Rose for Winter by Laurie Lee

Author:Laurie Lee [Lee, Laurie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781497641358
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

5. Castillo of the Sugar Canes

We had come down now to the warm south coast, to a small fishing village which I shall call Castillo – though this is not its name. Many years ago, in the summer of 1936, I had lived in this place. I was there when General Franco made his journey from Morocco and the Civil War exploded along the coast. I saw this poverty-stricken Castillo lift its head out of the smoke and clamour of those days and feed, for a brief hour, on sharp hot fantasies of a better world. I had come back now, as I knew I must one day, to see what the years had done to the town. I found it starved and humiliated, the glory gone, and the workers of the sugar fields and the sea hopeless and silent.

Castillo was once a pirate stronghold, standing on a fortress rock in the mouth of an estuary, surrounded by water and hooded by mountains. The estuary, now, was dry; the castle ruined and stuffed with graves; and the town, stripped of its pirates and Barbary jewels, depressed and desolate. The silted estuary now grew crops of sugar cane, and the ragged shore was littered with broken boats. The fishing was niggardly, and the sugar offered little more than a month’s work a year. For the rest of the time the townsfolk scavenged among the rocks or sat watching the sea and praying for miraculous shoals.

We put up at the white, square, crumbling hotel where, during my earlier visit, I had worked as porter and minstrel. The hotel was empty now and a wind of chill ghosts blew through the passages. We were offered our choice of rooms and took the best one, which had a balcony overhanging the sea. Below the windows a group of exhausted fishermen lay face downwards on the sand, sprawled out like starfish sleeping. Behind the hotel the promenade of cheap café’s, which once hummed with the talk of a world republic, now gaped at the sea with the empty eyes of beggars. The fountain was choked with refuse, goats browsed in the ornamental gardens, the sugar canes rattled like bones on the wind, and the dark-blue mountains stood close around, sharp and jagged, like a cordon of police.

A silence as of sickness hung over the place now, and I remembered Castillo as I had seen it long ago. A summer of rage and optimism, of murder and lofty hopes, when the hill-peasants and the fishermen, heirs to generations of anonymous submission, had suddenly found guns in their hands and unimaginable aspirations in their breasts. I saw them shoot the fish merchants, drive the sugar planters into the hills, barricade the mountain roads, and set up the flag of their commune over the Town Hall. ‘This flag,’ they said, ‘will be defended to the last drop of our blood.’ And so, indeed, it was. The smoke of violence and excess filled the streets in those first days. They looted the food shops, tore down the sugar factory, wrecked and burnt the Casino.

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