Judy learned how to mend broken dreams

Judy decided she could do something about it and on the long pitted road she went along she eventually learned how deal with obstacles that got in her way and also to mend many of her broken dreams.

Last month Judy published Agnes’s Broken Dreams, a 183,000-word novel that is a kind of fictional memoir: some of Agnes’s broken dreams are also Judy’s. Judy is Australian and the novel ist mainly set there and some of it touches on London and Mallorca. But it is mainly about Agnes’s return to Australia and her roots to discover what happened to her in those far off early years.

Judy first came to Mallorca in 1971 with her then Australian husband. “We met poet Robert Graves when we visited Deya and he took us under his wing and helped us in many ways,” she said.

“We went to dinner with Robert and his wife Beryl at the home of the Catalan painter and set designer Esteban Frances.” He was a surrealist painter with leftwing views and of considerable international repute, who had managed to escape to New York during the Spanish Civil War started by Franco when he overthrew the elected government of the day.

Frances continued to paint in New York and also designed sets for the ballets of George Balanchine, the Russian expatriate who was the foremost choreographer of his day.

On the night of that dinner in the house Frances rented, Judy didn’t know that Frances and the house would later play an important part in her life.

Judy and her husband were in contact with Graves on many occasions. “Robert took us to a house he owned, almost next door to ours, and he showed us the cord, displayed on a wall, that used to hang around the robe of T.E Lawrence.”

Judy and her husband were so enamoured of Deya and the village lifestyle that they bought a house there and spent what she calls a ‘magical’ year there.

“It was a simple life,” she said, “with a mind blowing cheap cost of living, riveting dinner party conversations, and my husband and I financially secure and without a care in the world.”

Robert Graves found Judy, in her twenties, a most fascinating woman but she didn’t become one of his muses and as far as she knows she didn’t inspire any of the love poetry Graves wrote.

But he visited her frequently, sometimes with famous writers and thinkers in tow, among them Julian Huxley and Idris Shah, a modern thinker and author who was born into an aristocratic Afghan family in Simla, India.

Judy commented: “My ignorance as to who Graves was and what he had achieved, precluded me at first from appreciating the full wonder of what was happening. Robert brought these people to me as if I were some famous import.

“At the front door he would give his companions a quick potted biography, which always included the fact that my father played polo in Sydney. I dispensed the coñac and coffee, as my husband was on the top floor strapped to his easel.

“Robert had a particular routine of village rounds: after me, he’d visit Martin Tallents who lived opposite. Martin was an eccentric Englishman who entertained Robert and his guests and anyone who cared to come to his regular English style afternoon tea.

“He was renowned for his home-made marmalade and even wrote a song called Marmalade. He used to perform it in a Gilbert and Sullivan style at foreign community get togethers. He was a contrast to the hairy Sixties hippies twanging out Bob Dylan songs on the guitar. Being a favourite of Graves gave him a certain cachet that protected him from ridicule.

“It was so cheap to live in Mallorca in 1971. The low cost of living was what attracted so many artists. When we shopped in the market they threw all the vegetables and fruit into the straw baskets with cords attached that we carried on our shoulders. It was in Deya that my husband, an architect, and I were inspired to become artists.”

A year later they returned to Sydney and Judy took with her work she had done at a part-time art school in London. “I applied and was admitted to the two-year ceramics course at the Sydney College of the Arts,” she said

Some seven years passed before Judy was back in Deya. This time she arrived with her young son, Andre, but without her husband.

“I returned emotionally bruised,” she said, “having spent two years in Sri Lanka recovering from the shock of my husband coming to the hospital the day after I’d given birth to our son and singing the praises of a woman with whom, unknown to me, he was having an affair.”

This was another broken dream for Judy and afterwards Mallorca was never to be the same again. And there would be other broken dreams along the way.

“It was the end of the marriage,” Judy continued, “and the start of financial and emotional hardship, plus a new life learning to manage as a single mother.”

Judy was not only husbandless but also homeless because in a divorce settlement she had lost her share of the Deya house she had bought with her husband.

This was when the house rented by the Surrealist painter Esteban Frances, where Judy had had dinner with Robert and Beryl Graves, came back into her life.

Judy managed to buy this rambling three-storey property called Can March and settled down to live there as a single mother with her son, Andre. He initially went to the village school and later attended the Balears International School.

“When his father neglected, as promised, to pay for his last years of schooling in England, I had to find the money myself. I turned the top floor of Can March into a rental flat which I later sold. I further divided the remaining part of the house into two separate residences and sold them off over time.

“That was how I got the capital to buy, renovate and sell other run-down houses in Deya. I reformed an old olive picker’s house and sold it on to Lynne Franks, the well-known PR guru lady in London. The Esteban Frances house proved to be a lifeline in providing income, a place to live and a boarding school education in England for my son.”

While clearing out Can March Judy discovered two of Esteban Frances’s possessions: a poem Robert Graves had dedicated to him and also a cardboard model of a set he had done for Balanchine.
Judy took the poem to Beryl Graves but she insisted that Judy should keep it as a memento. Judy now has it framed and hanging on a wall. Martin Tallents, one of Graves’s best friends, identified the poem as being a draft of Point Of No Return, that was published in the 1975 Collected Poems of Robert Graves by Cassells.

Judy met another well known writer in Deya: the Irish novelist Edna O’Brien. But no one actually introduced them. Judy explained: “Edna O’Brien literally fell into my life on a narrow path beside a chicken run that connects the main street of Deya with the one behind Calle Porcho, in which I lived. Edna had arrived the previous night at a house she had rented from Julie Simmons, then Robert Graves’s latest muse.

“Edna had fallen into some shrubbery and was in a frazzled state. Unaware of who she was, although I was instantly enchanted by her Irish accent, I helped her out of the shrubbery and took her to my house to clean up.”

Edna, her son Sasha and his girlfriend, the following Easter rented the apartment Judy had created at the top of the Can March house. That was in 1987.

“For a time, Edna and I were firm friends,” said Judy. “I took her to my hairdresser’s in Puerto Soller and we ate together in different restaurants. She was very observant and we saw the world through the same eyes and laughed a lot.

“That Easter together with her and her son was a happy time. When her son left she took a room at the Residencia Hotel and settled down to write.” O’Brien was then putting the finishing touches to a short novel called The High Road, set on an unnamed Mediterranean island and published in November of 1988.

“When we went to a restaurant in Fornalutx,” said Judy, “I told her the Canadian proprietor, Robert Goulet, wrote books. She forbad me to mention writing or books. But after we were the recipients of so many delicious treats from his kitchen, I couldn’t contain myself.

“Hardly were the forbidden words out of my mouth — ‘Edna, Robert here is also a writer’ — than I felt a sharp kick on the shin under the table that nearly knocked me out.”

When Edna went back to London after that Easter visit, she asked Judy to do some research for her in connection with The High Road novel. “This entailed the rituals around different saints as celebrated in the village,” said Judy. “I remember attending mass on her behalf to describe the August 15 fiesta of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary into Heaven.”

In gratitude for Judy’s help with The High Road, Edna O’Brien later sent her an antique lapis necklace she had bought in a Chelsea market. Judy said: “The theme of The High Road, as I remember it, is the negative reception of the village people against a lesbian relationship.”

Edna O’Brien on one occasion found a book in Judy’s bookcase called The Abnormal Personality Through Literature that contained a story by Anton Chekov she particularly liked.

“The story is called Grief,” Judy said, “and it is about a bereaved horse drawn taxi driver in Moscow who tried, unsuccessfully, to unburden his grief over the loss of a beloved son to his passengers. In desperation, he exploded with grief and wept into the head of his horse. Edna loved that story and she repeated it many times.”

Judy was in contact with Edna up until her ‘fateful marriage’ to an Englishman in the Deya church which ended in a legal separation. When their London house was sold the proceeds from the sale were divided equally.

Judy’s relationship with Edna, however, ran into a setback some years later when she had a chance meeting with her in Valledemosa, where Edna was staying at a hotel to write.

“I was thrilled to bump into Edna,” said Judy. “I had just come down from the mountains where I was on a walk with schoolteacher Francisca Sunar and a few others. We went walking every Sunday.

“Francisca is a member of the last family to live on the island of Cabrera and she wrote a book in Catalan called Goodbye to Cabrera that’s still in print. I was disappointed when Edna refused my invitation to have coffee in a bar down the road and meet my mates.

“She asked me if I still had the book with the Chekov story, but gave little importance to our chance meeting and rushed off. I was glad I kept the book and didn’t give it to her.”

Edna O’Brien once told Judy that to be a writer you have to be ruthless. “She is probably right as it takes a lot of contemplative time. Another piece of advice was ‘never waste time with people with whom you have no intimacy or are uninterested in.’”

There is a great deal more to Judy’s story than I have told and I have especially left out the nitty-gritty details of her two horrible marriages.

She now lives in Soller in Can Roig, the first house (and home) she has bought for herself and is very happy there. It is where she still sculpts and does ceramics and where she wrote Agnes’s Broken Dreams. She is delighted there are no broken dreams connected with Can Roig.