Silk Hats and No Breakfast

by Honor Tracy

Honor Tracy, journeying off the beaten track in Spain, throws herself with gusto into every aspect of Spanish life. Appalling meals, comic bullfights with dwarfs for toreros, the questionable Spanish welfare state, a tour of a sherry lodge ending in pig-drunkenness, the vagaries of public transport - all these she captures and preserves for our entertainment.
Often sympathetic, sometimes merciless with the foibles and idiosyncrasies of the Spanish people she encounters, she arouses our interest, our indignation, and above all our laughter, at each stage of her journey.

Genres: Travel, Memoir, Spain, Nonfiction

190 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1957

About the author

Honor Tracy is the pseudonym of Lilbush Wingfield, who was a British writer, born at Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk.

Tracy joined the British Women's Auxiliary Air Force from 1939 to 1941, working in the intelligence département, then she was attached to the British Ministry of Information during the Second World War, from 1941 to 1945, as a Japanese specialist. She worked for The Observer newspaper as a columnist and as a long-time foreign correspondent. She wrote also for The Sunday Times and for the British Broadcasting Corporation. Tracy is best known as a travel writer. Her novels satirize British-Irish relations and Ireland itself with wit and occasionally bitterness. Her best-known novels are The Straight and Narrow Path (1956), The Quiet End of Evening (1972), and The Ballad of Castle Reef (1979). Her best-known travel book is Winter in Castille (1973).

She settled in Achill Island, Co. Mayo, Ireland and died in 1989 in Oxford, England.

Reviews

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

A book about a journey through Spain by a writer who hates everything about the country. Why did she bother? After a week she should have packed her bags and gone home. Maybe she had already spent the publisher's advance. In fairness, the place does come across as a kip with grinding poverty and gangs of feral children pursuing tourists through the streets, begging. But still, why bother writing the book? Some quotes will give you a flavour:

"It would have been pleasant to take another turn about the Castle wall, but the children made it impossible. I think I never saw a meaner bunch of brats. The instant El Viejo opened the door of the church they fell on me, screaming and trying to pull my bag away; and when at last the idea sank into their brains that there was no more money they baited me as if I had been an animal."

"The village of Finisterre is one of the most wretched communites I ever saw... The people are wild and savage, with the wreckers mentality found in such places, and it is said that they would steal the laces out of a man's boots. Many of them live in cabins unfit for pigs... There was little to do in such a place but walk, followed everywhere by the rabble of furious children."

And she makes some not very complimentary comments about the Celtic nations all the more cutting for their (small) element of truth: "... like so many intellectuals of impoverished and backward lands, a man dedicated to a myth. What was it really but self-assertion in the face of more gifted and more competent neighbours? Galicia, Brittany, Wales, Ireland, the pattern repeats itself over and over again in these misty outlands on the shores of the Atlantic which, as Gerald Brenan says, empties the mind of reason and fills it with bad poetry. Everything has to be inflated beyond recognition, versifiers are puffed into major poets, rascals turned into national heroes, a small to-do into a glorious feat of arms..."

[Awbrey Cook · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book documents the author's solo travels through Spain, she often visits some rougher cities between the highlights, and wherever she goes she connects to the local people who show her around the landmarks of their towns.

[Ed · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fun whimsical account of a Brit traveling through western Spain in the 50’s.