Rose for Winter Read Online Free Page B

gin?’ he’d say. ‘Loads of it aboard. You sell it, and we’ll go fifty-fifty. Have to hit the old man on the head though. He keeps the key, the sot.’
    A girl would lead me to another corner. ‘You don’t know what I’ve been through,’ she’d whisper hoarsely. ‘He nearly pushed me overboard in the Bay. Said it was an accident, but I wouldn’t put it past him. Never did trust the swine. Wish I’d stayed in Rep.’
    From time to time there would be high words, blows, tears and sentimental reconciliations. Then the skipper, drinking rum, would embrace everyone. ‘I got the best crew in the world,’ he’d say. ‘They love me like a dad.’ Then there were nods, winks, obscure allusions, expressing a sense of shared mission, secret and dangerous. They were a shabby lot, but they all seemed to have plenty of money, to be bound on long mysterious voyages, and yet to have been stuck in the Straits for months. There was no doubt at all about it. Something more than the pure call of the sea had brought them to these waters.
    Across the bay stood rich Gibraltar. Across the Straits the free port of Tangiers. For the forbidden goods they had to offer, Spain was starved. So the yachts and fishing-boats ran to and fro on the dark nights, and Algeciras was their clearing-house. Watches, fountain-pens, nylons, cigarettes, sweets, cocoa and canned meats: here, in this town, I could buy them any day, untaxed and hot from the smugglers’ hands.
    The organization was smooth but implacable, and the right form of bribe had always to be observed. One morning, as I was dressing, I heard the crack of a rifle, and looking out of the window saw a young man spread-eagled on the pavement below. ‘A contrabandista,’ said the chambermaid, shaking out the sheets. But he was only a poor workman, a lone hand who had failed to obey the rules. So the green-cloaked policemen dumped his body in a cart and wheeled him like rubbish away.
    But in crowded Algeciras hundreds of other young men stood around in the streets all day. They were not fishermen, or labourers, and their pockets were stuffed with American cigarettes. Every morning an army of thousands – cooks and washerwomen, ostlers, dockers, roadmen, waiters, gardeners and guides – went across to Gibraltar to work. Every evening back they came, bulging like clowns with their loot. So they and their wives drank rich cocoa on cold nights, and their daughters wore stockings of silk, and the children sometimes ate chocolate. Nowhere else in Spain were these things either seen or tasted, at least not by the poor.
    Gibraltar, that juicy pear-drop of rock hanging from dry Spain’s southern tip, was captured by the British some two and a half centuries ago. Many of the original Spanish inhabitants fled to the mainland, and most of them settled in this town. Never, never did they cease to grieve their loss and shame. And yet …
    â€˜Do you know what the people of Algeciras are called?’ asked Ramón, handing me some chewing-gum. ‘Los Especiales – the favoured ones. They talk a lot about “our Gibraltar” and “the Spanish Rock”. They cry and stick out their teeth. But I’ll tell you something.’ He paused, and laid a finger along his nose. ‘They wouldn’t have it back for the world, you know. It would be the ruin of them.’

2. Choirs and Bulls – Seville
    In an afternoon of gale and storm we left Algeciras and took the motor-bus for Seville, a hundred miles to the north. Africa and the Straits had disappeared in a driving whirl of cloud and the sky was the colour of octopus ink. Our road was a bad one, narrow, cratered and steep, and it took us straight up into the Sierra de los Gazules, a dark region of craggy forests where no birds sing.
    From a distance these mountains look like a herd of driven animals, lean, diseased and beaten to the bone. Near at