Elias was awoken by pipes knocking as the central heating struggled to kick in. The bedroom radiator whooshed and gulped half-heartedly. Her illuminated watch said 6.30am.

She lay under the musty quilt, watching the dark forms of furniture take shape as the day began. Rivulets of condensation trickled down the casement windows. When it didn’t seem to be getting any lighter, she sat up, shivering despite the two jumpers she’d thrown on over her pyjamas. Her suitcase lay open on the floor beside the bed, and she reached down and pulled on a third before making her way to the kitchen. She’d feel better after a coffee. A stream of dark brown water belched out of the shuddering tap before righting itself. The cottage must have been empty for years.

Back in Boston, it was the bluebells that had attracted her. In the photo, the timber-framed cottage in the wood was surrounded by a carpet of blue. It was a quintessential British scene, she thought, when it popped up on her computer screen. It seemed to be calling her.

The wood was attractive, too, because she’d always loved trees. In her native New England, the riot of foliage – dense walls of green, orange and yellow punctuated with hot reds and shocking pinks, never failed to thrill. She’d fretted that she’d miss this during her secondment to Britain until, incongruous among the bland harbourside flats and city-centre high rises sent by the Bristol real estate agent, Spindlewood Cottage appeared within its delicate, almost fairytale, landscape.

Her colleagues had tried to dissuade her. “It looks so isolated,” they said. “Won’t you be lonely?”

They didn’t seem to realise that Elias was already lonely. Most of her friends had started families and previous close relationships had gone cold. This could be a new start, she thought.

“I’ll be fine,” she’d replied. “It’s only 30 minutes’ drive from the office. It’ll be a perfect countryside retreat.”

“I’ll take it,” she told the agent, and paid the deposit quickly, before anyone could change her mind.

The flight from Boston had been delayed, and Elias hadn’t arrived until late afternoon. The cottage smelt musty. The windows were sticky. She’d wrestled a couple open, then, with darkness falling, closed them again. The rooms were lit by pendant lamps hanging in the centre. The radiators were cold and she’d been too tired to look for the instructions. She’d dragged her suitcases in from the car, changed into pyjamas, thick socks and the two jumpers and crawled onto a bare mattress under a heavy cotton quilt found in the wardrobe. It would seem better in the morning.

***************************************************

Next day, coffee cup in hand, Elias began to feel more like herself. It was hard to believe it was April (what her colleagues had said about the UK’s never-ending winter was accurate) but she was here! She’d made it! She kept the light off and watched the back garden glint in the drizzle. Then, as a few rays of light broke through the gloom, her spirits rose. She just needed to cheer the cottage up. She’d unpack, tidy and take a shower. They she’d head out and see if she could find some of those famous British spring flowers.

By 11am she was ready. The cottage was swept and dusted, and she’d found two attractive ceramic vases, which she’d placed on the dining room table waiting to be filled.

Elias pulled her long blonde locks into a trendy knitted cap and put on her quilted jacket and walking boots. Then she headed out the door. There would have been more spring flowers in the fields running alongside the lane at the front, but it was as if a mysterious force was pushing her and Elias found herself going deeper into the woods at the back, her thighs pushing out like pistons. She was on a mission.

She felt the ground soft and springy beneath her feet and inhaled the musty yet pure smell of mixed earth and leaves mingling with the tang of bark, damp from the rain. From above, leaves splashed cold drops of water on her head. She heard the calls of mistle thrush, wrens and wood pigeons, coaxed out by the pale sunlight. A gentle breeze seemed to whisper her name, Eliasssssss…

Young aspens with slender silver trunks and penny-shaped leaves seemed to wave her along, then oaks, ash, sycamore and beech trees with their delicate emerald-green growth. Spiders’ webs glistened, suspended from low branches, clumps of mushrooms bulged from the base of trunks.

Along the path, raindrops balanced on clumps of Lady’s Mantle like mercury. The plants were interspersed with taller clumps of Red Campion, distinctive for their five heart-shaped petals.

Elias bent down to pluck a Red Campion, then recoiled. The hairy stem bit into her fingers, rough and sticky as it excreted a sticky white substance onto her hand. She kept tugging anyhow, but it drooped as if she’d killed it and emitted a faint smell of sulphur.

Elias dropped the flower and wiped her hand on her jeans. She’d just have to find something better.

Weaving deeper into the wood, ivy climbed the trees and the path was edged with a wealth of small plants, too small for a vase. Impatiently, Elias noted wood anemones, celandine, even a few faded bluebells well past their best.

Then, abruptly, the path ran out. Elias stood still for a few moments, taking it all in. She listened to the sigh of the wind, and watched the sway of the trees. The tops were moving faster than the middles and nearer the ground she observed a branch pinging back into position as the thrush which had been perching on it, flew off. Her eyes then alighted on another small track in the distance. It looked dark and forlorn, but she wasn’t giving up. She pushed on, thrashing her way through the undergrowth towards it.

The new track was stony, edged by tall dark pine trees, yet she felt compelled to keep going. Her feet crunched loudly on the ground. The air was colder and something else was different. She paused, puzzled, before realising there was no birdsong here, just the sound of her feet and a faint rumble in the distance every few seconds. Elias gave an involuntary shudder. What was she even doing here, alone in a wood, thousands of miles from home and anyone she knew?

Just as she was about to turn back, a splash of colour caught her eye.

Flowers?

‘Well, in for a penny…’

The strange noise came again, but her mind was made up.

Five minutes later she was outside a small stone cottage. The cottage was surrounded by a beautiful garden. ‘How strange,’ she thought. ‘Who could possibly live here, so deep in the wood without a car?’ But it was clear the cottage was occupied, because the garden was so well tended and bursting with life. There were beds of tall daisies, hollyhocks, delphiniums and phlox. There were sweet peas twining their way up willow towers. There were banks of thyme and lavender, and dog rose and honeysuckle scrambling up the garden walls.

‘How lovely these flowers would look in my empty vases,’ Elias thought. ‘But they’re not mine to take.’ She stood frozen in indecision. Not for long. She was determined to cheer up the cottage. It was now or never and she wasn’t going back empty-handed.

A trug and a pair of secateurs stood on a small wooden table by the front door. Compelled, as she had been to enter the forest earlier, she seized them and set about helping herself. Her fingers tingled as she lopped stem after stem, tossing the beautiful blooms into the trug.

She didn’t hear the garden give a wounded sigh, or the rumbling noise, closer now.

She didn’t stop until she’d cut every flower. Then she looked back. The destroyed plants were like gravestones, silhouetted in the fading light. Her head swam. Why had she been so reckless? Why was she always so reckless? There was a moment of silence, then the earth trembled. The mysterious rumble, Elias now realised, was furious growling and it was drawing closer.

Out in the forest, the Red Campions closed their petals even though darkness had not yet fallen.

The vases in Spindlewood Cottage never did get filled. When her new colleagues searched the woods for Elias the following week, all they found was an abandoned cottage with the petrified remains of a garden, and a few strands of golden hair fluttering in the breeze.

Didn’t have a family, outlived her friends. Now she’s gliding down the A1, just like she imagined it. A sleek electric hearse for her cardboard coffin, bound for the Cornish woods. Eventually, she’ll join the mycelial network – help to feed the trees. Staying useful and networking through eternity, just how she likes it.

I don’t know why the human at number 70 calls me ‘Donald’. ‘F-off, Donald Trump,’ she shouts, anytime I land in her garden. She lives there with the cute short-haired black madam, the one who looks like butter wouldn’t melt, but if you try it on, she’s a complete street brawler. Born in the gutter, I bet. Takes one to know one.

There’s not many that stand up to me like she does. And if they try, they soon give up. I dive into their gardens like a cat cruise missile, puff myself up when I land, and if they mount any kind of resistance, I go in for the kill. Little pussies, the lot of them. I don’t care about their pedigrees, either – that little Milo, I mauled him ’til he whimpered for mercy. Then I ram-raided his microchip-controlled catflap and had his dinner. I went on a tour of the house after, and marked my new territory. So much better than the pong of their scented candles.

There’s no cat in the next-door house, but next door again there’s Leonie. She’s a one. Little minx started flirting with me after I tailgated her through the ’flap. Fancied a bit of rough, I suppose. Had my way with her and was roughing her up some more when her human found us and chased me out. “Shoo, shoo, horrid cat,” she shouted. I still felt a bit lairy, so I lurked in the garden until she turned the garden hose on me.

Round the corner, there’s something else again. Bruno is as big, black and furry as a Beefeater hat. Proper toff, unlike her at number 70. When I stealth-bombed his garden, he just watched impassively. I made my usual moves on him, but he just blinked and flexed a claw, like some kind of Mob mog. Then, “Mi casa es tu casa,” he said. “Come in.”

I was tucking into Bruno’s lunch when his human arrived. “Oo, hello,” she said, friendly like him. “Who are you? Are you a stray? Poor boy.” She put some more biscuits in the bowl. When I’d scoffed the lot, I lay down in the sun with my legs in the air and purred. I felt almost feline again.

I’ve always liked Los Llanos. It’s a Saturday street market just outside the town of Albox in Almeria, Spain. In the top section you can find fruit, veg, bed linen, second-hand clothes, old furniture, silver jewellery, plants, homemade jam and rescue puppies. Down the steps there’s a sizeable rastro (flea market) with old tools, antiques, musical instruments and a Moroccan shop with a cornucopia of goods. In my early days living in Spain, I’d sometimes come with 20€ and mostly leave with a good, if unexpected haul – I once got a top-quality djembe drum for 5€.

One of the best things about the market is the diversity of the stallholders – a mixture of Spanish, Moroccan, Romanian, Ecuadorian, African, English, Gitano and more. Such variety is rare in this part of Spain, and it almost feels like my native southeast London. There’s even a bookstall playing loud roots reggae. I love reggae, but you hardly ever hear it round here.

So when I found out that Lynda, an English woman from my village, had a bric a brac stall at Los Llanos, I asked if I could share it with her for a few weeks in the run-up to Christmas. I wanted to shift some old clothes and other things that were cluttering up my house. I was delighted when she agreed.

I started on Saturday 4 December. Ahead of a move back to the UK, Lynda was selling her stuff for just 1 or 2 euros, so I did the same. On my first day I sold an electric brasero* for 3€ and a lamp for 2€. It didn’t seem much, but I decided to spend my takings. They went a long way – I got pair of crystal earrings, a vintage shift dress and a pansy for the garden. I was chuffed. It felt like an alternative reality where 5€ is a decent sum of money.

The second week I did better. Electrical goods seemed popular so I took some mini speakers, as well as the remains of a job lot of linen cushion covers gifted by a friend. Both were snapped up immediately, swiftly followed by a vintage juicer and some clothes. I took 25€ and found a pair of tongs for my wood burning stove (1.50€) and a useful credit card holder (€2). I needed a second hand axe and the Moroccan shop said they had one at home (unfortunately they never found it).

Often, when you’re shopping for something, you just can’t find it. But Los Llanos was proving this theory wrong, because it kept offering up exactly what was needed. In Week 2, this was demonstrated in an extraordinary way.

A woman picked up one of Lynda’s craft books. She wandered off with it. When she came back to pay, she said she’d been looking for the book for years after giving it away in the 80s. She’d searched everywhere, even contacting the publisher, but it had gone out of print. Her husband turned the front cover. “Look,” he exclaimed, “she wrote her name inside. It’s actually hers!” It was the woman’s own copy – last seen somewhere in the north of England and surfacing some 40 years later in an Andalusian street market.

Weirdly, she didn’t seem surprised. She paid up and wandered off, leaving us nonplussed. “Do you think she says that every time she buys something, in the hope she’ll get it for free?” Lynda asked.

Rhythms of the market

Being there every week, I noticed how the stallholders changed. There were regulars like Lynda, and there were others who came and went. The stall next to ours had different people all the time. One week there was a Spanish lady selling exquisite handmade children’s clothes, the next week a young African man with a job lot of small leather jackets for 5€ each. My favourite temporary stall was in the rastro section: a selection of beautiful old instruments: violins, trumpets, cellos and flutes. I wondered what stories lay behind them.

Lynda

After a few weeks on the market, Lynda and I were getting to know each other better. Although I knew she did markets, I hadn’t realised how serious she was about her stall, for which she made an interesting collection of dolls, cushions and crafts, and sourced an eclectic selection of clothes, craft books and antiques. She treated it like a job, tapping into what people want with skill and generosity. I found out how practical she was, too. Not only was she a keen crafter and a skilled cook, she’d singlehandedly reroofed a portion of her Spanish house with a friend’s unwanted tiles. “I just looked at how the others were laid in an interlocking pattern and copied it,” she said. It took four days and 148 tiles and the roof never leaked again.

It was only when I knew her better that I noticed how she quietly sipped tea at lunchtimes, not wine like the other retired expats. She was returning to the UK to find more mental stimulation – something I crave, too. People always said there were bound to be people like me in the area, but I’d never expected them to be hiding in plain sight right under my nose!

Week 3

I rocked up late after a disturbed night and knew I wouldn’t sell anything. I gathered information instead. The first stop was Dean the bookseller, who I’d been plucking up the courage to approach. I bought a couple of books to smooth the way and said: “I like your music.” He looked indifferent, but I persisted. “Do you know any local venues that play reggae?” He still wasn’t forthcoming. It was only when I said I’d done some DJ-ing in London that his ears pricked up and he remembered that he and his partner had visited a new reggae café on the coast the previous weekend. A new reggae café on the coast?! The market had given me what I wanted again! We chatted a bit, and he started playing one of my YouTube roots reggae playlists*. As I walked away I wondered if the Lubrin Dub Club would become my legacy at the market.

After Christmas

Lynda’s return to the UK was delayed, so after Christmas she was back at Los Llanos again. It poured with rain the first weekend, so she didn’t go, but it had become a habit for me and I went anyway. The place was half empty and the woman behind our favourite veg stall had time to chat. She told me that all her products were organic, grown on her farm. I bought a big bunch of spinach, eight oranges, two kilos of carrots, some bananas, two onions, three peppers, a garlic and four tomatoes for just 7.80€ and was surprised by an unusual desire to cook. Then I had a quick look round before leaving. There, in the middle of a stall of second hand tools, sat the full-size axe I’d been seeking since Week 1. It was priced at 18€, but the stallholder said I could have it for 14€ – which was lucky as all I had left was 15€ in small change.

As for Lynda, she did one more market. I went along to see her and she gave me the last in a long line of freebies – a handmade elephant cushion to remember her by. I got her something, too: a pair of silver earrings from the jewellery stall. I presented them to her over lunch the next week. She was thrilled – and promptly reciprocated with offers of her butano gas heater, a shopping trolley and a pressure cooker! I had to smile. Los Llanos – the market that gives you everything you want, and a few things you didn’t know you wanted, too!

* Electric version of the large metal tray of burning coals traditionally placed under Spanish tables, covered with a long tablecloth, to warm up the people sitting round the table.

* The Lubrin Dub Club is a series of World Reggae playlists I’d compiled on YouTube.

Photo of Mercadillo Rastillo Internacional Los Llanos de Arboleas c/o Facebook.

I started my Spanish adventure in 1997, just as Tony Blair ended 18 years of Conservative rule with the slogan ‘Things Can Only Get Better’. I was one of a number of young BBC journalists helping with the count on Election Night, but soon after fled the BBC on a trip to Mojácar in Spain, on the pretext of finding a cheap house to buy. I didn’t seriously think I would get one.

Accompanying me was my old friend Mark P, who had ridden to Mojácar on his motorbike a decade before. My friend Lucy’s house was empty, so we stayed there. We had instructions to call Jacqueline, the French postwoman for the mountain villages, who put the word out for villagers with houses to sell.

It was a beautiful early-summer day and the road to the mountains twisted and turned up through arid countryside, almond trees and old ruins until arriving in the pretty whitewashed village of Bédar, with a long view back down to the sea.

Jacqueline was waiting in one of a pair of bars facing each other on the road in. Tall and thin with a mahogany tan, long black hair framing strong, handsome features, and wearing lots of silver jewellery - she was unmissable.

Jacqueline drove us down a narrow unpaved road running under the looming peaks. We undulated through tiny settlements and over a rambla [dry riverbed] before accelerating up a perilously steep bank on the other side, to end up at a collection of three or four houses strung out along the top. We bumped down a track to one, a wide, two-story house set in an overgrown garden with several olive trees.

I don’t remember much about the house, apart from that the kitchen was outside, and the water supply was rationed from the nearby balsa [water store] where you took your turn on a rota with the neighbours. There was a ramshackle outhouse, and I remember standing near it while Jacqueline and a neighbour discussed which of the stones on the ground marked the house’s boundary. The discussion went round and round, much like the roads that had brought us there. Then, none the wiser, we all piled back into the car for the drive back to Bédar where Jacqueline dropped us at the bar and drove off.

I remember feeling out of my depth, and telling Mark that what I’d really like would be something less remote, perhaps a little house on the edge of a village. We decided to have a quick drink before driving back – and then I realised that the key to our hire car was no longer in my possession. I tried to call Jacqueline but got no reply. There were no buses. We were stranded.

What happened next was, as they say, fate.

A young blonde dressed in black leather came through the door and strode up to the bar. After exchanging a few words with the bartender, she came over and asked where we needed to go. When we said ‘Mojácar’, she offered to drive us. As we weren’t in a position to refuse, we accepted.

Nadja was Swiss, and although quite fluent in English, all her sentences came out back to front. When I told her that we’d been looking at houses, she said that she had one to sell, “with mains water, electricity, a telephone socket and seven terraces.” It sounded very grand so, to rule it out more than anything, I asked how much. “Four million pesetas,” she replied (approx. £16,000). It was the same price as the house we’d just looked at.

What’s more, Nadja’s house was on the edge of a small village – just as I’d wished for.

When we reached the main road, our saviour pulled into a garage and bought three cans of lager from a vending machine in the forecourt. We drove the rest of the way to Mojácar swigging beer and listening to her peculiar jumbled steam-of-consciousness conversation. I concluded she was very sweet but most likely mad.

I didn’t think I’d call about the house, but a few days later curiosity got the better of me and we made a date to visit.

To get to Lubrín we had to return to Bédar and carry straight on, up a narrow white asphalt road that twisted its way through a magical landscape of hills studded with olive trees, yellow broom and thyme. At the top we passed the village of El Campico before descending to El Marchal where the road broadened out and continued another 5km to Lubrín.

The strange thing was how at home I felt. While the views were far-reaching and magnificent the road itself felt cocooned and cosy. We didn’t meet another vehicle that day and in the years to come, I rarely did. If it did happen, I often knew the driver, and we’d stop to chat.

Nadja and her English boyfriend Steve were expecting us. Margaritas tumbled over their garden wall, and on the left of the house were the seven terraces Nadja had referred to, planted with almond trees and flowers.

By the end of the week, we’d agreed on a price and employed a gestor to manage the sale. We sealed the deal over a breakfast of beer and tapas in Mojácar.

Back then, Lubrín was my freedom. The village seemed not to have changed since the Fifties. Set in a valley, whitewashed houses were built up the side of a hill, around an enormous red brick church in the middle.

My house, later christened Casa Becca by a guest, was set off to the right, built into the side of ‘El Castillo’. Many Spanish towns have a ‘castillo’ hill, on top of which the original Moorish watchtower would have stood.

All the roof beams were tree trunks, gnarled and twisted, interspersed with traditional caña – cane. Stone stairs led up to a low-ceilinged dining room leading to a big kitchen with an enormous fireplace at the end. There was a windowless ‘cave room’ with a huge rock from the mountainside protruding within. More rooms led around to a third bedroom opening onto the front of the house at the other end. The bathroom, down by the main front door, was a very basic affair with an old toilet and a plastic shower over a dug-out portion of the stone floor. In its 200 years, the house had barely changed.

Although there was a phone socket, there was no phone line and, back in 1997, no Internet. Apart from the 6am bus to Almeria City, there was no public transport, either. Compounded by the feeling that I’d stepped back in time, Lubrín felt properly remote. Nobody would ever find me. I’d been unhappy at the BBC so it was a huge relief to find myself there, completely cut off from social pressures.

I turned into another person when I was in Lubrín. Scruffy, dusty, carefree. I wore flowery shift dresses and tatty shorts. The only other foreigner in the town was a Dutch guy who I never met. My friends were old men who regaled me with tales about the village and my house’s past. I found out that Casa B had been the home of the village transportista who took goods and passengers to the coast in his donkey and cart, and that a man had been shot outside during the Civil War.

My main friend was Paco, a portly fellow of about 60. He had small, dainty feet and spoke in a soft, high voice, often reciting poetry or playing with words. Like many men from the village, he’d emigrated during Franco’s rule. He’d worked in Switzerland as a carpenter – he said he’d made furniture for David Bowie.

Another frequent visitor was Christobal, a wizened, Steptoe-like man who would exhort, ‘Mujer, mujer!’ [Woman, woman] in the style of a whiny flamenco singer at the start of every sentence, while encouraging me to buy his house or be his wife.

Paco and I became good friends. Even though he didn’t speak any English and I not much Spanish, he was an excellent communicator and we understood each other surprisingly well.

Soon after I bought my house, Paco took me to his land in La Alcarria, a beautiful valley on the other side of the main road. On the land was an old trunk which he ceremoniously opened to take out two fold-up chairs – one for me, one for my friend. He set them out and we sat down – looking north over an infinity of hazy mountain ranges – the ones in the foreground like rows of reclining elephant backs. Paco loved his land and was planning to build a house on it.

When I think of the early days I remember warm friendships and laughter. Paco would accompany my friends and I on excursions in the car, or come round for raucous suppers on the patio, or we’d have mad nights out in what I christened the ‘Young Mans’ Bar’ next to the post office, where the clientele would chorus ‘Paco Toro!’ when he arrived with two young women on his arm. When I was the only foreigner in town it really was fun.

Slowly but surely, Lubrín caught up with the rest of the world.

A few settlers from England arrived every year. There was Ponytail John, who built his own house out in the campo, and Dave Beach, a lugubrious hippie with great taste in music. There was Sally and Ann, possibly the village’s first ‘out’ lesbian couple, and their neighbour Bill, a gay accountant. There was Mandolin John, always with a beautiful girlfriend. Tourists rarely found their way to the village, but when they did it felt bizarre. To me, they looked big and out of place. Sitting outside the Plaza Bar, they were like giants on a small stage.

Around 2003 the dear little road from Bédar to El Marchal was widened and tarmacked, and with that more and more foreign settlers came. The tipping point for me was when a young suburban couple arrived. Until then, the foreign residents had had something alternative about them, a touch of the pioneer. But these people had none of that. And with that, it was as if my secret hideaway had been busted and my freedom was gone.

Solo Visits

I started coming to Lubrín on my own around 2002. At first, I was nervous. I’d fly in from Gatwick, drive back in my hire car, make the bed and smoke the emergency cigarette I left on the dining room desk. Then I’d go out for provisions from Antonio and Fina’s late-night shop – and see who was around. One time I didn’t get home till midnight after being waylaid by Mandolin John and a friend of his. Another time, I woke up at 4 am in a panic. It was pitch dark and I had the sensation I was entombed within an endless Spanish mountain range – there were no buildings after mine. In my 40s I would often wake up in the night. For a while, an insomniac bird nesting in the roof would be up around the same time, moving about. I found it comforting.

Paco and I grew apart. Lubrín had won the massive El Niño lottery in January 1998 with a prize of 1400m pesetas (about 8.5m euros). Paco was one of the winners. He didn’t spend the money at first, but a few years later he bought a radio-controlled airplane and a souped-up black sports car with red flames blazing on the sides. Where once he had been patient and good-humoured, he became impatient and his gentle high-pitched voice became gruff. He’d tear off to holiday towns like Aguadulce in the sports car and return with torrid tales of his exploits.

They wouldn’t let him build a house in La Alcarria (the plot was just 1m too narrow). Bitter, and obstinate to the last, he built a swimming pool instead and put a squalid kitchen and bathroom underneath. He surrounded the pool with weird totems like plastic fans and dolls’ heads on sticks.

There was a succession of dogs he didn’t know how to look after and on occasion he’d chase English settlers in his car. The gentle, communicative Paco I knew and loved had vanished, and when I asked people how he was, they just shook their heads and said, ‘perdido’ – lost. He died in 2010.

Middle Years

So far, I’d only visited Lubrín for short holiday breaks but when I started my Spanish rug and tile business it became the base for buying and sourcing expeditions. From 2006 onwards, I’d embark on huge solo road trips around Andalusia several times a year. I visited Valencia, too, to go to the Cevisama tile fair, once driving 400km cross-country from there to Cordoba to visit our main supplier. I visited Granada and embarked on crazy missions to find new suppliers in a series of remote locations. I particularly loved going to Priego de Cordoba, a baroque gem perched atop a cliff in the Sierra Subbetica Natural Park. I’d stay at Hostal Rafi where the bar was like a Spanish version of the US series Cheers. Rafi was even playing Bruce Springstein the first time I went. My second visit coincided with a noisy religious procession, the virgin being borne through the streets, children dressed up for their communion and a major football match blaring out from TVs. Hostal Rafi was in the middle of it all – the centre of the world!

Priego was four hours from Lubrín. Driving there in the autumn you’d see bonfires blazing high on the horizon. There were deserted mountain passes where you could go for hours without meeting a soul. At these times, I’d marvel at how, sometimes just the day before, I’d been caged like a bird in my London shop watching traffic thunder by, and now was soaring free in the mountain air, maybe 100 miles away from anyone else.

Occasionally I ended up in dangerous situations like the time I took the wrong route to the pretty village of Castril, 890m above sea level on the edge of the Cazorla National Park. As the track got narrower and narrower, I found myself with no choice but to accelerate up the precipitous bends with an overweight load of wholesale ceramics in the back. Dusk was falling and I remember thinking, ‘no-one knows where I am and I might die,’ followed by a half-crazed relief when I reached the top to witness a herd of goats galloping home in a cloud of dust. It was a quintessential Spanish moment.

Now…

In 2016, Lubrín became my freedom for the third time. Disgusted by the Brexit vote in March 2016, my first thought was to leave the UK. On the basis of having a Spanish house, I applied for Spanish residency. To my surprise, the application was successful and I moved out here in 2018.

Today, Lubrín is firmly rooted in the 21^st Century. There are street lamps along the road in, and a small industrial estate just north of my house. There’s a world-class olive oil press, a honey factory and modern milking sheds for the goats. The once-silent hills are full of light and noise. There’s a small housing estate opposite me, too, mainly occupied by British families who now make up a sizeable proportion of the population.

Stubbornly ‘unreformed’ for years, Casa B has been updated to make her long-term habitable. The tree trunk roof beams have gone, as has the insomniac bird. The cave room has a window. The dining room and kitchen have been knocked together and the ceilings raised. A proper bathroom has been added.

I study Spanish, teach English and Creative Writing, blog, write and walk the hills. Everyday life is time-consuming – I collect my water from the mountain spring at El Campico and drag it up to my house in a trolley. In the winter I must bring in wood, make fires and clean the stoves. More satisfying, this year I picked my olives for the first time and took them to the press in exchange for some superb Lubrín olive oil.

It’s been a little tough, establishing a life here on my own. It can be awkward negotiating social groups as an older single woman. It’s taken time to find work, or friends on my wavelength, but I keep on. Perhaps the fourth freedom will come when I really don’t care what other people think.

In the absence of family, Casa B has been my continuity. Last March, returning from winter respite on the coast, it was surprisingly nice to be back. Even though I had to hoover the flaky paint off the walls and clean surfaces thick with muddy dust, it was just lovely to hear the birds again, and the goat bells, and the church ringing every quarter-hour. Enduring country sounds. The sounds of home.

Postscript

In June 2021, I went to a dance performance at Kensal Green Cemetery in West London. ‘Dance Me To Death’ was a project started by AofA’s Rose Rouse, with all the dancers in their 60s or older. At the after-party, I was on a table with a couple from Clapham. When I asked if they knew the province of Almeria, the woman gave a little start. She said that she’d visited a place called Bédar one Christmas in the Seventies. Back then, black-clad village ladies washed their clothes at the communal fountain and collected water in huge water jugs on their heads. Donkeys were the main means of transport, roads were few, and Fi and her boyfriend had walked four miles up to the village from the bus stop. On Christmas Eve, the village ladies taught her to dance Flamenco – she pulled her body up straight to demonstrate. She looked happy as the memories resurfaced, and I thought how great it was that we should meet by chance almost 50 years later, two strangers transcending time and space to share our experiences of a tiny, faraway place that has meant so much to us both.

Perhaps the magic lives on, after all.

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A week of unexpected action. Monday morning, as I get on the good foot and am clearing out the shed in a hunt for the key to my bike’s front wheel, I get a last-minute Airbnb request, my first ever. It’s for three nights starting tonight and the woman, Jane*, has great reviews. She apologises for the lateness of the booking, and says she can wait until the evening to come.

I say yes.

Everything needs to be cleaned and tidied. Linen must be found and inspected, and I know that everything always takes longer than you expect.

First, I look for linen. I have my visitor’s bag with a single duvet and cover, and damn, the cover needs a wash. No pillows. Up to the loft I go to find some. Then I unearth everything from the linen chest in my bedroom in a hunt for pillowcases which may also need a wash – a muddle of duvet, sheets, pillowcases and pyjamas all over the bed.

I find what I need, and it all goes, with the last of the washing liquid, on a quick wash.

The bathroom is next. I get into my decorating gear with rubber gloves and goggles, and pour thick bleach, bought weeks ago for exactly this, onto a rag fortuitously found in the shed. I smear it onto the tiles around the bath – aiming to clean the grout. I rub it in, wishing for nose protection and wonder if it’ll work. Leave it for a while and get on with the rest – my trusty Jiff, still going strong after I don’t know how many years. Basin, taps polished off with a towel, bath, rinsing off the bleach that has trickled into it. More bleach down the loo. Vacuum the floor with the Hetty, attempt to use the Flash Mop, batteries missing, down on hands and knees with the little sponge. Then, rinse the tiles. Better, but not 100 percent.

Hang the washing up. It’s hot and sunny with a breeze. Fab.

Then the spare room. Dust and polish, vacuum the floor, vacuum the mattress. Remove the keyboard and stand, replace with wooden fold-up desk and chair. Place pictures on the hooks, put Spanish blanket from the loft on top of the chest of drawers for extra warmth, pile up pillows and the cat cushion from my room, add my own bedside lamp and rubbish bin.

Then to the kitchen and a chance to properly tidy. Great. Vacuum the floor and spot-clean it. Vacuum the hall a bit, vacuum the stairs and landing, and spot-clean with the sponge.

And then, all the little bits you forget and, somehow, an improbable, random shower while I’m not looking from what had been a cloudless sky. No way! The garden is wet! The paving, the plants, the duvet cover again…

By now it’s 4pm. I finally have lunch. But there’s more to do. The duvet cover miraculously re-dries, so I put it on the bed. But at the last minute, I have to iron the pillowcases and get the long ladder from the shed to remove the linen globe lampshade to clean a thick coat of dust off the top. Man!

Jane arrives around 6.20pm and I take her around. I do a double-take when we get to the kitchen. “This is the kitchen,” I say, “tidier than it has been in years.”

At 7pm I’m away to Bell Green with my shopping trolley containing a broken bedside lamp and toaster to recycle at Curry’s. It’s still a beautiful day. I then do a big shop at Sainsbury’s, including a face towel for my guest. It’s dark when I finish, and the trolley weighs a ton. Exhausted. No obvious way to get home. I call an Uber but have no idea where the pickup point is, so cancel it. Trolley too heavy to heave onto the bus that would take me some of the way, so I drag the trolley home – a 45-min, mainly uphill walk. Supper at 10pm.

All the same, Airbnb strikes me as a win-win. Your guests are on their best behaviour to get a good review. They have minimal food to clutter up the kitchen and minimal belongings to clutter up the house. You, for your part, keep the house uber-clean and tidy and are nice to them.

But it also strikes me that I’m getting old.

On Tuesday, there’s an all-pervading smell of damp plaster. I go round, sniffing, trying to work out what’s going on. Prioritise preparing for the Creative Writing class later, the first of the new term. Reply to emails from last-min students. I’m a bit muddle-headed. There’s not enough time to go to Crystal Palace to flyer, so I go back to some editing I’ve been employed to do. Call the plumber eventually and, after teaching the first class of the new term, eat a ton of lentils and spinach, not wanting to cook anything smelly to disturb Jane, who is not yet back. Drink a little wine and end up falling fast asleep on the sofa, sitting up. Like narcolepsy. When I come to, at around 10.30pm, I’m disorientated and don’t know where I am, when it is, possibly even who I am. I wonder if I’m ill. I wonder if there’s a gas leak, or carbon monoxide. I stumble to the bathroom to gulp some water and then take to my bed, sitting up, as is my way when I’m ill. The cat comes in, perky as ever, then curls up on my chest (unusual) so I put thoughts of gas and carbon monoxide out of my head and attempt to rest, grateful that Jane is still out. What would she have thought if she found me sitting up, fast asleep? She might have thought I was dead!

Becca DJing recently

Today, Wednesday, I get up around 6.45am, gingerly. The damp smell has gone and I feel kind of OK. I wonder, what caused this episode? The hard physical labour of Monday, or the stress of Tuesday, worrying about my classes, still not getting to Crystal Palace to flyer, a phone call from a friend, 82, who herself blanked out for 10 days, waking up in hospital never to go home again? She’s now in a nursing home, diagnosed with Parkinson’s, arthritis and Long Covid. She asks what I’ve been doing, and I reel off a list:

Reggae festival, bike accident, teaching for one month, DJing, leafleting, interviewing, writing, editing, 4K overdrawn, 10 steps behind. Because she’s how she is, she doesn’t ask me about any of it but gives me an interesting insight into her current environment and says I am among her select group of real friends.

My friend tells me I must make plans for my forthcoming decrepitude, and I wonder, was it age or stress that caused me to pass out? Stress over not enough students? Stress over a forthcoming interview with a well-known reggae singer, stress over the transcribing and editing? Stress combined with that very long, hard Monday?

Attending Rototom Reggae Festival in Spain

I think I must be gentle with myself today. Forget about Crystal Palace. Concentrate on the good things I have rustled up over the past week: a possible Deptford teaching venue, more DJ venues, two new students from the leafleting I have managed to do (I now have six at Forest Hill, including 4 returners, which is not really enough, but just about OK).

Update: Thursday 6.30am. After a gentle day transcribing, a meeting with another author I’m supporting and a homemade spag bol, I sleep pretty well. Jane has checked out early for work. She’s also sent friendly messages and useful links to help with my projects. The sun’s coming up and I’m feeling positive again. Go with the flow, girl. Go with the flow.

It had seemed like a normal Saturday morning. Sound of trains going through New Cross station, the fast track flying non-stop through the middle, the near track trains slowing, stopping and starting again at 5-minute intervals. Justin would listen for the doors opening and closing, trying to make out their sound over the general din. Sometimes, just sometimes, the station would be silent of its whooshes, squeaks and roars and he’d listen for birdsong – robins, blackbirds, thrushes and wrens. They were there in the trees at the end of his garden, just drowned out by all the noise.

It was quieter at the weekend. Today he’d got up at 6am and sat out with a cup of mushroom and nettle tea, observing the cat which visited at that time. He’d called it over, but the cat had just looked at him for a moment and continued on its way.

Saturday was his day to go up the art college to see what they’d thrown out. He needed canes for his beans, and wood for a planter for the new cuttings he’d collected from his gardening clients. After making himself some breakfast, and several more cups of tea, he clipped the cart to the back of his bike and set off. Past the station, turn right, turn left and straight up the hill. Over the lights and turn right for the back entrance of the college. Turned out his intuition had been correct – there was a big pile of stuff outside the gate, awaiting his attention.

On closer inspection, Justin found some broken easels, a square of reinforced glass, a drinks fridge, an enamel sink, a transistor radio, two broken stools, some flattened cardboard boxes and a bucketful of gouache paints. He piled the easels into his cart – he’d nail some together for the planters and break the rest up to use in the place of canes. He loaded up the reinforced glass as well, for his cold frames, and slung the radio and paints in for good measure.

The kid came out of nowhere as he was cycling home down the main drag. Ran under his wheels and sent them both flying – his load as well. Thank heavens most of the traffic had stopped at the lights just behind, and the roads were quieter than normal over Easter. What traffic was left slowed to a halt while the two of them picked themselves up, checking for damage. The boy’s arm was bleeding, so when he finished retrieving his stuff, Justin told him he could come back to his to get the wound patched up. He thought a cup of mushroom tea and a sandwich might be in order as well.

The boy was about 16. Dirty Afro hair, stained grey joggers and sweatshirt; manky trainers. He just looked at Justin a bit dazedly for a minute and then shrugged. Justin took that as a yes. “Come on, then,” he said. “I’m Justin.” And then, when the boy didn’t answer, “What’s your name?”

“Clyde.”

Clyde had been running out of the mini-Sainsbury with a stolen prawn and mayonnaise sandwich when Justin knocked him down. He was so surprised, not just by being knocked down but also by the peculiar-looking brother on the bike, that he forgot all about the sandwich which had flown up in the air, landed in the bus lane and been squashed by a Number 436.

The bike guy had vertical dreadlocks and a noble face – Clyde thought he looked like Chadwick Boseman in Wakanda. He was wearing jeans and a loose hessian tunic with embroidered borders; and his bike had a long wagon still attached, to transport the load of wood, glass and paint which were now all over the road. The bike guy was darting around picking them all up, while a few cars hooted. They walked the rest of the way back to Justin’s. It was a small modern house, the last in a short terrace. Justin wheeled his bike down the side and gestured at Clyde to follow.

Clyde narrowed his eyes suspiciously. This was some weird shit. Behind the tiny house, the garden was huge. There was an assortment of vegetables, flowers, seeds in pots; and two derelict-looking greenhouses far away at the bottom by the railway line.

Justin gestured to a rickety garden table. “Sit down. I’ll bring the stuff out here. You want breakfast?”

Clyde wasn’t sure. It didn’t seem like the bloke was a nonce, but he could be going inside to change into some dutty bondage gear for all he knew. He shuffled his feet uncomfortably.

Justin busied himself in the kitchen. The kid was straight out borstal, he thought, still in his prison gear. Looked like he had been sleeping rough. Could do anything – not that he was worried. He was a big guy, didn’t take no shit. Still, those little yut’s could be unpredictable.

He fetched his First Aid box, filled a bowl with hot water and brought them to the boy. Then he went back in, took a dish of leftover Ital stew from the fridge to warm, and put the kettle on.

When he took everything out on a tray, there was some bloody cotton wool on the table and the youth was down the end of the garden, peering in the greenhouses.

He looked back when he heard Justin coming out.

“Come and get some tea,” Justin shouted. “It’s good for shock.”

Clyde wasn’t sure about no damn tea, but the dread was pouring his own from the same pot, so he decided to risk it. It smelled rank and tasted like mushrooms, earth and grass, but what Justin said was right, he did start to feel better.

The dread was speaking about his brew.

“It’s a wicked combination,” he was saying. “Lion’s Mane mushrooms from Wales, and nettles from right here!” He pointed at a patch of weeds by the fence. The Lion’s Mane is good for your brain, you know, and the nettles calm everything down – mind and body. And you see all those lickle seedlings in the greenhouse? Food for free!”

Justin listened as the boy told him he was squatting on a barge on the creek. His mate had set it up for him after he came out of detention. He said he’d been scared at first, but now he was coming out on the deck more because it was warmer, and nobody was taking any notice.

“Yes, bwoy! This is Deptford. People know how to mind their own.” Justin nodded towards some ganja plants in a cold frame on the patio and winked. “You got to lift up your head and hold it up high! Come nuh, mek I give you a class in cultivation.”

Later that afternoon

Clyde walked back to the barge around 3pm, carrying a long blue IKEA bag. Down the path past the theatre, towards the dregs of the departed second-hand market, clouds of white cherry blossom brightening the way.

In his bag he had 10 little flowerpots, an assortment of vegetable cuttings, a roll of clingfilm, a small knife, some elastic bands, a flask of mushroom tea and a bag of compost. Riffing though the remains of the flea market, he added a big plastic flowerpot and some scraps of wood to nail together for a planter. He’d done carpentry in detention and he was good at it.

He walked on via Achilles Street like Justin had said, and snapped off a piece of honeysuckle coming over the wall at Number 50.

Back on the creek, there was a sliver of sun shining on the barge. He jumped on deck and basked in it for a moment. Vitamin D first, and then he’d get to work.

He gazed up at plants he’d never had eyes for before. A rampant buddleia up against the wall, a few dandelions and daisies at ground level, and were those butterflies? Boy, the only wildlife he’d noticed before was his old seagull mate bothering him.

As if conjured by his thoughts, the gull flew in with a squawk and perched on the cabin roof, hoping for fast food scrappage. A scavenging t’ief like himself, Clyde thought, but them days were over now.

“In these perilous times, the future belongs to people like us,” Justin had said. “People who are good with their hands, people who can live on their wits. You got to use what you got, and you gotta use it to the fullest.”

It was the Deptford way.

“Nah mate. Things are changing round here!” Clyde told the screeching bird. First job tomorrow would be to find some netting to protect his seedlings. Should be plenty of that on the creek, he thought.

‘Stress and overwhelm interspersed with moments of wonder’. This is how I described my life last March, in a co-listening session that came through AofA. We were taking our first steps out of a dreige winter. It had been a busy one. Lots of winter introspection leading to an epiphanic decision about my future, the rekindling of an old relationship, launching new creative writing courses, coping with gallstone attacks, a miserable lodger, more DJing and a new business idea. I was scattered and overwhelmed, living what I call ‘life on a line’ – on one’s own, just keeping on and on ’til you drop.

There were new things starting, things that needed to change, and just too many things to do.

Two memories stood out. The first was from just before Christmas, blowing in out of a snowstorm to a friendly Brockley pub with a wicked music vibe and the amazing Ukadelix band playing up a storm. There was a whole audience of dancing, engaged punters – friends, familiar faces and a nice young woman who chatted to me about the band as I shook off the snow and got my first drink.

The second was from March, at Vinyl Sisters, a reggae night in Brixton where womxn DJs rule the decks. There was mellow music, a loving vibe and a warm welcome from what seemed like everyone I had ever met over the past two years, scattered through different venues on the London reggae music scene. Lady Bigz and Pandiva were playing roots, soca and calypso, while Annemarie, who I hadn’t met before, played an especially sublime selection which we had a great conversation after, discovering many things in common. There was Debbie, co-founder of the night, like a big sister who first welcomed me into this world, and her daughter who made me laugh when I told her about my boring Ancestry results, joking that I had too much rhythm for them. There was the gang from Brixton Downbeat sound system – young Ruddy, George and DeeDee; there were elders asking when I would play next, there was Miss Feelgood and Deptford Dub Club regulars Mark and Mikey. There was Ranjan from Advantages of Age and youngers from other sound systems. There was reggae royalty like Doc and Antonella, Princess Laura and the singer Deemas J. There was Nana, selector Sweetie and a trendy young couple from Deptford, ‘only just out of hibernation’. Like a Brixton fairytale, it was a glittering crowd of precious people, a family of music lovers, and one I suddenly realised I belong to.

Having no conventional family, history and space hold special significance for me, too. My rekindled squeeze is a writer, like me interested in the past. I used to imagine my ancestors meeting his fictional characters – and ponder on how us two have collided in the present day. I think a lot about my local area – my forebears who lived in Deptford, Brockley, Telegraph Hill and even Forest Hill where I am now. I believe my affinity with here must bear some relationship to these roots. I also think about modern history: anti-racism marches, reggae and sound systems – the world I have found myself in. I consider how both my parents loved classical music and realise I’ve inherited the musical gene, albeit falling for a different genre in line with my own life and times. In terms of reggae, I marvel at how it brings a huge diversity of people together, bonds us, performs a magical sleight of hand on so many levels.

The Vinyl Sisters crowd isn’t my only music family. There’s the Deptford Dub Club crew: Kathy and Don, Nick and Debbie, Anne and Chris, Soren, Una, Soft Wax and others. There’s the Heritage Vinyl DJs, especially Tim and Lloyd who guest at my own residency in Honor Oak. There are untold reminiscences with Chris and Yasmin at Sugahill café. There’s the Reggae Cookout in Finsbury Park, again with familiar faces, people who move between the above venues – a cosy cross stepping of loose connections and mutual interests.

There’s also the Soul Roots Radio family – fellow DJs on our community radio station for a global audience. Last summer I was in Valencia and discovered I was staying literally around the corner from a club night run by SRR’s Three Musketeers. The club was in session even as I looked them up on Instagram and five minutes later, I was there, introducing myself and getting linked to more people.

I guess, even though not usually in terms of individual friendships, the community holds me – and for someone so alone in terms of blood family, this feels significant. When I stop to think about it, it’s steadying. And it’s strengthening to be part of a movement, a network of likeminded people. It grants independence and brings opportunities – not just for myself – there are opportunities to support others, too. Much like a blood family, the reggae family gives me a home to grow from and to give back to.

In a time of unbearable division in society, polarisation and hatred, it’s important to tell this story of positivity and love. There is a purity in all music that anyone can respond to, and wrapped within reggae’s beautiful harmonies and rhythms are messages of unity, truth and rights. There’s the concept of ‘revolutionary love’ – love not just in the romantic sense but as a political choice. I’m currently seeking opportunities to bring music to new, unconverted audiences – ones who might benefit from its healing magic in the testing days ahead.

Personally speaking, the road ahead is clearer, too. Ending this piece almost a year after its inception, I’m going forward in a spirit of trust. There has been much moving feedback from my creative writing students, and to some of my articles. I can see how happy people are when I DJ. With a major two-year project out of the way, work feels more manageable and there’s space for new things – I’m learning that everything has its time. Moreover, the miserable lodger’s gone, the relationship’s hanging in and the gallstone attacks have stopped.

Listen to my radio shows at https://www.mixcloud.com/SoulRootsRadio/playlists/world-a-reggae/

Find out about my courses and writing at beccaleathlean.co.uk

Find out about my DJing on Instagram: @selectorbecca

(Bob Marley & the Wailers, Kinky Reggae, 1973)

O-o-o K, so this is the deal. We’ve only just hit the road in Eric’s luxury people-carrier, we’re jigging around to Protojé booming out of the speakers, and Eric suddenly says, “on the left, look, there’s Miss Brown’s Bar!”

I swivel in my seat but it’s too late.

“The Miss Brown? As in, I went downtown, I saw Miss Brown...?”

“Yes!”

Wow. We’re driving past Miss Brown’s Bar, listening to Protojé, on a free holiday to Jamaica. You couldn’t make it up.

Today, we’re going to Treasure Beach. We set out early, as it’s far. As usual, the drive is an experience in itself.

As we go deeper into the country, Eric points out medicinal plants. Or plants for washing clothes, or for cleaning the house. He idles the engine, and between botany bites, chats flirtatiously to a young woman walking past. Does he know her? We’re not sure.

We drive past rolling jungle gardens, houses with gravestones out front and a slightly larger house, belonging to Mr Hogg, a famous ganja pilot. “That’s Mr Hogg’s old house,” says Eric, “and this is his new one,” he points to an audacious-looking tomb on the other side of the road. Hah! Thinking about it now, I think it’s fair to say that Mr Hogg went the whole hog. (Sorry!)

A jovial man, almost bear-like, Eric is the essence of goodness and a mine of information. After an hour or so, he pulls into a brightly-painted roadside café and introduces us to the proprietor. We get a drink, and he moves away, chatting to her. Murmuring even. We clock it all and giggle like teenagers.

We reach Treasure Beach about 2pm. Many people here have Scottish ancestry and red hair. We pass a couple of flame-haired children. Eric slows the car again. “Whe’ yu shoes?” he demands. In the back, we’re laughing again, but I’m touched by how Jamaican people seem so close, as to almost be part of the same family. It takes an island to raise a child…?

Over the coming days, we visit the site of Bob Marley’s summer house (our idea), the Blue Hole underground mineral spring (his idea) and a Yellowman concert. Then, towards the end of our week, Eric drives us to the big ‘Spring Break’ concert just outside Negril. It’s late, no chance of anyone coming onstage before midnight. We’ve been advised to stick to rum, and we have a suspicious, skunky joint in our bag. It was our ‘change’ from a scurrilous taxi driver we rode with one night when Eric wasn’t free. A policeman waves us down.

Eric winds down the window, all his jokey bonhomie vanished. A bony-faced cop takes his licence and peers at us in the back. You lookin’ for Jamaican boyfriends?” he leers. And then, ‘Nah, you too old!”

Somehow, I find myself channelling my mother, dead now for 17 years.

“Officer! I would have thought better of you!”

I spot Eric’s shoulders shaking in the front, a picture of silent mirth.

Our turn to make him laugh.

(Photo is of a beautiful garden in Westmoreland, not Miss Brown’s Bar)

Jo found the key while she was in the loft. It was under the rafter with the shamrock and initials engraved in it. She’d puzzled over what the letters stood for, ‘F.C.B. 1906’ – Frank Cottrell Boyce had sprung to mind – one of those names that come to you even when you have no idea who they are. She’d Googled on her phone – children’s story writer.

F.C.B. The builder, she’d thought. An Irishman, proud of his work? Frank, Fred? There hadn’t been too much to mull over. The key was something else. It was tiny and gold, like the one that opened her mother’s music box.

The music box had fascinated her as a child. It was lacquered black wood with a dark red Chinese scene painted on, and gold leaf. Her mother would unlock it, and they’d watch the cantilever shelves float gently forward as a ghostly Für Elise filled the dreary bedroom. Metal pins plucking tuned steel teeth inside, a sound like bells chiming. It was other-worldly, exactly that, because inside lay a discarded world of elegance and plenty. There were diamond and emerald rings, a turquoise bracelet, pearl earrings, a coral necklace. Her mother would finger the jewels with her tiny hands, rougher now, the left still bearing a plain gold wedding band. The coral necklace came out the most, a pull to nature, to the ocean which, as a Pisces, she loved.

They’d go to the sea, a Pisces and Scorpio together. Jo would perch on the back of her mum’s Yamaha 90 motorbike. Her mother wore dark-blue nylon slacks and an old anorak, and they both sported crash helmets. They’d arrive in Teignmouth and cross the bridge to Shaldon to park the bike. Funny how the bike never got a name. Then they’d walk through the cold, clammy smugglers’ tunnel to their special beach. Emerging into the bright, there was an ice-cream hut selling Pollard’s vanilla cones covered in hundreds and thousands. Occasionally, they’d get 99s. Funny, all those numerical names for ice creams. Not so the Rocket. Then they’d crunch down the shingle to their spot. Come cloud, come shine there would be swimming. Her mother was a natural, diving into waves and taking off, far into the distance. She taught Jo to swim, but Jo was never as brave. Ancient bottle of Ambre Solaire suntan lotion, dark amber oil with a tart scent, rubbing in rough mixed with sand. Her mother was in her happy place and Jo was in hers – a rare harmony between the water signs.

There was one day she’d never forget. Up by the cliff, her mum had found a single tomato growing in the sand! A tomato! Growing in the sand! A true child of nature again, she was as thrilled with that as she’d ever been with her gold and jewels. More so, in fact.

After, it would be back to their bungalow. Cold lino, old furniture and sadness in the air. Joy and pain, like sunshine and rain.

I could swear the world is flat when I fly into Houston. Speeding towards the dusk, hundreds of Texan miles rolling out smooth and green below, the sun looks like it’s fallen clean off the edge of the planet.

It’s dark as the plane lands, and the skyscrapers of Downtown glow like a mirage in the distance. When the minibus drops us off, the city centre is deserted and eerie. Mockingbirds whistle from twisty oaks lining the street, and it’s like walking through a dream as I find my way to the YMCA, a 10-storey 1940s block that’s been dwarfed over the decades by futuristic buildings up to seven times its height.

Upstairs, my room is furnished with a fridge and a TV but has no coat hangers. A hard single bed is covered by a knitted blanket and a sheet with cigarette burns in it. Out of the window I look down the street into a massive porthole about an eighth of the way up a vast blue neon-lit building and notice, to its left, a disused revolving restaurant, circa 1960, now surrealistically redundant among the newer, taller towers.

Four miles of air-conditioned tunnels run beneath downtown Houston. Next morning, smart commuters march briskly along the streets before vanishing underground – it’s late February and temperatures are already hitting the 80s. Venturing after the workers, I enter the lobby of a shiny office block, but going down the escalator, I find myself alone in what seems like a basement. Broom cupboards and tiny archaic offices line a winding corridor which eventually leads to a cavernous canteen serving French toast and waffles.

Back above ground, at the intersection of Main and Prairie to the north of Downtown, the landscape opens out and I’m struck by how impoverished people are. Young and old, they gather at bus stops, ragged, shuffling and wild-eyed, looking poor in a way I’ve never seen in Europe. Towards the smart new courthouse, it’s still more desolate. A lone hotel, the Lonsdale, stands in apocalyptic isolation. Scarily seedy, it looks like a clapboard facade from the set of a Western.

Texas was an independent country until 1845 and in many ways the frontier mentality lives on. For a lawman, prosecuting capital cases is a political necessity – the state has the busiest Death Row in America, and a third of the inmates come from Houston. The city’s retiring District Attorney, Johnny Holmes, is notorious for prosecuting dozens of them personally. A bulging man with a long white walrus moustache, he’s also famous for dressing in full cowboy regalia, complete with Stetson, side arm, trench coat and boots – a living embodiment of the Old Law of the West.

Driving back into town one evening, I turn off the Interstate to meet a woman whose son is on Death Row. A little outside the city limits, Louella lives in a blue and white wooden house on a long, empty road just behind the railway track. When she hears me pull up, she calls:

“Rebecca, is that you?”, then hobbles to flip the catch on the flimsy side door. Despite her girly cotton print-dress, she is a strangely camp-looking woman. With brown skin stretched tight across a battered face, she has a Haitian look and the biggest, most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen.

We haven’t met before, but Louella’s happy and excited because I’ve been to see her son – without a car she’s rarely able to go herself. Isolated and ill with Hepatitis C and diabetes, she speaks in long streams of consciousness about “her baby” – she seems to be keeping herself alive with the thought that her son is coming home one day.

As we talk, though, a contender in the race for the new DA comes on TV. Chuck Rosenthal strides forth like an avenging angel, declaring war on crime and asserting his own get-tough credentials – he’s already sent 14 people to Death Row – “where they belong”.

“Send people to death row where they belong?” Louella mutters, bewildered, wounded, crushed. How often has she been tormented by Chuck’s boast as she sits alone, trying to convince herself that things will turn out alright? Later, she hunts around for something to give me, eventually pulling a desk diary from a shelf. “Girlfriend! I ain’t got no desk so I don’t need no diary!” she insists. It’s twilight when I go. She stands among the flowers in her front garden and waves sedately.

Back at the Y, there are men with limbs missing, women with no hair and people with all manner of afflictions. But although they look strange to me, I soon realise I must seem even stranger to them – they don’t understand my accent and think I must be French.

When I say I’m from London, a young lad says: “Isn’t that where they’ve got that big tower?”

‘The Tower of London’, I puzzle. ‘Canary Wharf?’ But no, he means the Eiffel Tower.

He’s embarrassed when he realises his mistake. “France is near England, right?”

Saturday. There’s been torrential rain and the temperature has fallen 20 degrees overnight. High winds cannon between the soaring buildings, and as the tunnels are shut at the weekend, I have to struggle half-a-mile to the post office overground, my body pitched against the force of the gusts. The skies are clear, though, so I catch a bus to my next appointment. The friendly driver drops me just beyond the busy I-45 flyover that borders Downtown. A stone’s throw from the shimmering space-age island, the road is muddy, pot-holed and lined with shacks.

On my last day, Clarence Brandley comes to see me at the YMCA. A one-time resident there himself, he spent nearly 10 years on Death Row for the rape and murder of a white woman, before an international campaign found evidence that judges had plotted with the prosecution to have him sentenced to death while two white men who confessed their guilt were never arrested. The death penalty in Texas grew out of racist lynchings and with Clarence, as with so much in this ghostly place, spectres of the past seem ever-present. In an experience more reminiscent of the 1930s than the 1980s he was told: “You’re the nigger, so you’re elected.”

The coach to Mississippi leaves at midnight so I go to recce the Greyhound station. It’s scary: gang-types loiter outside, apparently looking for people to rob. I opt to sit out my last seven hours in the lobby of the Y. As I wait, I wonder where the humanity is in this city of deserted streets, down-and-outs and Davy Crockett-style DAs. For a couple of hours I find it, in a nearby Japanese restaurant where tables are shared between strangers, and jokey acrobatic waiters juggle the dishes to entertain us. Next to me, a young couple are beginning a birthday night out and invite me to join them. We eat and laugh, and after 90 minutes pay up and go our separate ways. Back at the Y, though, my bonhomie is quick to fade. The lobby’s empty tonight, but at 11.10pm a large white-haired woman comes down in her nighty and talks to her daughter on the phone. She tells her she has cancer and that it’s spreading towards her brain.

https://houston.culturemap.com/news/city-life/10-04-10-put-it-on-the-culturelist-will-anyone-even-try-to-save-the-old-downtown-ymca-building

I’m a heavy old thing. Proudly black, I’m rough on the outside, pitted and greasy within.

I’m tired. I’m woken every morning at 4am. Rain or shine, snow or sun, light or dark. Today, July 1, it’s warming up and getting light already.

First, the kitchen light goes on – shining through the star-shaped holes in the Spanish-style cupboard doors. He coughs and croaks then crouches down and pulls me out. Same old, same old – I haven’t had a day off in weeks.

I’m placed on the gas ring. I hear the fridge door open and close, then the rustle of wrapping paper on the chopping board. A knife slices the lard and taps the wood. Then there’s the whoosh of gas, click of ignition and heat flares below. I warm up slowly. I’m super thick so it’s a pleasant warmth. I must say, I do feel for those flimsy silver frying pans – the heat must be excruciating for them.

A hunk of lard lands on me, cold and heavy. Then, as it melts, the hot trickles tickle. My dense surface keeps the greasy rivulets calm, they don’t hiss and sizzle like they would in a silver pan – they swim around somnambulantly. I sense rather than hear the bacon coming next, and by then there’s so much lard swilling about that I don’t feel a thing when he lays it down. I smell it though, the predictable porcine pong. Once the bacon’s done, the spatula scratches and I brace myself for eggs. I hear him cracking and dropping them in, one after the other. One, two, three, four, five, six. He’s singing now, a silly, ‘diddly do, diddly dum’ kind of hum but curses as he drops some eggshell on the floor. I know I’m old and experienced, but those bluddy eggs do my head in every time. One or two are OK but the stench of six frying together is too much, even for me. He doesn’t care though. Scrape, scrape, scrape – he levers them all out. Then the heat goes off but I’m still hot and bothered, and I’ll stay that way for hours.

A chair scrapes the floor by the French windows. Cutlery taps on the plate. Five minutes later, water running, clink of metal and china in the washing up bowl. But he picks me up and puts me straight back in the cupboard – shamefully unwashed and sweaty. I can feel the distain of my cupboard companions, the food. Tins of tomatoes and tuna, bags of rice, pasta, pulses, lentils. I’m not one of them and I’m so not making a good impression. Then the cupboard door shuts and he walks out of the kitchen, leaving the light on as usual. None of us are going to get back to sleep now.

Found: my old silver U-lock, a gift to me circa 1985.

I’m in the shed, riffling through the yellow plastic crate that is my bicycle box in search of the key to my front wheel. Ancient cans of oil, a canny flat bolt un-screwer with holes for nuts of various shapes and sizes, an ancient cycling cape slicked with oil, a pair of long, pink fingerless gloves smelling of damp metal and this, the old silver U-lock. It’s unbranded. Skinny, blackened steel, rusty along the bottom with a brass key in the lock and a spare key attached to it with some green garden twine.

I didn’t know I still had it and wonder, briefly, before inspecting it further, why I ever thought to buy a new one – the one I use now.

I turn the key experimentally, and find it moves easily. Despite being put out in the shed for the last 20 years, the lock seems well-oiled. Indeed, the whole thing is quite slippery. And, as I weigh it in my hands, it takes me back in time, 40 years, to Morat Street SW9, my little housing association flat, my bike at the time – a pink Raleigh – and the respectable older man next door who bequeathed the lock to me. I guess it is an antique.

It served me well for many years – in those days I cycled everywhere in London. To my early-morning cleaning job in Clapham Junction, then over to Brixton Rec for a swim; Brixton market and Sainsbury’s for groceries (I’d balance plastic baskets of shopping on top of each other on the back, secured with lengthy bunjy grips). I’d ride over to Elephant and Castle, to college in the daytime and to see my friends at night – go out raving and crash at theirs, then ride to my weekend job as a dinner lady at Kings College Hall of Residence. Once I got a proper job and some new friends, I’d go to Lewisham for parties and ride home, pissed and singing through Peckham and Camberwell. I got a green Witcombe bike during this time, and the lock accompanied me through it all – gamely guarding my transport while I gallivanted.

The cape and gloves tell stories, too. The cape, with holes for your hands, enveloped the drop handlebars like a kind of tent – no good at all once I got a blue Ridgeback around 2016. And the gloves are just so 80s. Obviously durable – as good as new apart from the smell. The nut-unscrewer, I think, is even older, coming from my mum.

Would I ever have imagined I’d bump up against my old bike lock again, 40 years hence, and where/who I’d be at 63? I thought I’d be fat and frumpy, a bit of an eccentric old lady. Certainly not a reggae DJ and thinner than I ever was then! I’d have been delighted with that.

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