After Bruce’s first Mallorca holiday ended, so did our stint at the Racquet Club Hotel—our base between yacht trips and chaos. Bruce flew back to South Africa, and my mom, dad, and I moved into our new “home” in Son Vida: a lovely Spanish style villa called Campo de Rosas.
It was brand new, technically—but jerry-built in a way that made the whole place feel like a practical joke. The architect, a man named Bordoi (and yes, that name is still burned into my brain), delivered a house so shoddy it should’ve come with a health warning. And yet, somehow, it’s still standing. I drove past it recently and could only assume someone’s been pouring money into it ever since—either out of love, or fear of being crushed by a ceiling.
When we moved in, there were live wires hanging from the ceiling. No earth leakage, in fact the earth-wire was live! Changing a lightbulb was flirting with death.
Around that time, I was enrolled at the British School in San Rapinya, a small village en route from Palma to Son Vida. My first day is burned into memory: overwhelmed by the idea of yet another alien environment, I bolted behind the house and hid. My mum eventually found me and coaxed me out, but I was properly terrified. The kind of fear that didn’t fit my age. The kind of fear that was already leaking in from somewhere deeper.
Surprisingly, the school wasn’t as bad as I’d imagined. Routine took over. Days at school. Evenings spent watching black and white Spanish TV while my parents played bridge with their equally disinterested friends.
One night, my dad had a big brass stand-up lamp by the bridge table—they played a lot of bridge. He warned everyone—including me—not to touch it. “It’s live,” he said. Not as in “plugged in.” As in: touch this and die. I went off to have my bath, came back in my dressing gown, said goodnight politely to my parents and their cronies, and—as I was doing so—I gripped the cursed brass lamp with my right hand.
The shock was instant and violent. My hand clenched involuntarily around the thing, locking me in place. No earth leakage. I was being electrocuted. My dad leapt across the table, grabbed me—then started getting shocked himself. It was my mum, with her usual presence of mind, who finally yanked the flex from the wall socket and stopped the current.
I collapsed into a chair, shaking. My dad wasn’t much better. That happened shortly after moving in to Campo de Rosas.
Then there was the plumbing. When guests stayed in the spare room—my dad’s study when it wasn’t being used—he would tell them not to use the bath in their bathroom. Inevitably, they forgot. And every time they did, the built-in cupboard in my bedroom would flood as water poured through the walls like we lived inside a submerged filing cabinet.
And yet, all this domestic lunacy was background noise to what I was really looking forward to: Bruce’s second visit.
To prepare, my dad borrowed an army tent from Steen—you’ll remember Steen as Kirsten’s husband. Yes, that Kirsten. The one my dad was busy having an affair with. Although at that point, I was blissfully unaware.
The tent was massive—faded khaki canvas with a few holes we were convinced were bullet holes. We pitched it just beyond the edge of our garden in the narrow no-man’s-land before the Son Vida golf course began. And for Bruce and me, it was heaven. Close enough to home to feel safe, but far enough to feel independent.
Inside the tent, we had a crate of Asterix and Tintin books, a nightstand with a bottle of orange squash, and a little Maltese terrier named Candy—on loan from Briony, who was gallivanting around the world (as usual). We’d zip ourselves in at night and wake to the hiss of golf-course sprinklers.
Grab a few golf clubs—usually a couple of seven irons and a putter—and sneak in nine holes before the first proper golfers appeared. It was magic. We were kings of a quiet kingdom that had no idea it had been conquered.
On our adventure, we met a lady named the Contessa de Roque Morel, who lived high up on the hill in Son Vida. She would invite us for tea and cakes and we got to play with her huge telescope pointed toward Palma Bay, as if watching the world from a fairy-tale turret. We’d sit with her, sipping tea like we belonged, and for that brief window in time, we did.
My parents were busy becoming part of the expat community. There were the Andrews family from Gibraltar, whose daughter Samantha was about my age—we got on really well. Then there was Peter Winter, his wife (possibly Margaret), and their daughter Carol, who I’ll tell you more about later. And of course, the heavy-hitters: Alva and Joan Terry. Alva was a red-faced American who could kill a bottle of Scotch before dinner without blinking. Lovely man.
That summer—before I had a bicycle, before the motorbike, before I started dabbling with explosives—was simple and perfect. It was friendship, fresh air, and enough near-death experiences to keep things interesting.
But Mallorca never stayed simple for long.