ABSTRACT

Driving in from the airport as dawn broke over the city of Lisbon was an exhilarating experience, the sun glinting off the seventeenth-century stonework and the blue glazed tiles, illuminating the thinking man's graffiti of political slogans which plastered every wall. For this was the summer of 1974, and fighting was still going on in the north to consolidate the revolution which had displaced the tottering dictatorship. One monument to that time still stood, the big suspension bridge across the harbour, the Ponte Salazar; but some enterprising revolutionary had hacked off the metal letters of the old dictator's name, leaving the superfluous legend “Ponte” (bridge). The obsession with words was everywhere, in the papers and falling off every public surface. But it was not long before I came to realize that these philosophical effusions went largely unread, not least because over half of the population was illiterate. In the fishing village of Nazaré, they had a brand new tractor to drag their fishing boats out of the water and up on to the beach, replacing the oxen, but that was the extent of change. In the grain-growing Alantejo, they had seized the land from the big land-owners, but it would not be long before they would be giving it back to them, as they discovered themselves unprepared and unable to manage. It was a revolution that might as well have been played out in the pages of The Times, as a sport for intellectuals, for all the relevance it seemed to hold for the average working Portuguese. Television was essaying some political parables, but the drama was of the level of school plays, and the old men in the bars just rolled their eyes and turned away. The only shows which attracted a crowd around the TV sets in the pavement cafes were “Jeux Sans Frontières” and a season of old movies featuring Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. Sometimes the service would break down and they would run a medley of martial music, which unwittingly contained the tune of “Britannia Rules the Waves”.