“South from Granada” by Gerald Brenan is about the seven years between January 1920 and 1933 that the author spent living in a small, very poor, Andalucian village sixty miles south of Granada. The village, Yegen, is about 4,000 feet above sea level and is located in a region called the Alpujarra. It is well irrigated so they can grow wine grapes, olives and many other foods there. This is a time before the tourist boom and the life-style in the 20’s was very primitive- for instance, there was no electricity or telephone in the village – and everything, as it was at the time, is described, warts and all: domestic life in general, beliefs, legends, the church, attitudes to animals are all discussed candidly and sympathetically. To my certain knowledge, many of those customs and beliefs extended into the sixties and possibly even into the seventies. It is well-written and I recommend it to you.
Gerald Brenan is also of interest. He was highly regarded as a writer on matters Spanish and went to Spain “to find himself” after serving as a Captain in the First World War. He came from a wealthy family and attended a good public school. At age eighteen he ran away to walk to China with an older friend, the photographer, Hope-Johnstone, but after six months and 1,500 miles, they had only got as far as Bosnia before they ran out of money and were forced to return. His relationship with his father was not good and instead of going to university, as his father wanted, he trained to serve in the Indian Army and when war broke out in 1914 he joined up.
After the war, in 1919, his walking friend, Hope-Johnstone, introduced Brenan to the Bloomsbury Group. He became a great friend to Ralph Partidge; he had an affair with Dora Carrington, the well knows artist;  and was a confidant of both Lyton Strachy and Virginia Wolfe, all of whom visited him in Spain though Lyton Strachy, in particular, did not have pleasant memories of the experience.

Bernard Gallivan
April 2018