A Handful of Honey Read online

  A Handful of Honey

  Annie Hawes, originally from Shepherd’s Bush, divides her time between Liguria in Italy, the west coast of Ireland and Whitechapel in London. Her first book, Extra Virgin, was a worldwide bestseller and she has written two further books, Ripe for the Picking and Journey to the South.

  Annie Hawes

  PAN BOOKS

  First published 2008 by Pan Books

  First published in paperback 2008 by Pan Books

  This electronic edition published 2008 by Pan Books class="copyrightpagelinebreak" /> an imprint of Pan Macmillan Ltd class="copyrightpagelinebreak" /> Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR class="copyrightpagelinebreak" /> Basingstoke and Oxford class="copyrightpagelinebreak" /> Associated companies throughout the world class="copyrightpagelinebreak" /> www.panmacmillan.com

  ISBN 978-0-330-46499-4 in Adobe Reader format class="copyrightpagelinebreak" /> ISBN 978-0-330-46497-0 in Adobe Digital Editions format class="copyrightpagelinebreak" /> ISBN 978-0-330-46501-4 in Microsoft Reader format class="copyrightpagelinebreak" /> ISBN 978-0-330-46500-7 in Mobipocket format

  Copyright © Annie Hawes 2008

  The right of Annie Hawes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Visit www.panmacmillan.com to read more about all our books and to buy them. You will also find features, author interviews and news of any author events, and you can sign up for e-newsletters so that you’re always first to hear about our new releases.

  A Handful of Honey

  Prologue

  I awoke at first light, as usual, to the clang and crash of heavy metal doors, the clatter of key-chains on the guards’ belts, their shouts echoing down the long tiled corridor as they headed this way on the breakfast round. Toc’acordar! Toc’acordar! Wake up, wake up!

  The spyhole in my cell door clicked open, snapped shut: I scrambled off the narrow bed and onto the steel-tube chair a couple of feet away. The bed, in a direct line with the doorway, was not a good place to be when the day’s bread ration arrived.

  Here they came. With a rattle and a crash the door flew open: another, close-up roar of Toc’acordar! and the solid kilo loaf came hurtling through the doorway. Seriously wholemeal, hefty as a rock, it landed with a thud on the mattress, dead centre. The door slammed shut again, keys jangled, lock clunked home.

  Alone again, and unscathed for the second day running. I was getting the hang of this place at last. Of the details, at least. The bigger picture still eluded me: I’d been here almost a week, and still nobody had told me what I’d been arrested for – or even, come to that, whether I was technically under arrest at all.

  I waited now, poised to deploy my tin mug – the only movable item in the cell apart from the sheet – as soon as I heard the next guard, the one with the bucket of sweet black coffee, begin rattling her way down the hall. No knives or forks in here, of course. You just tore bits off your loaf, dipped them into the coffee. No toilet paper, either, though I couldn’t imagine what harm you could do with that. At first I thought they’d forgotten it: banged on the cell door for half an hour. Surely loo roll was a basic human right? Wrong. There was a bidet for that, they said, next to the toilet. Which had no door on it, and was also in line with the spyhole.

  Early sunlight was already streaming through the window high up in the yard-thick wall. That unreachable square of luminous blue, the odd passing cloud, were all that was left of the Portugal I’d known for the last four months: a friendly village just south of Lisbon, a tiny sun-filled house daubed with generations of whitewash, leafy grapevines outside the door. Beyond the house, a field of sweetcorn and a luscious green ramble down to the sea, or up the lane to the shops and pavement bars at Sesimbra. My slightly derelict home, a spare farm building, was the den and headquarters of Octavio and his friends, the bunch of young locals my own age who had befriended me. Octavio’s mother was letting me stay in the upstairs rooms, in exchange for a bit of cleaning and painting, while I looked for a proper job.

  I’d found one, too, starting next month. Pointless, as it happened, because by midday today, although I had no way of knowing this, I would not only be out of this jail, but out of the country too. So far, though, there was no hint of a change. Here came the coffee. Make sure the sheet’s straight, grab the tin mug. If you weren’t standing by the door in full view, bed tidied, mug in hand, when the guard looked through the spyhole, she’d snap it shut again and move on to the next cell, leaving you coffee-less. And that bread was seriously hard work with no coffee to wash it down.

  Strange fact: I’d never come across any kind of brown bread at all in this country until I found myself behind bars. Although the prison-ration loaf was surprisingly reminiscent of my mother’s good solid home-made stone-ground, here in Portugal it was seen, apparently, as a form of punishment. Must tell the mother that. If I ever saw her again, that is. It was starting to seem horribly possible that I might never get out of this place. Who even knew I was in here, after all?

  The only people to witness my departure in the unmarked car, supposedly to answer a few questions about my lost passport, were Octavio and his mother, Eugenia. Not that any of us really believed it was about my passport. These weren’t the normal police from the station down the road, where I’d reported the thing lost, but the plainclothes PIDE – pronounced ‘peed’ – the Policia Internacional e Defesa do Estado, the grandly named International Police and Defence of the State. The dictator Salazar, though on his last legs, was still in power in Portugal at the time of these events, the early 1970s, and the PIDE was his much-feared political police force, keeping everyone in the country in a state of looking-over-their-shoulder anxiety. The PIDE’s reputation was certainly not built on a tender concern for innocent visitors’ lost passports.

  They had come for me just before dawn, as is the habit of such organizations, battering at Eugenia’s front door, across the cobbled courtyard from mine. She had startled me awake in the half-light, flanked by two strangers in dark suits, who stuck their heads round the door, peremptorily demanded my name and withdrew to stand guard while I dressed. Once Eugenia had fully grasped that the PIDE were here for me alone and not for her beloved son, praise the Lord, her main concern was – oddly enough – my outfit. No, no, not those jeans! A skirt! she hissed, snatching them from me. Jeans on a female had subversive connotations: the PIDE-men would take it as deliberate provocation. Realizing that I owned no such thing, she dashed off to return with one of her own, a navy-blue item unpleasantly reminiscent of the school uniform I had only recently escaped. She looked so panic-stricken that I didn’t even argue – though, truth to tell, a few weeks off my seventeenth birthday and deeply ignorant of the ways of dictatorships, I was a lot more troubled by the embarrassing outfit than by the prospect of being taken for a spin by the secret police.

  Now, naked legs exposed to the view of all and sundry – as befits a decent woman – I was driven to the harbour at Setubal, marched onto a ferry boat, handcuffed to one of the PIDE-men in case I made a dive for it: then off into another car, up a long dusty road, through a deep gateway in thick stone walls, to be deposited at last in a small khaki office deep in the bowels of this fortress.


  I retrieved my loaf from the bed, tore off a bit of crust, dipped and started to chew, as slowly as possible. If you paced yourself right, you could make breakfast last right up to the next event in the day: the arrival of the lunch-bucket. In a mere five hours I would get to moisten the second third of my daily bread in watery soup, a dish whose principal ingredient was the huge, spiky bones of some monstrous and apparently virtually fleshless fish, bulked out with the occasional chunk of mushy potato. Nothing else whatsoever would happen till lunchtime: because nothing was allowed to happen. They did the rounds every hour or so, checked through the spyhole, and if you’d found anything remotely entertaining to do, they stopped you. On the second day, unaware of this rule, I’d decided to ward off the fear and the boredom – worst possible combination of emotions – with a bit of singing. I would work my way through my Highland granny’s old Scots songs, fine wailing tunes with good fierce stories to them, mostly concerning the terrible fates that befall women who stray from the paths of righteousness. Very suitable to a prison cell, you’d say, and not too offensive to the ears of a nation brought up on the soulful wailings of the fado, either. I sang my way happily through the tale of the lustful Lady Margaret’s liaison with Sweet William, but hardly had I left her lying in her cold, cold coffin, face turned to the wall, and begun on the story of the young mother enticed away by her demon lover – ‘and a grimly guest / I’m sure was he’ – when two hatchet-faced guards appeared at my door. Não cantar, they said sternly. And mimed zipping their mouths shut, in case my Portuguese wasn’t up to it.

  So I sat quietly and twiddled my thumbs until lunch: when, inspired by the vast number of giant fishbones left in my mug, I hung on to one of the long straight ones and, making judicious use of my eye-teeth, bored a hole in its broader end. Now to pull a strand of cotton from the hem of the repellent skirt and thread up my fishbone needle with it. Proudly, self-sufficiently, I set about repairing the unravelling armpit of my T-shirt. Brilliant entertainment. Compared to staring at a wall, that is, or watching the occasional cloud pass across a patch of blue sky.

  The punishment for this, once spotted, was terrible. My fishbone was confiscated on the spot. (I was appalled to find tears starting from my eyes. Surely I couldn’t be crying over a fishbone?) Half an hour later – worse still – I was brought some proper sewing cotton and a real needle and made to finish the job at top speed, entirely surrounded by guards. They stood silent, critically watching my every stitch, till I was done.

  I gave up after that: just sat still and tried not to speculate. Would Octavio and Eugenia have guessed where I was? I didn’t even know myself. Still, what could they do about it, anyway? Nothing. As far as I could tell, the entire Portuguese nation was either terrified of the PIDE or employed by them. Sometimes both. I’d soon discovered, out and about with my Portuguese friends, that I could hardly talk about anything at all without being hissed at to lower my voice, just in case it was taken the wrong way by some eavesdropper.

  Weren’t there an amazing number of people around here with terrible cross-eyes? I might say, for example, while sitting at a pavement café watching the world go by. And odd wonky teeth, too. Why was that? Was it a local genetic defect?

  Ssssh! Of course not! It was just that they were poor, they couldn’t afford doctors and dentists.

  Afford doctors and dentists? A child of the Nanny State, I’d always taken free healthcare as part of the bedrock of life: like, say, tap-water. Or toilet paper. No, more like the weather: you got it anyway, like it or not.

  Too poor to see a doctor? But that’s outrageous, I might continue, after a rapid re-evaluation of the unsolicited doctoring and dentistry I’d been subjected to in my childhood. So what happens when a poor person gets sick? Is that why that man with no legs goes bumping up and down the Chiado on his bottom, holding a block of wood in each hand to raise him off the cobbles? Not because he’s a touch eccentric, as I’ve assumed till now, but because he can’t afford a wheelchair? Ssssh, would come the reply. Wait till we get home . . . !

  In the early days I would press on regardless, imagining that I was giving my Portuguese friends a much-needed lesson in the proud British tradition of free speech. How could they all be such cowards? Surely they couldn’t think the whole lot of us were about to be arrested just for talking? Anyway, it was me that was talking, not them!

  But that, I eventually grasped, wasn’t the point. The PIDE didn’t need to arrest people. The merest hint of disloyalty to the Salazar regime was enough – such as hanging around with a loudmouth like me. Your father might inexplicably lose his job; he might never get another. Bad things could happen to your whole family: homes lost, futures wrecked, nobody ever openly accused of anything – or given a chance to prove their innocence.

  So nobody was likely to be mounting a campaign to get me out of here, were they? I hadn’t seen anybody but prison guards since the day I got here, when I was escorted to that gloomy khaki office to have my photograph taken, clutching a card with a number under my chin. Next, into another identical office, where a genial man at a huge desk addressed me in French, for lack of any other common language, as he tipped out the contents of my bag and combed through them in slow motion. Ridiculous palaver, I thought, expecting in my ignorance to be back home in Sesimbra in an hour or two. What did he expect to find in there? Wasn’t he going to ask me some proper questions? The PIDE-man ploughed on through hair grips, shop receipts, half-eaten packs of chewing gum, tangles of earrings, while I sat trying not to yawn and doing my best to avert my eyes from the awesomely luminous flesh beneath the horrendous skirt.

  Until, that is, he picked up one last bit of paper, an old crumpled sheet that must have been lying at the bottom of the bag for weeks, and began smoothing it out with the side of his hand. Suddenly I was wide awake; my stomach gave a nasty lurch. The map. Did I not throw away the map?

  Just as I’d feared. The scribbled zig-zags of the hill-path leading through the scrubland and across the border were plain to see: with the road and the position of the sentry post marked out. My job had been to walk up on foot, playing the flirtatious hitch-hiker, and keep the soldiers occupied while the two boys nipped up the slope behind them, over the ridge, and into Spain and safety. The ruse had worked brilliantly, though the job wasn’t as easy as I’d imagined. It is surprisingly difficult to talk nonsense to four heavily armed men when all your attention is focused on the hillside above them – never letting your eyes stray upwards, even for a second, to check on the progress of the fugitives behind their backs. Harder still when it suddenly dawns on you that the hefty automatic weapons slung from their shoulders are intended for use in just these circumstances.

  This people-smuggling outing was exactly what I had feared I was being picked up for. And now I’d put the evidence right into their hands.

  Here in Portugal, as soon as a boy hit seventeen, he was drafted into three years of military service, no choice about it – unless he wanted to spend six years in prison and be branded a traitor, while the rest of his family suffered all the petty torments the PIDE could unleash upon them. Our friends Olavo and João didn’t want to kill any Africans, they said: nor be killed by them, either. Two of their schoolmates had already died in Angola, and one in Mozambique. Why shouldn’t Africans have their countries back if they wanted them, anyway? If the boys could just get out of Portugal and across a couple of hundred miles of hostile Spanish territory – General Franco was still in power in Spain and had no sympathy for Portuguese draft-evaders – they would be at the French border, where they would automatically get political asylum. There was a whole community of Portuguese dissidents living in France. And, as they pointed out, I was the ideal person to help. I had no family here to be persecuted if things went wrong . . .

  My map, strangely enough, seemed to mean nothing to Mr Genial. Unless this was some kind of Macchiavellian double bluff? He narrowed his eyes and stared at it for what seemed an eternity, looked up at me and paused – causing al
l the blood to drain from my head – and then, unbelievably, turned the paper casually over to look at the writing on the other side. Thank God. A harmless list of things I was thinking of putting in a letter to my mother. A fantasy letter, that is, because I suspected she would chuck any real letter of mine straight in the bin. I’d been nothing but trouble for years, and had trumped the lot by running off across the Channel at sixteen, the minute I’d finished my exams. Still, at least there was nothing incriminating on that side of the paper.

  Think again. The list, alas, contained the two words ‘No’ and ‘Salazar’. They were separated by a good dozen other words: but structure and syntax meant nothing to my interrogator. ‘No . . . Salazar!’ he announced triumphantly. Vous n’aimez pas Salazar?

  Hard to know how to answer this. Was there any point, anyhow, in answering a man who made up my opinions for me out of random words on a scrap of paper?

  Being a normal English teenager who had hitherto taken very little interest in foreign affairs, I had arrived here with no opinions whatsoever about Salazar. I didn’t recall ever having heard the man’s name and was surprised to discover, as I went about the country, that Portugal considered Britain to be its closest friend and ally – and had done ever since 1373, when our two countries signed their first treaty: the world’s longest-running alliance. Britain, though apparently happy to keep the treaty running, was a lot less keen to publicize its connection with Salazar. It had not taken me long to gather that inside Portugal, too, most people had little esteem or affection for their Great Leader – although, with the constant fear of eavesdropping informers, only the seriously inebriated ever mentioned this openly. And I was with them all the way, drunk or sober. Salazar and his PIDE seemed positively to enjoy tormenting their people, and over the pettiest details. Trousers, for example. Pointless tyranny.