A Pilgrimage to Palma

A few months ago during mum's house move, I came across a large packet of air mail letters, mostly typed, sent over a period of about four years from my grandmother, in Cala Mayor, Mallorca, to my parents, her son and daughter-in-law. All but a very few of them typed, and all on featherweight air mail paper, the letters painted a vivid picture of a life lived joyfully, animatedly, frugally at times but always well, and brought back many memories, fallen into abeyance in the 20-odd years since her death, of a woman who I remember as being beautiful, loving, forthright, awkward at times but more often than not very sympathetic and who above all else loved her two sons and their four children intensely.

Christened Helena, her letters were always signed 'Fritz', the nickname by which all the family knew her, coined (by herself, if I recall) on account of her having a strong Eastern European accent - she was Czechoslovakian by birth - which most people mistook for being German. In Spain, she came to be known as Elena, or more specifically, Señora Elena, and it was from Elena Wright that she would meticulously mark the back of each envelope as having been sent. She also naturally put the address of her apartment, and so when I initially decided that my first trip would be to Spain, I considered including a visit to Mallorca, and to 279 Avenida Joan Miró, in my itinerary. A little online research found that there were quick and convenient flights from Granada to Palma and then on from Palma to Valencia, which although expensive were sufficiently affordable to make the decision final. I booked a cheap hotel which looked, from the website, to be near the apartment (or rather, near where the apartment was - it could easily have been redeveloped since the 1980s) and packed a couple of my favourite letters, ones which gave the most detail about Fritz's day-to-day routine, the things she liked to do, eat or see and with whom, so that once there I would be able better to visualize what her life on Mallorca might have been like.

I arrived early afternoon, after a short and punctual flight from Granada, and my first observation was how huge the airport was for a relatively small island. I quickly realised that of course it would be this big, and busy; even in 1980, Fritz wrote of the island's dependence on tourism and how a bad season for tourist income could affect prices for residents in the shops as businesses sought to recoup their losses, and this vital visitor income has obviously been nurtured in the intervening decades. She wrote too, in a letter from 1982, of how the flight options to and from the island were improving; sadly it was only in the very last couple of years of her life that a new charter airline commenced flights from Palma to Bournemouth which would have vastly eased her journey to our house in a remote village in Dorset. As it was, she would fly from Palma to Gatwick, and make her way from there, her suitcase crammed with cigarettes for my dad (always the wrong brand, always!), cuttings from her beloved spider plants to give to all and sundry, and gifts for my sister - who carries her name - and me. Today she could fly, or at least connect with flights, to pretty much anwhere in the world from Palma de Mallorca, with every budget and charter airline under the sun.

Finding a total dearth of public transport information at the airport, I got into a cab (perhaps recklessly given that I had no idea how far Cala Mayor was from the airport and what the fare therefore might be!) and about twenty minutes later pulled up at the hotel. It was quite old and a little unloved, but I noted that it did at least have a pool, and air-conditioning, and best of all was very close to 279 Avenida Joan Miró. After a quick shower, I headed out to see if Edificio Delfin, as the block was called, was still there; as I walked along the winding road, past the royal family's summer palace, Marivent (her proximity to which I'm surprised Fritz never mentioned in her letters), a luxury hotel, a few private houses and a parade of shops, I was disproportionately nervous, not sure what I would find, or how I would feel. I needn't have worried: Edificio Delfin at 279 Avenida Joan Miró, Cala Mayor, is still very much there, and I felt elated.

I started off by taking a walk round the outside to take a look at the building. The paint's a bit flaky in places, and it's certainly not the most modern block on this particular strip, but it's neat and tidy and fabulously located, just up a path to the beautiful beach of Cala Mayor. Fritz was for two years the president of the residents' committee for Delfin, and I liked to think that the building's current good condition might still in some small part be due to her diligence and vigour in the role. At the foot of the building there's a parade of shops and cafés and, catering to the tastes of Brits abroad, a kebab shop (just up the road there's an Irish pub too). Fritz's apartment was on the 6th floor, and counting up from street level that would have been the top floor. No wonder then that she was able to indulge, as she wrote to my mum in one letter, in what she called 'free sunbathing', safe from neighbours' prying eyes. (Both Fritz and her late husband were keen naturists and she never lost her enthusiasm for it).

I identified the back door to the building which Fritz wrote of as being her shortcut to the beach; to avoid the tourist rush she would swim first thing in the morning, "Just sling over my bathrobe and grab a towel and grab the lift to the 2nd piso [floor] and out of the back entrance de Delfin and [in] 2 minutes run into the water. Then, I swim like a mad satellite or pescado [fish] and back again to my pad..." I would dearly have liked to go inside the building, just to see what it was like - maybe 'grab the lift' from the 6th floor to the 2nd - but alas repeated attempts to get hold of the portero came to nothing so I had to content myself with the exterior. Wanting to live a little of Fritz's life - and hell, wanting some respite from the heat - I went back to the hotel, grabbed my swimmers and returned to the beach, where for the next hour or so I too swam 'like a mad satellite' and reflected on what bliss it must have been to be able to do so every day. I had dinner at the nearest 'proper' restaurant to the flat and on enquiring found that it had been in business for over thirty years, so may well have been frequented by Fritz when she wasn't dining at friends or hosting a dinner herself as was very often the case.

The next day, after watching Hugo Chavez's one hour late arrival in a motorcade at Marivent from my balcony, I did as Fritz used to and hopped on the bus into Palma, the island's capital. While Cala Mayor was as well served by small shops and the like then as it is now, for serious shopping, window or otherwise, Palma's where it's at. On the way we passed the cinema at Terreno where Fritz used to go with her 80-something friend Nessie: "Only 10 mins on the bus and it [shows] English films as well as foreign, sometimes quite good. Sometimes!" This wasn't one of those times, the only English-language offering being Kung Fu Panda, but I was nonetheless pleased to see where Fritz used occasionally to enjoy going of an evening. I found Palma to be an absolutely beautiful city, rich in architecture, blessed with wide, shady streets and full of all sorts of interesting shops large and small, cafés, galleries, restaurants and bars. The port area is très chic; Palma actually feels unspoilt by tourism, rather it thrives on it and values its visitors.

That afternoon, I enacted the most enjoyable part of my 'pilgrimage' - lunch. Above everything else, be it her socialising, her spider plants or the business and scandals of the Delfin Residents' Committee, Fritz loved to write about food, and her love-hate relationship with it. She was - not unlike a certain grandson of hers, you might say! - on the one hand obsessed with her weight, watching every pound, but on the other hand singularly unable to resist the many foodie delights that Mallorca had to offer. In almost every letter she makes reference to a lunch she's given, or a dinner she's been invited to; the best hosts (or worst offenders, depending on how Fritz saw it at the time), were Hubert and Jacques, her gay neighbours. Always referred as The Gays - capital T, capital G - Fritz adored them with a liberalism very rare for a woman of her background and generation and indeed, for the time. The Gays were Dutch and spent half of each year in the Netherlands and half in Mallorca, and would always return bearing edible gifts and especially the smoked mackerel Fritz loved. The particular meal I chose to recreate, however, was one that she described in a letter as being typical of any encounter with 'the natives': "A chunk of Mallorceen [sic] bread with half a kilometre of sobrasada, and ensaimada full of nata (cream)." I had no idea what sobrasada or ensaimada were but soon found out; the former is a spicy sausage/paté hybrid rather like squishy chorizo, and the latter a very light pastry resembling a cross between a Danish and a choux bun dusted with icing sugar. I found a café which had both on the menu and for full authenticity ensured that their sandwiches were made with Mallorcan bread, a very light, very crusty slim baguette. As I ate my delicious meal, I wrote postcards to the family, reviving if only as a one-off the tradition of an 'H Wright' writing from Mallorca.

With just a couple of hours remaining before my flight to Valencia, I returned to Cala Mayor for a last stroll around Fritz's streets and a final look at Edificio Delfin. I tried the porter's bell a couple more times to see if I could get inside but it was obviously not meant to be; instead I ordered a beer at the bar across the road and watched the world go by like Señora Elena used to do. This little corner of an island that she loved, indeed from what I saw, the whole island, is thriving and vibrant and I can see why she would have been so happy here. Exiled from her country of birth, Fritz settled as a refugee in England, met, fell in love with and married my grandfather, had two sons - one my daddy - and had a few years of happiness before being prematurely widowed, after which she sought, and found, some comfort in sunnier climes. Halfway between my hotel and Fritz's flat, there was an old people's home, or Casa de la Tercera Edad. I couldn't stop myself from wondering whether, had cancer not taken her life in only her late sixties, Fritz might today be one of the elderly ladies sitting on the terrace in the shade, having tea brought to her by white-uniformed nurses. Then I got to thinking whether, if she had lived, she would ever have been able to recover from her adored eldest son's own terrible, premature death which came only a decade after hers.

And then I snapped out of it and realised that this is the danger of revisiting the past; we start to wish that it was the present. I'm so pleased and proud that I made the trip I did, and I will always cherish Fritz's beautiful, funny, eloquent and at times salacious letters. But wondering what might have been...that way only sadness lies. The past is history; the present, well that's for living, and my present is taking me to my next stop - Valencia!