop north', Conan Burke. Your travelling question-master is Douglas Ennicott."

Every week the programme was transmitted live and unscripted from a different location somewhere in Great Britain or Northern Ireland. It went out on a Friday evening and therefore did not interfere with the exigencies of academic life. There were no timetable commitments on Fridays which meant that Dad had no lectures to deliver and no seminars to hold before he could get on the road. On transmission days he would get up early and drive to wherever the broadcast was scheduled to take place. The more remote and unusual the venue, the more Dad wanted to arrive as early as possible in order to sample the local speech and brush up on his colloquialisms. Although the majority of the locations were traditional South of England stalwarts such as Potter's Bar, Cheltenham and Bath where the received pronunciation of the audience could be trusted, there was a growing spirit of innovation amongst the younger producers who considered themselves 'in the groove' and wished to include provincial contestants who did not speak Standard English. They argued that this was the remit of the programme; to celebrate the more recondite regional variations of the English language. They were encouraged by indications that there was a growing public enthusiasm for regional voices. After all, was not Fyfe Robertson the Scottish reporter with the broad Scottish accent the people's favourite on the BBC television programme 'Tonight'?

The producers of Beat the Brains horrified the old-fashioned back-room boys whose understanding was that part of the mission of public broadcasting was to uphold the Queen's English. There was also a widespread expectation amongst a less liberal section of listeners that the radio had an obligation to promote and enforce respectable standards of diction. Radio periodicals often carried letters from irate listeners who bemoaned the mispronunciation of "certain announcers, commentators, interviewers and actors". Outraged Letters to the Editor would enclose a list of faulty articulations that the keen-eared, scandalised listener had detected: "despicable, minnature, mann-uff-facture, dispute, recess, kilometre, reputable, spoilation, medeeval, hygeenic, malodorous, abzurd, and drawring". Civilisation was not yet on the back foot but clearly there were a lot of people who believed that this failure to enunciate correctly was allied with a general cheapening of social behaviour, something which clearly needed to be nipped in the bud. This was not something for which they had fought the war. A new fight was on. Recently, Beat the Brains had come from town halls in Enniskillen, Falkirk and Builth Wells and there had been some horrific malapropisms, some almost impenetrable accents and linguistic abominations that had brought forth howls of execration that could be heard all the way from Godalming to Broadcasting House.

So it was that the broadcasts attracted an ever-growing audience. The programme quickly became a mainstay of Friday night radio entertainment. It was equally popular amongst those who were interested in the rise of democracy and wished to hear the unpolished and unrefined voice of the common people and those reactionaries who sat red-faced and fulminating in front of the receiver, fuelling themselves with indignation, their Parker pens unsheathed, ready and waiting to do their bit in order to repulse this new threat to world order.

Dad had got his chance to appear on the show when the panel had become one short after the sudden and unexplained withdrawal of Sir Wilmington Beverill who had mysteriously gone missing at the same time as an Ealing Studios starlet. Rather surprisingly to Dad, he was treated to his opportunity for fame by none other than Larry Strange who knew the producer of Beat the Brains and had telephoned him suggesting Dad as a replacement panellist. Of course, it went without saying that this was not an act of undiluted goodwill; Larry was secretly hoping that Dad would make a jackass of himself on the radio.

At the time Larry was furious with Dad over a mishap that had taken place in the car park of the Languages Faculty. Larry owned a vintage French automobile, a 1920s Delage GS. He insisted that it was the sort of thing in which the Police Marocaine used to screech to a halt outside Rick's Bar in 'Casablanca'. (They would always arrive too late.) I remember telling Dad that the nearest Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman ever got to Morocco during the making of Casablanca was the film set at Flagstaff Arizona and that the cars were not exotic French limousines but American Buicks and Lincolns made up to look the part. Afterwards, I regretted being so prompt with this disparagement as Dad only used the information as a taunt with which to further torment poor Larry. Nevertheless, the car was worth a fortune. Every day Larry would arrive at the Languages Faculty car park and leave his prized possession, near, but not too near, the entrance to the building. He left it there so that it was the first thing everyone would see as they approached the front door, but he didn't do this entirely for the purposes of display. He judged it to be the safest spot in the car park, a place where he might avoid the risk of anybody inadvertently administering a passing scratch as they drove in and out of work, especially those idiots from Spanish. Larry's Delage was a brightly polished, perfectly restored and highly-strung creature. By modern standards it was a huge vehicle and at home Larry had built an outsize garage in which he could give it the love and attention on the scale that it deserved. It needed to be treated with care and respect. During the day it came out only when the weather was fine and at night it required careful protection from whatever were the deleterious effects of the season, be they the frosts of February, the fogs of March or the perpetual August rain. If the car was ever unfortunate enough to be caught in a shower it always received a rub down with a soft chamois leather followed by a full wax polish. In the winter, if there was any danger of snow or ice the machine would remain safely under lock and key, enveloped in the protective carapace of Larry's purpose built garage.

So the November day that Dad quite unintentionally boxed it in at the far end of the Languages car park and then caught the train to Birmingham airport to attend a week-long conference in Madrid Larry was desperate with panic. At first he didn't realise the extent of the problem. At four o'clock that afternoon he finished for the day and made his way to the car park only to discover that Dad had parked so close that the Delage would gouge out its side if it attempted to get past the Ford. Larry stormed into the building and burst into Joan's office demanding to know exactly when Dad would be through with whatever balderdash he was currently bamboozling the poor unfortunate students. When he heard that Dad had gone away and would not be back for a week and that nobody had a spare key to the Ford he became quite incoherent with rage. The prospect of leaving his pride and joy outside the Spanish Department exposed to the elements for seven days and seven nights was unthinkable. The weather that afternoon happened to be sunny and dry but Larry checked the forecast regularly and he knew that during the coming week a particularly deep depression would herald the start of a series of autumn storms.

When the full horror of what had happened had sunk in and Larry had recognised his impotence to rescue his beloved machine from the coming onslaught of the British weather he stood in the car park and jumped up and down, clenching his fists and going progressively more purple in the face, much to the amusement of the entire first year of undergraduates who at that moment were all disgorging from a late lecture on the dull politics of nineteenth-century Spain and were delighted to be treated to a spot of light relief. All forty of them spontaneously broke into a chorus of "Hats off to Larry". For his part, Larry, completely unhinged by his misery, forgot entirely to employ his routine Gallic accent and told them all to bugger off in a voice that Dad would probably have described as an outer London twang.

There was of course nothing that he could do. He wanted to cause some damage to Dad's car but he knew that to immobilise it further by letting down the tyres or filling the fuel tank with sugar would only cause extra delay. In the end Larry was reduced to making an impotent complaint to the Dean. The next morning he cancelled his classes and went to the army surplus store where he bought an old tank tarpaulin which he spent the rest of the day carefully tailoring to the shape of the car and securing it with ropes and chains that he fastened with padlocks that he bought for a small fortune in Timothy White's and Taylor's.

However, it wasn't this specific incident that caused Larry to detest Dad in the way that he did. His problem was that Larry was the one person that Dad could see right through and would regularly and mercilessly unmask him. Dad didn't buy into the story circulated by Monsieur Strange that his name rhymed with blancmange and that his father came from the south of France. Every time Dad chanced upon Larry in the corridor confiding his fake origins to some pretty, pony-tailed undergraduate, telling her that his parents originated in Nice, and even though the family had now lived in this country for many years, he still found that he had difficulty adjusting to the low levels of light, Dad would come up behind him and say the same infuriating thing that he always said. "That's a Nice story Larry. Somebody told me you came from Hemel Hempstead". Dad's repertoire of jokes was very limited and they didn't improve with constant retelling. They certainly irritated the hell out of Larry.

So, when Larry got wind of the vacancy on the panel of Beat the Brains he seized his opportunity for revenge. However, once again Dad got the better of Larry and the joke misfired. It was true that when Dad stepped into the vacancy he immediately demonstrated during his first appearance on the programme his obsessional but guileless enthusiasm for language by embarking upon a five minute long discourse on the origins of the Lincolnshire expressions, "Find your clogs in the dog's business" and "He can't tell a tanner from a rook's thruppence". Although he never intended his intervention to be as amusing as it turned out, the listeners found it hilarious and there were hundreds of letters congratulating the producer on his inspired choice of Conan Burke. After that, the inclusion of Dad on the panel was a sine qua non. He couldn't have been trusted on anything like Any Questions, What Do You Know, or Round Britain Quiz and never in a million years could he have been asked for his opinion on The Critics, but once he was focused on a local aphorism he showed he was as wick as an eel.

Dad sat on the bottom stair examining the letter from the producer of the show.

I hoped that the thought of the new series might take his mind of mum's rejection, but nothing could have been further from the truth. He didn't mention what he was thinking and he said nothing about Mum until a fortnight later, the day the letter arrived containing my A level results.

When the envelope from the school dropped through the letter box I was trembling. When I opened it and saw that I had got the required grades, my first emotion was not a feeling of excitement that I would be starting a new life but, once again, the sick sensation that I would be leaving Dad on his own.

Dad however was pleased for me and said I wasn't to worry about him as he had a fresh plan to sweep mum off her feet and take her on the honeymoon that they had never had. He showed me his letter from the producer of Beat the Brains outlining the details of the fresh series. It listed the typical Home Counties destinations – Hove, Maida Vale, Tunbridge Wells, Winchester and St Albans plus one or two of the safe regional regulars such as Harrogate, Chester and The Isle of Man. But there were also promising newcomers in the form of Paisley, North Shields and Coleford in the Forest of Dean. The first programme was scheduled for August 23rd in the Cornish resort of St Ives.

"Do you know, Mum always used to say that she'd like to visit Cornwall. I wonder, do you remember what I was saying about how she would like Galicia and all its isolated old-fashioned charm? Do you also remember what I said about Corunna and how St Ives was a replica only smaller?"

"How could I forget?"

"Well, I've been looking at the map again. In the same way that Finisterre is directly south west of Corunna, Land's End is directly south west of St Ives, the only difference being one of scale – four to one, the same as before. It's almost as if someone is trying to tell me something. Apart from the geography there are so many other things that the two places have in common as well. You know that Cornwall like used to have its own language just as Galicia does today. It was akin to Welsh and the county itself was once upon a time even known as West Wales."

The idea was that even if Mum wouldn't accompany him to Galicia Dad reckoned they could still simulate in miniature the journey that he and I had made to Finisterre and Corunna: they could drive to Land's End and double back along the North Coast, staying overnight in Sennen before arriving the next day in St Ives.

Chapter Seventeen

After six, when long distance phone calls were cheaper, I rang Mum to tell her the good news about my results. She was very pleased and was full of advice about moving away from home. I think she felt a little guilty that she wasn't there to minister to me in person as she became quite garrulous with her guidance. I listened politely to her stream of suggestions while Dad hovered in the background. The longer we spoke the more agitated he became. After ten minutes he started moving from one foot to the other and even though I was trying to ignore him by looking out of the window I could feel the insistence of his gaze. I turned to meet his eyes. He made the phone gesture with his hand and mouthed at me silently, in a comically exaggerated stage fashion, "Can I have a word after you?"

"Mum, I've got to go now, but Dad would like a word."

I think she must have been sorry for her previous outburst on the phone and she apologised to Dad for being so sarcastic, adding, "although I meant what I said". It was then, without a moment's hesitation and no shadow of a doubt that Dad put forward his alternative plan of visiting Cornwall instead of Spain, outlining the happy coincidence that the proposed trip and his next radio broadcast might happen in tandem."It's almost as if it was meant to be," he said. He felt no misgivings that Mum might feel slighted by being paired in importance with what she constantly referred to as "that loathsome drivel". Indeed, he made his suggestion as if the opposite were true: he was proud that the trip to Cornwall would serve a dual purpose. It was a fortuitous piece of economy. It seemed to have entirely vanished from his brain that Mum detested anything to do with the radio show and the comic reputation of the absent minded professor that he had unwittingly created.

Nevertheless, he got his way. He'd caught her on the hop. She didn't have the heart to say no when she had just confessed her regret about telling him off the last time they had spoken. Whenever the show was mentioned Mum had mixed feelings. She often berated Dad for his verbal diarrhoea but whenever she heard people laughing at his remarks on the radio, she felt that they were laughing at him rather than with him and she found herself experiencing a sort of vestigial loyalty to the person she had married. She may have found him trying but she did not like to see him mocked and it might well have been that this residual sympathy made her susceptible to his entreaty to join him in this reconciliatory trip to the West of England. Their month-long separation had no doubt also dulled her memory of all his irritating idiosyncrasies. She assented.

During their time apart Mary had gone back to stay with her parents on the Wirral and it was from there that Con went to pick her up in the Ford Prefect, on that Thursday morning just before the start of the late August bank holiday weekend.

Idris blamed Con entirely for the breakdown of the marriage and when he came to the door she insisted that he could not come into the house. She would have preferred him to return to wait in the car but despite her better judgement she allowed him to loiter on the doorstep. She fixed him with a stare and stood stock still, confronting him with her arms folded. Con made an effort to keep his mouth shut.

"I know she's going with you but I don't approve. I don't think you are right in the head. I've thought that from the first day I met you when you said you'd cycled all the way to Amlwch Bay without getting a single puncture." Raising her volume without turning her head, she addressed Mervyn who had failed to emerge from the house. "I said to Mervyn, that I thought you were strange, didn't I Mervyn?" Mervyn was sitting at the breakfast table, trying to stay out of the way, crouching behind an economy size packet of Rice Krispies and not getting involved. Although Idris's question had been largely rhetorical he thought some sort of distant verbal acknowledgement that Con was on the doorstop was appropriate. He called weakly from the kitchen, even though he did realise that by not coming forward he was not only admitting that he was a hypocrite but also a fully-fledged coward. His little voice echoed down the passage. "I'm sorry, Idris, I missed what you said. Hello, Con, I can't come out, I'm in my pyjamas and I can't find my dressing gown."

Idris continued to stare unflinchingly at Con. She would deal with Mervyn later.

"I want her back here safe and sound by Sunday. And if anything happens to her while you're away I shall be holding you personally responsible. I always knew this would happen."

That was too much for Con. "Why didn't you say something at the time then, Idris? Or is just that you've only got a degree in hindsight? And as for not being right in the head, I'm sure you'd know all about that."

Mum came downstairs. "For Christ's sake, stop it the pair of you. Goodbye mum, we're going. Just get in the car, Con."

To prepare himself psychologically for his mission to court his disaffected spouse Dad had decided to mug up on what makes women tick. While he was packing for the trip he told me about it.

"What better way to brush up on romance, Jennifer, than to read a famous romantic novel."

He contemplated various works before he settled upon Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier, a true epic of suppressed hysteria, packed to the pants with strongly drawn sensual images of brooding; the tale of how the emotionally stunted Max de Winter, lord of a Cornish manor, is lured into a pitiless marriage by a gold-digging vamp whom he finally murders after years of enduring her sadistic provocations; a man who then compounds his matrimonial mistakes by marrying an orphaned adolescent girl from the lower classes. So out of place is this nameless mouse of a girl that she lives a nightmare of inferiority, disdained by the domestic staff, and held in little regard by the County set with whom she is forced to mix. It is a powerful time capsule of interwar social prejudice with more than a hint of Jane Eyre.

"Do you know, Jennifer, just as an aside, that the Alfred Hitchcock film of Rebecca sparked a new wave of interest in the cardigan throughout Spain? Before the film's release in 1942 the Spanish had no special name for this garment; it was just called a knitted jacket. After the film it became known as a Rebeca, which is ironic because Joan Fontaine who sported the cardigan in the film and made it popular didn't actually play the part of Rebecca. Her character was the nameless second wife of Max de Winter."

"So, Dad, let's get this straight. The woman with an inferiority complex who spent much of her marriage being upstaged by her dead predecessor had to suffer the further indignity of seeing her dead rival's name used as a metonym for a jumper. Well, this poor woman really was the square root of nothing. Just think, a whole foreign nation joined in the fiction and reinforced the superior social status of Rebecca, ignoring the new wife as if she wasn't there. They could have at least called the garment a Fontaine, I suppose, or simply a cardigan after the woolly invented by the English Earl who led the charge of the Light Brigade. Gosh Dad, you couldn't make it up, could you?"

"I sometimes think you don't take me seriously, my girl."

"No Dad. The problem is that I do take you seriously."

Chapter Eighteen

The following events I have put together from what I understand of what happened during that harebrained weekend. Over the years I have heard more and more snippets so that now I am able to reassemble the incidents of those three days into what I believe is a fair approximation of the truth. If I should sound too blasé or too knowing of my parents' rather timid sexual behaviour it is simply that I am now many years removed from these events and I have long ago lost the embarrassment that goes with the contemplation of what they might or might not have got up to. I can't be absolutely sure of all the details and I have to admit that in some instances I have surmised what probably occurred. With the proviso that not everything written here is necessarily au pied de la lettre, I continue.

Despite Dad's preparations, the drive did not go as well as he had hoped. The journey from north-west Cheshire to the tip of Cornwall, even under the most propitious of road conditions, could rarely be achieved in less than eleven hours. Yes, there was the odd by-pass and on some legs of the journey there were even lengths of dual carriageway. There were also stretches where the single carriageway was supplemented with an extra overtaking lane in the middle, sections of road that have long since been abolished as they were notorious for producing horrendous head-on collisions when cars travelling in opposite directions simultaneously decided to overtake.

But, speed as you might between cities, there was no avoiding one town centre after another. Birmingham was a nightmare. Bristol was little better. Sitting in a car in a traffic jam in the centre of an unfamiliar conurbation in the middle of a long day's journey was not the ideal precursor to a romantic reunion. All this and Dad's driving too.

After five hours of slow progress they became stuck at a set of traffic lights situated at a notorious bottleneck on the Gloucester Road in Bristol. For twenty minutes they inched forwards every thirty seconds as the lights turned briefly from red to green. Dad broke an awkward silence in his typical way.

"Do you know, Mary, that the book was written in 1937 and I fail to see how it was that Max de Winter could make these runs up to London and back in the course of a single day. After breakfast he'd zip off in his sports car and be back in Cornwall in time for tea. I don't understand it. The roads simply weren't that good in those days."

Mum said that she thought he had possibly missed the point of the book.

Secretly, she blamed herself for Dad's vain search for romantic inspiration in the corpus of the aristocratic Daphne. In February of last year, in one of Mum's last-ditch attempts to make him understand how she wished to be swept off her feet, she had set up their big heavy Grundig reel-to-reel tape recorder next to the radio gramophone in the sitting room and every afternoon for three weeks she had listened to Women's Hour on the Light Programme in order to make a compilation of all the episodes of the dramatisation of Frenchman's Creek. Once she had the whole serial on tape she sat him down to listen to her home-made talking book. Dad dutifully listened but only remarked that he found it incredible that a large foreign sailing ship could be so effectively concealed just off a major Cornish waterway, especially in the winter when the leaves were off the trees.

When they finally got through Bristol, the weather on the way down to the West Country was sunny. Indeed, there wasn't a cloud in the sky until they reached Bodmin where Mum was the first to notice a sinister dark line which had appeared on the distant horizon. As they ventured further west the line slowly advanced to cover half the sky and just as they drew into Marazanvose there began a gentle Cornish drizzle which obliged Dad to resort to the feeble assistance of the worthless windscreen wipers. In Hayle they stopped for fish and chips which they ate in the car.

By the time they got to Land's End the rain was coming down in sheets and they got soaked making a dash from the car park to the signpost which says New York 3147 and John O'Groats 874. The cloudburst was such that when they looked out to sea the lighthouse was totally obscured behind thick curtains of water. They ran back to the car and decided to drive the few miles up the coast to the Bed and Breakfast that Dad had booked in Carn Towan, a village high on the hill overlooking Sennen Cove. The journey was made more difficult by the fact that every few seconds Dad would have to take one hand off the steering wheel to use his handkerchief to make an anti-clockwise sweep of the windscreen which had now become utterly opaque with the mist generated by the steam which rose from their wet clothes. Through this little circle of limited visibility they eventually spotted Sunny Corner Lane.

The landlady, Mrs Sybil Tredinnick, showed them to their attic room where she raised her voice to overcome the noise of the storm as it lashed against the dormer windows. "After you've settled in, you'd be very welcome if you'd like to come downstairs to the lounge and watch Eric Sykes and Hattie Jacques on the television. I'm afraid you've already missed The White Heather Club." Glancing out of the window, she added, "Sometimes you can see the Scillies from up here but I don't think there's much prospect of that this evening. It looks like it's set in for the night. Pity really, you only stopping for the one night. It must be a bit of a disappointment. It's twin beds. It's twin beds you said you wanted wasn't it?"

This was far from the truth. Dad had made a specific request over the phone for a double, even though Mum had only agreed to accompany him on the condition that they would be sleeping in separate beds. He therefore felt outmanoeuvred and didn't know what to say. He felt unable to take the landlady to task and obey his instinct to loudly reprimand her for her cloth ears. Neither could he check whether or not she was lying by pointedly asking for another room that had a double bed. So he limited himself to saying what he knew to be unmistakably true: that he was tired and just wanted to get to bed. He hadn't realised how ambitious an undertaking the day had been and he was so worn out that he couldn't even remember his head hitting the pillow.

It had been his intention to ask Mary for a cuddle. This wasn't exactly a euphemism for sex but it always signified the possibility of conjugal fulfilment; it indicated a predisposition towards sexual activity without committing either party to anything definite.

Even so, she wouldn't have heard his invitation. With her earplugs vaselined into place and the rain pattering on the window panes she would have been oblivious even to his snoring.

That night he dreamt he was staying in a five star hotel attending an advanced motoring course in the company of all his colleagues from the university. In an interlude between sessions on 'The Twelve Least Salubrious Places in which to Buy the Highway Code' and 'Why Circus Clowns Should Not Be Allowed to Drive,' he found himself downstairs in a single basement room sitting on the bed of the young departmental secretary who reclined beside him wearing nothing more than a white pearl necklace and a sympathetic smile. She was chubbier in the flesh than he would have imagined when he saw her behind the typewriter in the office. When he told her of the futility of his marriage she had playfully leant across and stroked his penis through his trousers, but she had smilingly rejected the idea of letting him have sex. He confessed to her that, unbeknown to his wife, he had sold the marital home and used the proceeds of the sale to purchase a one bedroom flat above a fish and chip shop close to the harbour in Whitby. The secretary gave him a typed transcript of the dream and kept a carbon copy for the records.

The following morning Con woke uncharacteristically late. He lay face down on the mattress and made his characteristic one-arm sweep beneath the bed to find his glasses although, even with them on, his eyes were still bleary and unseeing. He croaked out, "What's the time, Mary?" but there was no reply. Mary's blankets were thrown back and her bed was empty. Breakfast was between 7.30 and 9.00 and the fact that he could hear the signature tune of Housewives Choice coming from downstairs made him realise that he was too late to get anything to eat. He dressed hurriedly and arrived in the dining room unshaven and with his jumper inside out.

Mary was sat at the table in the window. "I'm afraid all the split kippers have gone and they've run out of boiled eggs but there's still some toast left on the next table. There was a lovely couple sat there from near Aberystwyth, come down for their daughter's wedding in St Ives. Do you remember when we stayed that time in Aberaeron and you had lava bread for the first time? You went as green as the sea, you did."

When he wondered whether or not he might have a fresh pot of tea Mary informed him that the landlady had just popped out to the Post Office in St Just and wouldn't be back for at least half an hour. He sat down and poured out the warm brown dregs from the stale brew, clogging the strainer with the swollen leaves and only half filling his cup. He leant over to the other table and from the stainless steel rack he took the last, blackened, slice of toast, anointing it with a smear from the contents of a large uneaten pot of quince jelly.

"I tried to wake you up but you just turned over and said 'brrm brrm Kathy'. I don't know who she was. So I just thought you wanted to sleep. I left you alone as you seemed so tired last night."

Con felt uncomfortable with this reminder of his nocturnal frustrations and was hungry with the lack of anything much to eat.

"Never mind, Con. I've paid the landlady and we can find a pasty or something in St Just."

Back upstairs, Con tried to run a bath but the immersion heater had only recently given up its contents for the couple from Aberystwyth and he sat with his bottom in three inches of lukewarm water, rubbing hard in his armpits in an attempt to stop shivering.

It was gone ten thirty before they got going and the landlady still wasn't back. On the way out Mary steered him away from the visitors' book. "Just get the cases into the boot, Con. I'll write something nice about the place."

The car smelt of stale fish and chips. In St Just they stopped in the village square to buy Con a snack. The cake shop was open and Con asked for one of their Cornish pasties which were being sold cold as the heated glass cabinet had blown a fuse the previous day. He was feeling aggrieved.

"How much?"

"Three and six."

"Three and six! In Yorkshire I could buy three meat and gravy pies for that. And it's stone cold. I wouldn't have to have a second breakfast if the woman in the B and B hadn't been so damn mingy with her meals. Some of these guesthouses are nothing short of daylight robbery. And who the hell serves quince jelly for breakfast?"

Mary stood behind him and kicked him gently in the back of the leg. When he turned round she motioned towards the shop window where there was a large stack of glass jars and a hand-written sign saying 'Special offer, local quince jelly, made on the premises'. Con looked back at the frosty face of the girl behind the counter and automatically averted his eyes to look over her left shoulder where his distant gaze was interrupted by the incensed stare of Mrs Tredinnick who was standing in the back room of the bakery, surrounded by as many as two dozen angry faces, including that of a tall, striking woman who wore a pair of orange spectacles. Con's only thought was that the colour of the glasses jarred with her red hair. He looked disconcertedly at Mary who pointed to a notice on the counter, 'Small hoteliers and guest house owners meeting in the back room'.

Con wasn't a man to back down when he sensed he was in the right. He said loudly, "You can keep it. I'd rather starve."

Back in the car Con discovered a quarter of liquorice allsorts that he had placed in the glove compartment for use in emergencies such as this. He ate one after another until the bag was empty. Apart from the rustle of the bag as Con dug for sweets and the intermittent sound of his chewing as he opened his mouth to pop in yet another nugget of hardened coconut paste bonded with layers of sickly sweet liquorice gum, there was silence until Zennor, when Mary quietly said, "Thank you for making such an effort to make things better between us. I rather wanted to stop for a muddy walk and hold hands along the path to the cliff top at Zennor Head but we've passed the turning now so don't bother".

Con took this remark literally and pushed on towards St Ives, last night's dream stubbornly repeating inside his head.

Chapter Nineteen

At St Ives he drove through the town and parked near the station overlooking Porthminster Beach, Mary remarking that the serried rows of beach tents made it look like a Bedouin encampment, something out of Lawrence of Arabia. "What do you think, Con?"

"I'll tell you what I think. I've never seen so many cafes and they all have cafe spelt with an acute accent over the e. We don't have accents in English but if we did, and given the way the word is pronounced in this country, the accent should be placed over the a. On the other hand if it is pronounced caff there should be no accent at all."

They chose the Beach Café. Con was beginning to get distinctly edgy. Not only had there been an inauspicious and unsatisfactory start to the day which had left him hungry in the first instance and full of sugar in the second, but now his transmission day routine had been thrown further out of kilter by Mary's refusal to go into any of the local pubs for a spot of lunch. Normally on a Beat the Brains day his habit was to arrive in a town about one o' clock and enter a likely public bar where he would commence his much practised ritual of being an innocent visitor who wanted to know a thing or two about the local jargon.

Instead, they now sat in the Harbour Restaurant and had macaroni cheese with chips. Mary drank Bovril and Con sipped tea. Out of the window they could see that, despite the uncertainty of the weather, many of the deckchairs were taken and there was a small queue of people who were willing to run the risk of a further shower and hire a rowing boat for a splash around the harbour.

Con looked at his watch. "Come on, it's three o'clock. Let's get back to the car and find the hotel."

The Atlantis Hotel was not quite what Con had envisaged when he had spoken to the proprietress on the phone. Mrs Flowers had told him rather grandly that the hotel was in its own grounds and gazed out over the romantic Celtic Sea. When they arrived Con thought there must have been some mistake for the Atlantis was a modern semi-detached house, albeit much enlarged by extensions this way and that. On one side it adjoined the Shangri-La Guest House and on the other it was only separated from the Bali Hai bed and breakfast by a do-it-yourself concrete garage.

The front door was opened by the same tall and striking woman with the shock of red hair and orange-framed spectacles who had been standing next to Mrs Tredinnick during the incident in the bakery in St Just.

"Good afternoon. You must be Mr and Mrs Burke. Oh, it's you. Would you still like the room or would it be better if I kept it?"

Very quickly, Mary said, "I'm sorry about earlier. My husband hasn't been sleeping well recently. I'm afraid he's a little tired and overwrought. Please forgive him. It won't happen again and yes we would still like the room if it's at all possible."

Mrs Flowers ushered them into a small vestibule which she described as the Residents' Lounge. This bijou antechamber was crowded with a tank of tropical fish, an art nouveau hat stand and a false fireplace with an electric heater standing in the imitation grate. Beneath the heater's two elements there was a translucent orange and black plastic moulding that was supposed to suggest the flames of a coal fire when the internal light bulb was switched on and its rays flickered through the blades of a small fan. Spaced equidistantly along the mantelpiece were a number of china animal figures. There were a couple of owls, a black cat and a string of frogs of all shapes and size.

The room was so crowded that Con felt his muscles contract with discomfort. There was very little standing room and Mrs Flowers was uncomfortably close. There was just enough space left in the room for two small items of furniture, both of which would have looked more at home in a cheap conservatory: a single upright cane armchair which was placed at right angles to an ill-matching two-seater wickerwork settee.

She invited them to sit down. "Please take a seat for a moment while I take your details, Mr and Mrs Burke."

Normally Con would have automatically sat at the far end of the settee, placing Mary between the landlady and himself, but there was insufficient floor space to complete this manoeuvre and he was forced to overcome the panic that threatened to engulf him and occupy the seat on the sofa at ninety degrees from the landlady's knees. Overcompensating for his nervousness, he plonked himself down heavily on the interwoven canes, producing not only the customary creaking that accompanies such a descent, but also a more sinister crack, a report which produced a similarly splintery glance in his direction, the only acknowledgement of his presence that Mrs Flowers was to make throughout the entire interview.

In order to prevent the horror of his thigh touching the landlady's knees Con tensed the muscles in his leg, holding his whole body in a pose of temporary spasticity. He never worked out if the kind of ache that he experienced when he was in close quarters with most other human beings was due to the anticipation and fear of contact or whether the physical discomfort was simply due to the muscular convulsions that were necessary to avoid any accidental intimacy.

He was made doubly uncomfortable by being studiously ignored. Although he was almost physically touching the woman and could smell the Fisherman's Friends on her breath when she spoke, the landlady looked unflinchingly past him and addressed all her remarks to Mary.

Con was relieved when Mrs Flowers finally let them see their room after a quick tour of the downstairs and a nod towards another diminutive cell that she referred to as the breakfast bar. "Yes," she said, "I don't think you'll have any quarrel with the food you get here."

She showed them into a room with a double bed, a feature that wasn't lost on Mary. However, after the recent debacle she made no comment as she didn't wish to appear difficult in the eyes of the landlady. The window overlooked the sea. Mrs Flowers seemed to have forgotten the recent ill-feeling. "There you are. The best room in the house with a lovely view over the Atlantic Ocean. Oh, I adore the sea. That's why we moved here."

She left a few seconds for them to wonder at the view before she added, "You do get a wonderful vista from here. Just think that somewhere out there in the sea before us lies the lost land of Lyonesse, submerged between Land's End and the Isles of Scilly. Far beyond there of course is the most famous of all drowned civilisations, the island of Atlantis, from which of course we take our name."

Con, who hadn't spoken until now, replied, "Not in this direction, surely? I would venture that the hotel is facing north by north east. I rather think that if you were to follow a direct line perpendicular to the facade of this building you would be more likely to find yourself somewhere between the caravan sites of Tenby and the new oil refineries of Milford Haven."

Mrs Flowers ignored his remark and addressed Mrs Burke: "Are you staying in Cornwall for long, may I ask?"

Mary, who didn't like to mention Beat the Brains said, "No, we are just visiting an old aunt who lives near here."

It was getting late by the time that Mrs Flowers finally left them alone. Con was expected at the venue by five for a run through and a short rehearsal before they let the audience in at seven. Mary didn't want to stay in the room on her own for fear of the reappearance of Mrs Flowers and she volunteered to walk over to the church hall with Con, although she had no intention of witnessing any of the proceedings.

The Atlantis Hotel was on Beach Road at the neck of the St Ives peninsula where it abuts the mainland. The church hall was in a corresponding position on the other side of the headland. Between the two there is a ridge which runs the full length of the peninsula, a feature which contributes greatly to the picturesque charm of the old fishing village. So it is that to reach the hall from Beach Road by the most direct route you have to tackle this elevated spine. You make the steep climb up Porthmeor Hill before descending Windsor Hill as it is known on the other side. You can also make the ascent through the vast Barnoon Cemetery where the tombs not only enjoy a beautiful view over Porthmeor Beach but also where the dead serve the very social service of prohibiting any new building development and thus preserve the view for the benefit of the living. It was this route through the long lines of graves that was taken by Con and Mary. At the summit they gratefully sat down to rest from their exertions on a bench which had been thoughtfully placed there for this very purpose. They said nothing and for a few minutes they shared with the ranks of the deceased their eternal contemplation of the town, the headland and the beautiful Celtic Sea. After a while Con and Mary exerted the privilege of the living and regained their breath. It was Mary who spoke first, as she surreptitiously drew from her handbag a small, neatly wrapped parcel.

"I've got something for you."

Con looked at her in complete surprise. She handed him the package and watched him open it and take out its contents. "I know you like to make notes during that programme of yours and so I bought you something which looks nice to write with."

It was a Parker pen with a packet of Quink cartridges, a fountain pen with a revolutionary refill system of comparatively recent invention. The great advantage of the cartridge pen over its conventional predecessor was that, in order to replenish it with ink, you no longer had to fiddle with a screw-top bottle and risk spilling the indelible black liquid all down your tie.

Con hadn't expected a present and he turned it over in his hands for a few seconds before he found his voice. "Oh, I usually like to use a good biro these days. Still I'll take it. Probably find a use for it somewhere in the office." After a couple of seconds he remembered his manners and said, "Well, thanks all the same."

Mary didn't reply and they continued on their way downhill. When they reached the church hall Mary could discern some figures peering out of the porch although the building was too dark to make out their faces. She announced briskly to Con that she thought this was the parting of their ways and that she was going for an evening stroll. She walked off resolutely in the direction of the Pedn Olva Hotel, the railway station and Porthminster beach.

Chapter Twenty

Inside the church hall, preparations were almost complete for the broadcast. Con was the last of the four panellists to arrive. Sir Hugh Wesley Forbes had been driven down in the Daimler from his stately home just outside Bath and Kelvin Yeargood was in the area already, researching the latest novel in his Bodmin Moor crime series, a book which he had a mind to call 'It's Not Far To The Beach, Sergeant Breward'.

During the summer Nancy France had resigned from Beat the Brains in order to go to New Zealand to work on a series called 'A Commonwealth Childhood' and a fresh woman had taken her seat on the stage. The new panellist was Cicely Rodding, a professor of psychological medicine at St Claire's on the Strand. She had travelled first class from Paddington. Dr Rodding had a special interest in the gray area between modern medicine and ancient lore. As the latter is rich in admonitions, commandments and solemn warnings she was felt to be a logical choice for a programme that dealt with age-old popular sayings.

The programme was entirely live but it never went out without careful instructions to the audience from the producer. This was followed by one or two questions from the floor before the programme went on air. Most people kept their hands down during this dry run, saving themselves for stardom when the live transmission began.

During the short break between this rehearsal and the live broadcast Dad turned quietly to Cicely and came straight out with his obsession about the astonishing similarities that there were between Corunna and St Ives. Surprisingly, she seemed to know quite a lot about the subject.

"Conan, igneous intrusions are commonplace features of the Atlantic coast of Europe. They are upwellings of magma from the Earth's core that shoot up through softer sedimentary deposits and spew out on to the surface where they solidify as hard granite. They don't emerge completely evenly, displacing all the shales and muds in a perfectly round dome. When a coastline occurs next to the intrusion, the tide and the prevailing weather systems slowly erode the softer, surrounding rocks, leaving granite islands or headlands with embayments on either side. Such is the case with both St Ives and Corunna. The geology of Galicia is much larger and much more complex than that of the Penwith peninsula, but there are striking similarities between the two regions of the Earth's crust. There's nothing magical about it, you know.

"If you look more closely at Galicia you'll find many more examples of this kind of headland. Mugía and Bayona are very similar, not to mention Lage, Cayón and San Ciprián. My younger brother, Guy, is a geologist who mapped the Galician fjords for his Master's. He used to bore me to death with the features of coastal erosion. Go on, Conan, I know you want to. Ask me something about wave cut platforms or longshore drift. Go on."

Con's reply was lost as the producer raised his voice: "Quiet please, everyone. Ten seconds."

They were off. Douglas Ennicott, your travelling chairman, was excited. This was the third series and the show had become very popular. Douglas was beginning to think that if he could be slightly more of an entertainer himself he might have a future in television. Con was no longer the new boy and Douglas hardly mentioned him in his introduction as he jokingly addressed the listeners at home.

"As you will already know, Nancy France has gone off to the antipodes and in her place for our new series we have a lady trick cyclist (laughter), sorry, psychiatrist, and so I'll shall have to warn our other panellists and members of the audience to keep their thoughts under control if they don't want her to know what they are all thinking (slightly less laughter). As well as feeling your bumps she's also a specialist in things that go bump in the night. Ladies and Gentlemen, please give a big warm Beat the Brains welcome to Doctor Cicely Rodding (applause). The first question please."

Since his conversation with Cicely Rodding, Con had been looking down at the graph paper that had been mistakenly supplied instead of the lined foolscap they were normally given for making notes. He had started to fill in every other square and he seemed determined to complete this pattern until the end of the sheet. The wait for the first question was always a slightly tense moment and the chairman's words jolted him back to reality. For the first time he looked up and scanned the church hall to see whose hand was raised. To his horror, there at the back he spotted Sybil Treddinick and Mrs Flowers sitting together, the latter looking directly at him and whispering excitedly in her friend's ear. What was worse, both ladies had their hands in the air.

Douglas had also seen them and singled out Mrs Flowers. "Yes, the lady at the back with the colourful specs. Please tell us your name and let us know what it is you would like the members of the panel to answer."

"Pamela Flowers. My grandfather was a fisherman. He used to smoke like a dragon and would cuss like a fiend but he always was very protective towards to me. I remember he had a lot of sayings. For example, he'd sit quietly by the fire smoking his pipe for hours on end and then he'd suddenly look up and see me a-playing with my corn dollies and say, 'My dear little Pammy, just remember my love, better off at sea in a broken-masted crabber than ever owl-blasted like Nathan Trewatha.'"

Douglas turned to Con, "Perhaps you'd like to start us off Conan."

"I....er....um....well, I suppose....I'm sorry I don't know. I'll have to pass this one on I'm afraid."

There was a slight but discernible murmur of surprise from the audience before Cicely came to his rescue. "Douglas, I think I know what this lady means. Owl-blasted is a general word for a malady inflicted by a witch's curse. Blasted, of course, means cursed and the word here is placed in close association with the owl which we also know, by tradition, to be a familiar of the witch and therefore potentially an evil creature. Now, whether the owl has actually generated the curse itself or has merely acted as the agent of the witch is a moot point. The prime mover of the hex notwithstanding, the curse when applied to animals, is believed to produce such things as the staggers in a horse, the mumps in a pig or the giddies in a sheep. In persons, the curse would give rise to a gnashing of the teeth, rolling of the eyes and a wrying of the neck, the latter being signs of a gran mal fit. But, let me also say that owl-blasted could just as easily refer to schizophrenia, hypomania or various forms of psychotic depression as these conditions were not as strictly differentiated in olden times as they are of course today with the great advances that have been made in the classification and treatment of mental disorder."

Polite applause followed the psychiatrist's remarks although there were a number of shared looks around the hall that seemed to imply that the good lady doctor did not quite understand the seriousness of the condition. Nevertheless, Douglas was convinced that the matter had been settled and moved on to the next questioner. Sybil Tredinnick was waving her hand.

"Ah, yes, the lady sitting next to the previous questioner. Yes, you madam. Please tell us your name and let us hear your saying."

Mrs Treddinick rose from her seat. "Sybil Tredinnick. When my father was vexed at a lazy workman he would often shout at him, 'Why don't you shave your head and go east!' Can the panel explain?"

Douglas again. "Perhaps this one is more up your street Conan?"

"I'm afraid I don't think so," replied Dad (quiet muttering from the audience).

This time it was Sir Hugh Wesley Forbes who was in quickly with a solution. "The Cornishman being first a pagan, then a convert to Methodism, but always and at all times being an unpretentious and hard working fellow (the old chap knew how to play the crowd), a fisherman, a farmer or a miner down the bal, he might occasionally lose his patience with one of his colleagues who was prone to sermonising rather than pulling his weight, perhaps a foreigner from across the border in England, a temporary worker from Devon maybe (applause), and as a manifestation of his annoyance with this wastrel he might very well remark upon his holier-than-thou attitude and bid him be gone from his sight. If he was a fisherman he would stand there on the foreshore, next to his plucky and well kept ketch, draw himself up to his full sea-faring height, look the other fellow in the eye and order him to 'shave his head and go east'. In other words, 'go on a long pilgrimage to the Holy Land, the longer the better. Indulge yourself in an orgy of self denial but don't trouble me with your high falutin' sentiments. We down 'ere in Cornwall have work to do, don't you know'" (rapturous applause).

At the end of the programme Con seemed to have shrunk into his chair. After the producer had thanked everyone for coming and the announcer had read the closing credits Douglas came over to see what was up. "I say, are you all right, old chap? Cat got your tongue? You look like you could do with what the yanks call R and R, a spot of rest and relaxation."

Conan walked back to the hotel alone. When he arrived he felt in his pocket for the key which he had been given by Pam Flowers. It dangled from a wooden fob carved in the shape of a toad. He let himself in and for a moment he stood still, feeling safe in the close confines of the residents' lounge. He remained there for a few seconds listening to the sound of female laughter that was emanating from somewhere at the back of the house. When he finally went upstairs and opened the bedroom door he could see that Mary had already retired for the night. This time, in addition to the earplugs, she was also wearing her eye-shield. She was sprawled diagonally across three quarters of the bed and had divided the mattress into his and hers with a long bolster that she had conveniently found at the bottom of the wardrobe. Con was left with barely a quarter of the surface area and he lay there cramped, troubled and turning, his restlessness in a such a small space causing the slippery and unfitted sheets to ruche up and ridge in the middle of his back.

He had abandoned all his romantic ambitions. Even if the bolster had not been there he would still have had to overcome the other substantial obstacles that Mary customarily placed in the way of physical familiarity. She always went to bed in full body armour and was never without a stout bra and a pair of large pants. On top of them she wore a long cotton vest. The pièce de résistance was a set of nylon, all-in-one, button-up pyjamas combined with a pair of knee-high woollen bed socks, the interaction between the various materials generating a permanent field of static which gave off a nasty shock to anybody who was foolish enough to go within the no touch zone. Neither did she ever remove her ladies' watch with the sharp corners, its luminescent green dial contrasting colourfully with the series of blue electric flashes she produced as she turned in her sleep. So it was that there was little chance of any spontaneous intimacy during the hours of bed. Not that Con was ever likely to have been a sensuous and impromptu partner. Such behaviour would have been completely inconsistent with his character.

When he awoke on the Saturday morning he once again found himself alone. This time Mary had left a note on the dressing table saying that she was sorry it had all gone so badly and they must have a talk sometime soon about having a proper break. He puzzled over the ambiguity for several minutes. Did she mean a separation or a holiday? When he went downstairs to see if he could catch her before she went, he found a smiling Mrs Flowers who informed him that just after eight his wife had taken the branch line from St Ives to St Erth to meet the Penzance to Paddington train which stopped there at nine fifteen to pick up holiday makers who were going home at the end of their fortnight's break. He looked at his watch. It said nine-thirty.

Once again, he'd missed breakfast.

Chapter Twenty One

"Frühstück. 2 across. German for breakfast. 9 letters. I'm sorry, it's not my business but I love crosswords and I could see you were stuck. I hope you don't mind." The smaller, more elegant woman, sat up straight, stopped peering sideways at Mary's newspaper and gave her a friendly smile.

Mary was slightly taken aback by this intrusion into her privacy but at the same time she thought that it was nice to be spoken to in such a spontaneous and genial manner. She felt her good judgement was still intact and had not been corrupted by too much exposure to Con's blundering behaviour.

The woman's friendly overture complemented the feeling of warmth and self confidence that Mary had experienced as she stood on the platform of the station at St Erth watching the arrival of the express train to Paddington. A carriage with just two lady occupants had drawn slowly to a halt and stopped directly in front of where she was standing. One of the women, the petite one who spoke to her now, had looked out at the platform, seen her and smiled. The other one had noticed her struggling with her case and opened the carriage door. Mary had smiled at them both in turn, thanked them for their kindness and flopped down in relief. She had been worrying that there wouldn't be anywhere to sit and, even if there had been, she might have had to squash into some smelly, smoking compartment with a lot of sweaty men. Instead, she exchanged some pleasantries about the weather and opened her copy of the Daily Express at the page with the quick crossword.

When the woman offered her impromptu advice Mary immediately felt that it was so nice to be addressed by somebody sane. She almost felt that it had been worth undergoing two days of Con's unrelenting harebrained clumsiness just to experience such a moment of consideration. This was exactly what she needed, a tonic, an antidote to the unpleasantness of the last few days, a gift from God, an angel sent from heaven.

"I suppose you speak German?" she said.

"Well, I'll tell you. My father was an architect and when I was younger he used to work a lot in the States. One time, when he was in upstate New York he met a man called Alfred Mosher Butts who sold him a home-made copy of a game he had invented which he called Lexiko. It was a forerunner of Scrabble. Daddy brought one of these prototypes back home so we could all have a go at playing it. There were four of us at home and we were a handful for mummy although she did have a nanny from Stuttgart called Frieda who was a great help. We played the game and then Frieda suggested we adapt the alphabet and play in German, using German characters and changing the frequency of the letters to match their prevalence in the new language. This we did. I must say that it greatly improved my linguistic skills and helped me to acquire some quite abstruse words which I used to great effect in my school work. As a consequence I did well at university. Unfortunately, because of Adolf Hitler, I couldn't do my term abroad in Germany. I very much wanted to go to Berlin but it was 1938 and I had to settle for Zurich University instead. Still, I learnt a lot in Switzerland and it was terribly exciting. How far are you going?"

"Oh, I'm changing at Bristol for Birmingham. I'm on the way to the Wirral and it's a bit of a round the houses sort of journey. After Birmingham I've got to change again at Lime Street. I should be home before my parents go to bed."

"Are you all right? You look very tired."

Mary had wanted to talk to somebody for a long while, but she had nobody in whom she could confide. The solicitousness of this anonymous person, her confidential tone and the presence of the other woman who had opened the door for her, almost as if she were a quiet but attentive assistant, lent the carriage an air of trust, giving it the atmosphere of a consulting room. The privacy of the situation and the realisation that she would never see either of them again helped her to blurt it out.

"Well, I've been having a bit of a difficult time recently. I've just split up with my husband". There, she'd said it and the person who was most surprised at the news was herself. She had admitted it out loud. Just like in traditional Islam a man can rid himself of a wife by thrice saying 'I divorce you', she had determined a future lifelong change in her marital status by the simple utterance of a few words. She had acknowledged that it was all over. Having made this open declaration, Mary fell silent as she considered the novelty of her new social position. She didn't feel unhappy. Indeed she felt rather excited. The others tactfully said nothing and they proceeded in silence for a few minutes.

Then she added, "He's a very clever man and I suppose I used to love him although I'm not even sure of that any longer. University man. He's on the radio and everything. Oh, I've said too much. I'm sorry. Let's talk about something else. The train robbery. How did they get away with it? So much money. They say it was the greatest amount ever stolen from a train."

Once again, the petite woman intervened to help her. "I wouldn't worry; we're not carrying anything of any value on this train. We're quite safe from robbers. Let's have a go at the crossword. 15 across, 7 letters, what's that? Skill employed in a shrewd or sly manner. Cunning, I'd say."

And so the journey continued in a calm and soothing way and when Mary alighted at Bristol Temple Meads and waved farewell to her two travelling companions she felt that a weight had been lifted from her shoulders and that a decision had been reached. The train ride had proved unexpectedly therapeutic. How glad she was that she'd taken the bold decision to cut short the trip to Cornwall and to go back home on her own terms.

Chapter Twenty Two

When Mary got back to the house in West Kirby Idris was waiting for her with an 'I told you so' look on her face. Mary smiled at her mother, said "Hello Mum," and swept straight into the kitchen to make herself a cup of hot chocolate.

"How did it go then with Polly the Parrot?" sneered Idris.

"Mum, give it a rest. Everything's all right." She had no desire to enter into detail concerning the events of the weekend. "I'll tell you about it in the morning. Night, Mum." Mary took her cocoa and retired to bed. If she hurried she could catch the start of Saturday Night Theatre.

The greatest pleasure in Mum's life was to listen to the radio. She did so every evening. Friday evening's schedule may have been rudely interrupted by 'Beat your Brains Out' as she used to refer to 'Dad's silly programme', but luckily for her, Dad's silly programme wasn't recorded and the rest of the week remained unsullied by repeats. Even Friday nights were not totally ruined. She still had Friday Night is Music Night and Book at Bedtime, not to mention Winifred Atwell at the piano.

We never had television when I was growing up. Mum always dismissed it out of hand as if it was a fad of little consequence that would go away eventually if she ignored it for long enough. Dad didn't seem to mind whether we had one or not and he was happy to go along with Mum's wishes. Whenever I appealed to him to buy a television by pointing out the fact that all my friends had one, he simply said, "Well, why don't you go round to their houses to watch it?" as if I could invite myself in, just like that.

Mum had inherited a distrust of television from Idris, who was so firmly against the thing that she would have died rather than accept it over the threshold of the house. Idris was a nervous believer in the supernatural and she suspected that there was something irreligious and blasphemous about pictures from afar, ever since she had been round to Dewi Jenkins house in 1956 and seen the brown box with knobs on that he had brought back from a weekend visit to Liverpool. When he plugged it into the mains and turned on one of the knobs she had recoiled in horror from the snowy, flickering, grey and white images that he claimed were coming from a transmitter at Winter Hill, a prominence an impossible distance away, situated as it was, just above the town of Bolton in Lancashire. Idris was convinced she had seen a ghost and shouted "Ectoplasm," at the same time making a madcap dash out of the house, across the vegetable patch and into the garden shed, where she hid under an old carpet and refused to come out for two days.

Idris could just about live with the wireless. It was acceptable to hear things from London through the mouth of a box on the sideboard although she took care never to say anything herself whenever she was in its presence. She was forever fearful that if she revealed her vicinity the newsreader would break off from his account of the day's events in Parliament and address her directly and possibly make an impertinent observation regarding the state of her personal hygiene. In this guarded manner she endured the risks of having a radio receiver in the house.

It was a similar logic that led her to place a cover over the skylight in the bathroom. She had read that in moments of idleness the pilots of planes would peer out of their cockpits, searching the towns beneath them for some visual diversion from the ennui of flying. It was common knowledge that they possessed far-seeing devices capable of reading the details of unknown aerodromes at a phenomenal distance and there was no reason on God's Earth why one of these flying men should not employ one of these very same mechanisms in the frivolous pursuit of his own self gratification and focus it on her particular toilet, peering through her window in the hope of relieving his boredom with a glimpse of her suffering the unrelieved torture of constipation. Until the day on which she had come up with the solution of suspending a black cloth beneath the glass pane she would sit straining on the seat with her face pointing upwards to the sky in a grimace of anxiety, on a constant lookout for the giveaway vapour trails that indicated the risk of a high altitude intrusion into her personal space.

So it was that Idris's fear of being seen on the toilet by men in planes was closely allied with her religious horror of television. She used to say that seeing things at a distance was a step too far in Man's impudence. If we could see an otherwise invisible weather man in London how long would it be before we could fashion a contrivance whereby we might gaze upon the face of God? Idris's candid opinion was that such an unforgiveable sin might still be a way off but she was sure that the process begun by John Logie Baird was working towards this end. At the moment the medium was only revealing childish gewgaws and gimcracks and had no more hope than had the Roman Catholic Church of leading us to the true God. As yet it was only capable of showing us craven images of small screen celebrities, in the same way as the Church of Rome paraded its own wriggling pantheon of minor supernatural beings. But the intention was there.

Idris wanted a God that surpassed all understanding, a God "in light inaccessible hid from our eyes". For this reason Idris was always very down on Catholicism and its "false images". For my own part, I never understood what such a strictly Calvinist parent like Idris had been thinking when she named her only daughter after a top Catholic deity?

Unlike her mother, Mary wasn't totally against television. She just inherited a feeling of guilt that made it difficult for her to have one. She used to excuse her lack of a set by saying, "TV takes away your imagination," and she expounded her love of radio, romanticising the presence in the living room of disembodied voices and sounds. There was, she said, something magical about their ethereal presence; switching on the wireless had the feeling of being in attendance at a superior form of séance or eavesdropping on clever people. And you judged people by the sound of their voice and their ability to entertain you with their intellect. You weren't distracted by the superficial values of their appearance. You detected their sincerity or their pomposity by what you heard and you marked them in your head accordingly. You could even become enamoured of them.

Mum used to say that if you were lucky enough you might even hear the voices falling in love with one another and then you could listen in on a real romance. Mum always used to cite the case of Jean Metcalf and Cliff Michelmore, the joint comperes of Two Way Family Favourites, a Sunday lunchtime record request programme broadcast simultaneously by the British Forces Broadcasting Service in Germany and The Light Programme in Britain. It was a very popular way for wives and girlfriends in this country to keep in touch with their husbands and boyfriends serving as soldiers in the British Army on the Rhine. They could request a record and a dedication. At school we used to joke about it. "This record goes out to Dad, Staff Sergeant Nobby Stiles of BFPO 47. Nobby has been away now for sixteen months on the trot. Mum says she hopes he's looking forward to seeing the new baby when he gets home. For you Nobby, she's chosen Dickie Valentine and 'The Finger of Suspicion'". Apparently the programme was a nightmare of synchronisation. There was no simultaneous radio link apart from the banter between the records; the discs had to be played separately at each radio station and there were continuity upsets if they weren't started on the turntables at exactly the same time.

Mum always used to put the programme on while she was serving up her dreadful Sunday lunches. Just like Family Favourites, Mum's uncoordinated lunch used to drag on for an hour and a half. In the inevitable long lapse between the roast and the pudding Mum always used to say the same thing: "Jean Metcalf and Cliff Michelmore couldn't see each other. She was in London playing the records and he was in Hamburg. He just fell in love with her voice and asked her to marry him. Not on the air of course. Nobody knew till they got married". She was quite unaware that this final remark belied her previous assertion that you could listen in on their romance. Ah, the remembrance of things past.

Every Sunday lunchtime it seemed that we used to sit through the same broadcast that we'd heard the week before. And it lasted an age. It bored me to death but I felt I couldn't say anything about its dull, repetitive formula because Mum said it was what the troops wanted. To listen to it was a civilian duty. It would have been unpatriotic to have turned over to the Home Service whilst it was on. It was part of the post war effort, like rationing or digging the allotment. I got the impression also that for some people it was an early form of time travel, taking the country back, week after week, to 1945 when the war wasn't quite over and we could all enjoy it for a little while longer.

So it was that Family Favourites was forever associated with Mum's appalling cookery. Even now, if I hear 'With a Song in My Heart', the programme's theme tune, I can still see a plate of soggy vegetables and a half cooked lump of cartilaginous pork hiding beneath a cold gelatinous slab of thick brown gravy. If I ever wrote my culinary autobiography it would be a thin volume entitled 'Gristle', not 'Toast'.

I used to like 'Billy Cotton's Band Show' which began at 1.30 because that was associated with the end of the meal. When the band struck up and Alan Breeze began to sing, 'I've got a lovely bunch of coconuts' or 'There's an awful lot of coffee in Brazil', it was time to get down from the table if we had finished our bread and butter pudding. There was an extra poignancy if Alan sang 'Yes, we have no bananas' and I showed Mum my bowl now empty of her special pudding of sliced bananas covered in bright yellow custard.

Chapter Twenty Three

So when Dad came back alone from the ill fated trip to St Ives late on Saturday afternoon and announced that he'd been to Radio Rentals on the way back and ordered a TV for Monday, as well as the installation of an aerial that would receive both BBC and ITV programmes, I knew something definitive had occurred.

When I asked him about the weekend he told me that the stay at the B and B in St Ives had been "all right apart from the unholy humidity and continual glimmer generated by the untethered nylon sheets that kept slipping of the plastic bed cover," I drew my own conclusions as to the conjugal success of the weekend.

After the man had been round on Monday afternoon to erect the big H aerial for the BBC and the smaller, fishbone array for ITV, we had a four day marathon of watching everything that came on the screen, Coronation Street, University Challenge, Emergency Ward 10, No Hiding Place, the lot. The novelty was such that we couldn't stop watching it. On two nights Dad went out to get fish and chips which we ate on our laps in front of the box. On the other two nights we had sandwiches,tinned salmon one night, peanut butter the next. Dad liked University Challenge but he couldn't understand the point of Coronation Street. The episode of Television Playhouse that we watched was called 'Collect your Hand Baggage' and starred Kenneth More. It depicted a failed relationship between a middle aged roué and a girl 25 years his junior. Dad said it was in bad taste.

Dad may have returned up north for the week but on the Friday the Brains remained steadfastly down south, this time in Sussex. He said that he didn't mind making the long journey as he intended to go by rail on this occasion. If he caught the milk train he reckoned he could be in London by twelve, have lunch on the Brighton Belle and take a taxi to Hove Town Hall from where the programme would be relayed that evening.

When Dad had left the house that morning at half past four, happily grasping the packet of sandwiches that I'd prepared for his breakfast, he had seemed quite carefree and undaunted by the events of the previous week. At least I didn't have to worry about him that evening. The Corporation had a list of landladies in every town and they always laid on good digs. Neither did I have to concern myself about his driving. My only misgiving was in relation to the Brains. As I watched him leave the house and walk along the road to the corner where he vanished from view, I knew that, of the two of us, I was by far and away the least confident about the forthcoming programme.

After he'd gone I couldn't go back to sleep and I spent a long fitful day frittering away my time, the only productive hour being when I leafed through the first year reading list, caught the bus into town and ordered three of the recommended texts from the academic bookshop.

While I was browsing along the Spanish shelves I came across a brand new publication, El Único Camino, The Only Way, written by the firebrand Basque communist Dolores Ibárruri, known to all the world as La Pasionaria. She had escaped from Spain after the Civil War and continued to pour out Marxist propaganda. I thought the book would make a wonderful present for Dad and I bought it to give him on his birthday in January. If he read this, or even if he just flicked through it, he could impress Carlos the next time he saw him. At the till I bumped into a man I vaguely new and instinctively disliked, the man who had been a bit drunk and loud mouthed in our kitchen that afternoon: the one who had called Rodolfo a wanker.

"Alo Jennie, you remember me, Larry Strange from French. Mon Dieu, what have you got there? That doesn't look like a little light reading for a girl like you." I shook him off, saying it wasn't for me, that it was a present for my father and would he excuse me but I was in a hurry and had a bus to catch. As I left the shop I caught a glimpse of him through the shop window, scowling at my snub. I felt pleased with myself for finding such a suitable present and dealing so dismissively with such a boor. I caught the bus home and began the long wait till the programme began at half past seven.

The trip must have gone to plan for Dad arrived at the Town Hall at about two o' clock and gave me a ring to say he was there.

Chapter Twenty Four

After putting down the receiver and leaving the phone box Con immediately cast around for a pub in which to spend the last hour before they closed for the rest of the afternoon. Not far away on the opposite side of New Church Road he spotted the Dog and Dyke. The pub sign showed a fresh faced young man striding out for a walk with his springer spaniel at a local beauty spot, the Devil's Dyke.

It was a warm day but the public bar was closed. The door seemed stuck to begin with but it opened with a cracking sound when Con put his shoulder against it and gave a firm push. Inside, there wasn't much drinking going on. Instead, a handful of helpers were employing a step ladder to hoist up a banner which read 'Regional Darts Player of the Year', a contest which was due to take place in the public bar starting at seven o'clock.

There was nobody else sitting at the bar but even so, Con had a job catching the attention of the barman who was busy replenishing the optics. It was a full five minutes before he finally acknowledged Con's presence.

"Er, we're not actually open at the moment."

"Then why don't you put a notice outside saying closed?"

"Are you trying to be funny?"

"Not in the slightest. I'd like a half of bitter, please."

As the barman didn't recognise his face he decided to play it safe. After all, this was a big day, and Con looked as if he could be an inspector from the Council. He decided to serve him. After all, how much trouble could half a pint of Tamplins cause?

Con cast around for somebody to engage in conversation regarding contemporary local issues but he found that there was no one else drinking. Two men were absorbed in the tasks of setting out chairs, moving tables and putting up bunting. The only other person there was obviously a serious competitor for the championship, a lean man with slicked-back, brylcreemed hair, who seemed in danger of wearing out the rubber mat, such was his incessant trekking to the dartboard to retrieve his feathered arrows. Con decided to break the ice.

"Don't you get bored with that?"

Con's views on the pointlessness of sport were always very near the surface and he was apt to comment on the matter repeatedly and often. Athletics were a common target for Con. Why the hell should anyone want to single-mindedly waste their entire youth fixated on the monomaniacal desire to prove that they had a set of legs that could carry them one tenth of a second faster than those of another chap the previous year? Darts seemed to fit into a similar category.

"What?"

"I mean all that continuous back and forth to the dartboard. Don't you find it a bit repetitive?"

It turned out that the person practising on the dartboard was no less than the paladin of the Premier Dairies Portslade and District Darts League Division One, Reg Sprake, known to all as Sprinter, a nickname he had acquired not only for the fast delivery of his darts, but also for famously and unfailingly finishing first in the track events held at the velodrome in Preston Park, and no, he did not find it a bit repetitive.

"You've got to practise if you want to be any good. What's your sport then, Squire?"

"Well, I don't have any. I have done a spot of cycling now and then."

"Aha! Something near to my heart," replied Reg. We had the Milk Race through here in June. They stopped in Hove before going on to Bournemouth. Pete Chisman won it. He won all the stages. Did you know he did over 1300 miles at an average of 24 mph. That's some cycling. We all went down the front to see them off in the morning."

Con couldn't think of anything much to say about cycling and decided to make the best of a bad deal and engage in picking up some darts match banter. He learnt 'right church wrong pew', 'throwing a Robin Hood' and that a score of twenty six was known as bed and breakfast and was a potential match loser. This took the time round to ten past three. It seemed odd that the barman hadn't been seen for half an hour and nobody had called last orders, but he left the pub before he was asked and wandered along to the Town Hall for the rehearsal.

Chapter Twenty Five

I'd waited so long that I'd lost track of time and when the moment came for Beat the Brains I switched on the radio a few minutes late and discovered that the programme was already under way. Douglas Ennicott was prefacing his introductions with a few complimentary remarks about the grandeur of the venue, "a magnificently solid red brick building designed in the Victorian style of mock gothic by Alfred Waterhouse, the celebrated architect of both Manchester Town Hall and the Natural History Museum."

I remembered Brighton and Hove from one of Dad's linguistic jaunts which he always misrepresented to us as family holidays. I didn't like the stony beach which hurt your bare feet. I preferred the deserted sands of Northumberland where we had been the previous year. All the way along the vast open shore from Bamburgh to Seahouses I had done cartwheels, somersaults and handsprings. You can't do those on pebbles. In Brighton we were confined to a family room in a guest house in a side street off the seafront where the landlady served us rhubarb pudding four times in a week: rhubarb crumble, rhubarb pie, rhubarb upside down cake and a cold sickly sludge she dished up under the name of rhubarb surprise. If you looked out of the dining room window you could see enormous clumps of it growing like big green Triffids waving in the wind, tapping on the glass panes and threatening to climb over the flint walls that enclosed the small back garden. Every time it was served up Dad used to annoy Mum by forever repeating his irritating little rhyme, "What's long and thin and covered in skin, pink in parts and goes in tarts". I also recalled him saying that nothing ever pleases the Hovians quite as much as being compared favourably with their brash neighbours to the east. The good people of Hove have always looked down upon Brightonians but at different periods in history the reasons for their disapprobation have not always been the same.

In the years surrounding Beat the Brains, Brighton was viewed by the residents of Hove as little more than a common seaside resort for lower-class Londoners; a place where they came for dirty weekends and ate their filthy food. It was a grubby place of whelk stalls and jellied eels and streets strewn with the discarded newspapers of a thousand fish and chips. It was sometimes a violent hell hole where marauding gangs of mods and rockers fought running battles on the beach. And the crowds of carefree and careless holidaymakers with money in their pockets were always a hive of attraction for the droves of minor criminals who descended on the town looking to make a fast buck.

Those were the prejudices of the time. Homosexuality was not yet the prurient issue it is today for many ageing and conservative residents of Hove. In the early sixties Brighton was not yet condemned as the Great British Sodom. Not that Brighton would complain when the time came. Indeed it was frankly delighted to be saved from its prospects as an indifferent seaside resort by being proclaimed the Gay Capital of Britain, and thus converted into a prosperous upmarket town made rich by the pink pound.

But the only pink things in those days, apart from rhubarb, were sticks of rock and Pinkie, the gangland protagonist of Graham Greene's early novel which centred on the seedy underworld goings-on at the race track and the penny arcades on the Palace Pier. Beyond these hackneyed attractions, a lot of the town centre behind the railway station was very shabby indeed; the trendy area of North Laine that it later became had not yet been invented. It was still a down market area in which a far-sighted property speculator could purchase a complete terraced street for less than the price that a single one of those houses would fetch today.

And, if the truth were known, Hove's sense of superiority was based upon nothing more than the superior age of its population, for it was peopled almost entirely by the shrunken and mummified survivors of an Edwardian England. A walk along Western Road in the early 1960s could convince any average person of some forty years of age, of medium height and unremarkable appearance that not only were they still young and good looking but also that their stature was tall and imposing. Any such person would stand head and shoulders above a pavement full of mainly elderly ladies. The ancient stooping gentlemen were vastly outnumbered by the crowds of frail old biddies who still hobbled around in the outdated apparel of their youth, wearing their worn-out, ankle length black skirts, long dark overcoats and broad-brimmed hats.

Douglas went on to do the introductions. He really was becoming unbearable. "The larger than life Sir Hugh Wesley Forbes is here as usual and sitting next to him we find the small but perfectly formed Doctor Cicely Rodding who joins us for her second appearance. Further along we come to the writer and quickwit Kelvin Yeargood. Last but not least the Bootle boy, Conan Burke. Ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together and give a loud welcome to your Beat the Brains panel."

As I had heard the week before, the real job of ingratiating the team with the local residents was the responsibility of Sir Hugh Wesley Forbes. In this case he had the impossible job of trying tactfully to refer to the gentility of Hove without making invidious comparisons with the tawdry nature of Brighton.

I sat on the sofa and gazed at the framed photograph of the team taken at the end of the first series. Dad was looking embarrassed, Nancy France was looking like she wished she was somewhere else and Kelvin Yeargood was raising his hands in mock horror and mouthing his catchphrase, "I just don't know where the listeners get some of these questions!" Sir Hugh, standing slightly away from Kelvin's left, was by far the most impressive figure, an eagle-eyed giant of a man. He may only have been six feet tall but with his brushed back ginger hair and mutton chop sideburns, his aquiline nose, and the piercing eyes of a bird of prey, he had a most intimidating aspect. His appearance was made all the more remarkable by his anachronistic elegance. Whatever the time of year he was invariably dressed in a long Victorian frock coat. He was never without his top hat and his silver plated walking stick. When he removed his outer attire at the commencement of the proceedings he was always seen to be sporting one of his many richly embroidered silk waistcoats all of which were adorned with the traditional pocket watch and fob.

Before he began his eulogy he paused, sat back in his seat, straightened his bow-tie and surveyed the audience slowly. Only then did he begin his sententious address, all the while staring his listeners in the eye.

"The good people of Hove have traditionally been reluctant to bracket themselves with their more famous next door neighbours, but the accident of geography and the expansive nature of the settlement on their eastern periphery have been such that the association has proved ineluctable. The towns may have started off as small villages separated by a distance of some two miles but as a result of their growing popularity they now sit hip to haunch on the South Coast of our fair land where, together, they gaze out across the English Channel, facing the coastline of the Old Enemy. At one time, of course, it was otherwise..."

At this point he paused for effect, reached for the decanter of water, filled a glass and raised it slowly to his lips. Throughout this process he would have taken care to remain eyes front, holding steady the gaze of his onlookers. Over the rim of the glass they would have stared back at the whites of his eyes, every man jack of them afraid that Sir Hugh might suddenly lower the drinking vessel and single him out for public humiliation by asking an unfathomable question. Indeed, he did lower the glass to the desk somewhat briskly but, to everyone's relief, he continued with his discourse. He repeated:

"At one time, of course, it was otherwise. Two millennia ago a small Roman settlement was founded in the shelter of a fold in the South Downs. It went by the name of Villa Hovis, although it was probably known at the time of the then governor of Britain, Sextus Calpurnius Agricola, as Villa Ovis, a name which might be very loosely interpreted as 'a country mansion surrounded by sheep'. Sheep of course were very important to the Romans who brought with them flocks of a hornless, white faced, short haired variety which they used to cross with the native breeds and better the quality of the animals, thus improving the character of what the beasts produced, the items of apparel made from the wool, the raw materials for writing such as parchment, or simply the good healthy mutton roasted with Mediterranean herbs and spices.

"It is common knowledge around these parts how it was that the excellent breed of Southdown sheep was formalised and refined in the late 1700s by John Ellman on his farm at Glynde near Lewes, not very far from where we sit this evening.

"As we also know, the H was added to Ovis many centuries later in order to lend the name, somewhat perversely, a more classical edge, to associate it with the lyricism of Horace and the heroism of Hector, not to mention the relative pronouns of Hic, Haec and Hoc, etc. In more recent centuries the name of the town has become shortened to what it is today. The honest talk of Sussex yeomen has eschewed all fancy reference to their classical past and they have preferred to count their town amongst no-nonsense, single syllable settlements such as York, Hull, Leeds or Stoke.

"Nevertheless, as a living descendent of Latin speakers, the Hovian knows that he lives a life separate from the mobile vulgus. Deep inside him is a racial memory that informs him of a longer and a more noble pedigree than that which is enjoyed by the denizen of the more recently elevated neighbouring town, the johnnie-come-lately whose history came only to be writ large a mere century and a half ago, and then only as a consequence of the outrageous antics of the Prince Regent, a ruler who squandered much of the nation's wealth in gross acts of self indulgence, although, even he, may to some extent, be forgiven for his wickedness by his bequest to the nation of the wondrous spectacle of the Royal Pavilion.

"And so today we have Hove, an ancient and venerable town which has a proud and distinct identity - as separate from Brighton as is the pure and unsullied South Downs chalk from the white and watery cheese we find processed and for sale in those horrid little glittery triangles. Ladies and gentlemen, Floreat Hova!"

There was little need for the producer to indicate to the prompter that he should hold up the board which said applause, for so loud and spontaneous was the ovation that arose from the throats of the many who crowded the Great Hall that their cries could be heard over a hundred yards away inside the walls of the Dog and Dyke where it was the moment at which all the bar room spectators stood silent as Sprinter Sprake took his place on the oche and took aim. As he leaned forward and released the dart he too heard the fearsome noise. He was seen to hesitate, look around, and throw a single five instead of a double top, followed closely by a one. "Bed and breakfast," shouted the scorer.

After Sir Hugh had finished his learned discourse I waited anxiously for Dad's first intervention but it didn't come straight away.

There was a question from a miserable man in the front row who said that he had lived in the area all his life and ever since he could remember his mother had scolded him with the words, 'what a Peter grievous child you are'. He said he knew what it meant although he had never known the exact origins of the expression.

Kelvin Yeargood came first. He chortled falsely, in the style of those radio presenters who seem insanely bent on drawing attention to the inanity of their remarks by modulating their comments with a tremulous laugh: "Just before I answer the question I would like to say that I do hope, Angus, that you haven't annoyed the neighbours too much with that introduction of yours. You know, they're not all that bad and I'd like to mention them once more.

"You know, I'd like to see certain words brought back into use. One of them is the nickname which used to be used for Brightonians in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In those days people from the town were known as jugs or juggs with a double g. The name was applied to them because they were fishermen and they transported and sold their catch in large earthenware containers. The only current use of the name as far as I know is in the name of The Juggs Arms, a delightful rural pub near Lewes. Jug is such a nice satisfying word, short and punchy, containing the sort of post alveolar affricate sound of which my fellow author Charles Dickens was so very fond, coining as he did, such names as Jaggers, Crachit, Scrooge and Barnaby Rudge. I think if Dickens had employed this eponym for the Brightonian it would have suited his style admirably.

"Back to the question. I don't know whether or not this is a particularly Sussex saying. I seem to have encountered it in other places in my travels. But it is a reminder of our proximity to the continent and its myriad influences on our tongue. May be this one came over with William the Conqueror, I don't know. Somebody who is a Peter griever or a Peter grievous person is someone who continually whines, whimpers or complains. It comes from petit grief, meaning something very similar in French."

The miserable man sat down looking a little more miserable, presumably because he hadn't managed to bamboozle the Brains. Next up was a man who introduced himself with the odd name of Preston Nomad.

"Earlier this year Hove was the overnight stop for something that can be said to have started some nineteen years ago in Brighton. What is the present name for this phenomenon and also can the members of the panel please explain why, when it began, Brighton had a brief claim to be known as the land of milk and honey?"

I remember thinking, Oh my God, I hope they don't ask Dad. It's far too Round Britain Quiz for him.

"One for you, I think, Canaan, I mean Conan, ha, ha, ha," said Douglas.

I could imagine Dad looking at him blankly before he slowly said, "I think that must be a joke you've just made, Douglas." To my surprise, he continued. "Originally, of course, the Biblical land of milk and honey was Canaan, the land promised to Abraham by God. Honey is mentioned in the Bible 61 times, the first of these being in Genesis chapter 43 verse 11. In 20 out of these 61 verses, the Bible describes Canaan as a "land flowing with milk and honey" the first occasion being that of Exodus, chapter 3, verse 8."

Thank you Mamie Louise and thank you Father Bertrand, I thought.

"But obviously that isn't what is being referred to here. The milk part of the question refers to the Milk Race, as the Tour of Britain is currently known because of its sponsorship by the Milk Marketing Board. The race began at the end of the war as the Brighton to Glasgow, a six day cycle race. As for the honey...."

He seemed to stall for a few moments as if he was mulling something over in his head. When he needed time to think he always cleared his throat with a dry cough, after which he would reach automatically for the inside pocket of his jacket where he always kept a tin of Zubes for moments such as this. I could hear the hesitation in his voice and the sound of his hand rustling in his pocket. I recognised the act as one of his well practised plays for time and the way he used it to mask moments of panic. My heart sank. He didn't know.

Douglas felt obliged to chivvy him along. "Come along Conan. Get that brain box of yours working, old chap". I knew that this was not a good way to encourage Dad. The audience began a low murmur of consternation.

Then Dad resumed. "There was, in the first of those six-stage marathons to Scotland, a little known Portuguese rider called Mel Rodrigues who vowed to complete the race on a diet entirely composed of honey sandwiches. There's no doubt honey is a marvellous foodstuff. After all, John the Baptist sustained himself in the desert on a diet of locusts and honey. Perhaps he was the inspiration for this Portuguese chap. Unfortunately, senhor Rodrigues dropped out somewhere near Buxton and was never heard of again. Perhaps if he taken more locusts with it he might have made it to the end."

Dad was even joking! However, Christian sensibilities were still such that the laughter of some was mixed with a sharp intake of breath from others who realised that the remark bordered upon blasphemy. Nevertheless, Dad continued.

"Cycling is one of those sports which have always been very popular with the French and, following on from what Kelvin had to say about the influence of their language upon ours, it has given us the word peloton as the name for the small platoon that always leads the field, the two words coming from the same source."

And so it went, wending its usual way to Douglas's closing remarks and at half past eight, at the end of the programme, I went to bed exhausted by the long anxious day but relieved that Dad had acquitted himself well. I didn't know where he got his energy from.

Chapter Twenty Six

When the audience had filed out and everybody was saying their goodbyes, Cicely Rodding came over to Con. "Fancy a drink?" Taking control was something to which Cicely was accustomed.

"Er, yes, why not?" said Con, disconcerted as ever by any sudden show of friendship.

"Do you know anywhere around here?"

"Only the place I was in at lunchtime. It was a bit quiet then."

"Sounds ideal. Shall we go?"

When they arrived the public bar was spilling out onto the pavement and they decided they might be better off in the saloon. But it was Friday night, the darts match had not long finished and both bars were busy. Cicely was wearing a fawn coloured Jaegar dress with a matching cardigan she had bought several years ago after she had seen it modelled in Vogue by Celia Hammond. In the West End it might have looked a little out of date but in Hove it was as if a member of the household of the Shah of Iran was paying an informal visit to the town. Heads turned and there was a momentary silence as Cicely entered the saloon bar.

In the controlled atmosphere of the outside broadcast Con had been relatively relaxed, but faced with a busy pub on a Friday night, a beautiful woman who had asked him out for a drink and the attention of an unpredictable assembly that was already merry, he immediately lost all of his self confidence and would have happily agreed to the sacrifice of one of his lesser used bodily organs in order to be sitting quietly in his room at Mrs Dugget's bed and breakfast in Lower Rock Gardens where the producer's assistant had booked him a room for the night.

By a great stroke of luck there was a couple vacating a table in the corner furthest away from the bar. "This will do nicely," purred Cicely. "I'll have a gin and it".

Despite his growing panic and the prickly sensation in both armpits Con made his way to the bar in a manner that he hoped would be construed as manly and decisive. He felt his face going red as he contemplated the crush of customers three deep at the bar. He looked through the thicket of arms waving empty glasses or ten shilling notes and was distressed to see the face of the sullen barman who had reluctantly served him at lunchtime. This time, as he responded to the regulars, the bartender's face was lit up with friendly recognition. "Fill us up, Jack," he heard someone say. As he gazed at the man's features with all the preoccupation of the mouse who knows he is just about to be spotted by a snake, he failed to notice the small chubby woman who was backing out of the throng holding her handbag and two glasses of barley wine. As she put her back into Con's midriff he bent forward and his chin caught her on the top of her head, causing her to wobble and spill the drinks, some of the sticky golden brew splashing down the front of Con's right leg. "You clumsy oaf. You can buy me another for that," she squawked.

Through the hubbub that was emanating from the public bar came the sound of a man tapping a microphone and pleading for quiet. "Ladies and gentlemen. Please can I have a little hush? Thank you. You don't need me to tell you that the final of the regional darts player of the year has been won by no other than your old favourite, Pete pop-em-in Porter. Step up Pete and receive the cup." Huge applause followed: shouting and whistling, cheering and clapping.

The saloon bar was a cut above the public bar and you had to pay a penny a pint extra if you wanted to drink in there. The exclusiveness of the saloon, or the lounge as it was sometimes known, was preserved by the strategic design of the interior of the pub. The serving area was common to both sides but there were two dividing walls which overlapped and largely shielded the view from one drinking room to the other. However, as the bar staff served both sides, the two counters had to be visible from wherever the staff were standing, so that they could check if there was anybody waiting for a drink. So it was that if a customer stood at the far end of the saloon bar and craned slightly forward he could get a diagonal view of the counter of the public bar. It was in this position that Con found himself. There was a crush at the bar and he was claustrophobically squeezed in at the end of the counter, completely unable to attract the barman's attention. While he waited he looked across and saw that Reg Sprake was leaning dejectedly on the public bar. In the hope that some false bonhomie might help to ingratiate him with the crowd waiting for drinks and so lessen his anxiety, Con called out to him.

"Never mind, Sprinter. It's only a game. Worse things happen at sea, mate."

Despite his working class origins Con was never sure exactly where this familiar form of address should be interpolated and this time he had settled for positioning it at the end of his remark. He was instantly unsure whether or not it would have been more correctly situated earlier, just after 'It's only a game'.

Reg's look seemed to indicate that he had got the message although Con thought it was odd that he didn't say anything in return.

The further five minutes it took for the barman to recognise that he was waiting to be served felt to Con like an interminable period of awkwardness. After he had finally received his drinks Con looked down and examined his change, wondering if he had been overcharged. He looked up but instead of complaining he whispered, "Thanks, Jack". The barman just glared.

Con turned to the crowded room to carry back to the table his hard won prize, but he had been away for such an age and so much panic had intervened that he was alarmed to discover that he could not see where Cicely was sitting. He itched all along his arms as he felt people look up from their tables and raise their faces towards him. He swivelled to the left and to the right, causing a little of the beer to spill on to his hand and trickle inside his shirt cuff, tickling its way past his wrist and up to the elbow. Finally, he spotted a small figure waving in the far corner and with a sudden great relief he realised that it was Cicely.

"Are you alright? You were gone an age. I thought you'd left the pub."

If only, thought Con, setting the glasses down awkwardly and spilling a little more of his pint.

"Cheers, Conan. How do you think it went tonight? I thought it was better than St Ives. It's only my second one so I don't have much to go on. Maida Vale next week. That's more my patch." Cicely was chatty and exhilarated by the evening's performance.

"I thought you were brilliant tonight. How the hell did you know that about the Portuguese rider? Doesn't Hugh go on and on? And what about Douglas? I'm going to have to complain if he gets any more personal with his remarks."

Con was pleased to get on to a discussion of someone else's failings although, in truth, he hadn't noticed Douglas's growing impropriety. He decided that he would feel even more comfortable on home ground and talking about something with which he was properly familiar, like linguistics.

Cicely, for her part, had started to observe him and had noted that he was in some form of distress. His demeanour had changed and the man she saw before her was pink-faced and sweaty and had lost the calm and composed persona which he had exhibited during the show. Cicely hadn't spent the previous seventeen years in psychiatry without learning how to spot the signs of anxiety and to recognise how such discomfort could be alleviated if the sufferer were encouraged to expatiate on the causes of his distress. She also had enough experience not to tackle the problem head on. She led with a self deprecatory remark designed to immediately boost the confidence of someone who felt threatened.

"Con, I'm so sorry I was so brusque in St Ives. My amateur lecture on geology was quite uncalled for. I thought afterwards that I'd been my usual pushy, inconsiderate self."

"No. You were right and I was wrong. I never mind being corrected."

"Tell me more about your trip to Santiago with your daughter, Janie."

"It's Jennie. Short for Jennifer."

Cicely dug deeper into her repertoire of self belittlement: "Sorry. I'm such a fool. You'd think with my job I'd have a better memory for names. Please forgive me. I must say it was a great idea the pair of you going away together. You know, a father-daughter holiday. Whose idea was it in the first place?"

This triggered a narrative response in Con who went straight into a detailed and factual account of their itinerary starting from the point at which they arrived at the Spanish frontier. After fifteen minutes of being a good listener Cicely stopped him at the incident with the Civil Guards which had taken place at the cathedral.

"This book. Have you still got it?"

"What, the Borrow? No, it went missing somewhere in the Basque country. Jennie said that perhaps old Borrow left us in Guernica because he felt more at home there. I don't know why she said that."

"No, the other one by Álvaro whatshisface."

"Cunqueiro. Well yes, but it's hardly a book – more of a pamphlet. The introduction by some local medic is longer than the actual text. Anyway, I'm reliably informed that he was a propagandist for Franco who distorted the truth and his accounts are not to be trusted." He described Carlos's damning description of the thoroughly unscrupulous author. Cicely, however, was animated:

"Well maybe, though there's a wealth of difference between what a hack would churn out being in the employ of a fascist press office and what he might write if he became disgusted by his own deceitfulness and decided to return to his native land in order to redeem his soul by documenting the minutiae of local life. It could be that he considered an authentic description of rural characters as an act of atonement, an antidote to the hateful falsehoods that he had been engaged in propagating during the Civil War. You see, these vignettes he's writing now could be important. If he's putting on paper his reminiscences of the 1920s and 30's he's recording how medicine and psychiatry were practised in a rural society before the advent of a State health service. It could be a unique record of a vanishing mixture of barefoot medicine and parochial psychotherapy carried out against a background of pre Christian superstition.

"I can see how anything he writes would be taboo in the Basque Country. I can see how irredeemable he is to the defeated Republicans who feel utterly revolted by his lies, but without being insensitive to them, you and I, because of our distance from these events, we can choose to differentiate between the dodgy war reporting that brought him so much opprobrium and the invaluable anthropological gobbets that he has recently taken to penning."

Cicely was quite fired up. "Even if he wasn't unrepentant he wouldn't be the first person to produce great creative work despite his otherwise unworthy beliefs. You can still admire the Ring Cycle despite Wagner's anti-Semitic sentiments. D H Lawrence had the most peculiar and reactionary views on women but his misogynist beliefs don't stop us appreciating his Sons and Lovers. Most people seem happy for their kids to read the Jungle Book despite the fact that Kipling is nowadays so reviled for his nonsense about the White Man's Burden.

Cicely's enthusiasm had made Con forget about his recent and unfortunate exploits in the pub and he exclaimed, "God, I wish I'd thought of all that when Carlos was going on about him."

"Even if you had, your friend wouldn't have been convinced. Look, could you bring it with you next time, read me a couple of the sketches?"

"Yes, I suppose so. I could even type them out in English if you like."

"Con, I really think I'd like to know you better."

"Well, I can tell you everything you need to know now. Well, more or less. As you know my main interest is in linguistics. It's a fascinating subject. What I am particularly interested in at the moment is colloquial speech in Latin America. The problem is that it is difficult to come by in any of the places I generally frequent."

There was no note of irony in his voice as he continued: "Jennie says I'm obsessed with speech. She says I'm an obsessive and I can't stop myself going into detail. I constantly have to remind her that if you didn't have people taking care of all the details, people who build planes, wire up the National Grid, fix your teeth, carry out painstaking surgical operations or run complicated systems like the rail network then the world would be a much more dangerous place. She always adds that although I'm hot on detail I miss the big picture and I can't see the wood for trees. She says I'm rude and don't know when to keep my mouth shut. I say I'm straightforward. I say what I think. The other thing she always says is that I'm gullible and I'm easy prey for anybody who wants to deceive me. That's because I like to think that the world is a place in which people should say what they mean and mean what they say. I don't see anything wrong in that." Con was beginning to break into a slight sweat.

Cicely cut him short. "Listen, where are you staying tonight? In some dingy run down B and B I'll bet. Why don't you have a lift with me up to London tonight instead? I've got a spare room you can have and tomorrow you can eat a decent breakfast as well as shortening your journey by taking the tube straight to King's Cross. I was going to suggest having another drink here but if we leave now we can have a nightcap in Knightsbridge."

Quite frankly Con would have agreed to anything in order to get out of having to go the bar again and it was with great relief that he accepted Cicely's offer. He said, "Yes, I'd like that very much."

It took an hour and a half from Hove to the centre of London in Cicely's Jaguar Mk II. When they reached Kensington Road she turned into a small mews and parked in a reserved space behind an impressive residential block somewhere near Queen's Gate and the Royal College of Art. A man in a uniform opened the door. "Thanks," said Con.

Cicely's place was an education. Until then, Con's only experience of flats had been the big square utilitarian blocks that the Council had been building on the outskirts of the town where he worked, following the demolition of the terraced houses in the centre where their residents had previously lived. Con thought it profoundly odd that something this different should share the same four letter, single syllable definition of 'flat'. What made the commonality of the term even more odd was that the lobby was carpeted and there were no kids hanging around the lift. When Con stepped out on to the fourth floor he noted that the small corridor was utterly silent, insulated even from the rumble of traffic on the main road directly outside. The flat itself was double glazed and had an uninterrupted view, above the trees, right across Kensington Gardens to The Serpentine.

Cicely flung her cardigan on to the sofa, walked into the kitchenette and called back over her shoulder, "What'll you have? I've got a very nice Talisker, if you like?" Con missed the insinuation in her voice and replied that he knew the names of over a hundred and twenty single malt scotches but he'd never really had a taste for it. He added, "What I'd really like is a cup of tea."

"You know, Con, we're in Maida Vale next week. Why don't you stay here until next Friday instead of hoofing up and down the country yet again? Why don't you give that daughter of yours a ring and tell her you'll be back next week?"

"What would I do here in London?

"Oh, I don't know. Have the week off. Have a lie in. Go out for lunch. Do what you like. Take in a few exhibitions, visit museums. Go to the cinema. Have a break. Just sit around and read if you like." Con glanced uncertainly at the bookshelves that lined the wall. He wasn't sure how much he would gain from leafing through back issues of the British Journal of Psychiatry or the pile of Tatlers. Cicely was very insistent. "Look, the following week we're in Harrogate which is comparatively close to the university. You can resume your academic duties then. My God, the students have enough time off. Lecturers deserve a holiday as well, you know."

I have to say that before I knew the whole story I was terribly surprised when Dad rang to tell me of his impromptu decision to spend a week in London. I was astounded to discover that he was staying in a woman's flat in Knightsbridge, even if it was only in the spare room as he had hastened to reassure me at the time. However, I did have my suspicions about the innocence of the arrangement when he returned home the following week seeming, at the same time, both sheepish and pleased with himself. He also seemed unusually possessed of a certain jokey self confidence.

Twenty Seven

Around the middle of September, before the start of each academic year, the Faculty of Modern Languages held its Annual Staff Council (ASC). This served various purposes. It was an opportunity to welcome new members, it gave existing incumbents a chance to become reacquainted with each other after the long vacation and it allowed the Head of Modern Languages to rally the troops for the long and daunting task of ten weeks' teaching as well as offering him the opportunity to garner any suggestions for the improvement of the Faculty that might have occurred to lecturers during their Summer research. Each year the ASC was hosted by a different Department on a rotational basis. Last year it had been the responsibility of Spanish and the meeting had been spoilt by a long tedious wrangle concerning the new forms which had been designed by Professor Calvert to record the academic progress of the constantly expanding student body. Con had been a major participant in this debate, dismissing the forms as unintelligible, illogical and unworkable. Larry had taken the opposite point of view, not out of any sympathy for the professor's scheme but because he was forever searching for a way of exposing Con's weaknesses. Larry had bitterly countered Con's rejection of the new forms, pointing out that Con's disapproval was really nothing more than a manifestation of his own anxiety which had its origins in the fact that he was totally unable to grasp any administrative system that he hadn't devised himself.

The two of them had led a tedious debate which had tied up the meeting for over an hour during which the elderly Bernard Russett had nodded off, Emma Prout's eyes had glazed over and several other members of staff had left, pointing to their watches and feigning another appointment elsewhere.

This year it was the turn of French and the acting head of department had carefully vetted the agenda in the hope that they might avoid any controversial issues such as those which had marred the previous annual assembly. The meeting was scheduled for Thursday 26th September at eleven. At five minutes to the hour, on the way to the French senior common room, Con passed Larry's office. On the door was a brand new sign: 'Larry Strange' had been replaced by 'Dr Laurent Étrange'.

In the Common Room Con spotted Larry sitting next to Barry Building.

"Good morning, Barry. Oh, hello Larry. Wasn't sure you'd be here. New member of staff got your old room?"

Larry said nothing. He just looked ahead as if nobody had spoken.

"Did you get back to Hemel this summer, Larry? Or should that be Émsted Emelle? Ha ha ha."

Larry said nothing, just coloured slightly.

Con persisted. "I see this new Laurent Étrange is advertising himself as a Docteur. Does this mean that when the captain of the flight from Nice to Clermont Ferrand makes an emergency appeal over the intercom for medical assistance because one of the passengers is experiencing an acute myocardial infarction, Docteur Étrange will be able to help the patient's recovery by sitting at his side and reciting excerpts from his fascinating doctoral thesis on Marcel Proust?"

"Oh, fuck off Con, you lame-brain. And what have you been doing all bloody summer, I wonder? Making lists of words? Being a prat on the radio? I heard you from St Ives. You couldn't even string two measly sentences together: 'Oh. I'm sorry I don't know, Mr Chairman. Ask somebody else'. I wouldn't be so perky if I was you. I was surprised after that dismal performance that they didn't take you off the show. If it hadn't have been for that sexy little shrink you'd have looked even worse."

Con was rarely nettled by Larry. "You might like to know, Docteur Laurent Étrange, that things have changed a lot in the last month and that sexy little shrink and I are now great friends." Larry made no reply but his face nearly fell through the floor.

People were now turning around to see where the noise was coming from and there were groans when they realised who the protagonists were. The situation was defused by the arrival of Professor Lester Jeffreys, the acting head of Department and there were no more disturbances. Con was more relaxed this year and he had decided that no personal antipathy would colour the formal events of the morning.

After the meeting Barry suggested that the three of them have a bite to eat in the bar of Senate House. He said he wanted to pick Dad's brains over a holiday he was planning to the Basque country and get Larry's slant on the merits of crossing into France to visit Biarritz. Barry was a good, solid sort of man who looked uncannily like some of the members of the Soviet Politburo. He particularly resembled a young Nikita Khrushchev. Barry also fancied himself as a bit of a politician and the idea of taking Con and Larry for lunch and asking them each for their special view on separate topics was his way of trying to smooth things over between them.

As they entered the bar Larry spotted Justine Slowley at the far end of the room. Covering his mouth with his hand, he whispered something to Con.

Barry bought two pints of Double Diamond for Larry and himself and a lemonade for Con. The three of them carried their drinks over to the table where Justine was sitting with Miriam Russell who taught formal logic in the Department of Philosophy. Barry asked very politely, "Would you mind if we joined you?"

Justine gestured for them to take a seat. Con always thought that Justine was the epitome of the femme fatale and he went straight into automatic pilot, staring into her eyes and smiling, saying with commendable presence of mind, "That's a lovely dress, Justine."

But Justine was having none of such poorly rehearsed sincerity. "Thank you, Con. I wonder if you would be so kind as to tell me what Larry was saying behind his hand when you came in."

"He said that he'd seen a call girl wearing the same dress as yours at the trial of Stephen Ward."

Unfortunately for Con, he had still not been able to programme in to his autopilot the software that included the psychological device for dissimulation which is constantly required in the navigation of complicated social situations. His global positioning system was still only functioning at the geographical stage and did not help in finding his way amongst the hazardous terrain of interpersonal relationships.

"Larry you're a creep," was all Justine would say.

Chapter Twenty Eight

At the end of September Dad drove me down to Hampshire and to Botley Grange, a women's hall of residence in which I was obliged to spend the first year of my undergraduate career. He didn't seem in a bad mood but he was unusually quiet for the first part of the journey, so much so that I asked him if anything was wrong. He insisted that everything was fine but didn't volunteer anything more.

Normally he would have been burbling on about his latest linguistic project, something that he had only revealed the day before. For the previous three days he had shut himself away in his bedroom, sawing, hammering and moving furniture around. I had no idea what he was doing as his DIY skills were practically non-existent and he couldn't put up a shelf that didn't collapse before the end of a week.

When he was ready to reveal his creation he led me into the room. "Close your eyes, Jennie." I let him pull me along by the hand. "You can open them now."

I opened them. "Oh my God, Dad."

Mum and Dad's faded green double divan had gone and had been replaced by a huge revolving wooden crucifix which took up all the space from the ceiling to the floor. The cross was mounted vertically on an old broom handle which swivelled inside a makeshift wooden tripod, the whole device resting on a carpet-sized great circle map of the globe which had the United Kingdom at its centre.

Immediately I wondered if recent events hadn't affected his mind; that he'd undergone a religious conversion to a home crucifix sect whose members worked together in close coordination to beam the collective benevolence of their crosses towards trouble spots all over the world.

"Dad, shouldn't you have waited to carve your Jesus before you showed me?"

"Sometimes I wonder if you're my daughter. It's not a bloody cross, it's a frame aerial. Look at the loop of wire that goes round the outside."

Apparently it was all part of a method of hearing native voices from abroad. He'd obtained the plans for the aerial from the university radio amateur club. He said that when the ionospheric conditions were favourable to the propagation of long distance radio waves, sometime from the late autumn onwards, he was planning to use it in order to spend long happy evenings tuning in to the domestic service of Radio Renascença in Lisbon and Spanish National Radio in Madrid. More excitingly, when the Heaviside Layer was reflecting well, he anticipated being able to receive Radio Mundial in Rio de Janeiro, to listen to LR1 in Buenos Aires and eavesdrop on the Radio Club of Mozambique transmitting from the capital city of Lourenço Marques. In those days there was no online streaming available at the touch of a computer button. If you wanted to hear the colloquial repartee of local radio in faraway places you had to buy a reliable communications receiver, attach it to a large coil of wire wound tightly around the biggest wooden frame you could manage and then point it in the direction of the incoming signal. This is what he had done.

"What do you think?"

"Where's the bed gone?" was all I could say. He told me he had dismantled the bed that he and Mum used to share and that he had stored in the shed. He announced from that day forward he would be sleeping in the spare room.

Now, in the car, I was even more amazed when he broke his silence with the seemingly incompatible news that he had a girlfriend.

"What do you mean 'a girlfriend', Dad?"

"It's someone you've heard on the wireless."

"How do you mean? The lady who reads the weather forecast or does Listen with Mother? Not Marjorie Anderson? Not Mrs Dale? It can't be Jill Archer."

"No, stop being silly. Somebody in my sort of line."

"Come on Dad, just tell me. This isn't Twenty Questions."

The news ruined what should have been a pleasant drive down through England on a sunny day in early autumn. I was totally unprepared for Dad to have a girlfriend. She came out of the blue. Well, she didn't really. I just failed to see her coming. Despite the unexplained week away in London, I simply didn't expect it to happen. Dad was Dad. He wasn't a boyfriend. It was all wrong and I hated her from the very moment I knew of her existence. Well, that's not true either. By the time I found out about their 'relationship' as she was pleased to call it, her voice had been familiar to me for several weeks, in fact, ever since the beginning of the new series. I listened to her as an incidental part of Beat the Brains but I never paid any attention to her point of view, in the same way that I never listened to any of the others. I was only ever interested in what Dad had to say. It never dawned on me that there was anything more to her than she was just another of his faceless colleagues. Neither did I realise that she was already a personality. I'd never heard of her.

I certainly didn't have a clue to her appearance. Although television was putting an end to the age of anonymity it was still perfectly possible to know the sound of lesser celebrities without ever realising what they looked like. The TV 'chat show' hadn't yet begun. The Michaels, Parkinson and Aspel, were unheard of. Wogan was two decades away and it would be a quarter of a century before the Clives, James and Anderson, made their sardonic appearance on the box.

I tried to think it through. She must have met him for the first time in St Ives. She must have seen Mum accompany him to the door of the church hall from where they were doing the outside broadcast. She must have seen Mum turn away and walk down the hill towards the harbour. She must have realised then that something was wrong; that there was a breach in their relationship. It drew her attention. She must have looked at Dad with an interested eye.

Nowadays I always look back on the whole episode and think that if Mum hadn't gone with him on that occasion to Cornwall then the whole thing might never have happened. If, on their first broadcast together, the Rodding woman hadn't thought that Dad was anything other than a slightly outré middle-aged man who probably was very happy in a pipe-and-slippers marriage with a dependable wife who looked after him in a motherly fashion and routinely protected him from the consequences of his everyday gaffs, then she wouldn't have thought any more about him. She would not have seen the latitude she had to act in the way that she did.

But once she had discerned their disconnection, her mind couldn't stop going deeper and deeper into the fault line that separated them. Her perception was corrosive. She was like battery acid eating its way through a damaged cell wall. Once she fixed her insidious gaze on him I don't think Dad stood a chance. Dad was just an open book. He'd say what he thought without thinking. He wasn't deceitful or sly, just guileless.

Eventually I must have dozed off, tired out by the long drive, Dad's revelation and the turmoil of my own reaction. I woke with a start during a dream about a fish that swam too near the surface and was seized by a heron.

"Well, if you've got a girlfriend where's she going to stay when she comes round? I mean, now you've got rid of the bed? She's not sleeping in my room and the spare room is the size of a broom cupboard."

"Don't poke your nose in where it's not wanted. I couldn't invite her to stay in Mum's bed. That wouldn't be right. As for the spare room, I reckon you could get a three quarter size bed in there if you sacrificed the bedside table."

I worried that I might end up like Dad.

Chapter Twenty Nine

The University was an ideal place in which to study. The half timbered town was enclosed by a bend in the river; from the top of The Mount the Norman castle dominated the broad flood plain and protected the surrounding countryside from the threat of a seaward invasion. The eleventh century cathedral had been built above a Saxon church that was still preserved almost entirely intact in the crypt below the central nave. The permanent population at the time of the census in 1961 was calculated at 18,317 although this figure was swelled by several thousand students during the course of the academic year.

The ancient borough was far removed from the sight of any modern manufacture and the local industry was predominantly rural. It was also possessed of a well-known brewery which produced the finest of traditional beers, a County Jail which had held some of the most famous criminals in the land and more five star hotels than would normally be commensurate with a place of its size. These businesses thrived on the large number of guests that the town entertained; there was a small proportion who were detained at the pleasure of Her Majesty the Queen and could not leave even if they had the inclination, but there was a much greater number who were free to come and go whenever they felt the need, although they too found themselves captured forever by the place's charming and hospitable atmosphere. So it was that the abundant hotels were kept fully occupied and made exceedingly prosperous by the constant visits of many proud parents and hangers-on.

This exclusive little enclave was first choice for those privately educated students who had narrowly missed the entrance qualifications for Oxford and Cambridge. They generally came from families that were comfortably off. Even those who came from Grammar Schools arrived with a generous County Major Award, a grant from their Local Authorities which covered all the fees as well as paying their recipients a generous personal allowance which was more than adequate to ensure and maintain a steady supply of cakes and ale. The town lived high on the hog.

On the first day of university I wandered into the Freshers' Fair. The stalls were all set up in the Great Hall where every student society was making a pitch for new members. Surely here I could find some diversion from my worries. Instead, I happened upon an instant reminder of the past few days. As I entered the medieval gloom of the building, inadequately illuminated by stained glass windows and lit by dingy chandeliers with light bulbs shaped like candles, my eyes were drawn through the dimness to another of those giant crosses that I had just seen Dad cobble together in the bedroom. This one was on display behind a stand emblazoned with the acronym of the Hampshire University Radio and Television Society. I had never seen one of these monstrous antennas before last week and now I had seen two in four days. In charge of the stall were two spotty faced boys wearing white nylon shirts and ties which were also embroidered with HURTS. I wondered for a while if I had stumbled upon the University Flagellation Society and the aerial wasn't an aerial at all, but rather a more famous means of inflicting torture or even death. The spottier of the two boys who was evidently in charge of the stall saw me peering at the logo on his tie. "Clever isn't it? Play on words." I hadn't a clue what he meant and I moved on without acknowledging his remark, pretending that my bewildered gaze was due to some private reverie unconnected with the contingency of my present surroundings.

I was still maintaining this other-worldly expression when I was hailed by the jolly members of the Liberal Club. Eighteen months after their unexpected victory in the bye election at Orpington they were still cock-a-hoop with success. They now had not six, but seven seats in Parliament and they were expecting a dramatic revival in the fortunes of the party. Their banner read, 'There is not a safe Tory seat in the country'. I floated past.

Then, with a shock, I came to the Socialist Society, the Soc Soc, complete with several ghastly lookalikes of John Gates, my old boyfriend from school. On the table there were pamphlets on every question of organised labour. Amongst an array of New Left Reviews I shuddered at a copy of Ralph Miliband's book, 'A Study of the Politics of Labour', remembering how John used to read it aloud in his many attempts to interest me in the cause.

The religious brigades had won the raffle for the best pitches in the hall and they were appropriately raised up on high, right at the front of the stage. I shared Dad's rationalist contempt for religion and I turned my back on the Meth Soc, the UniBaps and the Hampshire Evangelical Christian Union and I was just making my wistful and other-worldly way towards the exit when I saw a girl with long auburn hair who put me in mind of a young Edna O'Brien. She seemed very composed, sitting quietly and reading a novel behind the counter of a bookstall which advertised itself as The Guild of Women Readers.

"I've never heard of the Guild of Women Readers," I said.

She smiled. "That's because we've only just made it up."

"What do you do? Apart from read books of course."

"We talk about them. We take it in turns to suggest a book. We read one a week and discuss it. Your book, your flat, your booze. No men."

"Why no men?"

"Well, we've come to the conclusion that literature has become a bit of a boy's game in Britain and that the post-war canon of English literature doesn't seem so far to have much relevance to women. We are tired of the plethora of novels about what men did in the Second World War; what spies do in the Cold War; how annoyed by everything are the Angry Young Men. We don't want tales of young bucks coming of age, religious allegories written by Oxbridge dons, swan songs about aristocratic estates, humorous novels about the antics of upper class buffoons, or science fiction about spacemen. We don't even want heart warming tales about a chap's family and how they all started a zoo together."

I guessed how she might feel about Lawrence of Arabia.

"The idea is that we look at literature written by women and we don't want to do it with the condescending presence of men in the room. You can choose anything you want. Novels, short stories, plays, even research articles. The only proviso is that it should be written by a woman." She held out her hand. "Gill Wiseman."

"Jennie Burke."

"Interested?"

"Yes, definitely."

Despite the certainty of her views Gill spoke gently. I wondered if they were all like her: quietly assertive and independent, if a tad serious. There were to be no men at their book group but I didn't imagine it was a girly night in. Neither did I tell her she reminded me of Edna O'Brien. I didn't want her to think I was shallow.

The book club turned out to be less threatening than I had imagined and it provided light relief from the set texts I was obliged to read. The degree course was good but some of the literature was distinctly stuffy. I persevered with Camões' sixteenth century poem about the glorious discoveries of Vasco de Gama, but the language was archaic and difficult and I spent a lot of my first term reading the books suggested by the Guild. They, more than anything, took my mind off my recent preoccupation with the separation and the shock of Dad's revelation about Cicely Rodding.

I was so pleased when the book club actually began with Edna O'Brien and her two light novels concerning a pair of spirited Irish girls who move to England, shrug off their repressive upbringing in Ireland, put two fingers up to the Catholic Church and reject the prejudice and drudgery of rural life. For me, the books' cache was automatically increased by the fact that they had been banned in Ireland. Not only did I consider Edna O' Brien the freshest writer I had ever read but she also had the looks to which I aspired. Oh, how I wished I could be like her – a beautiful, wild woman, with long, red, tousled hair.

Her first book was The Country Girls. I was told by my grandfather in one of his long letters from Lisdoonvarna that the book had taken its title from three words in The Ginger Man by JP Donleavy, another book that was banned in Ireland. Of course, I then had to read that, although I didn't confess it to the group. The protagonist, Sebastian Dangerfield was unlike any man I had ever met. He was an outrageous sexually exploitative misogynist but you couldn't help but marvel at the sheer unbridled cheek of the man. And the prose was the thing. It was not anodyne and it wasn't British, old girl. Dangerfield was a bastard but he was credible, the sex scenes seemed real (for all I knew) and Dublin was painted as bright and alive and quite unlike anything you might find in England. It was beautifully, beautifully irreverent. In between the Iris Murdochs, the Muriel Sparks and the Lynn Reid Banks of the Guild I went off on a spree of Irish books. I adored the sheer craziness of The Playboy of the Western World and I loved the barmy rich language of At Swim Two Birds. God knows where, but I even found time to read Ulysses, although I didn't understand the half of it. Nevertheless, it just seemed that the Irish writers I read had a freshness and a take on life that was so much less stuffy and less obsessed with the bloody Second World War, especially those who wrote before the Second World War. They were so much more imaginative. For me, Ireland became an antidote to England. I felt that the reading group were missing out on a lot by their insistence on a narrow feminist focus.

The necessary corollary of my wayward reading habits was that I was also beginning to miss out some of the books from the Guild's weekly line up. Increasingly, I would leave the end of a novel unread or not bother looking at an article until the Monday night when we met. It was becoming obvious that I was not keeping up and I had had one or two sideways glances from the other girls when I had failed to contribute to the session. On several occasions Gill had even mentioned that there was a long waiting list of women who wished to join the GWR.

Throughout the first term I dissipated a lot of my nervous energy in this orgy of literary indulgence and I attempted to dissolve all my remaining anxiety about Dad in a solution of Gin and Cinzano Bianco, which I realised, on the mornings after the nights before, did not serve as an ideal solvent for stress. Nevertheless, this combination of liquor and fiction did succeed in putting deeper concerns to the back of the mental queue, although I still felt a compulsion to listen to every episode of Beat the Brains. Besides the slightly edgy enjoyment of listening to Dad, I felt I could somehow keep an eye on him in this way. It was comforting to hear him confidently clearing up the queries of all the local agents provocateurs who tried to catch him out with their detailed knowledge of regional words and their derivations. He dealt competently with 'goody two-shoes', 'oddballs' and 'three dollar bills'; in the Forest of Dean he acquitted himself famously with his knowledge of free mining; in Haywards Heath he waxed lyrical over the scatological and ornithological traps that had been laid for him on his challenge to name the local sport of stoolball.

I was finally released from monitoring Dad's wellbeing on the eighth of November when the twelve week series came to an end. After that I lost contact with him for a while but I was pleased to feel that I didn't mind being out of touch and that I was confident that his self confidence had safely returned.

Chapter Thirty

As unhappy as I was about Mum and Dad's break-up, I decided that the mature thing to do was to stop fretting, accept what had happened and let them get on with it. I had made some new friends at university and they had been helpful in getting me to see reason. However, I was aware that this detachment was easier to envisage than it was to achieve. Knowing intellectually what I should do was not at all a guarantee of how I would be able to feel about it emotionally. But I decided to do the best I could.

My first concern was how I should divide up the winter vacation. I took the decision to go to Dad's for Christmas and Mum's for the New Year. The following year I would be scrupulously fair and reverse the process. Opening up before me was a new world of tact and diplomacy in which I had to be brave and balance the needs of both parents. I resolved to be even handed and loyal to each of them and never criticise one to the other. If there were disputes I would listen to each one in turn and avoid taking sides.

When that first term ended I caught the train back up north. As I arrived at our house Dad was looking nervously out of the window. I thought he came to the door in a more self conscious way than usual. When I got inside I saw why. Dad detested Christmas. It was another of his pet hates. He couldn't understand why everyone wanted to waste so much money on presents and decorations while half the world was starving; he said that if people were really Christian they should spend their money on donations to the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief and cease their quasi religious self indulgence. I called his bluff one time when I was fifteen. I challenged him straight out about how much he was giving to charity that Christmas. He said that he wasn't a Christian and he hadn't given anything to anybody. You could always depend on him for the truth. Neither could I recall any Christmas when he had put up any decorations. As far as I could remember he'd never pinned up a paper chain in his life.

Imagine my surprise when I got through the front door and found the house festooned with tinsel and a large tree covered in strings of flashing lights, almost blocking the entrance to the front room.

"I'm sorry about all this, Jennie. Cicely loves Christmas. I wanted to surprise her."

"Well, you've certainly surprised me, Scrooge. This isn't like you, you tight-fisted old bugger. When's she getting here? Oh, God, she's not here already is she?" I panicked.

"No, she's not coming till Christmas Day. She's going to cook. I've bought all the stuff."

I took off my mac and scarf and hung them on the coat rack. I peered inside the gloom of the larder. Cicely had sent Dad a shopping list in advance and apart from a few technical errors like buying tinned peas and carrots he had managed his trip to the butcher's and the greengrocer's quite well. I lifted the top of the meat safe. The chicken looked a bit on the small side but I said nothing.

On Christmas morning Dad started his nervous hopping around quite early. When he came in to wake me with a cup of tea at about half past seven I could sense immediately that it was not going to be the most relaxing of days. Anticipating my early morning wake-up call, I had placed his present beneath my bed. I leant over and pulled it out.

"Happy Christmas, hypocrite. I've got you something that the Africans don't need."

He pulled it out of the wrapping paper. It was a thick green jumper with a mountain scene embroidered on the front. A snow-capped range stood out above a bright blue lake. In the foreground two green mallards sat rather awkwardly amidst some unusually mauve rushes. I'd got it in a sale on the men's outfitters by the cathedral, before I'd left uni. No one could accuse me of not being tasteful. Anyway, it would keep him warm.

Dad went and got what he had bought me, an unwrapped copy of the Portuguese dictionary published by Porto Editora. These were like gold dust. I didn't mind that it was second hand. On the fly leaf, written in beautiful copper plate, was a loving dedication. 'Ao meu grande amor, Nalgorio Bettencourt Matos'. Beneath the inscription was written, 'Christine, Toronto, 1962'.

Dad said, "It's the best there is although I have to say that it's rubbish on reflexives. Cicely found it in a bookshop in Canada while she was over there for a conference." I put the book down.

It was a long wait until ten o'clock when Cicely was due to arrive. I busied myself, making the fire and laying the table. When I ran out of things to do I sat and leafed through the new dictionary and wondered what somebody with such a strange old fashioned and comical name like Nalgorio was doing in Canada, why he had needed a purely Portuguese dictionary and why he had relinquished it so soon after Christine had given it to him.

When Cicely finally drew up in the jag, I watched from the shadows at the back of the lounge as she opened the driver's door and rose gracefully from the plush leather seat. She was immaculately dressed as usual, sporting a Harrod's skirt suit in grey flecked wool. The jacket was straight cut with no collar and fastened with large flat mica buttons. The skirt was a snug fit and was tied around loosely with an ornamental belt of the same material. The simple and elegant ensemble was topped off with three strings of pearls worn in the style of a choker, highlighting the delicacy of her long, slim neck. I reminded myself that this was Dad's life, and if he truly wanted to be in the company of this haute couture harlot then so be it. I would bite my tongue and make an effort with the bloody woman. I fought down my feelings of being invaded although I really didn't want to share him, especially for Christmas Day, and it was extremely hard to suppress my resentment of her presence. I thought that it was appropriate to give them some space and when she rang the front door bell I went out to the coal cellar to fill the scuttle and pick up some logs from the wood pile. Also, in this way, I could avoid the emetic spectacle of them kissing.

While I was scrabbling about outside I got to thinking. What was puzzling about this particular romance was that it was perfectly obvious that Dad, however much I loved him, wasn't in her league. He may have been her equal intellectually, but he had the dress sense of a scarecrow, the manners of a mental defective and the appearance of a short-sighted middle aged man who was beginning to lose his hair.

I left them alone together for a few minutes to make sure that any demonstrations of affection were well and truly over before I returned to the living room and placed the coal scuttle on the hearth. Cicely was already seated by the fire.

"Ah, Janie dear, how lovely to see you. Your father was just showing me his fascinating device for listening to the radio in Brazil. It's so clever of him."

"Yes, it's good isn't it?" I agreed. It was patently obvious that she didn't mean a word of it. I privately thought it was a monstrosity, but I was damned if I was going to say anything derogatory or slighting about Dad in her presence. If he had said that the World was flat I would have backed him to the hilt.

She insisted on doing all the cooking herself and I was relieved to lose myself in the telly. Frankie Howerd was visiting sick children at Great Ormond Street Hospital. When Dad came into the lounge at a quarter to one and announced that dinner was ready, I tore myself away from the Flintstones and we all sat down to the Christmas dinner that Cicely had prepared. Her cooking was much better than Mum's but I wasn't going to admit that either. Anyway, even with the garlic and mushrooms she'd brought up from London, it was only a chicken. Even I could have cooked a chicken.

Conversation was little stilted during the meal. In those days, whenever there was a lapse in the discussion, the talk very often turned to the war. Cicely was determined to impress. She leant forward in a conspiratorial manner and whispered that she'd worked for BP during the war. She obviously thought that this was a fabulous piece of disclosure but I ignored it because I didn't want her to think that she was the slightest bit interesting. Besides, who wanted to talk about fuel logistics for the army? Necessary but dull. She wasn't easily put off though. She seemed determined to impress and so we had to listen to an account of her subsequent career. After the war she had gone to medical school and then she'd trained as a psychiatrist.

"I got a job at The Tavistock Clinic or The Tavvy as everyone used to call it. I've always been fascinated by the human mind. I remember that just after the war had started I bought a copy of the Pelican edition of 'The Psychopathology of Everyday Life' and it seemed to explain a lot about how people ticked. Everybody was reading it but I loved it. The Tavvy was intent upon making psychoanalysis available to as many people as possible. It was all Freud this and Freud that. You know. The boy wants to kill his father and marry his mother. The girl is in love with her father. All very well until it gets out of check."

As I failed to rise to this provocation, Cicely decided to up the ante.

"Once I was qualified I got a job at the Professorial Unit. Don't get taken in by the name, mind you. When it's all said and done it's nothing more than a fancy term for another psychiatric ward with more staff. I don't suppose I was very much older than you, Janie. The prof used to do a lot of deep sleep therapy as a way of getting some of the more anxious patients to have ECT. They didn't get into a flap worrying about the shocks if you first put them into a state of prolonged unconsciousness. I had a friend who was a junior doctor in Medicine and she worked all the hours that God sent, sometimes a hundred a week. On the odd weekend she got off you would have thought that she would've gone out like a light. But it wasn't like that. The work had ruined her sleep pattern and in her free time she could only manage to doze fitfully. So I came up with the bright idea of using the prof's method for getting her off to sleep. On her weekends off we both tried the therapy for ourselves. After we'd had a couple of drinks early on the Friday evening we'd down a quantity of sleepers and be spark out till late Sunday afternoon when we would come round slowly and then get up for a couple of chasers down at the Red Lion. Well, that was the theory. And it worked most times. We stopped doing it the weekend that we both slept from Friday night to Monday lunchtime and wet the bed. It was of course, ridiculously dangerous. There were cases in which people never woke up at all. Their hearts just stopped."

This was evidently an attempt to ingratiate herself with me: she too knew what it was like to be a young and crazy student. I told her I'd joined the Guild of Women Readers. Dad looked at her sideways.

After dinner we put on the radio and listened to the Queen's Message. Cicely informed us that as Her Majesty was six months pregnant she didn't wish to do her usual spot on the old goggle box. Dad made a face and looked out of the window. He placed The Royal Family in the same bracket as Christmas. I presumed that he was putting up with it for the sake of true love.

Meanwhile, I took the liberty of opening Cicely's second bottle of Chablis. As Dad only had one small glass and Cicely was being careful, as later on she was driving back to her sister's in Lincoln, I was the one who was doing all the drinking. When the Queen got to the bit about peace and goodwill to all men only being achievable through determination and concerted effort, I knew exactly what she meant.

After the broadcast Cicely turned to me and said, "I have been so interested in that little book that the pair of you brought back from Spain. Your father has been so kind translating it for me. It's been a labour of love. I've written something on the basis of it, the publisher has already seen it and is very keen to go ahead as soon as possible. He wants it on the shelves by Easter. Cunqueiro's slim volume, The School of Medicine Men, will appear unabridged, as an annex to my analysis of Folk Medicine in Europe. I believe your father has translated it phenomenally well and that part of the book only needs proof reading and then it can sent straight off to Godley and Godley to join the rest of the text.

I was clearly having difficulty in coming across as deferential and polite and this was probably her last effort at dragging me aboard. I felt that the alcohol was beginning to loosen my tongue. Just as I was on the verge of withdrawing my approbation for their absurd affair, Dad asked me if I would help by looking at his translation.

"Would you proof read it for me, Jennie? You know how I like to be spot on."

How could I refuse?

Chapter Thirty One

The day after Boxing Day I took the train to West Kirby. Mum knew I was coming but I thought I would surprise her nevertheless. I had decided to arrive earlier than she expected. I caught a train which was due to arrive about noon.

I was hoping that Mum hadn't found out yet. I wondered how she would take it when she did discover he had another woman. Not that it was her business any more than it was mine. She was the one who had walked out. Logically, she had to accept the consequences of her actions. However, I was pretty sure that resignation would not be her response. Whatever she said, she wasn't over him yet. Even if she never wanted to see him again she'd still be cross with him for not trying harder to win her back. She would see his latest behaviour as an act of treachery but, as it was extremely unlikely that he wouldn't be there when she did find out, she wouldn't be able to let him have a piece of her mind. Knowing Mum, if she couldn't have a go at Dad, she would go into a huff. She could sulk for Wales. I had a sudden vision of a great Olympic arena constructed somewhere near Port Talbot full of silent middle-aged women with a face on, all sat around tight-mouthed, with eyes averted and arms folded. Maybe it could be a new category in the National Eisteddfod. I saw the prizes being announced. On the podium, all pretence at self righteous suffering at an end, there would be pure unmasked fury, the three winners standing angrily together, the silver and bronze medallists snarling at the undeserving champion, the gold medal winner.

If Mum hadn't found out yet I certainly wasn't going to be the one to bring it up.

The train journey to West Kirby was long and involved. There were several changes, and there was much waiting around for connections. It gave me plenty of time to think. On the way to Liverpool I rummaged in my bag and found the A4 envelope that contained Dad's translation. I looked through it. It was expertly done. It just needed a few additions. I thought that it would have been more balanced of Don Álvaro to have included a few wise women, some curandeiras, amongst his barefoot practitioners. I felt that it was only right to redress the balance of the sexes. My attendance at the Guild of Women Readers may have been desultory but it had been sufficient to heighten my feminist sensibilities. To my first invention I awarded a complete chapter of her own:

"Lorenza of Abaria was the owner of a large rabbit warren. Every Saturday in the season she would bundle up the pelts of a thousand coneys and drive them to the market in Lugo, a journey of several leagues.

As was her custom, she always equipped the cart with a generous number of bales of hay so that by the end of the night, when she had whiled away her profits on wine, she could snuggle down safely in the back of the wagon and snore all the way to the village, towed along home by Gumersindo, her unruffled and patient percheron, a beast familiar with his mistress's much practised habits.

The thing that surprised the horse on this particular Saturday night was that Lorenza returned to the haywain stone cold sober, not wishing to drink for fear of forgetting any detail of what she had witnessed that evening during a performance at the municipal theatre where she had paid a perra gorda to see a stage demonstration of hypnotism by a travelling doctor who had learnt the secrets of the power of suggestion during a voyage of discovery to the Indian sub continent.

During the spectacle various people were invited up on to the stage where they were induced to manifest skills they were hitherto unaware that they possessed. One roughly dressed labourer was told by the good doctor that he could speak fluent French and much to the amazement of the crowd the man promptly began a learned speech in that very tongue. One woman was made to remember the day of her first birthday and yet another was put into a trance while the lights in the auditorium were dimmed and she was instructed to place her hand in the flame of a candle. Not only did she not flinch for the full thirty seconds that she held her palm in the burning heat of the naked flame, but afterwards when the lighting was restored, she showed the outcome of her ordeal to the audience and all present bore solemn witness to the fact that her hand had been totally unblemished by the event.

Lorenza was fully convinced of the authenticity of the demonstration and believed that the doctor's confidence, assertiveness and good eye contact were the keys to taking effective command of the subject's mind. As a metaphysical discipline, hypnotism was clearly in a class above all others. It exceeded the results of the laying on of hands and dwarfed the achievements of fortune telling in all its many guises, be they cartomancy, palmistry or tasseography, or indeed of any of the manifold representations of the art of clairvoyance.

Lorenza sat in her kitchen all night considering what she should do. By dawn she knew that she could emulate what she had seen the night before. Not only would the afflicted of all the surrounding parishes benefit from her curative endeavours but her success in treating their mental disorders would bring her such fortune and fame that her own life would be changed forever by her newfound skill. She began her services for free. She cured stammers, sleeplessness and envy. She even freed a fellow from his fear of the fox or the NowIgetyou as he is oft known thereabouts.

Once her healing credentials were established she began to charge for her help according to a sliding scale of psychological severity. For the cure of minor ailments like bed wetting or fear of the dark she would ask only a perra chica, whereas for the elimination of more serious and socially embarrassing complaints such as stuttering or involuntary swearing she would oft times demand a duro.

Lorenza of Abaria became greatly celebrated in the city of Lugo. She established her own consulting rooms in the main square and it was not long before she was invited into the much coveted membership of the exclusive Círculo de las Artes."

And so it continued in the same anachronistic vein.

My second penning was that of Cecilia of Stives whom I introduced into the chapter on Borrallo of Lagoa as his wife. Cecilia gave advice on the various difficulties of married love. She dealt with the practical issues of contraception, her most effective prophylactic being a bowl of broth prepared from fresh cow dung and raw ground parsnip. Taken before intercourse it was a wonder in preventing unwanted pregnancies. She also treated problems of erectile dysfunction in all male animals from boars to men.

My creations didn't quite have Cunqueiro's folksy and conversational style nor the same endearingly fractured appearance on the page but, if I could convince a bored sub editor who wasn't paying full attention to the integrity of the text that it had already been proof read, I figured that I stood a reasonable chance of getting the amended script into print. In case his suspicions were aroused I took the precaution of removing Dad's covering letter and replacing it with a note explaining that the enclosed text was ready to be typeset. As the train drew into West Kirby station I just had time to add an utterly illegible signature.

Chapter Thirty Two

At a shop near the station I bought a bunch of chrysanths before walking the half mile or so to Victoria Drive. When I turned the corner I was pleased that my grandparent's car was nowhere to be seen. This meant that I had a much better chance of sneaking in without being spotted. I pushed open the wooden gate and stole silently down the path which led to the back garden. As I crossed the small patch of lawn behind the house I could see that luckily Mum was sitting at the dining room table with her back to the window. Lampshade was sprawled out on the sofa, deaf to the world, his gigantic bits lolling on the green terylene cover Gran had fitted to the settee to prevent stains. On the table in front of Mum was the big old Grundig reel-to-reel tape recorder, the same one she had used to record those thirteen-minute episodes of Frenchman's Creek in her belated and unsuccessful attempt to inculcate some romance in Dad. Through the glass it was impossible to make out what was playing. Whatever it was, it seemed to be loud enough to disguise the squeak made by the hinges on the door to the back kitchen. Grandad persistently refused to oil them as he said they were better than a burglar alarm. (Not if you are listening to a tape recorder, Grandad.) Once I was in the kitchen I tiptoed across the sticky lino and inched open the door to the dining room. As I did so I was startled by a loud German voice.

"Was ist los?"

"What's the matter?" the voice insisted in English as if I hadn't understood.

Mum was sitting with her head in her hands, leaning over the tape recorder. She didn't speak. She didn't look up. She hadn't heard me.

"Ich muss die Blumen in Wasser stellen. Ich bin gleich wieder da."

Once again, the hidden presence repeated in the same didactic fashion, "I must put the flowers in water. I'll be right back."

At first I thought Mum was convulsed with laughter but then I realised that she was sobbing, tears as big as rain drops splashing on to the plastic spools as they revolved.

"Möchten Sie auch einen Kaffee?"

"Do you fancy a coffee?"

"Ja, warum denn nicht?"

She suddenly looked up and I was horrified to see how miserable she looked. Her eyes were red, her face was all blotchy and her nose was running.

"Und schau mal, Heidi, was für schöne Blumen mir Herr Leipzig gebracht hat."

"Look, Heidi, what lovely flowers Herr Leipzig has given me."

I reached over her shoulder and turned it off.

"I'll never learn this fucking language. I fucking hate it. I fucking hate it. It's shit. All shit."

To say I was taken aback would have been an understatement. To hear my mother swear was as likely a thing as finding out that Dad was opening a school of charm and deportment. Still, I was pleased. It was better than sulking.

"Mum, this isn't like you. What ever is the matter? "

"Larry rang to say 'how sad' he was that Dad and I were no longer together. He told me all about Dad's new girlfriend. How she'd called in at the university the week the programme came from Harrogate, how she'd arrived looking like a French pop star."

"Oh, that's just Larry's wishful thinking. You know what an empty-headed francophile he is."

"No, he wasn't making it up, Jennie. He has an eye for detail. He remembers everything. And I remember what he said because it all seemed so specific. He said she was wearing a black, proofed-cotton, poplin jacket probably made by Spectator Sports. And she wore it over a pair of matching Daks trousers. I could never understand how Larry always had such an accurate eye for female attire. Then he went on about how Joan had gone scuttling off to find Dad for her, and how he'd watched them all as they'd sat in the Modern Languages Common Room and how she'd 'got chatting with Ernst Weber from German' and very soon they were all jabbering away in German because she's such a proficient German speaker and how Dad's kudos had gone sky high as a result, because the German Department normally looks down on the chaps from the Romance languages but now here he was almost one of them. Apparently she'd just flashed her pretty little eyes, said Guten Morgen and they suddenly got over their quiet disdain. And the irony was that when Larry rang I was sat here just as I am now, hunched over my bloody teach yourself German tape because I've got a friend from Dusseldorf called Evie who works on the international switchboard and wants me to go skiing with her in Austria in March."

"I never knew you could ski."

"I can't. She's going to teach me. She goes with her family every year. She's going to lend me all the clothes and everything. I couldn't afford to do it otherwise. It's a great adventure but there's still something in my head about Dad that I can't let go and when I hear all these stories I just know that she's leading him up the garden path, and I know I ought to let him learn the lesson the hard way and I am trying not to ring him up. Not that he'd ever listen to me."

There was a pause while she collected herself and dried her eyes.

"I've wanted to go skiing all my life but Dad always poured scorn on the idea. He used to say that it was ridiculous to spend hundreds of pounds just to slide downhill on two bits of metal strapped to your feet, all so that afterwards you could stand around and eat runny cheese in the company of a bunch of hooray bloody henries. You know what he's like about sport and the upper classes."

"How the hell did Larry get your number?"

Chapter Thirty Three

I had forgotten that once upon a time when I was much younger, Dad and Larry had been friends. Perhaps it would be better to say that they were fellow misfits. Dad was ten years older than Larry and came from a vastly different social background, but these characteristics apart, the two men had a number of things in common: they both started as junior lecturers at the same time; neither of them had what you might call friends; and both had been neglected by francophone mothers.

In 1920 Larry's mother, Yvette, had come from Clermont Ferrand to study at Queen Mary College in London where she had met Edwin Strange, the heir to a considerable estate in Hertfordshire. They married the summer that they graduated, the reception being a very grand affair in the grounds of the main house, just outside Hemel.

Lawrence Strange, the only issue of Edwin and Yvette, was born in 1930 and given the middle name of Oliver in memory of his maternal grandfather. Lawrence's early years were spent under the supervision of a series of indolent tutors and ill-chosen nurses who had little sympathy for such a small and weepy child. At the age of eight Lawrence was sent away to board at Cashbourne, a minor public school in a remote village in the wilds of Somerset, somewhere off the road from Bridgwater to Minehead. During term time his parents were alone, save for the presence of the dogs, two black Labradors of whom they always made such a great fuss. Indeed, so attached were they to the creatures that whenever the boy returned home for the holidays there was an uncomfortable period of readjustment that lasted for several days during which he was variously addressed as Lawrence, Kim or Sabre.

The accepted theory of how boarding benefits a boy states that for the first few weeks of his internment he undergoes a short sharp crisis of separation, but then quickly learns to rely upon himself and develops what is known as character. If he is lucky his acquisition of character will help him to become a leader of men, a sort of being much more readily produced by the private rather than the State sector of the educational system.

The metaphor of the swimming bath is much invoked. The boy is thrown into the deep end where he must learn quickly that he has to swim if he is not to disappear beneath the surface and drown. So it is that he is forced to rapidly overcome the shock of being plunged into the freezing pool. He soon splutters to the surface and learns to tread water or paddle quickly like a dog. Within a few weeks and after a decent spell of practice he can make a passable attempt at propelling himself along without the need for outside assistance.

The sad truth is that not all boarders care to learn this skill and Lawrence was one of the significant minority who could not see the merit in learning the swimming lesson. Lawrence felt that he had already been steeped in cold water for as long as he could recall and he had developed an alternative strategy for dealing with the chill consequences of immersion in a hostile medium.

Lawrence's father had attended Cashbourne just as his father had done before him. When Edwin was there, before the First World War, it was a great place for the Humanities and he assured Yvette that the school would encourage Lawrence's natural bilingualism. However, the boy's arrival at the school coincided with a major remodelling of the curriculum in which the Arts ceded their sovereignty to Science. The school's four houses were rechristened with the names of contemporary physicists. Rubens, Michelangelo, Brueghel and Turner became Albert Einstein, Max Planck, William Rontgen and Ernest Rutherford. Lawrence found himself allocated to the latter.

In tune with the new scientific orientation of the school, all boys had to write their initials in the top left-hand corner of their exercise books and, followed by a dash, the initials of their house. This was an invention of the headmaster, a device to give the appearance of a classification or taxonomic inscription, the hallmarks of the scientific approach. The fact that Lawrence was obliged to write LOS-ER on his books was immediately noticed by all the other boys and his pejorative nickname was fixed for the next ten years.

Because of his predisposition to bleat he was also known as Larry the Lamb, the name of the protagonist of 'Toytown', the new BBC radio series for small children. One of the character's self-effacing catch phrases, which he used whenever he had misconstrued an idea or lacked the physical wherewithal to complete some challenging task, was a tremulous, "But I'm only a little lamb". By this utterance of mock humility he would encourage the assistance of the more bluff members of the cast, such as his friend Dennis the Dachshund, Ernest the policeman or even the august Mr Mayor. Whenever Lawrence failed in a lesson, a similarly plaintiff little whine would echo around the classroom.

Lawrence's life at Cashbourne was a lonely affair and it was only made bearable by his mental withdrawal into a fantasy world in which he regarded himself as a French prisoner of war. To lend verisimilitude to his fancy he began to systematically subvert his English syntax and from time to time he would casually incorporate literal translations of French tenses in order to make himself sound more convincing. On the phone he would say, "Thank you for having called," or with a rising intonation he might ask, "I can leave a message?" In the refectory he might use the same questioning style: "The pudding was good?" When he was asked to help another child who was in some sort of difficulty, he would enquire, "What is it that you have done?" When he spoke about his family he would make utterances such as, "My parents are departed this morning", "I must go to see my father" or "We lived at Besançon during three years". Instead of congratulations he would exclaim, "felicitations". He feigned tiredness just so he could say, "I am fatigued". At his most absurd he would utter, "I am descended from the bus". He longed to be found interesting but his efforts often made him sound more archaic and affected rather than exotic and endearing, and as a result he was usually treated with contempt.

He sought solace in French literature and even without the encouragement of school he still excelled in his chosen subject.

He left Cashbourne in 1948 to do his National Service and at the end of these two hateful years he gladly took himself off to the Sorbonne where, for the duration of his stay, he cultivated the image of an Englishman abroad, a looking-glass inversion of his previous Gallic masquerade. He may have claimed to deplore the fashionable French philosophy of existentialism as the most unappealing of mental outlooks but there was no question that his soul was imbued with many of its heathen tenets. Its emphasis on the liberty of the human being to invent and reinvent himself free of any God-given constraints suited his personality down to the ground.

When he arrived at his first lecturing post he met Con, the other new boy in the Department. They were initially drawn together by default. They had no other friends. And, of course, they shared one or two superficial similarities.

Now that the significance of his ovine nickname was well behind him, Lawrence was happy to try reinventing himself as Larry, a devil-may-care Frenchie with a penchant for classic cars. Try, of course, means fail.

When Larry was unable to impress with his style, he fell back on the universal technique of the damaged little person who attempts to make others look bad in order to make himself look better. It was in this frame of mind that he'd used the number in his little black book to ring Mum and sound off-hand about what he knew of Dad's romantic activities. In the course of a ten minute phone call he'd managed to give an outline of the petite and talented woman with whom Dad was 'knocking around'. It turned out that not only was she a top-flight psychiatrist, a broadcaster and researcher into the imprecations of rural life but also she was a talented German speaker who shared the Beat the Brains platform with Con.

Larry's phone call had very effectively reduced her to tears and I had to remind her of what he was like: "Mum, have you forgotten? He's not nice. He really is a spiteful little toe rag. The best thing is to have nothing to do with him. Everyone ignores him these days."

Eventually she realised that she had taken Larry's revelations far too seriously. I determined to cheer her up and by the time I left West Kirby, three days into the New Year, she was feeling a lot better. We filled our time by going out and escaping from Idris and Mervyn.

We went to the pictures to see 'Billy Liar'. Mum so rarely went out that she was easily amused. She hooted with laughter all the way through Billy's chaotic escapes from reality and then cried her eyes out at the sad ending. She said Tom Courtney looked good enough to eat. I thought that this was a good omen and on the strength of it I suggested that we should go out to a cafe for lunch the following day. That's what we did. Over a nicely done plate of liver and onions we chatted about how my course was going. Then Mum said how much she was looking forward to her skiing holiday with Evie and her family. We hardly mentioned Dad and Cicely. Mum limited herself to saying, "What goes around, comes around," a favourite remark of hers. To me it always seemed like a sigh, a prayer or just a simple belief that fate would inevitably intervene and humble those who had brought suffering unto others.

I didn't believe in fate. On the way to the station I dropped my proofreading into the post box, addressed to the Editor, Godley and Godley, Charing Cross Road, London.

Chapter Thirty Four

The Spring Term passed uneventfully until the Monday morning of the last week of February when I suddenly remembered that I had not found the time to read the article which was to be the subject of that evening's discussion at the GWR. An envelope containing a wodge of cyclostyled paper had arrived in my pigeon hole a few days earlier, courtesy of Paula Stebbings, a fourth year medical student, a tall, bespectacled and serious girl who took her responsibility to the group very seriously indeed. As photocopying was an expensive business she had eschewed all worry about copyright and gone to the trouble of retyping the article on a stencil and run off a dozen or so copies on the old Gestetner in the basement of the student union. These she had personally delivered to each of the members of the group so they would have several days in which to digest her unorthodox contribution to their weekly celebration of contemporary women's writing. The fact that Julia had gone to so much trouble made me feel even more guilty about my neglect of the group and I felt impelled to knuckle down there and then and read the article without any more ado. Then I realised that I was late for a seminar on the History of Spanish Linguistics in which we would all be marked for the relevance and accuracy of our intellectual offerings. I determined that I would definitely read the article as soon as this was over. But when I returned from the seminar I became embroiled in a dispute over whose turn it was to answer the phone on our corridor and I forgot about the contents of the envelope until I grabbed it at five to seven and raced to Julia's flat in the Old Town. I arrived a few minutes late, sweating from the run and panting for breath. Everybody else was already in place in the living room and there was nowhere left to sit so I was forced to squat down just inside the door. Nobody offered to move up as they were all tired of my last minute arrivals and what they no doubt considered was my general lack of commitment to the group. Paula was just beginning her introduction but she paused theatrically while I settled down and did what I could to get comfortable in the cramped conditions.

I wasn't really listening as Paula started to speak. Surreptitiously, I glanced around the room and wondered if this was the last session I would attend. Then, like a bolt from the blue, I caught the name Cicely Rodding and redirected all my attention to Paula's talk. So violently did I look up that I expected all heads to turn my way to investigate the cause of my sudden agitation, but my brisk movement had attracted little attention. I fished inside my envelope and pulled out the slightly smudged, blue ink contents. The article came from the British Journal of Primitive Medicine and was entitled 'The Early Twentieth Century Practitioners of Folk Remedies in North West Spain'. It described the discovery of a book that Dr Rodding had made the previous year and included two of Cunqueiro's short chapters in translation; the one that dealt with the unusual psychotherapeutic skills practised by Borrallo and the account of the hypnotherapeutic talents of Lorenza de Abaria.

I examined the article. Nowhere was there any acknowledgement of any translator or of Dad's role in bringing the book to light.

For a moment I was so incensed by the scale of Cicely's fraudulent behaviour that I temporarily forgot about my own. Only when my initial outrage had abated was it possible to concentrate on what Paula was saying. Paula had just taken her psychiatry module and was disillusioned by what passed for therapy in the Victorian institution where she had spent six weeks witnessing what she thought looked less like treatment and more like torture. When a fellow student showed her the refreshing article by Prof Rodding she noted that the treatment offered by the practitioners in their rural backwater was not only far more humane but also infinitely more effective than the standard responses to depression that were meted out to patients in the mental hospital; a diet of valium for those who knew how to behave quietly, straightjackets for those clawed at their own skin and a course of six electric shocks to the head when all else failed.

Paula was impressed by the extent of Cicely's research and Jennie heard her saying, "You have to admire this work which includes Prof Rodding's masterful translation of a little known local author who has diligently documented the work of unqualified but talented therapists who obey age old countryside conventions of healing in which the treatment for depression is not reduced to a simple ten minute consultation followed by a prescription for a bottle of pills. These healers do not give ten minute appointments; they work alongside their patients for days if necessary. When Borrallo treated Listeiro he took him walking every evening. The pair of them covered several leagues at a time, and if night fell while they were on their way back home they would either put up at an inn or sleep the night in a hayrick."

I too remembered being impressed about the way Borrallo had conjured up a vision of those who sink into states of terminal depression. Perhaps this was how my grandmother had wasted away. I recalled Dad translating the sentence as we sat outside that cafe last summer, in the Plaza de la Universidad in Santiago: the sentence that Borrallo had spoken, that Cunqueiro had written down, that Dad had translated, that Cicely had appropriated and that had now been pronounced by Paula:

"They are people who grow sad, weak, tired, lose interest in food and lie dying in a corner, silent and scorned, their skin the colour of wax, complaining from time to time of a cold spot which roams around their body, sometimes in the chest, other times in the spine."

It was then that Paula came on to the bit about Borrallo's wife, Cecilia de Stives, and how wonderful were this couple of self-taught peasant doctors who practised their techniques in a largely barter society and who were paid for their work not in money but in kind; how Cecilia worked patiently to restore the potency of a local farmer and received a big fat goose as a reward; what a wonderful example of the symmetry of nature it was that the two dwarves that she had treated for infertility should pay her in free range eggs; and how it restored one's faith in human nature that the Borrallos had organised a sponsored goat riding marathon to help raise money for the treatment of the case they couldn't solve themselves, that of the little boy whose leg had been badly chewed during a school trip to the crocodile farm on the outskirts of Orense.

Paula was also full of praise for Lorenza of Abaria, whom she described as another valiant and spirited autodidact who had brought to the smallholders and market gardeners in her neighbourhood a sophisticated psychology service far superior to that which was enjoyed by even the most privileged patients of the British National Health Service.

At the end of her talk she was pleased to announce that the article was only a taster, an excerpt from the book which Professor Rodding was due to publish at Easter and which would include an entire translation of Cunqueiro's vignettes, accompanied by an introduction by RD Laing, characterising the depression of the self as a logical response to the ontological insecurity engendered by a crisis only understandable via an existential phenomenological analysis.

At this point I must have let out a little squeal, as everyone had turned to stare at me.

"Excuse me," I said in a tiny voice.

Gillian spoke, "Have you got something to say, Jennie?"

"Yes, I mean no"

"You do do Spanish don't you? I would have thought this sort of stuff would be right up your street."

"I have to go," was all I could say.

I stood up and fumbled for the way out. As I closed the front door behind me I heard somebody say, "Don't bother coming back".

As I arrived at the hall of residence and passed the porter's lodge I encountered the tutor in residence, Dr Snell. He was evidently not in a good mood. He looked pale and irritable, and his frown deepened when he caught sight of me. He dispensed with pleasantries and addressed me somewhat bluntly: "You shouldn't have left the building; you were rostered to answer the phone. It's been ringing all evening and no one could find you anywhere."

In fact it was ringing at that moment and I was grateful for the opportunity to go and answer it and thus excuse myself from the officious and unpleasant attentions of Dr Snell. As luck would have it, Dad was on the other end, wanting to know how things were going.

I turned my back on the horrible Dr Snell. "I'm fine, Dad. How are you? How's the lovely Cicely."

"I was going to tell you about that. I'm afraid that we broke up a couple of weeks after you came to see me at Christmas. She said that she was sorry but she didn't think we were compatible."

"Dad, I never thought you were. She's a self-serving witch and she's been using you to add another title to her list of the Sensitive Woman's Guides to the Planet. You might not have noticed but I've never liked her and when you gave me the proofs to read I decided that the medicine men needed a few female companions so, in a fit of pique, I made some up and wrote them into the translation. Everybody says they can't tell your handwriting from mine."

"You did what?" The revelation left Con appalled.

Chapter Thirty Five

Cicely's book was duly published as part of Godley and Godley's 'Future Classics' series, but the five thousand copies of the initial print run had to be returned to the distributors and pulped when the Spanish company who owned the rights to the original work complained of serious anomalies in the translation and threatened to sue for defamation unless the book was withdrawn from sale. In London some of the books had already reached the shelves and a number of copies were sold before they could be recalled. Over the years these publishing oddities have become collectors' items and nowadays none remain in the public domain although the occasional copy will sometimes surface at auction.

As no translator was ever credited by Cicely, no contract for the translation was ever signed and no money ever changed hands, it was not possible to hold anyone other than her responsible for the mistakes and additions to the text when it was rendered into English. Cicely was reduced to issuing a heartfelt apology, pleading that she had been monstrously let down by an anonymous and now untraceable Spanish translator. She couldn't admit now that Conan had actually done the work as that would have brought her own duplicity to light.

If everything had gone to Cicely's plan and Conan had complained that it was he who had found the book and rendered it into English, Cicely had been prepared to dismiss his allegations as the hysterical outburst of a jealous and rejected lover.

The subsequent small scale controversy surrounding the bastardised translation was short lived and never reached beyond the world of university research. It remained a discreet academic and publishing scandal, although it was a big enough row in linguistic circles to reach the ears of Larry Strange. When he got wind of the debacle he wasted no time in writing to Godley and Godley pointing to Dad as the putative translator. Naturally he did so reluctantly, revealing the name of his close colleague only inasmuch as this might help to salvage the reputation of a wonderful woman who was not only a ground-breaking anthropologist and a radio celebrity whose informed opinions brought so much enjoyment to her many listeners, but also a gifted psychiatrist whose sensitive treatment had returned so many unhappy people to a life of sound mental health. He felt impelled to speak up on her behalf.

As a result of Larry's display of integrity Dad promptly received a stiff letter from the publisher's solicitors asking for his comments on a matter that had cost the company several thousands of pounds. It was lucky it was still the Easter vac and I was at home. Dad showed me the letter and I told him to keep his mouth shut. This wasn't the moment for him to demonstrate his inbuilt desire for plain speaking, his contempt for dishonesty or his attitude of stand up and be counted. If it had been Dad who had meddled with the translation, however unthinkable that prospect was, I know he would have admitted his responsibility in his usual ingenuous fashion. Even now, although he was innocent, he was still tempted to say something which would implicate us both. It was only because his loyalty to me overrode his natural candour that he agreed to make no comment.

Seeing how he had reacted to the situation I decided to protect Dad from the knowledge of Cicely's subsequent fate, just in case he was overcome by an unnecessary desire to make a belated confession.

The unmasking of Cicely may not have caused a big public furore but it certainly sparked a commotion in her own career. Not surprisingly, the members of the editorial advisory board of the British Journal of Primitive Medicine were alarmed by having to print a retraction of her discredited article and they decided to launch a discreet investigation into the authenticity of the dozen or so of Cicely's articles that they had already published. As a result of their careful examination they were embarrassed to discover that over the previous ten years they had been taken in by a string of Cicely's plagiarisms, omissions and underhand methods.

The most distressing of these involved an article they had published in 1959 which Cicely had ironically entitled 'The Primitive Power of Confession'. The article was based upon the uncontroversial premiss that encouraging people to own up to their bad behaviour was an invaluable part of the repertoire of the primitive therapist. As a way of instancing her theory, she claimed to have conducted, over a period of several months, a survey into the mental well-being of Roman Catholics, choosing a sample of those who had just emerged from the confessional booth of an anonymous English church. She said that her subjects had been very willing to reply to her questions; they had voluntarily repeated to her their moral and religious trespasses and told her of the psychological relief they had obtained as a result of this baring of the soul. For obvious reasons she could not reveal the name of the church.

Immediately after publication the Catholic Church had expressed its outrage to the Journal and demanded to know where this offence against their religion had been committed. The editor would not be drawn and refused to reveal the identity of the place although he knew it full well to be none other than Westminster Cathedral. He argued that to reveal this confidential information would not only breach the trust of those who had voluntarily participated in the survey but would also seriously damage the reputation of the Journal as a reputable scientific publication. Yes, he agreed, some of the confessions were frankly shocking, but then it was in the nature of science to make some shocking discoveries. He was not going to have his professional judgement doubted by a bunch of standpat reactionary bishops. Surely he didn't have to remind the Primate of the obstructionist history of the Catholic Church in matters of science. He admitted that the scientific methodology of the survey was unusual but it was sufficiently impartial to be published. He stood up for his principles.

But five years later, when the investigating team from the Journal could find nobody in the congregation who had ever participated in this survey, let alone spoken to Cicely, they were dumbfounded. Only when the Bishop got wind of what was happening and ordered the confessional booths to be scoured, did they discover above one of the grilles, a hidden microphone that Cicely had neglected to remove. She had recorded the conversations that the penitents had had with the priest.

When questioned, some of the Cathedral clergy were able to recall the time that they had noticed an unfamiliar and elegantly dressed woman in her mid thirties who wore a headscarf and sat with her head bowed at the rear of the nave, scribbling notes into a small black book. Cicely had sat there for the best part of a week, listening through an earpiece and noting the age, sex and appearance of the repentant sinners as they emerged from their sessions of contrition.

When the extent of her artifice was revealed she was summoned to appear before the General Medical Council. They issued her with a warning that she had extensively contravened the guidelines laid down by the Standards and Ethics Committee and behaved in a grossly unprofessional manner. They stopped short of striking her off.

The producers of Beat the Brains were less forgiving and Cicely was not invited to take part in a further series.

Of course, I felt thoroughly vindicated by all this. I didn't care about Cicely's plight. Despite my sneaking admiration for the cavalier way in which she dealt with the Catholic Church, she got what she deserved. If you mess with my father you mess with me. And that was the end of that. Or at least I thought so.

Chapter Thirty Six

It was a fortnight into the Summer Term that Joan rang and left me a message to call her back as soon as possible. The call had been taken by Sandra, one of the girls on my corridor. She had the most illegible handwriting that I had ever seen and I could only partly decipher what she had written. Something to do with Dad. I hadn't spoken to him since I'd been back at Uni. I guess I still felt a little bit guilty about putting him in the difficult position of having to keep quiet about the discrepancies between Cunqueiro's original and the version that went to print. But why was Joan ringing? I hoped he was alright. I rang her back and got Kathy and the blast of her north-east accent.

"Ola, Spanish. Can I help you, por favor, pet?" In consonance with the Department's belief that the over use of Spanish might lead to misunderstandings it was thought sensible to hire a monolingual English secretary. That way everybody knew where they stood. Kathy however liked to inject a little local colour into her opening remarks whenever she answered the phone. When this encouraged Spanish speakers to talk to her in their native language it led to more confusion than ever, thus confirming the departmental belief that English, however imperfect, was always the preferable option.

"Kathy, it's Jennie, Conan Burke's daughter. Joan asked me to ring her urgently."

"Oh, yeah, he's been arrested."

"What for, for God's sake?!"

"Oh, I don't know what for. The police said he had been found out but Joan said that she didn't believe he'd do such a thing. Yeah, that's it. Something to do with being found out."

"Found out about what?"

"I dunno really. She'll be back soon. She's on an errand for the prof. Shall I ask her to ring you when she gets back?"

I sat and waited by the phone for twenty minutes. When it finally rang it was a man for Sandra. I said I was sorry I couldn't understand what he was saying and hung up. Shortly afterwards Joan rang.

"Joan, what's going on?"

The relief in Joan's voice was overwhelming. "Oh, Jenny, I'm so glad you've rung. Conan's been arrested and he has been at the police station overnight. Apparently, they've been asked to detain him so that someone from London can come up to interview him today. The police won't tell me anything. You're his next of kin. They've got to tell you. Listen, I know it's no consolation but this is just the latest in a whole series of things that have been going wrong. It's been chaos in Languages for weeks. Rodolfo has been behaving even more like a supercilious prat, Barry Building has been off for almost a month and they can't find anyone to take his History of the Revolution classes so Professor Sigorski has had to step in and Larry's been extremely strange over in French. You're coming up, aren't you?" The question was rhetorical and she ploughed on in her agitated but relieved fashion. "Well, you can stay with me when you get here. It doesn't matter what time of the day or night it is. You know where I live." I was taken aback by her generosity and concern and I said I would call her when I got there but, although I didn't say it, I had no real intention of imposing on her. I would be fine in the house on my own.

I caught the first train back home that afternoon. It didn't arrive until midnight and by the time I got to the police station the desk sergeant said that it was too late to see Dad. He added that he had been allowed to have a solicitor with him when he was questioned that afternoon. He looked at his note pad and said it had been a Mr Hardwick, and I should be well advised to have a word with him as soon as possible. I told him not to be so bloody condescending and demanded to see Dad straight away. I refused to leave until they let me. Eventually, in the face of my intransigence, I was told I could have a quick word with him but I was warned that I could not tell anyone of what we discussed. I was shown into an interview room and Dad was brought in by a burly policeman who remained in the room for the short while we were able to talk. Dad looked dreadful, all red-eyed and irritable as if he hadn't slept.

"Christ, Dad, this is a bit much for a little forgery. I'm so sorry. I never thought it would end up like this."

"Jennie, I wish it had something to do with that, but I don't think it has." Dad had been trying to work it out but had become confused and kept going on about the fact that he hadn't done it. The police doctor had given him some sedatives and he seemed groggy and confused. I didn't want to make him any worse in the short time we had together. Despite my desire to know what had happened, I had the presence of mind not to bombard him with questions. I simply told him not to worry and I would be back in the morning when I would sort it all out. On my way out the desk sergeant was once again his tight-lipped and unhelpful self. I told him I would report his unhelpful attitude to his superior officer. I stormed off and walked the two miles home.

When I got to our house I was amazed to discover that the house was cordoned off and a policeman was standing guard outside the front door.

"What the hell's going on?" I demanded. "I live here."

"I'm sorry young lady, but I can't allow you to go in. The property has to be searched in the morning and no one can go in there until they've finished. I do apologise, but I'm not permitted to discuss the matter any further. Is there nobody you could stay with tonight?"

I was beginning to think I was going mad. No wonder Dad was looking so agitated. I needed answers badly. I remembered Joan's strange and unexpected invitation to ring her at any time. There was a phone box half a mile away. It was two thirty in the morning.

Her husband, the Physics professor came to pick me up from the phone box. I'd never met him before. "This is a dreadful business. I'm so sorry for you and your father. Neither of us has any idea of what's happening but you're very welcome to stay for as long as it takes." And so it went on. For all her sympathy, Joan really didn't have the faintest idea of what it was all about despite Kathy's assertion that she "didn't believe he'd do such a thing". Nevertheless, Joan was kindness itself and she made me a cup of tea and a sandwich. Eventually, when I had recovered from the shock of what had happened she showed me to the spare room.

Chapter Thirty Seven

I slept poorly in Joan's spare room and I had vivid dreams of an enormous book falling out of the sky and flattening the city of Leeds. I woke tired and confused. I had that sensation of insecurity and unreality that you get after only two hours sleep. At eight thirty I rang the solicitor's, Hardwick and Quinn. The receptionist gave me an appointment for ten o'clock and I set off as soon as I put down the phone. By a quarter past nine I was sitting in the waiting room. I sprang at Mr Hardwick as he arrived at the office. He presumed I was au fait with the situation.

"You're Conan Burke's daughter, right? Pleased to meet you. Now the first thing is to keep it as quiet as possible for the sake of your old man. It's bound to get out sooner or later but I think the hoo-ha can be delayed if the papers don't get wind of it straight away."

I was beginning to reel. "What do you mean, the hoo-ha?"

"You know, the public outcry, the blasted papers."

"Will you just bloody tell me what he is supposed to have done, for Christ's sake!"

"Oh, you don't know?"

"Would I be asking you if I did?"

"I'm sorry. Your father is being questioned by MI5 about his relationship with Dr Building. It seems that Dr Building has been arrested and charged with treason. He doesn't appear to be on a par with the other Cantabs like Philby, Blunt, Burgess or Maclean but he has been an important go-between. Furthermore, the intelligence service suspects that Conan may have been an accomplice of Dr Building." I sat stunned, trying to take it all in as Mr Hardwick explained.

It appeared that over a period of ten years Barry Building had been taking a series of holidays on the Bay of Biscay. He had a regular summer let in the village of Laredo near Santander and every year he spent part of the long vacation on the coast of Old Castile, venturing inland to visit the cities of Burgos, Oviedo and León, or driving as far as Navarre in order to participate in the San Fermines of Pamplona where, every day for a week, he would join the multitudes of younger men, fuelled with alcohol from the night before, as they made their early morning dash through the narrow, winding, cobbled streets of the old town, risking their lives in the insane and often lethal activity of running at full pelt in front of six fighting bulls weighing up to three quarters of a ton apiece. Asked why he did it, he would reply that he was often dismayed by the languor of university life and he would not be able to teach if he didn't have the exhilaration of running a few risks elsewhere.

Nobody ever suspected that he also got his kicks by spying. Politically, he appeared squeaky clean. Of course he went to Moscow frequently in the course of his job but every trip was dull, transparently academic and he never aroused any suspicion. But that innocence was just an act. In reality he led a secret life as a courier of stolen documents that revealed vital details of British national security. Every year he would deliver these to his contact from behind the Iron Curtain, meeting him not in Russia but in a succession of northern Spanish cities. Only last August, when his controller was accidentally uncovered by the French Service de Documentation Exterieure et de Contrespionnage and they started the painstaking process of backtracking his movements in Spain, did they eventually discover exactly who it was that he had been meeting in Bilbao.

Not only had Barry been acting as a courier but his work regularly took him back to his old haunts in Cambridge where he was in a very good position to identify highly gifted students with communist sympathies who might not be unreceptive to approaches from agents of Russian intelligence. He handed over their names and their contact details at the same time as he gave away the documents.

I asked Hardwick why it was that the police should think Dad was involved. No sooner than the words were out of my mouth I knew the answer. From what the solicitor told me and from what I knew of Larry I put the story together.

Larry had a nose for trouble and when he heard that Barry was off work because he was ill, he juxtaposed this information with his memory of the Barry he had seen running around the athletics track the day before his disappearance. He came to the conclusion that there was something strange about the story of a man who had been in such rude health right up to the point where he was suddenly laid so low that for three weeks he had been completely unable to communicate with the outside world.

Larry had decided he should investigate. Armed with a get well card and a bunch of flowers just in case his suspicions proved to be unfounded, he went round to Barry's flat where he was confronted by an uncommunicative member of the constabulary who was stationed at the front door.

Larry retired back to the university and wondered what to do. He knew that the person to ask for further information would be Kathy. She was always fully aware of whatever gossip was going around in Languages. When she told him she had been sworn to secrecy and nothing would make her part with what she had heard from her friend Vanessa in Russian, Larry immediately resorted to bribery and she blurted out everything she knew for the tidy sum of ten pounds, exactly the price that she and her boyfriend would have to pay for a weekend at Butlins in Filey. Larry considered that what she told him was worth every last penny and in a state of high excitement he rushed off to put his newfound knowledge to good use. He did his civic duty and went straight to the police station with his inside information.

In the atmosphere of political paranoia that obtained at the apogee of the Cold War when university dons were the proven links to the Soviet Bloc, Larry's claims were taken seriously and he was given an appointment with MI5 officers who made another special journey up from the capital to listen to what he had to say. He started by telling them that he knew Dad had been thrown out of Spain in 1962 for inciting a student revolt in Bilbao and he explained that, for a long while, he had been troubled by Dad's furtive association with Barry, to whom he now invariably referred to as Dr Building. He knew from a slip that Conan had made in casual conversation in the bar of Senate House that the two of them had seen each other in Bilbao while Dad was supposedly researching for his PhD. He also knew that Bilbao had been on our itinerary last year when we stopped there on our first night in Spain.

On the basis of this flimsy circumstantial evidence Larry had invented a career for Dad as a collaborator of Dr Building, aiding and abetting him in all aspects of espionage: copying secret documents on to microfiche, smuggling small arms aboard cross-channel ferries and keeping radio contact with their handler in Leningrad and their communist allies in Spain. If the police were to search his house they would find there the communications equipment that he used to receive his instructions from abroad.

He explained that the image Conan Burke liked to cultivate of himself as a high-minded loner was a mere masquerade. The real reason why he kept himself to himself and made a deliberate effort to appear aloof was to prevent anyone getting close enough to suspect that he might have underhand dealings with foreign agents. His only permitted friend and ally in Britain was his daughter, a poor girl who was oblivious of her father's double dealing. Conan used her cynically in his attempt to disguise his recent trip to Bilbao as part of a family holiday to Spain. Conan Burke had a discreet but active association with a network of red sympathisers and activists in Northern Spain. Why, he asked the men from MI5, would a person have developed such a detailed and extensive knowledge of the geography of the up-country end of the Western Pyrenees unless they had journeyed extensively in this heartland of anti Franco sentiment? The truth was that Conan Burke was a clever communist agitator in the pay of the Russians, an undercover Marxist-Leninist infiltrator who had been paid by the Soviet government to reignite the smouldering embers of proletarian Spain, to rekindle the flames that had burnt so brightly during the Spanish Civil War, when the revolution had been set alight by the blazing oratory of local Bolsheviks in the 1930s. He was nothing less than a covert successor to figures such as Dolores Ibárruri, La Pasionaria, the woman who had harangued her noble countrymen with inflammatory speeches and filled their heads with Stalinist nonsense.

Larry had a good memory and he recalled the moment he had met me in the bookshop in the summer. There was nothing fortuitous about his reference to Dolores Ibárruri. When our house was searched, on Dad's desk in the radio room at 5 Acacia Avenue, there was an open copy of her blueprint for communist world order, The Only Way, the book I'd bought Dad for his birthday. It was found held open at page ten by a cold cup of tea which had left a circular brown stain on the paper.

Larry explained further that Dolores was now in exile, championing the cause of world communism and living in the USSR. Only three years ago she had been invested Doctor Honoris Causa in Historical Sciences by Moscow State University. He pointed out that Conan Burke had listened avidly to all her speeches as they were broadcast over the airwaves from behind the Iron Curtain by Radio España Independiente.

If Dad had really listened to those speeches he would have heard the one in which she had implored the world to put pressure on Franco to spare the life of the communist party official whose ghastly execution John Gates had described as he tried to dissuade me from visiting Spain the previous year.

Unfortunately for Larry he had no contacts that he could reveal and he recklessly threw in the only name he could find, that of Carlos Goicochea the supervisor who figured on the flyleaf of Dad's PhD thesis. He hoped he could get away such a wild assertion by tempering the rest of his diatribe with a measure of critical thinking. This way, anything could be made to sound more plausible and intriguing. So he qualified his remarks about communism in Spain by sensibly recognising that a large proportion of the Basque people had little time for revolutionary left wing politics. He acknowledged that the separatist culture that endured in rural Ávala, Vizcaya and Guipuzcoa was a nationalism built upon their ethnic differences with the rest of the country.

But, as he pointed out, Basque culture also contained a strong Catholic element and it was Conan's education in this religion and his recondite biblical knowledge that made him trusted by the ordinary people of the region and gained him entry into their hearts and minds. According to Larry, he was not the simple, unsophisticated character as he liked to paint himself but a despicable satanic traitor who was using the word of God to legitimise his call for a fresh Communist uprising in Spain; his only miserable ambition was to serve as an apparatchik of the Soviet system and help to undermine the foundations of western civilisation.

So it was that Dad was brought in for questioning.

Larry worked on the principle that if you threw enough mud some of it was bound to stick. As soon as he had made his initial statement to the police he made an anonymous phone call to the press and by the weekend the affair was headline news in all the Sundays. Several front pages had juxtaposed photos of our house and Barry's. One paper used the caption, "They look like ordinary homes". Another went with, "Has Con conned us all?"

Newspapers were more circumspect in those days. They didn't trade in quite the wild and unsubstantiated accusations that you now see every day. The tabloids didn't rely solely on studied imbecility. There was however no shortage of damning innuendo and careless inaccuracy in their reporting.

In one newspaper there was a picture of a white coated investigator leaving our front door with Dad's frame aerial over his shoulder. Beneath this was the caption, 'Home Office investigators remove transmitting equipment for analysis'. The Herald had hunted around for photos of Dad but had found very few. In the end they voiced their frustration by reusing the snap of the Beat the Brains team in which Dad appeared at the end of the line looking distant and detached and ran the caption, 'Why didn't he like his picture taken?'

The papers were beginning to build up the story as a successor to the Profumo affair, although the cases didn't really have much in common. This latest university spy ring didn't have any prostitution and the Profumo affair didn't have any spying: 'The Pros and Cons' as one of the Dailies characterised the two scandals.

Chapter Thirty Eight

Dad's trial by media lasted a week. Then, as suddenly as it began, it was called off. Dad was released from custody without being charged. He had no case to answer.

This time Larry had overstepped the mark. MI5 did not believe his exaggerations and his purple prose. They dismissed the sworn statement of Lawrence Oliver Strange partly because Barry made a full confession as soon as he was told that Dad had also been detained. It then became abundantly clear that he had acted alone and Dad's coincidental journeys to the Basque country had nothing to do with spying. Barry admitted that he was in Bilbao when Dad was there but he made no secret of the fact that the two of them had only met by chance. He told them that the Conan he knew was instinctively non reverential but he was no communist. Not even a fellow traveller. Conan straightforwardly believed that the validity of any idea should be judged on its merit, not upon the authority with which it was imposed. If he had any political beliefs they were unformulated in his head. His was simply an untutored naive belief in things being right or wrong. Neither could he see the value of any local sentiment such as Basque nationalism. That, of course, was what had maddened Carlos.

As far as the student demonstration was concerned, Dad had been nowhere near it. On the day that the trouble erupted he was having lunch on his own in a restaurant at the other end of town, tucking into a plate of squid in its own ink. In a piece of characteristically solitary research he was sampling all of the many local fish dishes, one by one. He had been upbraided by a university colleague for spouting the names of fish without being able to say how they tasted and he had decided to take the criticism on the chin and learn not only the species indigenous to the Basque region but also the many ways in which they might be prepared. For the past month he had been to the same restaurant every day and he was systematically trying everything on the menu, working his way down from the top to the bottom, from almejas to zamburiñas, eating up every last morsel of whatever he was served and leaving nothing on the plate.

Dad's expulsion from Spain two years ago had been a result of a trumped-up charge and nothing more than a minor reprisal by the State authorities against the university Languages Faculty which it saw as a subversive influence and a nest of Basque nationalism. When Larry was questioned about this he tried to point out that the fact that Conan Burke was nowhere near the trouble when it broke out was part of his masterful deceit; he had orchestrated the movement and then melted into the background.

But that didn't wash. Now it was Larry's turn to be arrested and he was charged with wasting police time, attempting to pervert the cause of justice, false accusation and endangering national security by deliberately providing wrong information.

Larry had become increasingly disturbed throughout the course of the investigation. He hadn't ever contemplated the madness of what he was doing. He was so swept along by his singular hatred of my father that he had begun to believe his own lies. It didn't dawn on him until he was taken into custody himself that he would probably be imprisoned for making his rash allegations. When he suddenly realised what was happening it was too late.

When he had to appear in the magistrate's court, surrender his passport and be given bail he was suddenly engulfed by the horror of the prospect of being incarcerated for several years. The thought of jail brought back all his unhappy memories of childhood. But he wasn't at school any longer and he wouldn't be let off with a show of derision from the other boys or a warning from the headmaster. In the heightened anxiety of a world that took spying very seriously indeed, Larry was convinced he was going to be locked up. In prison there would be more catcalling, more isolation and more tears. Only now it would be worse. He would be an easy target for all sorts of violence and abuse. He imagined warders looking the other way while a succession of malefactors and sadists used him as a punch bag on which to vent their pent-up feelings of aggression. There might be worse, more unspeakable things. He couldn't face being a loser again. And this time he wouldn't have the freedom to defend himself by pretending to be someone whom he was not.

Larry went home from court with the date for his next appearance set for October. In desperation he turned to his only love. He shut himself inside his hermetically sealed garage and turned the starting handle of his 1920s Delage GS. With one effortless revolution of the crank, the perfectly maintained engine burst into life. For the last time Larry climbed into the driving seat and waited for the garage to fill with fumes. There was enough petrol in the tank to keep the car ticking over for several days.

But Larry had few visitors and the vehicle had run out of fuel long before his body was discovered by a post office van driver the following Saturday morning. He was found slumped forward over the steering wheel. The postman had spotted him as he was peering through the dimpled glass of the garage window looking for someone to sign for the parcel which contained the brand new tailpipe that Larry had ordered to cure the leak that he had recently detected in the exhaust.

Dad was profoundly distressed by the events of that week. Peculiarly, what he found most difficult to bear was not Larry's death nor his own incarceration and interrogation, but the fact that he seemed to have been found guilty by the press of a crime that he hadn't committed. As he had been so tortured by my treacherous interference in his translation you can imagine how intense must have been his sense of hurt and outrage when his own integrity was questioned and he was accused of being a spy.

Barry was duly charged with treason and remanded for trial. He was held at the far end of the country, in the very jail you could see from the window of my hall of residence. When he was convicted at the Old Bailey he was sent back to the same prison to serve a further twelve years. We therefore became neighbours for the rest of my undergraduate career at Hampshire University. Of course, Barry couldn't pop round to see me but I made a point of visiting him from time to time. He was always glad to see me. I had always liked him and I was grateful for the way he had helped expedite Dad from custody. Occasionally I would take him something to read. I gave him my prized copy of Cicely's book, a gift from one criminal to another. Mum had picked it up for me on her way to her skiing holiday with Evie. She'd gone into Foyle's on Charing Cross Road and bought a copy on the morning it came out, on Friday 13th March, only fifteen minutes before the remaining copies were taken off the shelf.

We never heard any more from the lawyers of Godley and Godley. Without a direct admission of guilt there was no proof of who had meddled with the text. The matter was dropped and no revised version of the book was ever made, the publishers being unwilling to throw good money after bad or to risk further unforeseen allegations of fakery.

Álvaro Cunqueiro passed away in 1981 and he had to wait until fifteen years after his death before Merlin and Family finally found its way into English, by which time it seemed quaint and out of place, a fifties fairy tale or a nostalgic lament for a little country long ago lost in a far away corner of Spain.

Anyway, Dad and I liked the Medicine Men the best.
