A Few Days in Mallorca by Paul May

I've visited the houses of quite a few dead writers: Kipling, Shaw, Yeats, Dickens, Johnson, Lucy Boston, Vita Sackville-West, Henry James . . .  They're always interesting and sometimes very atmospheric. Sometimes it's as if the author in question has just popped out and might return at any moment. That's what it's like visiting the house where Robert Graves lived for many years in Deià on the island of Mallorca.

Lemons and olives near Sóller

Robert Graves's study

Before going there last week I read Wild Olives, an account by William Graves, the son of Robert and Beryl, of growing up on Mallorca. And while I was there I was reading the extraordinary memoir/novel by Simon Gough, Graves's grand-nephew, about his time with the family. That one is called The White Goddess: An Encounter. The advent of mass tourism has changed the island in many ways from the place described in the books, but the terraced olive groves, the amphitheatre of craggy mountains and the rocky coastline remain. What's more, the throngs who crowd onto the bus which takes you up the winding mountain road from Sóller to Deia are not, it turns out, heading to Ca'n'Alluny, la casa de Robert Graves. They are on their way to the bars and restaurants and the rocky cove of the Cala where Robert Graves used to swim every day.

                            Ca'n'Alluny

The Cala

We were astonished to have the house more or less to ourselves. We wandered in the garden and chatted with the gardener who showed us photos on his phone of the massive tomatoes and aubergines that he'd grown last summer. I was interested in Robert's compost heap. Robert spent a lot of time tending it, but the gardener was less keen and I suspect his massive vegetables were not entirely organic. But then, Robert Graves had the advantage of manure from Isabella the mule.

Graves was a poet and a novelist, but he was also a children's author. I first came across The Big Green Book in the 1980s when it was republished as part of the I Can Read series which also included the Little Bear stories by Else Holmelund Minarik and Arnold Lobel's Frog and Toad books. It's a nice quirky story about a boy who finds a magic book and it is elevated to another level by its wonderful Maurice Sendak illustrations.

The I Can Read books were published by World's Work Children's Books, a company which was the subject of a couple of earlier posts from me. T E Lawrence was involved in the setting up of The Windmill Press, which eventually went on to print these books, and Lawrence was also a close friend of Robert Graves. After WW1, in which Graves was badly wounded and almost died, Lawrence supported Graves financially, and Graves later wrote a biography of his friend. I do like these odd connections.

That's all for now. More about Robert Graves's house here.