No More Roses

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30390, 14 March 1964, Page 10

No More Roses

Any interest in the opposite sex was severely frowned on .during his.upbringing in Wales, said the novelist Gwyn Thomas in a recent 8.8. C. broadcast. This left him ill-equipped to withstand the romantic enchantment of Spain when he went there as a student. The cause of his downfall, in the literal sense of the word, was a girl who used to appear on her balcony near his lodgings on the outskirts of Madrid. ' “She was unbearably lovely and wore about a mile of black lace. Her eyes and mouth were touched by the ravishing sadness that makes its home on the Spanish face.” Fascinated, the young man began humming suitably mournful tunes whenever she appeared, and the “golden tenderness” his subdued serenades appeared to arouse spurred him to try to speak to her. In a “desperate moonlight manoeuvre” he climbed the trellis on the house and made a wild swing at the balcony. “It came away in my hand; and they started a collection to reassemble my spinal discs.” “I never managed to see my Castilian rose again, and I got a bill from her father for the balcony.”