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In 1956 my aunt and uncle lived in Palamós. What had taken them there was cork. My uncle worked for an American company, Armstrong Cork, which manufactured just about everything imaginable from the stripped bark of the cork oak: pictures, vanity cases, dolls, later on tiles and wallpapers, and at all times of course - corks. I recall him being based at a factory in Palafrugell, a few kilometres from Palamós, and I remember visiting the factory and watching as, in the dusty, stifling atmosphere of the workshops, people went through what can only have been the mind-numbing operation of producing bottle corks. It was in the open square of Palafrugell, incidentally, that I first learned how unbearably torrid the midday Mediterranean sun can be.

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Palamós in 1956 was a fishing village that still looked nothing at all like Las Vegas and much more like an image from a nineteenth century print. Buildings were white and hugged the ground. All the streets were narrow, nothing more than lanes, and the shops were tiny. I'm thinking in particular of Señora Samso's cake shop and the numerous tobacconists whence originated filthy smelling cigarettes called I think Ducados. There were cars, of course, although the major roads in those days - and major has to be understood relatively - were, like the celebrated road to Dublin, rocky. But there were such roads - and Agostin Bosch ran the garage in Palamós.

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At the centre of everything during those two 1950s summers, correctly and appropriately, was the sea - the blue Mediterranean I had been told about and which I found to be in general rather more a green Mediterranean. It seemed all the more colourful as, at home in England, we lived a short distance from the coast of the grey North Sea. It was in Palamós bay that I first managed to swim a few strokes and that I made my first extended trips on open water in a small boat.

My uncle was a keen if spectacularly unsuccessful fisherman - a catch he made was considered by American novelist Bob Ruark to be worthy of mention in a book (in, I think, The Old Man's Boy Grows Older, the sequel to his delightful The Old Man and the Boy).


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In addition, he kept a small boat previously owned by another American expat neighbour, Artie Shaw. Of an evening or a morning we would climb aboard, my uncle would whip the small British Sailor outboard motor into action, and we would head off to the fishing grounds, either a few hundred metres offshore or close by some rocky promontory at the far end of the bay. The greatest seaborne moment of all, however, was an outing in something rather larger than Artie Shaw's old boat, up the coast to Aiguablava in a real live fishing boat.