But I think my most lasting impression was still the unhurried dignity and noblesse with which the Spaniard handled his drink. He never gulped, panicked, pleaded with the barman, or let himself be shouted into the street. Drink, for him, was one of the natural privileges of living, rather than the temporary suicide it so often is for others. But then it was lightly taxed here, and there were no licensing laws; and under such conditions one could take one’s time.

I followed this straight southern track for several days, living on figs and ears of wheat. Sometimes I’d hide from the sun under the wayside poplars, face downwards, watching the ants. There was really no hurry. I was going nowhere. Nowhere at all but here. Close to the spicy warmth of this foreign ground a few inches away from my face. Never in my life had I felt so fat with time, so free of the need to be moving or doing. For hours I could watch some manic ant dragging a piece of orange peel through the grass, pushing and pulling against impossible barriers in a confused and directionless frenzy.

I was awakened next morning by the high clear voice of a boy singing in the street below. The sound lifted me gradually with a swaying motion as though I was being cradled on silken cords. It was cool crisp singing, full-throated and pure, and surely the most painless way to be wakened – and as I lay there listening, with the sun filtering across me, I thought this was how it should always be. To be charmed from sleep by a voice like this, eased softly back into life, rather than by the customary brutalities of shouts, knocking, and alarm-bells like blows on the head. The borders of consciousness are anxious enough, raw and desperate places; we shouldn’t be dragged across them like struggling thieves as if sleep was a felony.

I was at that age which feels neither strain nor friction, when the body burns magic fuels, so that it seems to glide in warm air, about a foot off the ground, smoothly obeying its intuitions. Even exhaustion, when it came, had a voluptuous quality, and sleep was caressive and deep, like oil. It was the peak of the curve of the body’s total extravagance, before the accounts start coming in.

Finally: ‘Take me with you. I wouldn’t be any trouble.’ I felt light-headed, detached, and heartless. ‘Take me with you’ was something I was also hearing from other girls, who seemed not to have noticed me till now. For the first time I was learning how much easier it was to leave than to stay behind and love.

Crossing the Sierra was not just a stage on my journey, in spite of the physical barrier. It was also one of those sudden, jerky advances in life, which once made closes the past for ever.

They even took me one night to a tenement near the cathedral and pointed out a howling man on the rooftop, who was pretending to be a ghost in order to terrorize the landlord and thereby reduce the rents.

Sometimes, leaving the road, I would walk into the sea and pull it voluptuously over my head, and stand momentarily drowned in the cool blind silence, in a salt-stung neutral nowhere.

But war was not far away, and after nightfall, unexpectedly, it paid its first mad call on Almuñécar. A destroyer crept into the bay, unseen by anyone, and suddenly began probing the shore with its searchlight. The beam swept over the hills, up and down the coast, and finally picked out the village and pinned it against the darkness. Held by the blazing eye, opening so ominously from the sea, the people experienced a moment of naked panic. There seemed nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide, so they hurried down to the beach, and stood motionless in the glare, facing the invisible warship and raising their arms in a kind of massed entreaty. As the searchlight played over them they remained stiffly at attention, just letting themselves be seen. In the face of the unknown, all they could do was to offer themselves in this posture of speechless acquiescence. Such pitiless brightness had never lit up their night before: friend or foe, it was a light of terror.

But the village seemed purged, curiously enough, by its night of fire. One heard no blame laid against the warship. In spite of the ruins and the dead, the capricious savagery of the bombardment was accepted as one of the traditional blows of fate. Almuñécar, if anything, felt enlarged by the ordeal; it now had wounds to boast of, had smelt the hot reek of powder, stared down the muzzle of guns, and known itself to survive. There was satisfaction, too, in the fact that the destroyer was theirs, and had splendidly shown its powers.

For me it was an hallucination of honour, no doubt a self-indulgence, irrelevant to events and certainly irrelevant to the girl. I told her my plans one evening as she sat twisting her hair with her fingers and gazing into my eyes with her long cat look. She wasn’t impressed. Others may need a war, she said; but you don’t, you’ve got one here. She bared her beautiful small teeth and unsheathed her claws. Heroics like mine didn’t mean a thing. If I wished to command her admiration by sacrificing myself to a cause she herself was ready to provide one. Of course, I tried to persuade her that I would be doing it for her, but this wasn’t true, and she knew it.