The Island of Volcanoes

Doctor’s orders took my mother and Bill to Lanzarote. During the winter of 1960 Bill, who was by then posted in Switzerland, had a small heart attack and was told he should go somewhere warm to recuperate. The nearest place was the Canary Islands and Bill, adventurous as ever, chose the one that sounded the most unusual, and where tourism was almost non-existent. There was one hotel on the island, a government-owned parador in Arrecife, the main town. By the end of their holiday Bill had fallen in love with the strange island, three-quarters covered in dark cone-shaped volcanoes, old craters and lava flows. On their last day he bought a house in an isolated fishing village, Playa Blanca, at the far south of the island. The village was surrounded by desert hills and reached by an unmade road, which cut through a sea of bronze black lava that looked as if it had bubbled out of a volcano the day before and, still molten, was moving slowly towards the sea. The time it took to get from Arrecife to Playa Blanca on a bad road, and the weird terrain we passed through on the way, made me think of it as the village at the end of the world.