Meeting Milligan

A younger debonair Milligan

The frail figure clutching a blanket around him emerged from the house blinking, and crept towards me. A pink face surmounted by sparse grey hair looked like a deflated balloon. He held something delicately in his right hand, cupping it.

I’d driven across the Tramuntuna mountain range in north-eastern Majorca, from Fornalutx, where I lived, to Pollensa, where Spike Milligan and his wife Sheila often summered. He had described C’an Tatoli, where I was now standing by the pool, as a  “paradise of silence…..”

Not the night before. There had been one of those storms that sweeps in from the north, across the Mediterranean, knocking over pine trees and ripping terracotta tiles from rooves. The wind that accompanies such a storm shares the name of the mountain range, tramuntana. As I  point out later, all the winds that  shriek across the island are named.

So violent had been the wind and the storm that before I left that morning, the friend who had brokered  this interview with Spike, Pauline Scudamore, his biographer, rang to tell me to expect that he might not be up to seeing me. The storm had disturbed his sleep and he was extremely fragile. He was, after all,  71 years old and had suffered, since the second world war, from manic depression.

Pauline met me when I arrived and asked me to wait by the pool, which I did, for quite some time, with increasing trepidation. If he decided he was too frail, I would have to drive back across the mountains, without my story and worse, without having met my hero. The irony of meeting the creator of the quintessentially English characters, Eccles, Moriarty, Min and Henry, Bluebottle  and Major Bloodnok on an island in the Mediterranean had not been lost on me.

I’d first heard The Goon Show at the age of eleven,  in the old Double Bay Sailing Club, a ramshackle boatshed on Double Bay beach. After the Sunday race, we’d huddle around the steam radio, still in our wet sailing clothes and laugh maniacally at the surreal idiocy of the Goon Show. I still love it, but then, in the anodyne age of Menzies, it was a whack across the cerebellum, it seemed, somehow, subversive to be listening. Later, I bracketed Milligan with Charlie Parker as the two who broke the mould after that war that wreaked so much havoc on the world and on Terence Alan Patrick Seán Milligan KBE.

He held out the cupped right hand and said something to me in so soft a voice that I had to lean forward and ask him to repeat it. “I saved it” he said and opened his hand. In it was a beetle, dripping wet but still  moving. “It was in the pool and would have drowned, but I scooped it up and saved it”. He crept over to the garden, laid it gently in a flower plot, and turned back to me. “Would you like a cup of tea?”

We went on to talk for three hours, three of the most exhilarating hours of my life. I’d been warned, by Pauline, not to ask him  about the Goon Show – but you could no sooner meet Milligan and not talk about the Goon Show than meet Nixon and not talk about Watergate or  John Cleese and not mention Fawlty Towers. Talk about the environment, she said, and indeed, that was how we started – but we ended with the Goons.

During that three hours he transformed from a fragile deflated old man of  71 who looked like the next puff of wind might blow him over to a vigorous artist in full flight, in full control of his comic genius. It was as if he had been pumped, with a bicycle pump, full of life again.

I think it was partly because I was Australian. “My Mum lives in Woy Woy you know.” I did. He called it Woy –  a town twinned with Woy, and God’s Waiting Room. Yet he did much for Woy Woy, and they responded by naming a bridge that spans Woy Woy Bay Inlet the Spike Milligan Bridge – a decision that was the subject of a fight amongst the councillors which would have made Spike gleeful.

We went on to speak of over-population, the spread of mankind over the earth as ‘the human plague’, who was greener, Jesus or Buddha (Spike opted for Buddha), humour and, finally, I broached the topic of the Goons – at his suggestion.

He spoke of the genesis of Bluebottle. “… a boy scout. This tall thin chap turned up with a ginger beard and knobbly knees to see Sellers. He said (Bluebottle voice) Hello Mr Sellers, can you go out for tea. Sellers thought – I don’t believe this. And I met him afterwards. Eccles and Bluebottle became friends.”

I asked him about Grytpype-Thynne. “He’s one of those johnnies (Grytpype-Thynne voice ) Parkinson the politician. Jeffrey Archer. One of those.”

And finally, I asked him what he would teach my two year old daughter about the world she’s growing up in. “Oh, only have one child. And tell her the reason for it. Give her a sense of the divine, a sense of beauty, a sense of love, a sense of wonder. Never hit her; otherwise she’ll think that violence is justice. And that wonderful free commodity love – bestow that upon her. And don’t smoke in front of her.”

Well we did have another child.  Shamefully, I did hit my first child (and the second one), but I also love them both dearly – and I did give up smoking. As for the divine, that, Spike, is hard to bestow.

 

Returning to the Scene of our Times #2

Over the intervening 25 years, I’d been back, alone, several times, for short periods, never longer than a week. And leaving was always a wrench. But this time, and late last year, De and I returned to the valley and stayed for ten days.

We stayed, not in Fornalutx (and upon reflection were relieved we hadn’t) but in a comfortable apartment in the heart of Soller, with views down to the torrente – which runs through the town, fed by the melting snow off the Tramuntana. In times past, the torrente ran thick with garbage and discarded household goods. I once rode an old mattress with a friend down to the Port one winter when it was raging. But today’s Soller has acquired civic pride, and the torrente outside our window was alive with noisy ducks of many varieties, which we fed daily with stale bread.

The craggy peaks of the Tramuntana, with dark green vegetation scrambling up their sides above the olive groves, were also visible from the window of our apartment, as they are from practically every building in town, a reassuring reminder of the human scale of the town.

We were there in early November, which means, in a small town with a large tourist population in season, that many restaurants were closed. But this suited us. We had a well-stocked kitchen and we knew where to go to stock the larder. To the deli in Calle Luna, still run by Pep, who taught me about Jamón so many years ago. It’s the gastronomic centre of town, selling the best sobrasada, a raw pork sausage cured with pimentón, which holds a similar status on the island to Vegemite in Australia, except that it is an artisanal and not an industrial product: the finest cheeses from the island and further afield; a wonderful selection of local wines and much more to please the palates of two Australian gastronauts.

I recall years ago when I first noticed the scungy looking legs of jamón on the carving rack. Pep offered me a slice. I’d never tasted anything like it. He told me the price, even then something like $150 a kilogram. I blanched. He said, ‘Señor, who eats a kilogram of ham?” I bought 100 grams. This time, we visited daily for wine and other delicacies.

I loved that Pep was still there, his shop was still there. Coming from a city where food is dictated by fashion and fad, I love that I can return here in 5,10 years time and know that I will always be able to get the dishes I love and remember. In a Spain currently obsessed with what the author and journalist Xavier Domingo called ‘the scourge of creative cuisine’ on the island of Mallorca the time-honoured dominates.

We also renewed our acquaintance with the butcher in the market, another Pep who still made wonderful sausages and sells scrawny, flavoursome chickens. It was winter, and although the vegetable stalls were limited, wild mushrooms were abundant. We ate well at home.

I have always had a thing about the little pies they call empanadas de guisantes or sometimes empanadas de xixols, a local word for peas. Having tried them from several bakers in Soller, I’ve chosen this one from a a little baker behind the cathedral, Forn de Can Frau, as the best. Moist, crusty pastry. Now you know.

We had come to the island after 15 days on the mainland, mainly in Andalusia, and had eaten there both well and very badly ­–­ the worst meal the most expensive. But the very best meal we had was in Palma at Celler Sa Premsa which has been there since 1958. I first ate there in the early 1970s. This time I had as a main what I would have had then. How do I know? I have it every time. Lechona, baked suckling pig, with perfect crackling and moist, sweet meat. To start, plump preserved white asparagus on a large plate with a large handful of pimientos de pardon, and a dollop of allioli.

Another memorable meal was the pamboli at S’Hostal in Montiuri. What’s pamboli? Literally bread (pa) and (amb) oil (oli). Another Mallorquin culinary cultural touchstone. When first we lived in Fornalutx, a young girl from the village took to visiting us, ostensibly to practice her English, but always at lunch time. Lunches were a feast of leftovers from the fridge, cheese, olives, left over meat, left over dishes, fruit…everything. After a few meals like this she said to us “you eat something different every day for lunch,” We replied “yes, what do you eat?” “Pamboli” she replied.

We had our pamboli at S’Hostal with a friend from those days, Tomás Graves and his wife Carmen. Tomás’ book Bread and Oil examines every principal ingredient, and all the ways that pamboli can be embellished: with seasonal vegetables, cheese, jamón and other embutidos (cured meats). Tomás, along with his late brother Juan and others, had a rock and roll band, the Pamboli Band. We couldn’t have had better companions for this meal in this small town in the centre of the island, known everywhere for its – pamboli.

During our first stay on the island, a plan was announced to build a tunnel through the Tramuntana to open up the Soller Valley to Palma. This plan was vehemently opposed by many in the valley, including me

At the time, to get to the valley was not easy. You could come by boat to the port, or drive the coast road through Deía, a precarious journey skirting precipitous drops to the sea, or drive over the mountain, an equally precarious and difficult road involving some sixty switchbacks. Or you could catch the small and very slow train from Palma.

These natural barriers meant that you really had to want to go to Soller and the villages of the northwest, as you really had to want to go to Shangri La. And while it was not the mysterious place described in Lost Horizon, Soller was a haven, a bubble cocooned from the outside world.

In August of1 990, the second year of our migration to Mallorca, the talk of war with Iraq was on every front page.

I recorded in my diary a conversation at that time.

“They say the war will start tomorrow.”

“Oh really? (pause) I wonder if you can buy soy sauce in Soller?”

The inaccessibility of the valley added to the unreality of such a thing as the invasion of Iraq although, in reality, Iraq was not that far (and the war didn’t start until January 1991). We worried, those of us against the tunnel, el tunel, that when finished it would burst that bubble.

The tunnel was built, but the bubble remains intact. Whether that is a good or a bad thing, I’ll leave to one side. But it does go some way to explaining the way we immediately sank back into life in Soller. It took only two days. We wanted to stay. It was as if we had never left.

Yes, the streets and the villages were filled with the ghosts of dead friends. And yes sometimes the changes were overwhelming ­ – there was yet another tunnel on what had been the old road to the Port – but in essence it was the place that we had grown to love 25 years ago. Let me leave you with one story.

We were walking through Soller one day, past the railway station. ­There’s a lovely old train to Soller which is priced out of reach unless you’re a resident or a wealthy tourist, it used to be much cheaper. The extra money earned has been spent on upgrading the station and adding an art gallery. That day, there was an exhibition of Miró graphics and Picasso ceramics. In a railway station.

To go back to that question, can you go back? In our case, most definitely yes. But would we want to live there again? Alas, no. You can only migrate once. But we will most certainly go back as often as we can. It is still in our hearts.

 

Returning to the Scene of our Times 1

(The clearest map I could find is, not surprisingly, in German. They’re taking over)

The question is, can you go back? If you’ve had a sublime experience somewhere, what happens when you return? This is how it was for us.

In 1989, my wife of three years, our daughter of eighteen months and I migrated to the island of Mallorca. Migrated. That’s how we saw it. We weren’t running away, we were deliberately turning our backs on what we saw as a dull and bland country.

There were other reasons, but I won’t go into them here. Enough to say that we were over the country of our birth, and I persuaded De (my wife) that a fresh start in the country with which I’d conducted a long term love affair (and many short term love affairs) was our best bet for a future. She didn’t need much persuading. She too had fallen in love with Spain, the island of Mallorca and the house I’d bought there long before we were married when I took her there for our honeymoon.

The island of Mallorca is much maligned. In England it is a joke. Somewhere to go to take a holiday from the bad English weather, to lie on the beach and drink too much every night. To arrive home sunburnt and not quite knowing where you’ve been. I’m pretty sure that many English tourists don’t even know that it’s a part of Spain.

But to damn the entire island for that would be like damning Queensland because of the Gold Coast. There is much more. Take our little corner, the northwest, the largest town there, Soller (pronounced Sol-yeah).

‘We’ll go to Soller — Papa always says it is the finest place on earth,’ said a child character in Loup Durand’s novel Daddy. Those who know it well wouldn’t argue.

The little city of Soller could have been used to illustrate the assertion by historian Fernand Braudel that ‘the Mediterranean is a …sea ringed by mountains.’ Those mountains certainly shaped Soller and the Soller Valley by guaranteeing insulation from the rest of the world. Soller and its port, before the advent of buses and trucks, before the tunnel, offered the easiest access to the markets of southern France for the produce of the Soller Valley, mainly oranges, olives and olive oil. Little ships would cross from the port to Marseilles, and with them generations of Sollerenses (as the natives are called) with two results. One, there were and are many families from the valley in Southern France, many in the produce trade, and two, French is the second language — after Mallorquin — of many Sollerenses.

And above Soller, the village where once we owned a house, Fornalutx, a village of some 400 inhabitants which swells to at least twice that in the summer. A cosy blanket of a village with its mix of nationalities, still predominantly Mallorquin, but with an increasing number of Germans and a small handful, when we lived there, of Australians, English, Swedes and Spaniards from the mainland: a very different lot from the locals.

The honey–coloured stone cottages of Fornalutx – some of them, like the one I bought, 700 years old – tumble down the hillside which leads eventually to the Tramuntana, the mountain range that forms the north western spine of the Island whose peaks are covered in snow in Winter. So hilly is it that there is still work for a man with a donkey to lug building materials up the steep paths no mechanical workhorse can handle.

Two crops still dominate the valley, oranges and olives. The orange groves lower down on the valley floor, the olives growing up and down the hillsides, planted on dry stone terraces, a feat of man-made engineering (they encircle the island) often compared to the pyramids. Their construction points to them having been built by Arab and Berber settlers in the tenth century.

So there we were, fresh from the cutthroat world of advertising (literally in my case, cutthroat I mean) and the ‘open all hours everything on tap’ life of a big city plonked, after considerable difficulty with customs, in my funny old house in a tiny village on a mountainside, with a wife who didn’t speak the language and an infant daughter who had been ripped from her home. What could possibly go wrong? Well, over time, everything. ‘ I Pity the poor immigrant’, wrote Dylan, ‘Who wishes he would’ve stayed home’ he added. Eventually, we didn’t.

It took six months to adjust. Six months during which there were tears, fights, and a real danger of the marriage breaking down. I don’t know about the experiences of other migrants, but I would assume not much different. And we had it a lot easier. We weren’t entirely stranded. I had friends I had made over the years. There were other English speakers, and I had some Spanish. Gradually, we settled into what we (De and I) agree were the best three and a half years of our lives. Curiously, our daughter Laura who was four and a half when we left, and who was fluent in Spanish and Mallorquin by then, remembers virtually nothing of that time.

Even my own memories are vague and selective. I remember people, I remember incidents, but as I read through my old diaries, I am surprised by how much of what were obviously important events and people with whom I was close I have completely forgotten. Entries like ‘Gerald to dinner. Religious waffle.’ Who was Gerald? What religious waffle?

But also, reading through those diaries, I’m reminded of the intensity, richness and variety of our lives. There, as here, the life of a writer is essentially sitting all day in front of a machine, and squeezing words and sentences and chapters and stories from the brain. But there, surrounding the hours spent at the machine we fostered deep and abiding friendships with people we could never have met in Australia (the poet Paul Roche, the illustrator Paul Hogarth, the painter George Sheridan among many), were intertwined with our community in ways in which I certainly never had been in Sydney. When it was all over I realised that we had spent a good twenty per cent of our time working for that community in various ways.

But in spite of that, and tending to our almond trees and planting a flourishing garden, I finished (and sold) my first novel and began and almost finished a second (also later sold). We left, not because we wanted to but because we had to. With heavy hearts.