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Gilli Smyth wrote about her memories (obviously clearer than mine) of the "haunting" of the Banana Moon Observatory:
The house on the hill near the church in Deia, was very old and had a history of hauntings, which I gradually discovered after the events described below. The Mayor of the village, for example, had found an old book in Madrid describing hauntings that had taken place 200 years before, thought to be a young man pushed down the well, and it was its reputation as much as what happened to us that led the priest of the village to eventually do a full exorcism with bell, book and candle, in the time honoured way.
These events took place in the late sixties. I was alone in the house with my little daughter Tasmin for a period of time while Daevid was away on music business. The house was magnificent in the old way, tiled floors and carved wooden arches, three floors the same. Of course no bathroom, or running water, just a well beside the sink. The well was reputed to have never been empty, as it was a flooded cellar. There was something very inspirational about the house, and we had written a lot of music and poetry there, eventually to be published. I was fully engaged in doing this, and therefore was using the top floor studio a lot. One morning I woke up to see the electric light shining down the stairs, and thinking I had forgotten to turn it off, I thought no more about it. However the same thing happened the next night, and the next, but by then I was very careful to turn off the lights before sleeping. After a few nights however, I started waking up just before three, and lying there in the dark saw the lights upstairs come on and beam down the stairs. Robert and I were good friends at the time and met frequently to read poems (or write them together, like the "Square man and the Round Woman" published in the Saturday Evening Post) and of course I told him my increasing concerns about the house, so he and Alan Sillitoe came down to check the electricity, Alan busy sticking tape over the switches etc, which didn't make any difference. So after a week Robert wrote out a spell (in the vernacular, he said ghosts always preferred that) which he pinned up on the studio door, meantime Tasmin and I, feeling a bit scared and vulnerable, came to stay at Cannellun (as it was spelled then) for a few days. When we returned to the house, the atmosphere felt different, and the lights never went on again.
However there were a few sequels. Despite the fact that I am pretty sceptical about ghosts I was persuaded by others who wanted to investigate this, to have a table turning in the kitchen, with a heavy wooden table. Five people sat around, with little fingers touching. Suddenly the table rocked and shook as if it had an electric current in it, then turned partly on its side and smashed against the wall. Daevid, who had returned by this time, was upstairs in the studio and could hear the crashing down below. Eventually through the method of 1 bang A, 2 B etc. it spelt out "the well" "to bury the bones" in old spanish of course which I had to get translated! I never do ouija boards, and generally not table turning. I did it in the Calle del Puig house because i had by then learnt something of its dark history, hearsay from the neighbours, but they knew the two previous occupants, both of whom had committed suicide, and prior to that a South American couple who ended up in a mental hospital. You know nobody had the courage to go down the well in a diving suit and search for the bones, and I felt it a failing on my part that i didn't either, with consequences. I feel that this was "a hungry ghost", and a bit later on I had the most terrible miscarriage there, in which I lost half my body's blood and only just got to the hospital in Palma. (ironical that I would have done anything to save that baby, I really wanted it, but the doctor in the village thought I had done the usual thing at the time and tried to get rid of it, so wouldn't come. Beryl was the most tremendous help to me at that time). After we left, apparently a Chilean woman with four children moved in, and had an inexplicable accident, and lost a lot of blood. I really hope something has been done about the bones. We asked a well known psychic in the U.K. to do a distant exorcism, but did not hear more. However, apparently after the priest's exorcism some English tourists were staying in the house next door, that was connected to our house by a locked top door, and sitting having coffee in the entrada one day, saw a young man with an old-fashioned brown velvet jacket with frills at the wrists come down the stairs and go out the door. They thought it was something to do with the landlady, which of course it wasn't, nor anybody staying in the village.
The other story in your book involving me that I must mention is that terrible article in the Barcelona paper, I felt totally betrayed by their taking photos secretly, and inventing a lot of what I was supposed to have said... all I can say is that we were very naive, and didn't realise the antagonism of the entrenched "anti-hippy, anti-writer/musician" forces, and the political implications i.e. anyone involved in the "feminist" movement was automatically a "slut". We really blamed ourselves for that naivety, and the publicity it caused, the last thing we or anyone else wanted.
From
Tim Roberts
This is to say how much I enjoyed Tuning Up At Dawn, which I read on a recent visit to France. In fact, it was the only reading matter I had with me, so I read most of it twice. I laughed out loud quite a lot, as well as being moved, especially by the chapter on the Prison and by the material on the Spanish gypsies. Lots of 'not many people know that' intersting facts, as well, of course. As a 'highbrow' (your word) musician, it was interesting to read something of how the other half lives. Your description of the pleasure of mutual improvisation made me aware of one reason I find my work frustrating at times. My speciality is playing the continuo figured bass in Baroque music groups, so I'm often in the situation where I am improvising but everyone around me is sticking to the written notes. Lonely! and sometimes I feel a bit like a performing monkey put there to entertain my hidebound colleagues - like everyone else is doing a serious job, and I'm just showing off. (It doesn't mean much to the audience that the composer left the keyboard part to be improvised, and that the flourishes and even the harmonies can be different each night.)
We were born in the same year - my birthday is half a year after yours, 25 July - and so grew up through the same era. You say you 'had a grandfather as a father' and certainly your father was over 30 years older than mine. But, apart from his need for silence around his study, it strikes me how un-dominating yours was, musically speaking, letting you develop as was natural to you. (At least, that's the impression your book gives.) I too started out liking the pop music of the 60s - I think I was depressed for a long time after the Beatles split up! - but I had subtle but strong parental pressure to the effect that that really wasn't the thing - compared to 'worthwhile' classical music. The classical music world is certainly seeped in ancestor-worship, for good and ill, and - though this may seem surprising - I think that in middle age I'm still untangling my own real musical identity from the inherited loves, understandings and prejudices of my background. (...) I was 27 when I went back to college and decided to have a go at becoming a performing musician. The jury's still out on whether that was a good move!... Anyway, thanks again for your excellent book. I hope it does well.
Teresa Rebull
Although I had lost touch with Teresa twenty years ago, she read about my writing endeavours in a Catalan newspaper and got in touch by phone. We exchanged books by mail; hers, in Catalan "Tot Cantant" is also published in French as "Tout Chantant" and is highly reccommended to anybody interested in the recent story of catalonia, left-wing politics, the French resistance and agitprop music. She read the pages about herself in Tuning Up at Dawn (or rather her son, who reads English, translated them for her) and she would like to set the record straight. Although her parents were anarchist sympathisers and activists, she herself didn't belong to the CNT or any other anarchist group but to the POUM (Partit Obrer de Unificació Marxista, United Marxist Workers Party, an anti-Stalinist group founded by Andreu Nin and strongly influenced by Trotski). "It's such a long, complicated story..." she says. She is now well into her eighties and still living and performing in Catalunya Nord, where she has a solid following. She feels that she has little to do in her native Catalunya.
From
Robert Wyatt:
(...) ...how your experience + memory weaves so expertly into subsequent research (only slip I noticed --well, you did ask-- was how I became an ex-Soft Machine: I didn't jump ship, I was pushed overboard as it were and I'm too vain to think that it was because it became too intellectual... anyhow, I wasn't told why (the British way, eh?) -all blood and urine under the bridge (another book title?!) now.
The thing is, again, it's a brilliant book. You live right, you write right. Love and best wishes from (Alfie and) Robert (Batty)
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