Spain Made Her Laugh

The Spaniards still have a few old-fashioned ideas about neris place, and the bull-ring is not one of them. But this ’here, according to her own story, Elizabeth Ferguson, by onality Australian, found herself.

E she got back to Australia the last year, Elizabeth has two TV appearances to tell t and has written a book called t Laughter, which is ely guaranteed to make no d laugh. To tell the truth, t do much for this Australian, beth’s comic-opera is laid-on trowel. And Spain is the ace where this sort of treat is unnecessary. To tell it :, with its fun, laughter, sad eauty and ugliness, should be Spain is an anachronism one half of the world (in- Elizabeth) pines to reform; which the other half (includ es truly) likes to escape from /e have made of the rest of rid. beth landed in Barcelona with ney, no Spanish and no place but with the cosy idea that uld make a living teaching ds to speak English. She n a house for revolutionary I students and graduated to ;o dancing before catching the ! a famous matador whose dance, naturally, led to her a bull-fighting school, in turn, naturally, led to her a band of gipsies at Granada, i all too quickly four years The time element alone that the Regime has some :e. No Spaniard could have so long in the UK without :-permit; nor would such an ic as Elizabeth have got past t immigration barrier in Aus whatever else you may feel he girl, you have to hand it that she never sees anything II and mediocre sizes. The s are peasant-ier than any seen elsewhere. Donas are ;r; and the revolutionaries evolutionary than anything in enturies.

Guardia Civile don’t just up and down the beaches and the roads, as poor, bemused see them —they rattle about celona tram-cars leaning on üb-machine guns. And when th flies, the beaten-up DC3

claws and bounces through the air like a yo-yo while the passengers mutter prayers and cross themselves.

But even more extraordinary than her book was her last appearance on Sydney television after the book was published in late May. In a five minute interview, in which she did not stop to draw breath, she described how, since the book appeared, strange Spanish gentlemen have been materialising out of the solid Sydney landscape and threaten ing her with a nasty end.

From all reports, the Generalissimo is rather busy on the home front these days, but if what she says about some of his emissaries is true, we can’t altogether in our hearts blame him. (SPANISH LAUGHTER. Published by Angus & Robertson Ltd. 25/-.)

It Made This

One Sad

A MUCH more mature and authentic Spain emerges from Time is an Ambush, a novel by Francis Clifford, although the theme of it is slight.

It concerns a German couple and an Englishman whom fate throws

together in a town near Barcelona, but although the central characters are expatriates the events that make the story could not have been forged or shaped anywhere but in Spain.

Tyler, an English novelist, has an affair with lisa Scheele, wife of a German tourist who seems more interested in exploring the country than in his wife.

Events become complicated when flood rains cause a dam in the mountains to burst and the husband is a victim, and even more so when it is found that the husband was shot before he drowned, in a deserted mountain village that was destroyed during the Civil War at the com mand of a German officer.

The theme of the novel is guilt complex. That of lisa, because she had been with Tyler at his villa when her husband died—a fact that becomes an impassable barrier to their affair; and the larger guilt of the Spanish people about the Civil War.

The latter is manifested through the behaviour of Captain Romero of the Civil Guard towards those he considers still on the other side of the fence. The cleavages of 1936-39, it is shown, still exist, more dangerously so because the genera tion which suffered most has pushed those years vigorously out of sight in the furthermost recesses of their minds. (TIME IS AN AMBUSH. Published by Hodder and Stoughton. Price, 18/9.)