Life’s a Scream

We stayed in Uruguay, eating into our reserves, for about two months. With us sitting on their doorstep, virtual refugees, our backers seemed less keen to commit themselves. Orlando de Benedetti, a staunch Perónista, had had his wings clipped by the new military government and was lying low in Venezuela. The financiers claimed that it was de Benedetti’s judgement they were backing and without him the deal was off.

We decided that Tonio should return to London and see if he could raise some finance there, perhaps by mortgaging the house. We also decided that Steffka had to go back. She had already missed a term of school and it was unfair to keep her hanging around while we sorted ourselves out. I wept for days after they had gone and during the three desperately lonely weeks of Tone’s absence.

Tonio ran around Britain trying to raise money and interest in our projects. There was lots of interest but no money or commitment. He put in motion the paperwork for getting a mortgage on the house but even that was going to take weeks. Things were not looking good. To take his mind off the bad news and in the hope that someone might want a representative in Uruguay he decided to go to a motor race at Brands Hatch. He was walking through the paddock when he heard his name called. It was a friend from the flying club, Robin Ellis, and they went off to the bar for a drink.

At that time Robin was a rich young man with all a rich young man’s toys: a Ferrari Boxer, a Kawasaki motor bike and an international hobby racing model cars that cost him a packet. Tonio told him what we were doing in South America and Robin thought for a bit, then asked how much we needed. He thought some more and made a counter offer to pick up our living expenses while he sussed out whether he wanted to commit himself further. Tonio almost snatched his hand off accepting. Robin also warned him that he was negotiating a deal with a huge construction firm that might take up a lot of his time. The deal was with Bairstow Eves. That sounded good. John Bairstow had served with Tonio in the Navy as snotties and they had been friends for years. Tone had joined the Merchant Service to avoid conscription, a common ploy in those days. However, his idea of sailing the oceans of the world was strictly limited to Amyas Leigh and Westward Ho!, and he hated it. So he left the Navy and joined the RAF.

A week later Tonio turned up with Robin in Montevideo. While he had been away I had talked on the telephone with Hector Olivera. Somehow Hector had bridged the political chasm and come out ahead. He said he was ready to start shooting a film with us. I asked him about our chances of survival and he assured me that the new government was focused on weeding out local dissidents, not international investors. So we decided to go back to BA.

Our move back was well timed. Business, especially the entertainment industry, was beginning to pick up. The only drawback was that the military now occupied all significant positions. The film industry was given an admiral to whom scripts had to be submitted for approval. While Hector was doing that de Benedetti and Perina came back on the scene. Both companies wanted to make El Ultimo Enemigo. We massaged them along, hoping one of them would come up with the goods. With Perina, we decided to recommence the recce while waiting for our projects to be approved. Perina’s military buddies, through the governor of San Juan province, lent us a helicopter and we spent days zooming around the Andes looking for suitable locations. We saw mountain villages and incredible waterfalls, landscapes that were Martian and pockets of unbelievable fertility, but what we were looking for was a bridge like the one over the River Kwai. The governor said he knew just such a one. On the morrow he would send his car to take us there. Our party consisted of the producer, Emilio Perina, Juan Sires, the production manager, Gunter Jeanee, the director, Tonio, me and the driver. Robin had been scheduled to come with us but he had been recalled to Buenos Aires. There was some problem with his property deal and he had to see his lawyers urgently. It was a good thing, as it worked out, for Robin is six foot two and bony, and the car we were assigned was a small Renault. The driver assured us that we could all fit in and that anyway, we didn’t have far to go. Piled on top of each other we headed towards the Andes.

The ‘not far’ turned out to be very far indeed. The desert road we bumped along ran out. Every few hundred yards we had to jump out of the vehicle and heave it out of a patch of soft sand. Tempers were getting frayed. All we could see was miles of featureless desert shimmering in the heat haze. None of us had thought to bring any water and our bodies jammed into the car were creating a temperature that would have coddled a coconut.

Again we hit a sandpit. I sat on the ground and gazed around, trying to imagine how I would look when some seasoned traveller stumbled across my whitening bones. The radiator was close to melting and it was clear we could not continue. Despite the fact that it was hardly likely that anyone would come along and steal the tyres, the idiotic driver insisted on staying with his machine. We decided to walk towards the mountains, where there was a railway line, in the hope that we might catch a train. Almost straight away one came along. We waved and the passengers waved back – and the train shimmered off into the heat haze.

We stopped and looked around us. In one direction there was endless track. In the other, the same. It was a toss-up. Reasoning that the train had to have come from somewhere we decided to go north. I wanted to point out that it was also going somewhere but didn’t wish to seem unconstructive. We walked for hours. I couldn’t get the picture of my bleached bones out of my head. So far everyone had been philosophical and amazingly hopeful but the midday sun began to take its toll. Sires, a sprightly seventy-year-old, was – incredibly, in this land of leather – wearing plastic sandals and they were melting. Tonio offered to carry him on his back and Sires showed how far gone he was by letting him. After a while, however, Tonio had to put him down. He suggested Gunter took a turn but Gunter declined the invitation, arguing that we had no idea how far we had to go but however far it was we weren’t going to make it if we had to carry Sires. Tone ploughed on for another three or four hundred yards but by this time he was on the verge of collapse. With Sires’s permission, we found a cutting under the line, in the shade, and stowed him away so that we could find him later. The men suggested I stayed with him but Tonio wouldn’t allow it and I was relieved.

We walked and walked along the endless track. After about four hours we saw a boliche, a decrepit-looking hut, in the far distance by the side of the track. It was the station of a tiny village. When we eventually arrived, no one seemed to be around. At the back was a little patio covered with vines. A water bottle was suspended from a beam. I grabbed it and got stuck in but Tonio took it way from me at once and poured the water over my head. It seems you don’t drink water when you’re dehydrated.

We wandered around to the front where, in a lean-to, stretched out on a leather sofa, was an Indio-looking fat man dressed only in pants and singlet. When he saw me, he did one of those cartoon take-offs and disappeared into another part of the boliche. We stood around wondering if we should follow but soon the door opened and the man reappeared dressed regally in his station-master finery. We tried to explain our plight to him, about Sires slowly dying in the desert, but he insisted that we left matters of business until he had finished welcoming us. He made tea for everyone, reminded us that it was the Queen’s birthday and pointed to a brass plaque, shining brilliantly on the wall, which claimed that the station had been built in Birmingham. Finally we were allowed to share our problems with him and he conjured up a boy who was detailed to take Gunter to some unspecified place to fetch a lorry. About half an hour later Gunter turned up on the back of a load of wreckage which I was assured by our station-master was a truck. Gunter wasn’t too keen on ploughing off into the desert again as it was getting dark now, but nobody else volunteered so, with bad grace, he finally agreed to navigate if Tone would drive. When they eventually got back with Sires we were all tucking into a huge feast of steak. Sires wasn’t much disturbed by his adventure. He just asked what had happened to our car and driver. We all looked at each other and dissolved in laughter. Hours later a Land Rover arrived from the governor and we piled in. We were told that the driver had walked back along the tyre tracks of his car and had been home for hours.

Gunter decided that we needed a break, as much to avoid any of the fall-out of our souring the relationship between the San Juan governor and de Benedetti as to rest after our adventure. Gunter’s finca, or small farm, in San Marcus Paz outside Buenos Aires was all ponchos and leather. We sat under the Southern Cross and talked of gauchos and horses. London and Steffanie seemed a galaxy away and I missed her.

The next day Gunter was keen that we should watch him play a game of ‘pato’, which turned out to be rather like rugby on horseback. The game is called pato, which means duck in Spanish, because in the old days the ball had been a live duck. Two teams would fight to grab the unfortunate fowl by the neck and ride with it to the far end of the field without being flattened by the opposition. Nowadays the duck has been replaced by a leather ball with a number of loops jutting from it.

After the match, which Gunter claimed his team had won, although he could have told me anything, everyone was invited back to the finca for asado. Gunter was really laying on a feast. He had an accordionist, four guitaristas and some bombos (drummers). The entertainment went on well into the night. Someone sang Tango. The guitaristas did a duello, where two or three gauchos sit and challenge each other with their guitar playing. Then the story-tellers got into their act.