COMPOSTELA TALES

By "VICTOR" "GIBSON"

A group of employees of Sanctuary Medical Services are hiking across the Galician landscape, accompanying Major Callum Strachan an amputee from the war in Afghanistan and his helper Corporal Alice Jones, who was with him at the time of his accident. Their objective is to reach the city of Santiago de la Compostela and their progress is being recorded by a journalist who is issuing daily press r...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scribl
• Release date: Sep 29, 2018
• ISBN: 9781633480681

"VICTOR" "GIBSON"

Victor Gibson is a former ship captain and technical author. He has written a number of short stories two of which have won prizes and has authored plays, addressing aspects of modern life, which have been publicly performed in Madrid where he now lives. He has also written three novels, writes film reviews at www.review2view.com and commentates on marine events at www.shipsandoil.co.uk .

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CHAPTER 1. THE PROLOGUE

‘We were a platoon of Royal Engineers surveying the approaches to a village in Helmand, in order to build a road, when we came under fire. Of course it happens quite a bit. The infantry go in and clear an area and then bugger off back to base for tea, and then the Taliban crawl back in and give us trouble.’

The corporal, a young woman with cropped blonde hair, fetchingly attired in army fatigues, was telling us the story. We were sitting round a table in the dining room of a hotel in the Galician town of Sarria, in Northern Spain, the most popular starting point for those wishing to walk on the Way of St James.

‘Bomb disposal was making safe areas available slowly. Rex, their Alsatian sniffer dog, was just developing an interest in an area of disturbed sand when we heard a shot and he fell to the ground, blood pumping from a hole in his rib cage. The shooter was hidden somewhere in one of the houses on the edge of the village. We took cover and returned fire with our SA80s, but we had the disadvantage of not knowing exactly where he was holed up, while he could see us attempting to hide behind our Land Rover.

‘Poor old Rex was lying there, whimpering. I don’t know whether you’ve seen that film, Full Metal Jacket?’

She looked round at us. I nodded as did Julia, our CEO. We were hanging on her words. The corporal continued, slightly encouraged.

‘So one of the Americans is shot down by a sniper in the open area in front of a building. He lies there screaming. No-one steps forward because they know that the next person out there will be shot dead.’

We both nodded again and she carried on.

‘But we were not too surprised when, without waiting for us to lay down covering fire, the dog handler, Private Anderson, moved forward out to try to recover him. He took a round in the chest and fell to the ground over the dog. The boss,’ she nodded at Major Strachan who was sitting next to her, ‘dashed out to pull Anderson back, and stepped outside the safe area.

‘Blam, that was it. He was lying there bleeding to death with no left leg below the knee. Fortunately for him, we’d seen the flash from the shooter’s rifle, and had collectively put about 300 rounds into the ruin where he’d been operating from. This gave Private White a minute to prepare our Heckler and Koch grenade launcher. He lobbed a kilo of high explosive into the building; it disintegrated, spreading cement, breeze block, blood and bone all over the landscape. The shooting stopped.

‘Even before we’d recovered the major and Private Anderson and Rex, the medic had put in a call for a helicopter to evacuate the wounded, so within minutes there was the Chinook on the sand beside us. We loaded the three of them into the aircraft and it took off, while the rest of us got into our Land Rovers and drove back to base. After that the major and the private were evacuated back to the army hospital in Birmingham. Rex died on the operating table and we buried him in the sand outside our perimeter.’

The boss, Major Strachan, was the reason we were sitting round the table in Sarria. We were there at the bidding of Julia Stewart, the Chief Executive of Sanctuary Medical Services, so that we could accompany him on the last 111 kilometres of his 800 kilometre walk from Seville to Santiago de Compostela.

Julia was enthusiastic. ‘Fantastic; make sure you get all this down, Geoffrey. We want our sponsorship to make the best possible impact, but maybe leave out the bit about the dog. That’s not very cheerful.’

I thought that the major losing quite a bit of his left leg was even less cheerful, but she was probably right. Most of our press releases would be printed in English newspapers, and the English are well known for thinking more of their pets than their children.

I nodded in agreement and made a bit of a show of taking notes. I was actually hoping to get a bit of one-to-one with the corporal, even though I felt that she was almost certainly spoken for by the major. She had, after all, accompanied him from Seville on a sabbatical from the army while he was proving that he was just as tough with one leg as he had been with two. They must have shared a room on many occasions.

Julia went on to address the major. ‘You’ve done so well, averaging 20 kilometres a day for the whole distance. Did it hurt?’ The major shook his head and looked down at his plate. I hoped that he was going to be a bit more voluble later, but the corporal seemed ready with the answers.

‘We had three spare legs; two of them wore out. The one he’s wearing now is carbon fibre. It seems to be a bit better, but his stump gets sore after a whole day on the road. We’ve got special creams to sort it out. We’ll probably make it okay to Santiago though.’

That was probably true, but would we, the ragtag group of hangers on, wanting to keep in with Sanctuary, also make it okay? As well as the major and his corporal, Julia had brought along her assistant, her personal physician and her Spanish translator, Enrique, who had been hired for the job. She had also set the whole thing up with a tour agency, who had assigned us a team leader to make sure everything went well. I had been hired as the scribe to ensure that Sanctuary Medical Services’s largesse was made known to everyone, or at least to every reader in the UK.

‘What was your name again, dear?’ Julia, addressed the corporal.

‘I’m Corporal Jones - they don’t like it up ‘em, sir!’

I laughed, but you would have to have been a Dad’s Army fan to get the joke. The Corporal Jones sitting at the table was exactly the opposite of the aging soldier in the TV show. She was an attractive young thing made even more desirable by her matter-of-fact attitude to life-threatening events. He had been an old fart, the central joke of the TV series.

‘Yes, I suppose we should introduce ourselves.’ Julia addressed Harriet the tour company rep. ‘I’m Julia Stewart from SMS. This is Lisa, my PA, and Enrique my translator. Enrique comes from Madrid.’

Enrique raised a hand and grinned. He was what the Spanish call a Moreno, someone with a preponderance of Moorish genes, giving him a very dark complexion. She waved her hand in a way which encompassed us all, ‘and these are the rest of my people from around the world, all of them supporting Sanctuary Medical Services in one way or another.’

I was singled out for special attention. ‘This is Geoffrey, who’s putting it all down and releasing the results to the press. He’ll probably get something from this dinner. What do you think, Geoffrey? Do you think you might work out how much we are worth per day collectively? Or how much it’s all costing Sanctuary Medical Services?’

‘I’ll try to put something together for you to look at before we start out in the morning,’ I replied. ‘If you like it we can put it out to the press through your office back in London. But I think informing everyone how much you’re paying us all might not have the effect we want. They’ll start telling us how many nurses, or how many school teachers they could be employing instead of us.’ She nodded. I saw that my main problem was going to be how to promote Sanctuary Medical Services, without producing something so boring that no-one would want to publish it at all.

Fortunately the major, Major Callum Strachan of the Royal Engineers, was still news. He had been on the front pages of the tabloids when he announced that he was going to walk the 800 kilometres from Seville to Santiago de Compostela. It was going to take him roughly 40 days at his intended average of 20 kilometres a day. Indeed he might have been on the front pages even longer had the delectable Corporal Jones been part of the story.

Sanctuary Medical Services had been in negotiation with the Ministry of Defence, the owners of the Cardiff Military Rehabilitation Centre, when Major Strachan had been on the point of going out into the world again. He had announced his intention to walk the distance, with the idea of raising money for the Military Support Trust. Julia, always alert to a means of improving her company’s image, had offered to sponsor him. SMS, as she liked to call her company, was in the business of building and running hospitals for the British health providers. It also owned and operated two hospitals in the Arabian Gulf, one in Abu Dhabi and one in Dubai.

At the time of the major’s great walk, the company was expanding into the United States, negotiating with a couple of insurance companies to provide the full range of medical services. To this end SMS had employed a range of American financial and legal services, and to bolster up our gang of walkers she had got her American lawyer, and the lawyer’s assistant, to join us. Making up the team was her financial advisor, Patrick Roper from Killick Underwood, and the MP from Cardiff Northern, the area where the Rehabilitation Centre was situated.

‘So before your tour of duty in Afghanistan, Major, where else have you been stationed, or deployed,’ I asked.

The major cleared his throat. ‘Yes, well, I was part of the Royal Engineers detachment which went to Sierra Leone in 2000, I was in Bazra with the British force during the Iraq war, and I was on my third tour in Afghanistan when I had my accident.’

‘And how about Bazra; how did that go?’

‘It was a bit hairy. We were supporting the advance into the city. The infantry were clearing houses as they went. They’d throw a grenade in through the front door and see what effect it had. Sometimes a few Iraqi soldiers would come running out with their hands up. Sometimes nothing happened at all. Sometimes the grenade would detonate a bomb inside the building and we’d be showered with debris of all sorts. Our job was to make the ruins safe after the front line had passed, so usually we would set a charge or two and reduce the buildings to rubble. Sometimes there’d be enemy remnants still in the area, and we’d come under fire, and actually I did rescue someone in Basra.’

‘I’d like to know about that too, Major, but not today. We’ll catch up on the rest of your life story tomorrow.’

I tried out a few possible headlines. Pilgrim Major on his Last Leg? Yes, it had possibilities. I jotted down a few words:

* * *

Sanctuary Medical Services, the international health service provider, continues to support Major Callum Strachan in his heroic pilgrimage from Seville to Santiago de Compostela, the destination of the 200,000 or so peregrinos who take a variety of routes to the northern city every year. Many consider the walk to be spiritually uplifting and will often return to enjoy the experience again.

For a thousand years, pilgrims have walked from France, Portugal and Southern Spain, and even from England partially by ship, prompted by the legend that the body of Saint James had been washed up at Cape Finisterre and transported to Santiago, where it had been buried.

Major Strachan, a veteran of the Iraq war and the military occupation of Afghanistan, is an amputee. He lost his left leg below the knee while rescuing one of his platoon during a sniper attack. He is not the first amputee to walk the Camino, and will not be the last, but nevertheless we salute his grit and perseverance. For the final five days of his walk he has been joined by Julia Stewart, the Chief Executive of Sanctuary Medical Services, and some of her team.

Julia Stewart Biography. Julia Stewart trained as a nurse in the Harefield Training Hospital, and became part of the NHS system. She quickly saw that her place was in hospital management, and became part of the management of the South Severn Hospital Trust, and was promoted to Chief Executive of that trust in 2003. She was recruited by Sanctuary in 2007 as the Chief Executive designate and took over the company when Sir William Jacobson retired in 2009.

* * *

‘I think we should get a photo,’ I said to Julia. ‘They always like a photo.’

She stood up to go over to where the major was sitting.

‘No,’ I said, ‘I think we’d be better off with the major and Corporal Jones. And then in the caption we can say who Corporal Jones is.’

She looked at me raising her eyebrows, ‘What do you mean, who Corporal Jones is?’.

I tried to explain. ‘We take a photo, the major with the corporal standing next to him, maybe with her hand resting gently on his arm, and her looking at him in admiration. And then the caption will say that Corporal Jones is on a sabbatical from the Army and has accompanied the major throughout his walk.’

Julia was getting the idea. ‘And when the picture editors get a look at Jones they’re going to ask for more photos of her, and every time they do we’ll manage to squeeze in a bit of info about SMS. Good thinking, Geoffrey.’

Jones spoke. ‘They’re going to think that the major and I are lovers, aren’t they?’

‘Well, yes I suppose so,’ I answered. ‘I’m afraid there’s nothing like sex to sell papers, even if it is only hinted at, especially when celebrities – I pointed at the major – and good looking young women are concerned.’ I suppose the response by the good looking young woman could have been predicted.

‘But it’s not true. It might look like that, but it is absolutely against the rules, for officers and other ranks to…become intimate.’

‘But you must have shared a room with Major Strachan on many occasions,’ I suggested.

‘I did. We often shared a room, but we usually shared it with a dozen others as well. Some of these albergues are really primitive. Dormitories with twenty bunks and the whole twenty sharing a single bathroom. Sometimes we stayed in a hotel but if we shared a room we had two beds of course, and the major is an officer and a gentleman. Let’s face it, women routinely share tents with men out in the field. It can’t be helped, and we’re used to it. This bit of our trip is going to be sheer luxury for us. We have a room each, with a bathroom. It’s fantastic.’

‘But you won’t mind if we take a photo of you with the major, and make a bit of a splash. Just to make sure the papers print what we’ve got to offer.’

The major spoke again. ‘I’m afraid I can’t allow it. I can’t have Jones seeming to be having an affair with me. There’d be an enquiry. She’d get the sack. She’d be cashiered. You know, thrown out. Worse, she’d end up being court martialled first.’

‘But she wouldn’t be having an affair,’ I replied. ‘We’re only implying that there could be something going on, just a vague possibility. Just the merest thought. Only for the people who add up two and two and make five. And she’s so attractive. It’d be a waste not to use her in the PR. I mean look at the rest of us.’ And I did not go on to mention that the major might have forgotten that he was no longer a serving soldier.

We looked round the room. Julia herself, well preserved, but unfortunately visibly older than the major, or the American lawyer’s lawyer, attractive in a sharp business-like sort of way. I thought her name might be Taylor. Or the PR lady from Sanctuary? Despite the size of her breasts, the rest of her just did not measure up, and we had to face it, none of them had walked seven hundred kilometres with Major Strachan. Or shared a room with him, or was wearing army uniform in such an attractive way.

‘Could we maybe leave it for tomorrow’s press release?’ Jones looked straight at me unblinking.

‘Okay,’ I answered, ‘that would be fine.’ I felt I could rely on her to sort out the problem. It occurred to me, for no reason, that Jones was old enough, or young enough, to be my daughter. But anyway I felt that I could rely on her to talk the major round. Even for someone apparently as sensible as Corporal Jones, there was an attraction in being in the public eye.

* * *

We had finished eating what had been an excellent meal in a private dining room in the Hotel Splendide, and were sitting back with chupitos, Spanish shots of one sort or another. Most of the ladies were sampling herbal alcoholic drinks; most of the men, Spanish brandy.

Julia addressed the rep from the tour company. ‘Harriet, perhaps you could tell us what to expect from here on in, for the first day at least.’

Harriet stood and spoke to us. She was a tall girl, probably in her early thirties, wearing evening clothes in which she obviously felt awkward. I judged that maybe she preferred jeans and tee-shirts, or hiking gear. She spoke good English.

‘I’m Harriet Salgado. My mother was English and my father was from Madrid, so I have the advantage of speaking both languages. I also speak fairly good French, a smattering of German and I’ve recently been studying Russian because we are beginning to find that Russian tourists are rolling up here looking for a new experience.’ I could see that her linguistic ability had silenced most of us, who could only just manage English, and if we were lucky a bit of French from our school days.

Harriet continued. ‘Sarria is 111 kilometres from the cathedral in Santiago, and is the closest distance you can walk to be awarded a Compostela, which is a certificate to show that you have succeeded. If you ride a bike or a horse you have to do twice the distance. And incidentally, on the subject of bikes, you will find that quite large groups of cyclists can approach completely silently, and they can be right on top of you before you realize. So keep an ear out for them and if you hear one, warn the others.

‘Our first day will take us from here, straight up those steps across the river and then onwards up the hill. Most of the day is on country paths, with occasional bars and albergues for refreshment if you feel like stopping. We have arranged that we should all meet for lunch at the Albergue Parque which is at kilometre 98. I would suggest that we all go at our own pace, so the ones who get to the albergue first will have to sit about and wait for the ones who are going slower. You’ll find that if you’ve done a bit of training, it won’t be too much for you. We’re only covering 24 kilometres tomorrow. It’s also inevitable that the younger ones amongst us will find it easier than the older ones. I do this trip every couple of weeks so it’s not too much of a problem for me. Oh, and those of you who don’t want to carry your baggage, we’ve laid on a van to take whatever you want to the next hotel.’

‘I’m going to carry my rucksack.’ This was Patrick, the financial advisor. ‘I’ve been training at lunchtimes; hiking along the embankment with ten kilos on my back. A bit hazardous actually with all these keep-fit types dashing back and forth. It’s more like a running track than a pavement by the Thames.’

A quick round of question and answer determined that we were all going to carry rucksacks on the first day except for Julia, who had not even brought a rucksack. She had a wheel-along suitcase. The military would continue to carry their packs, of course. They had carried them for the last seven hundred kilometres so they saw no reason why they should do anything different now.

Harriet continued. ‘And at the end of the day tomorrow at Portomarín we have arranged accommodation at Hotel Nautico. The town is on the edge of an enormous reservoir and it has a yacht club, but at the moment we are in the middle of a drought, so it is virtually dry. All the reservoirs in Spain are nearly empty. We’re running out of water.’

As she finished talking, a mobile phone rang. Patrick Roper hauled a smart phone out of his pocket and answered it. As one does when answering a phone in company, he stood up and without excusing himself from the group, walked out of the door into the main dining room, and then out of that room onto the veranda which fronted the hotel. The rest of us were briefly silent. Julia looked in his direction disapprovingly, and addressed the rest of us.

‘Perhaps we should have a rule for using phones. We’re all busy people. Speaking for myself, when I’m at work my phone rings all the time, despite my assistant being in my outer office. Particularly, when people have got my mobile number. Then if they want to speak to me they just ring me. If I don’t want to speak to anyone I have to turn the phone off, and then my husband gets annoyed. Wants to know what I’m up to. He’s suggested I get a second phone which has a secret number for use of family and friends only.

‘And then there’s texting, and instant messaging. You can only do either by looking at the screen. I don’t know whether you’ve come across these texters in the street, but you have to get out of their way. I imagine that if we tried that out on the Camino we’d end up with twisted ankles, or worse. So let’s make some rules about phones. What do you suggest, Geoffrey?’

I wondered why she was asking me, but I suppose it must have been because I was a professional communicator, and I would normally be spending an hour or so a day on the phone. I thought for a moment.

‘It seems to me,’ I said, ‘that we shouldn’t be using our phones at all while we are on the road, so to speak. Or while we are collected in a group at any time. If Julia has arranged for us to stay in good quality accommodation, and if the food’s good, and it will be if the meal tonight is anything to go by, we shouldn’t be using phones during meals either. In fact, let’s pretend our trip pre-dates phones altogether. There’ll be time at the end of the day, before we meet for dinner, for us all to call our loved ones, and make any business contacts, so let’s restrict ourselves to that hour or so. It’ll be no problem because in Spain everyone eats later. So that’s it. No phones. What does everybody think of that?’

Well! I might as well have suggested that we control the population by culling the firstborn of every family. They were going to take some convincing.

The broker returned to the room, and I told him that we had decided that phones were a no-no. Not on. Against the spirit of the walk, and possibly dangerous in the case of texting or instant messaging.

‘You’ll all have to get used to enjoying yourselves,’ I told them. ‘Walking twenty kilometres a day may not be classed as enjoyment by many of you, but you will have the opportunity of communing with nature, away from all the hurly-burly of city life.’

The American lawyer raised his hand as if in a school room. ‘No, that’s not possible. I’m Oscar Schulz, by the way. We’ve not agreed to any of it. Me, I need to talk to my office first thing in the morning. That’s their morning. Early afternoon here I suppose. Or if not me, then Anna will have to do it.’

So it’s Anna - not Taylor. I made a mental note.

Julia glared at him. ‘Just a minute. How much am I paying you to be here with us, not counting the cost of British Airways first class travel, and the chauffeur-driven car from Madrid?’

Oscar turned towards her, looking surprised. Big-time lawyers are not used to being questioned about their rates or anything else.

‘Yes, okay, I suppose you’re right. ‘I’ll make the arrangement for us to have a conference call from our room, well, one of our rooms. And I can call my wife at the same time.’ Now it was Anna’s turn to look surprised. I judged that she had not expected to have it announced publicly that Oscar might be visiting her room for any reason at all.

‘And what about the rest of you? Are you all happy with that or do we have to discuss this further?’ Julia looked round. The various assistants looked down at the floor, and the various chiefs looked frustrated and angry, visualizing what life would be like without the instant communication provided by the mobile phone, and therefore the means by which any serious thinking could be avoided.

I was having difficulty adding up how much this little venture was costing Sanctuary. Probably hundreds of thousands, but commercial medicine is big business, and this lot were probably not getting paid any more per hour than some of Julia’s top surgeons. Me? As usual I was on the casual hack’s hand-to-mouth rate, but at least I was getting a free holiday. Anyone who ever wanted to be a journalist should look at the employment pages of the Guardian before expecting to be on the same rate as Jeremy Clarkson.

‘So what are we going to do then?’ Patrick was visualizing the desert of silence stretching out before him, over the six days. I cast about for ideas.

‘Well, we could emulate one of the first major literary works in English.’

‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone,’ Julia’s assistant contributed. I turned towards her.

‘Sorry, what’s your name?’

‘Lisa James.’ She stared at me owlishly through her thick glasses, and brushing some non-existent food remnants off her front, tightening the material over her breasts, in a way which I assume she had learnt would create a level of interest in young males. I stared back at her unbelievingly.

‘Do none of you see the similarity in what we are doing with that classic of English literature then?’

Light began to dawn and Patrick suggested The Canterbury Tales.

‘Yes, of course. The Canterbury Tales related the travels of a collection of pilgrims from London to Canterbury, and to entertain themselves they told stories on the way. And, by the way, if we are thinking of doing this, I’m not going to tell anyone what sort of stories Chaucer recorded for posterity. Otherwise people will begin to think that they have to provide a particular type of narrative. You need freedom of thought. You need to shake the cobwebs out of your brains, and maybe remember some tales you’ve been told, or the stories you’ve told your children, or anything that comes to mind. We’ll start tomorrow, when we get to lunch at the albergue.

‘The stories will replace the instant gratification you get from using your mobiles. They will do no more than entertain us when we stop for meals or for rest. They’ll take the place of the telephone, the iPod and the iPad. Are we all also agreed that we are not going to walk along with earphones stuck in our ears?’

The MP made a contribution. ‘I had intended to have a constituent’s workshop by phone from here. It would be so…European. For those who don’t know me, I’m Dafydd Llewellyn-Llewellyn.’

The MP had obviously had to explain himself many times. ‘My first name is Dafydd, after the Welsh poet Dafydd ap Gwilym, who was famous for his work years before Chaucer.’

‘Surely, that’s pushing it a bit,’ I said. ‘He was almost a contemporary.’

‘And if you think Chaucer is racy you should read one or two of his poems. He wrote over a hundred on a whole variety of