Ancestors behaving badly

Our ancestors fascinate me. And I don’t mean just my grandparents or great-grandparents. I mean the ancestors who moulded my native continent, Europe, and turned Spain into the place that I now call home.

Some time ago I visited the site of some Neolithic rock wall painting not far from where we live. They were seven thousand years old but still spoke to us about a life which wasn’t wholly alien to us.

Far closer to home is another place, far closer to our age. A Bronze Age settlement from just three and a half thousand years ago. There we saw no art, but the remains of a small farming community, with its water cistern, its grinding stones for grains, its oven for baking bread. 

The earlier people had been hunter-gatherers, or forages as many archaeologists seem to prefer calling them. The Bronze Age settlement belonged to farmers. That’s a huge change. Farmers have to work a hell of a sight harder, the downside of a move to an economically more enriching existence. 

But there’s also a massive psychological development that has to take place. A forager collects food to eat at once. A farmer, however, has to keep some of his harvest as seed for next year. That means that, even if hungry, farmers have to refrain from eating some of the food that’s just in front of them, so they can sow for the next harvest or to keep livestock alive. 

It’s hardly instinctive to defer the satisfaction of needs in this way. 

The other big difference between these two communities was that the painters of the rock walls were black. Their successors were white.

So, what happened between the two?

Agriculture, which so transformed life, arrived. People turned up from the Middle East, where farming had been pioneered. Some of the foragers, amazed by the newcomers’ celebrity status – the Neolithic equivalent of a New York cabby marvelling at the splendour of a Trump Tower, and probably with no better basis – decided to see whether they too couldn’t make a success of this superior way of life, and switched to farming. Agricultural communities sprung up among the foragers.

It’s likely that quite a lot of them spoke languages rather like Basque, unrelated to any other in the world today. Somehow, the two groups coexisted in what I like to think may have been peace, although all those rock paintings with their clouds of arrows and bands of foes marching towards confrontation, suggest that I’m probably being naive.

Meanwhile, far, far to the East, in a blood-chilling real-world echo of The Lord of the Rings, a dark force would soon start to build. In time, it would spell the end of these farming and foraging communities. Though, when I say ‘in time’ I mean something like a millennium or two, so it wasn’t a prospect that should have kept many of the intervening generations awake at night.

Herders living on the Steppes of southern Ukraine and Russia some 4000 kilometres away, between the Black Sea and the Caspian, were about to be introduced to some significant technological changes.

There was the horse, initially as food. Horses are cheaper to keep than cattle, because they use their hoofs to scrape away snow to get at the grass underneath and will even break ice to get at the water. Ideal for an environment with cold winters, like the Steppes.

Later, the herders learned to ride them, which meant they could herd even further into the grasslands, in bad times when fodder was scarce. What’s more, if you got fed up with herding, the nice thing about a horse is that it could get you quickly to a farming community to raid it, carrying you away quickly afterwards before the pursuit could get its act together.

After that, they learned about the wheel. And boy, were they good with it, developing the extraordinary skill you need to build a wheel out of wood, especially difficult when they switched to the spoked variety, so much lighter than solid wheels. With wagons, they could go further into the Steppes, and manage even bigger herds.

They didn’t stop at wagons, though. They also built the war chariot. In fact, they probably invented it.

What’s more, they had several good sources of metal ores, just as people were waking up to the fact that it was time for a copper age, and then a bronze age. Not only did they get immensely rich, they also got some great metal weapons, which went well with the horses and the chariots, to turn them into a terrifying force.

Reconstruction of the head of a Yamnaya man

These characters, the Yamnaya people, were relatively pale skinned. They spoke the forefather of the Indo-European languages. This blog post is written in one of its descendants. When these rich, powerful and well-armed warriors broke out of their Steppe homeland, they sent people both East (taking Indo-European into Iran and the Indian sub-continent) and West, into Europe. The whole continent now speaks languages descended from theirs, with few exceptions, such as Hungarian, Finnish and, of course, Basque.

Eventually they reached Iberia, present-day Spain and Portugal. And their impact was massive. Genetic studies show that some 40% of the DNA of today’s Iberians is from the Steppe herders. But practically 100% of male DNA is from them.

Compare this with what happened in Britain when the Angles, Saxons and Jutes showed up. Today, British men owe about 4% of their genetic material to them. Women owe nothing. So, like what happened with the Yamnaya in Spain, it was men who showed up, not couples, and they bred with the local women. But most of the locals survived.

I said ‘bred’ because we’re not talking about marriage. I can’t imagine the Yamnaya in Spain sought any kind of consent. The men were murdered or, at any rate, prevented from fathering any more kids. Instead, the invaders set to work on the women to father the race that would populate Iberia. 

That would include the inhabitants of the Bronze Age settlement near us. They probably spoke an Indo-European language, though it wouldn’t have been Spanish: that derived from the Latin which the Romans brought with them. It may well have been a Celtic language. 

Their settlement is unfortified, so their existence was probably peaceful. However, they were descended from the people who turned Spain from racially black to racially white. That probably took the form of a mass extermination. Followed by mass rape. 

It seems that even the most innocent-looking prehistoric remains can hide some much more difficult back stories.

Istalif

We drove along the course of a river, between regal lines of trees ablaze with autumnal colours. 

For my piece about my father’s experiences on the night before the D-Day landings in Normandy, I spent some time looking through some of his old photos and documents. That’s how I stumbled across his account of a day in a mountain village which had clearly marked him.

We drove along the course of a river, between regal lines of trees ablaze with autumnal colours. Vineyards stretched out on either side of the road with patches of grapes which looked like purple carpets laid out to dry in the sun. Criss-crossed irrigation ditches divided the land into neat geometrical squares and oblongs, and farmstead sheltered behind curtains of poplar and silver birch.

Well, we could be in Europe still, though you’ve probably guessed, not in England.

The last leg of the journey was along a dirt track winding upwards in a long series of hairpin bends. We approached Istalif through doorlike gaps in several massif walls and parked the Land Rover in the shade of a long line of eucalyptus on the edge of the gorge.

Right. So we’re talking about Istalif. Quite possibly not somewhere you know or have even heard of. I certainly hadn’t. So where is it? 

Helpfully, my father provided the answer: 

Istalif is in Afghanistan. It clings to a mountain flank some 35 miles north of Kabul, at almost 7000 feet… On the far side of the plain in the hazy distance, the Hindu Kush snow-capped peaks tower into the sky. On all sides as far as the eye can range, the horizon is circumscribed by mountains, rugged, arid and inhospitable.

As far I can establish, Istalif is a little closer to Kabul, the Afghan capital, than that, and not quite as high. But it seems to be a remarkable place, as his photos showed.

Istalif is topped by a mosque backed by a stately copse from which the houses tumble down in a jumble of whitewashed cubes scattered haphazardly in a pattern disciplined only by the configuration of the mountainside.

Istalif, topped by a mosque, backed by a stately copse
One of my father’s many photos from his visit

My father was struck by the way age-old crafts, long-vanished from so much of the world, were still carrying on in the village as though he was in the land “where time stands still” – the title he gave his piece about the town.

Here in the bazaar all the ancient crafts were practised. Cotton material was being hand-blocked… 

Leather was tooled into colourful shoes, camel saddles and garments. Woven split cane produced … lampshades, baskets, table mats and many other objects… Gold and silver chiselled into filigree were transformed into glittering assortments of brooches, rings, many-stranded necklaces, pendant earrings and any number of trinkets…

Istalif main street bustling with crafts

He was struck by the craft for which the village was best known, the production of is characteristic blue pottery.

Potters moulded clay into the perennial classic shapes, later to be glazed in traditional shades of blue varying from peacock to turquoise.

It felt to him as though he was witnessing a scene not from the autumn of 1961, when he was there, but from biblical times:

As I stood watching the vistas of the teeming bazaars, the men with their flowing robes, turbans and sandals, the asses bending under their loads, the supercilious camels and the shapeless dogs lying in the sun, I was reminded of an illustrated copy of the Bible I saw many years ago.

Istalif main street with supercilious camels

A lot has happened since 1961, and time certainly hasn’t stood still in Istalif. My father watched the news of the Russian wars in Afghanistan with horror, since he retained great affection for the country. But he died long before the worst disaster was inflicted on the village he’d enjoyed visiting so much. 

Serious fighting between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance of Afghanistan ravaged much of the area around Istalif, destroying crops and livestock. Then, in 1998, the Taliban occupied the town. They burned much of it and forced large numbers to flee. Lives were lost and livelihoods destroyed.

As the new millennium opened, Istalif would not have displayed the same kind of scene my father witnessed nearly four decades earlier.

People have begun slowly to return. Some trades have resumed, including the blue pottery. But once again, Afghanistan faces an uncertain future. 

American-led troops are still in Afghanistan. They join a long list of foreign forces that have tried to control the country over nearly two centuries. Back in the nineteenth century, it was Britain that tried to tame the Afghans. The British Empire believed that it carried, in Rudyard Kipling’s words, “the white man’s burden”, the duty to bring to peoples of darker complexion the benefits of civilisation only the white-skinned truly appreciated. 

Those who were to be enlightened often failed to appreciate the advantage of having the British telling them how to live, and might even fight back. Indeed, the Afghans resisted so hard that Britain sent an Army of Retribution to teach them a lesson (the lesson presumably being that no inferior people has the right to resist British invasion). Among other actions, that army sacked Istalif pretty effectively in 1842, killing rather a lot of people in the process, including civilians.

In the late twentieth century, the Russians had a go at invading Afghanistan. The Taliban then tried to impose their version of enlightenment on a population as sceptical of them as their ancestors had been of the British. Finally, the Americans are leading the way and have apparently made as much progress as the Taliban, the Russians or the British before them.

Today, the Americans want to cut their losses and get out. It’s hard not to imagine that the Taliban will sweep right back in as soon as they’re gone. And Istalif will, in all likelihood, find its slow road to recovery blocked again.

All that made reading my father’s short description poignant. He painted a picture, not of an ideal life, but at least of a peaceful and productive one. Wouldn’t it be uplifting if outsiders got the heck out of the place and let people there go on living their own lives and progressing at their own rate?

Perhaps even towards whatever version of enlightenment they feel is appropriate for them...

Grandparenting

Let me say at once that Elliott has an impeccable sense of timing.

He managed to delay his emergence into the world perfectly to share a birthday with his grandmother. That’s my wife, Danielle. He was born on the same day as she was. Just a few years apart. 

He only just pulled it off. It was twelve minutes past midnight. Thirteen minutes earlier and he’d have missed giving her that special birthday present.

You’ve got to admit that’s smart work by someone who at that stage wasn’t even a minute old.

Impeccable timing

His arrival meant that his parents would welcome some help from the grandparents.

Well, I say grandparents. I really mean grandmother. She left the very evening when he announced his arrival, the eve of her birthday, turning up at what was soon to be his home in the hills north of Madrid (after a mad drive through the night and through Covid travel restrictions from our home in Valencia), in the early hours of the birthday itself.

She has skill and experience. She had a real contribution to make. This is less true of me. My ignorance may not be total, but it’s close to it. I know which end of a baby is up. Why, I can walk up and down a room making rocking motions with the best of them. But dealing with any kind of crisis? I wouldn’t know how to start. I’d freeze.

That’s a bit like the plant I drowned. Because Danielle left me with clear and simple instructions on how to deal with various plants in and around the house. I think when it came to the large thing in the living room, once impressive enough to command even my admiration – and I don’t usually notice plants – I must have misunderstood the quantities and watered it at twice the level needed. 

The poor thing’s struggling now. I think Danielle gives it about the best chance of survival of any plant so badly mistreated, but it’s touch and go all the same. I’m torn between hope and anxiety.

When it comes to Elliott, I feel that if I were called on to provide any actual help things would be scarcely better. I’d end up doing far too much or far too little, even if I got the thing to do right in the first place. I’m happy to be the affectionate granddad, but it’s probably wiser not to ask for anything too concrete from me in the way of actual practical help.

I showed up at Elliott’s ten or twelve days after Danielle. Let me say, as an aside, that one of the reasons for the delay was that I was waiting for my first Covid vaccine shot. Which raises the question of whether my decision to travel to the Madrid hills was my own, or  the result of sinister manipulation to suit the wicked ends of Bill Gates. I have my own answer to that question, but I leave you to come up with your own.

It was with a profound and humbling sense of my own inadequacy that I joined the Elliott grandparenting team. All the more humbling given the superb quality of the parenting team itself. I wish I’d shown the same nurturing spirit towards my kids as these parents show to theirs. Since the father in this young family is one of the kids I subjected to my parenting skills, I imagine he too might feel that way.

Like I said. Humbling.

Still, however little I usefully contributed to the Elliott effort, it was by no means beyond my capacity to walk my granddaughter Matilda, Elliott’s big sister (now nearly two) to school and back. Or, more accurately, push her there and walk her back. With a stop on the way home to eat bread and marmite. She and I are on opposite sides of the great marmite divide, between those who are wildly enthusiastic about the stuff and those who can’t stand it. Matilda seems to like it. 

She got blueberries or bananas too, and on those at least we see eye to eye.

A little quality time for Granddad with Matilda in the park

We’d either stop in the park, where she could scramble over rocks or run down paths, leaving me behind on one occasion as she made a determined dash for freedom, or in a playground where she could slide or swing (the latter under granddad power) or, just as in the park, make a determined dash for freedom.

Self-assured young lady, she is, with a clear focus on liberty.

The school, incidentally, is an extraordinary place. It takes kids from the age of six months, though Matilda joined at one. Her class may not yet have made a great deal of progress on higher mathematics, or tackled the great classics of either Spanish or English literature, or grappled with the provisions of the Treaty of Utrecht that left Britain holding the Spanish territory of Gibraltar to this day. But the kids do seem to have a wonderful time there. That became particularly clear when, during my visit, Matilda had a memorable moment at school, when the teacher and class covered each other with flour in the garden, to everyone’s joy.

Great for socialisation, great for language-learning and, if the video clips shared with us are to be believed, great fun too.

Matilda started off wildly enthusiastic at the arrival of a granddad she hadn’t seen since late last summer (well, you know how it is, Covid and all that). That was gratifying. However, I quickly faded into a routine presence, of course, just someone who was there each day and pushed the buggy to school and picked her up later. Safe and familiar but a little dull.

She, at any rate, was anything but dull. That will. That sense of adventure. That clear drive to achieve firm purposes. She’s impressive. And the smile, when it bursts out, is entirely seductive.

It was a joy to get to know Matilda better. And to meet Elliott too. But I think it may be a little while before I get to know him as well as his sister – Matilda’s age is one I find it easier to relate to.

But thanks to my experience with Matilda, I know that means I have another pleasure to look forward to.

Matilda getting to know Elliott

Sometimes you just have to swallow your pride

We’ve put our cat, Misty, through the wringer a bit. Poor chap. It makes me feel guilty just to think of it.

He was born in France, but we took him to Germany. From there, we moved him to England, with a few return journeys between the two countries during the process, each of which he loathed. And now we’ve moved him to Spain.

What’s worse, we twice abandoned him. He spent several months with friends before we could bring him to England; later, we did the same in Engalnd, until we were ready for him to join us in Spain. He did well on both occasions – we only left him with good friends – but it was still traumatising to be deserted in that way.

It changed his character. We first met him at dinner with friends. We’d promised each other we wouldn’t come away with a kitten, but the one who would soon become Misty charmed us by his overwhelming affection. It even drove him to climb all over us. That was painful, as you can imagine, since he used his claws to climb our legs, but it was seductive all the same. We took him home that evening.

After our first abandonment of him, however, the easy affection turned into something far warier. He’s become more sensitive to slights. He’s inclined to show his displeasure with tooth and claw.

Who can blame him? He was the victim of treatment bordering on abuse, for which I can only hang my head in shame.

On the positive side, our second separation was followed by a last move, just as soon as we’d moved from a flat to a house with a garden he could feel at ease in, and it has been a success. Like us, he’s finding Spain a wonderful place for a retirement. He fitted straight in, finding his favourite places, on a bench in the front garden, on a bed indoors, on the lawn at the back, on a sun-drenched balcony, within a few hours of moving in.

Misty’s decided Spain’s just the place for a senior cat

But nothing’s ever an unmixed blessing. He’s just had an unpleasant experience, a reprise of an equally traumatic moment ten years ago. I made a record of the incident at the time, but let me give you a quick summary here too.

We were surprised one day to see Misty, on the roof of a garage, engaged in some kind of strange game, or sinister dance, with two crows. They were taunting him. One would land in front of him and tempt him to attack and, when he did, fly off. The other then landed behind him, making him turn and start the process again.

Why were they doing this, we wondered?

We discovered a few days later, when we were woken one morning by a storm of cawing from the street outside our bedroom. A crow fledgeling had fallen from the nest. Too young to fly back, he was stuck on the ground and easy game for a cat in his prime. When we looked, Misty had the fledgeling in his jaws, ready to turn him into breakfast. 

It wasn’t proving easy, though. It wasn’t the young crow that was cawing but the parents. They were both attacking the cat, with beak and talons, and giving him a terrible time. So terrible, in fact, that in the end he dropped the fledgeling and fled back to the house. 

He never troubled the crows again, even though the young one spent several more days on the ground before developing the strength to fly out of danger.

Well, the same thing has happened again here, ten years on. Not with crows, though. This time it was a far smaller and apparently less menacing bird. These are the ones who have made their nest above our front door. I had thought they were house martins, but it turns out they are in fact common swallows. But there’s nothing common about these fine birds, so small and yet so valiant.

One of the things this couple did was extend the nest they took over, and we soon discovered why. Like a young suburban couple, they were getting ready for a large family. As far as we can tell, there are five fledglings in the nest. They certainly needed some extra space.

Busy, busy swallows. And watchful too.
Note the nest extension, at the top, for their large family

Of the five, one is now big enough to try flying around a bit. That makes him vulnerable. He could fall to ground, leaving him easy prey even for a cat like Misty, rather slower in his retirement than he was when young.

Now the space by the front door is where he likes to spend a few moments before wandering to his bench. So the other day he was resting quietly on the doorstep. Presumably taking his time as he contemplated a few hours’ leisure in the sun. 

The swallows were having none of it. They went straight onto the attack.

Poor chap. It must have felt like déjà vu. Under vicious airborne attack by two aggressors. Even though, this time, he’d done nothing to merit such treatment. Why, these days, ten years on from his prime, his eyesight’s not so good, and he’s a bit rheumatic in his movements. The hunting instincts may still be there, but the performance is lacking.

The parents, however, weren’t prepared to make any allowance for his pensioner status. He was too damn close. He had to go.

The persecution got through to him fast. Now he doesn’t hang around when he leaves the house by the front door. He heads straight to his favoured resting place without pausing anywhere near the swallows. 

There’s no peace for the wicked, they say. Even when, as on this occasion, he hadn’t even been given the chance to be wicked. A humbling experience, having to swallow his pride, when he hadn’t even tried to have a swallow.

Idiosyncratic hiking

One of the issues we face in the Spanish hiking group we belong to, is how to describe the urge, that all of us experience from time to time (me, at my age, perhaps more than the average), to disappear for a moment into the bushes.

Most of the Spaniards we walk with call that a visit to the ‘baños publicos’ which, strictly speaking, means the public baths. But since it’s not unusual for us to refer to the ‘bathroom’ in English too, even though we mean a place in which there is no bath, and indeed in which we have no intention of plunging ourselves into a large tub of hot water, we should perhaps be a little indulgent towards that euphemism.

Talking about euphemisms of that kind, the one I really like is the American ‘restroom’. With Americans or, even better, in the United States, I like to announce that, “I’m going for a rest”. They don’t generally seem to have any idea what I mean, even though ‘restroom’ is their own term for the destination I have in mind.

But back to ‘baños publicos’. I always suggest to my Spanish friends that this is perhaps a little vulgar. That we should use an expression that’s somehow more clinical, even more professional, in tone.

My suggestion? “I need to treat a minor urological condition.” 

I feel that has a much better ring to it. Unfortunately, it’s my impression that my fellow walkers think I’m just taking the piss.

I like our fellow walkers. Especially the leader of our group, one Javi (pronounced – roughly – Habi, with the ‘a´ a bit like, though not a lot like, the ‘u’ in ‘cut´). That’s short for Xavier, a fairly common name here in Spain. He works on building or maintaining footpaths all around the Valencia region and, as a hobby, takes groups like ours out Nordic walking, with never a charge for the privilege. And a privilege it certainly is.

Javi with his trademark smile

Now one of the things that Javi likes to do, apart from keeping everyone amused with his humour and his lively smile, is navigate – perhaps I should just say find our way – without reliance on boring modern innovations like the internet. He uses some electronic device that he holds in his hand and consults from time to time, but I have no idea how it works. Or whether it works. It seems not to be internet-connected, because whenever Danielle suggests to him that we use an application on her phone, he refuses saying that, “part of the pleasure is the discovery”.

This means that it’s not entirely unknown for us to have to backtrack occasionally, to take a different path than the one we’ve spent a few minutes going down in error. But what does that matter? He’s entirely right about the pleasure of the thing. What are a few minor digressions among friends? We go on those hikes for fun, not to engage in some kind of scientific exercise. We can keep the science for managing our affairs at home. The walks are for amusement, and even the digressions contribute to amusing us.

Our hikes: fine places, occasional challenges, and Patxaran

They are, in any case, quite a good thing, because it means we walk rather further than planned and, after all, the whole idea of the walk is to get exercise. This way we get more than we’d bargained for. And at no extra charge, except in energy and shoe leather (or, in my case, shoe rubber).

Actually, he also has another nice trick for getting us to walk further than we thought we were going to. It happened the other day, when he took the group for a reasonably short walk, of nine kilometres. After nearly two kilometres, he  announced, “that was a present from me to you all. We've reached the start of the walk. We're doing nine kilometres from here”.

Good for the body. Perhaps, in some weird way, good for the soul too.

Besides, he always gets us to some pretty remarkable places, every time, without fail. Places that take our breath away by their beauty, places that challenge our agility by making us do things we probably wouldn’t have done otherwise or, as on one memorable occasion, places that allow us to collect the ingredients for that wonderful intoxicating liquor, Patxaran.

This all makes Javi’s methods of navigation highly effective. On the other hand, they are, shall we say, somewhat idiosyncratic. So, as I’ve come up with my own description of those little dashes into the bushes, I’ve come up with a word for Javi’s approach to route finding: Javigation.

When I launched the new term on our most recent march, it was greeted with laughter – OK, OK, chuckles, but I’ll take whatever I can get – though he didn’t seem that charmed by it himself. To the point where I worried that I might have offended him. Which isn’t something I’d willingly do.

So it was a great relief that, when we parted company at the end of the walk, he called cheerily after me, “See you soon, when I can be your Javigator again”.

A man after my own heart. One who can take a tease and make it his own. Who can turn a potentially upsetting label and make it into badge to wear with a smile. The smile that’s his trademark.

Definitely a good guy to lead our hikes. However erratic his Javigation..

The day before...

The things we make our young people do…

I write these words on the 5th of June. That means that on this night, 77 years ago, my father, then aged 22, flew his third combat mission as navigator on a Stirling bomber of the Royal Air Force’s 296 Squadron. A laconic entry in his flying log tells the tale.

4.6.44 No. 3 Operation - Invasion France - 18 Para
3 hours and no minutes, night time
All in a handwriting that remains deeply familiar to me

That entry isn’t the only trace of what happened that day. He also kept a reconnaissance photo of the Normandy coast near the coast of Ouistreham. That’s the nearest coastal town to the city of Caen, which was soon to become the target of fierce fighting. The mission on which my father was flying that night was to drop paratroops who were to hold bridges over a canal and a river, in the opening move of that campaign. The log entry shows that his plane was carrying 18 of them.

Reconnaissance photo composite of the French coast at Ouistreham

I visited the University of Caen in the early 1980s. It’s housed in a fine, if slightly soulless, modern building. The original university, founded in the fifteenth century, was completely destroyed by Allied bombing during this particular phase of the fighting. The French may have been allies, but the Germans held the city. So it was bombed. Something like 35,000 people were made homeless and some 3000 civilians died.

An account I found of the 5 June mission say the first plane took off at 23:19 that evening. My father’s log entry shows he was in the air for three night hours, so he returned in the small hours of 6 June 1944. That’s the morning of D-day, the allied invasion of France, the first action against Nazi occupation of Western Europe. 

Soviet armies were moving from the East. Soon American and French troops would land in southern France. Together these offensives end the Hitler regime.

My father’s logbook records the operation as being part of the “invasion of France”. I can imagine how exciting that must have been. Brought up in a francophone neighbourhood of Brussels, he was deeply attached to France, and it must have been a great feeling that he was now helping to liberate the country, after four years of Nazi occupation.

According to the account I read, however, while all the planes completed their task, some were hit by anti-aircraft fire, some of the airmen were injured and one plane was lost with its crew. My father’s made it home unscathed: it wouldn’t be until the autumn, during the operation to secure a bridgehead across the Rhine in Holland, that my father’s plane would be shot down.

Unscathed he may have been in the small hours of 6 June 1944, but he clearly flew through the same anti-aircraft fire that brought down one of his friend’s planes and killed the crew. I can’t imagine what it must have been like, flying at night through gunfire of people who want you dead. He wasn’t even the pilot, so any evasive movements they could make weren’t in his control. Besides, although I don’t know much about it, I assume you can’t do a lot of swerving around if you’re trying to drop paratroops at a specific place. 

All in all, I imagine the excitement of taking part in the liberation of France might have been just a tad tempered by the terror of that moment.

The young man on the wing of his bomber is my Dad

After the 5th of June 1944, my father would fly another 24 missions, including the one when he was shot down. He survived that with only a minor injury. But a lot of young men like him, in the air or on the land, wouldn’t make it. The war had just over 11 months to go and the Allied forces on the Western Front alone would lose going on for another 200,000 killed. 

It never ceases to appal me that my father did all that when he was 46 years younger than I am today. Or that a lot of other kids his age were asked to do the same. In my childhood, I expected to have to face the same horrors too, and I’m profoundly grateful that I never did.

Frighteningly, there are lots of young people, even today, who aren’t going to be that lucky. 

Sticks and chains may tax my brains

“You can’t do as much as you approach 70,” people trying to be kind like to tell me, “as when you’re approaching 17.”

Well, I suppose that’s consoling. But only insofar as it’s a consolation to be reminded that 70 is nearly upon me, and 17 a remote past (however vividly still remembered). Some years back – possibly decades – I heard someone saying, “it was a shock to discover that my glorious future was all behind me”. 

It’s worse for me. It isn’t even a shock anymore.

This all came to mind on Sunday, when we went for a walk with a local hiking group, for 16 kilometres (ten miles if you prefer). When I was seventeen, I used to walk with teams of my colleagues for 20 to 30 miles in a day and once, memorably, 35 miles overnight. Sadly, Sunday’s effort left me about as tired as the 35 miles did. 

Still, at least we were in the mountains on Sunday. That’s my excuse.

These mountains were down at the southern end of the Valencian Community, the region around the Spanish city of Valencia. We were walking near the town of Alcoy, in the province of Alicante. One of the first places we saw was the ‘Seven Moons Bridge’. You might wonder whether this was a case of locals thinking that “one moon is good, so why not have seven?”. The reality’s more prosaic. It’s just that the bridge runs over seven arches.

The Seven Moons bridge stretching across the valley by Alcoy

It’s a fine structure and now part of a well-maintained cycling and walking route. On the other hand, you might wonder whether a viaduct 46 metres high and 230 metres long is overkill for a leisure path. Originally, it was designed to carry a railway, and though the line was completed, including the tunnels and the viaducts, the plan was eventually dropped. No train ever ran across it.

Remember Boris Johnson’s plan to build a garden bridge in London when he was Mayor? It was a bit like that. Probably even more expensive, though I’d never want to belittle Johnson’s capacity for wasting public funds on failed prestige projects.

Cataract and pool where we stopped for lunch

We had lunch by a stream flowing from some cataracts. A lovely sight. But the scene, alas, of a senior moment for me. 

I’m useless at Nordic Walking but I still often take sticks with me on this kind of outing. Sadly, however, I left them near where we had lunch. Fortunately, I noticed pretty soon and shot back to collect them. 

This is a fine bunch of people to walk with, and four of them decided they’d wait for me so that I wouldn’t be left alone struggling to catch up with the main group. Unfortunately, however, although it only took me ten minutes to collect the sticks and get back to the others, that was enough for the rest to have struck off down a side path we decided, mistakenly, not to follow when we reached the turning.

The result? The five of us spent the next hour adding a kilometre or two climbing up the valley in completely the wrong direction, struggling to maintain some form of communication with our guide on crackly and broken calls in the patchy cell phone coverage up there. 

To my amazement, and underlining what great friends they are, the four who’d stayed with me and the main group all claimed repeatedly and loudly that the fault was theirs. I’m not quite sure how it could have been, since I was obviously the one who’d forgotten the sticks. My apologies, however, were simply brushed aside.

The lesson I learned was that it’s all about sticks and stones. Forget your sticks, and you’ll be walking over a lot more stones. Or, to put it differently, if you take sticks, then stick with them, or get stuck with more miles.

Getting seriously stuck is what might have happened after we caught up with the main group. We had to make our way along a cliff face along a river pool. The local council had thoughtfully hung a chain along the cliff, to cling to as we sidled across.

Clinging to the chain and my rescued sticks,
and surrounded by three of the walkers who stuck with me

I have to say that, as it was pretty hot, there was a temptation to let go of the chain and fall into the water just to cool off a little, but I suppose the walk back when soaking wet might not have been much fun.

The best thing about the chains was that there wasn’t just one set. Soon after the pool, we found another lot helping us climb up a cliff. With apologies to Rousseau, and only a small distortion of his words, I couldn’t help feeling that “man is born free, but around here he’s dangling from chains”. 

The second chain. For the uphill climb

We have mountains closer to our home too. They’re called the Sierra Calderona. There’s a much-repeated story, retold by our guide on Sunday, according to which María Inés de Calderón, known as la Calderona, was a seventeenth-century Madrid actress who was married at sixteen only to become the mistress first of a duke and then of the king himself. She gave birth to the only illegitimate son (of many illegitimate children he had) that the king recognised (though to this day we don’t know whether he was the duke’s). 

His habit once the king decided he’d had enough of a mistress was to send her off to a convent. The tale has her escaping from hers and holing up for the rest of her life with a bunch of bandits in the mountains near Valencia. The legacy of her life of crime is that the name ‘Calderona’ has stuck to mountains, as a memorial to her, ever since.

La Calderona.
In her days as an actress and mistress to the powerful

It’s a fine story, so I wouldn’t try to spoil it by pointing out there is a far less interesting one, based on boring things like documentary evidence. It suggests that after the birth of her son, removed from her by the ghastly king, la Calderona spent fourteen years in her convent, before rising to the rank of abbess. She ran the place for the next two years before dying.

That’s dying in the convent, not the mountains. Surrounded by nuns. Not bandits.

That’s a much less uplifting story, isn’t it? And how would it explain the name of our closest mountains? The other story must be the true one.

Just not correct, perhaps, in terms of dull facts.