Watching The English Part III

It’s raining and wet outside the caravan so I play indoors with Sis. Playing with a Sis who is not quite two when you yourself are already six is rather boring but there is nothing else to do. Mama tells me it's Summer but it feels way colder than any winter I can remember back on my island. I am getting tired of all these continuous changes and want to go back to my old familiar life but gradually I realise that this old life has gone for ever. I look at Sis playing innocently with her dolls in the middle of the caravan floor and I see that she does not have within her the beach, the sun nor the mountains as I do. It must be nice being not quite two and having this moment as your oldest memory. She does not have inside her the wave of sadness that washes over me as I yearn for the life that I had before this one (see post Share The Moon).

At night-time, unbeknown to Mama and Papa, I escape on my magic carpet and return home. I fly back over the patchwork of emerald coloured fields that stretched out before me on my arrival in this strange land, I turn down towards the warm waters of the Atlantic, skirting the coast of Africa, over the mountains and back to my beautiful Island. And there I am once again on my beach, listening to the roar of the waves as they crash on the shoreline, feeling the hot black sand on the soles of my bare feet, and the power of the scorching sun on my little six-year old face. I look up and see the majestic Teide volcano in the distance, silently watching over me as it did on the day of my birth and it’s a safe and warm feeling.‘ Mari Carmen ! We’ve missed you, where have you been?’ the mountains, the sun and the beach all ask me in unison. But I am too busy to answer for I have already jumped into the warm Atlantic waters, and after I have had my fill I lay on the black sand and dry off in the hot sun. After a while I fall asleep, and when I wake up I am once again in the land of chickens.

One day Papa brings me a bag full of girls' clothes. One of his English co-workers has kindly given Papa the clothes his daughter has grown out of so that I have warm clothing for the coming winter. Papa tells Mama that this man is one of the Supervisors or 'Foremen' as they call him in English and this entitles him to certain privileges such as the first cup of tea and biscuit on 'The Tea Break' (see post Watching The English Part I And II). Jumpers, trousers and jackets are exotic things for me and I love trying everything on. I tell Mama it's a fashion show and she and Sis clap and laugh and I try out one outfit after another, swaggering up and down the caravan with my little girl hands on my little girl hips pretending to be a model. After the sadness, it feels good to laugh again.

The following week the same man brings his daughter to the farm so that I have a companion to play with. Her name is Jane and she is eight. We don’t have a language in common but when you are six and eight it’s not so not essential. We become friends and whenever her father brings her to the farm, we spend the day roaming and exploring our farm world. So long as we do not get in the way of the grown-ups, we can go where ever we want. And we do. We peek into the area where the adorable baby chicks are hatched, then onto the coops and cages where they are fed and fattened, and finally we silently pass the area where they are slaughtered and plucked clean for packaging and selling. We both understand the terrible fate that awaits the innocent baby chickens we were playing with earlier in the day. They are happily ignorant of their destiny and it’s better that way. For the first of many times in my life, I realise that it’s often better not to know what the future holds. Knowledge can bring with it terrible pain. The chicken farm also has horses and fields, and on sunny days when we are fed up with chickens we buy an ice cream from the farm shop with some of the wonky money I have saved. We then sit on a haystack and watch the horses prancing in the fields as we lick our melting ice creams. Jane and I have no language in common but we both understand the value of ice-cream on a hot day. I look up at the sun shining high in the sky above the two of us and realise that this same sun is shining at this very moment high in the sky above my Island and over my beach. Suddenly my old home does not feel so far away (see post Share The Moon).

The very next day a nicely dressed lady knocks on the door of the caravan and asks to speak with Mama and Papa. We don’t understand everything she says in detail so she goes away and soon returns with the owner of the farm. He explains to Papa in simple English who then explains to Mama and me in Spanish that starting next month I must go to school. We arrived in England back in early May and it's already the end of August. I must go to school, and it will be in English, a language that I hardly know. I am soon turning seven and am not sure how to take this.

To be continued......

 Next post 6th November : B Is For Bun

 Note: All written content is the intellectual property of this Author. Image material is drawn largely from Pixabay with some small additions from private family archives.

Watching The English Part I and II

The year is 1970 and the month is May. In that faraway place called America Richard Nixon has been 37th President of The United States for just over one year and the Vietnam War is at its peak. But this detail does not touch us in any way, for our energies are concentrated on adapting to a new life on this strange new island called England, and on this chicken farm that we now call Home. All four of us are now living near to a big town called Banbury and behind us we have left the only life we have ever known, life on our Island (see post Share The Moon). Our new Home is now a mobile caravan in the middle of an enormous farm in the village of Bloxham. Papa works with chickens and Mama looks after us. I am used to running around outdoors with the sun warming my skin and the beach on my doorstep, but somehow here it all feels so different. The mobile home is rudimentary with only a small electric stove in the main room for heating and after the warmth of Tenerife even the British summer feels cold. 

On this chicken farm, we are surrounded by chickens day in and day out. Papa works with them, we play with them, we eat them.  After a while we are all sick and tired of chicken, we need some bread. Luckily the farm has its own shop so Mama decides it’s time to pay a visit. Mama does not know the word in English for bread, or for anything else for that matter, so she cannot ask anyone for assistance. She will just have to find the bread herself. Easier said than done. Mama steps inside the store and resolutely starts looking around for bread but cannot for the life of her find anything remotely resembling a French stick. All she can see in one corner are mountains of milk-coloured square sponge cakes which have all been neatly sliced and packaged into rectangular plastic bags. Out of curiosity Mama squeezes one of these packed sponges and sniffs the bag trying to see what flavour it is.  This is of no help and she shrugs her shoulders thinking to herself, ‘Strange sponge cake, doesn't smell of anything!’ This is Mama's first encounter with English sliced bread. She brings a loaf home and we are puzzled. We have never seen such a thing in all our life but that's all we have and soon we have forgotten all about the delicious crusty French sticks we used to get from the baker's van back in our village in Tenerife.

In the evenings after work we gather as a family in our new caravan home, and Papa studies this new language that none of us really understand. He has a dictionary, a work book and some tape cassettes that he puts into a square machine called a cassette player. Every evening he listens to a set of new words pronounced by a man with a lovely voice and then repeats them after him as best he can in his thick Spanish accent. Today he learns the words ‘wom-aaan’, ‘vehiii-cle’and 'peooo-ple'. I sit with Papa and follow his example and they are also the first words I ever learn in this strange new language. Later I overhear Papa telling Mama about this thing called ‘The Tea Break’: In the evenings after work we gather as a family in our new caravan home, and Papa studies this new language that none of us really understand. He has a dictionary, a work book and some tape cassettes that he puts into a square machine called a cassette player. Every evening he listens to a set of new words pronounced by a man with a lovely voice and then repeats them after him as best he can in his thick Spanish accent. Today he learns the words ‘wom-aaan’, ‘vehiii-cle’and 'peooo-ple'. I sit with Papa and follow his example and they are also the first words I ever learn in this strange new language. Later I overhear Papa telling Mama about this thing called ‘The Tea Break’: 

Every day Papa and his English co-workers must stop everything they are doing and go into the little kitchen off the meat packaging area and prepare a hot drink called tea. They do it for exactly twenty minutes twice a day, once in the morning and once again in the afternoon. They all gather round an electric machine called a kettle that boils hot water very fast and wait for their beloved drink to appear. After the tea has been prepared, they pass around biscuits to go with it and then talk happily with one another until 'The Tea Break' finishes and all return back to work. After the strong coffee from Spain Papa finds the taste of tea hard to get used to and tells Mama it looks and tastes a bit like dishwater. He tells Mama they huddle around the kettle and look forward to ‘The Tea Break’ like little children, even more than lunch time and he can’t really understand why. If they were to take away the tea break, it would cause a mutiny. ‘Never mess with an Englishman and his tea break,' he solemnly tells Mama. 

On a Saturday afternoon when Papa is not working, we all venture into the big nearby town of Banbury to see how the English live outside of chicken farms. We are shocked to see weddings where the bride and groom are old. There they stand outside the church happily posing for the photographer with their guests as if old people getting married is the most natural thing in the world. 'Don’t they feel embarrassed?' we think to ourselves. Mama tells Papa they each look at least forty and that the only weddings she ever saw in the Spain were those where the bride and groom were both young. Mama is twenty-six and Papa thirty-one and that for me is already old. I cannot understand for the life of me why these ancient people are bothering to get married because soon they will both be dead. If I could speak English I would go up to the guests and tell them they can wipe those smiles off their faces, because soon they will all be returning for two funerals!

Even the money is strange in this country. Some of the coins have corners on them and I am perplexed by this. I am used to coins being round. Within the year of our arrival in this strange land they will change all their money over to a new system called 'Decimalisation'. But they will still not get rid of the wonky coins. The English and their lifestyle are indeed strange, I conclude as we return to the chicken farm from one of our weekend jaunts into town: they get married old, feed each other sliced sponge cakes that taste of nothing, wash it down with dishwater and then pay for it all with wonky money. I will never understand these English, I think to myself.  

To be continued......

 Next post 30th October : Watching The English Part III




Note: All written content is the intellectual property of this Author. Image material is drawn largely from Pixabay with some small additions from private family archives.

Share The Moon

On a clear moonlit night I sometimes call Mama and ask her to look out of the window. 'Let's Share The Moon', I tell her. We are both living at different ends of our majestic European continent; Mama, down south next to the coast of Africa in warm and sunny Tenerife, and myself tucked away up north by the Arctic Circle in beautiful and cold Finland. Yet, with a bit of luck, as we speak over the phone, we can each look out of our respective windows and contemplate the same heavenly body suspended high in the sky above the two of us. Sharing The Moon feels warm and reassuring. Suddenly we are not so far away from one another

My earliest childhood memory takes me back to the island of Tenerife where I was born: We are moving towards the end of the 1960's, and in a far-away place called America, Lyndon B. Johnson has already served over half of his term as 36th President of the United States of America. I am just a small child, yet I have already lived through two US Presidents, for I am exactly eight weeks old when John F. Kennedy, 35th President of The United States of America is assassinated. Before the decade is over Neil Armstrong and the crew of Apollo 11 will historically land their lunar craft on the surface of the moon. On my little Island these events will pass largely unnoticed. For the grown-ups in my world, life centres around the daily toil in the tomato fields and banana plantations. Any precious free time is dedicated to family. Today is such a day.

There's a black volcanic sand beach near our village and I am there playing with my cousins. The beach is called Playa de la Arena and a multitude of grown-ups and children are swarming all around. We all belong to the Sanz family. There's me, there's Mama, there's Papa, there's aunts, there's uncles and finally there are many Sanz Cousins and I am one of them. I walk over to the water's edge and lodge a large Coca-Cola bottle in between some stones in a rock pool. This will cool it down and after swimming in the blue Atlantic waters we will drink it with our picnic food. Adults and children are all jumbled up so it’s hard to recognize which child is with which parent. The sun is shining, the waves are crashing onto the black sand and life is good.  Wherever I am in the world nowadays, I just close my eyes and in an instant I am transported back to the beach, to the roar of the ocean and to the immense power of the sun, and it's a safe and warm feeling. 

It's Sunday and Papa is showing me where he works. It's a gigantic building site and I am running up and down a rectangular hole which somebody has dug in the ground. But I cannot work out why. Papa tells me it's a swimming pool belonging to the nearby hotel which is also being built. I am barefoot and the warm concrete feels nice on the soles of my feet. I love the way the hole slowly deepens and I run from one end to the other as fast as my little legs will carry me. ‘One day,’ Papa tells me, ’this will be an enormous tourist resort called 'Playa de Las Americas.' I cannot imagine this because all I see around me are similar buildings all with similarly big rectangular holes in the ground. Many years have passed since that day but whenever I drive past the sprawling Las Americas Tourist resort on my return to Tenerife, that distant memory is reactivated and I am once again that little girl running up and down an empty swimming pool. 

On an ordinary day like any other, Mama tells me that soon I will become a big sister and that the stork will bring our family a new baby. I have no idea what Mama is talking about and I forget all about her words until, one day Grandma Filomena, Mama's Mama, tells me to run up to the sotea, the roof balcony. The baby is due any minute and with a bit of luck I will see the stork bringing its delivery. But I am out of luck, I wait, and I wait, and I wait, but there is no sign of any stork let alone a baby. What seems like hours elapse, and my neck is hurting from staring upwards as I scour the sky for storks. Now I'm beginning to get thirsty. Finally, I hear the crying of a baby coming from downstairs so I rush down towards the source of the noise to see the cause of all the commotion. 

I can’t go into the bedroom where Mama is, Grandma Filomena tells me. I know Mama is in there with a baby with Grandma and with a lot of other women, and I can hear the baby crying but I don’t understand why I can’t go in. Unbeknown to me, hours have elapsed since the birth but the placenta has still not been expelled. Everyone including Grandma is frantic with worry and the women have no idea what to do; If the placenta is not expelled soon and intact Mama will die. Grandma has an idea. She makes Mama blow as hard as possible into an empty Coca-Cola bottle and finally, to everyone’s immense relief, this squidgy, slimy thing that everybody has been terrified of, slides out of Mama. After a while tranquillity returns to the room.

The bedroom door is now ajar and from the doorway I see Mama lying on her bed cradling a baby in her arms. How did that get there? How can I have missed the stork? The sneak must have flow in through the bedroom window as I scoured the skies, I crossly think to myself. There are a lot of women fussing around Mama and the new baby. I recognize my grandmother, Abuela Filomena and my aunt, Tia Feliza. The others are unknown. ‘And what a lovely little girl!’ They gushingly tell Mama, 'Look at that shock of hair,' and everybody seems to have forgotten all about me. Except for Mama. She sees me standing forlornly at the door and calls me towards her saying that I can get into bed with her. So I do just that. I tuck myself in next to Mama, and now everybody that files past the bed to admire the baby also has a few words for me. ‘Oh, what a charming young baby, and what a pretty older sister you are, Mari-Carmen!' And I am beaming with happiness because Mama is including me in the centre of her admiration moment. My new baby sister is called Rosa-Delia. She is tiny and covered with a fine layer of little black hairs which will all disappear with time, Mama tells me. I tell Mama she looks like a monkey. Grandma says it's because she arrived prematurely. I am now five years old and officially a big sister. 

I'm starting school now and Mama sends me off every morning with a kiss and a wave at the front door. It's only at the end of the lane so I walk on my own. Girls and boys each have their own classrooms and each morning we must form two separate lines outside the school entrance. One line is for the boys and the other is for the girls. I somehow never make it to the front of the line and I want that more than anything, but one day I am unexpectedly granted my wish. My great-grandmother, Celia dies during the night and when I go to school the next day to take my place at the end of the girls' line as I usually do, one of the girls who always makes it to the front comes up to me. She solemnly offers her condolences for my enormous loss and tells me that I can take first place in the line in lieu of my sorrow. I am ecstatic, like any six-year old would be and think to myself, 'I wish a grandmother would die every night!'

The sixties give way to the seventies and my school days at the end of the lane soon finish because the following Spring I am sat on a plane travelling to England. I am six years old and on this journey with me is Mama and my baby sister who is not yet two. I call her Sis. Our little group is leaving Spain to join Papa somewhere in England. He is already there working on a chicken farm and it has been over a year since we last saw him.  We are one of many Spanish families that have left their homes in search of a new life abroad and most of us are poor. As we board the plane, I am blissfully unaware that my life is about to change forever. None of us speak a word of English, and behind us we leave everything that is familiar and reassuring. As the plane takes off and climbs high into the sky, I see the mountains and blue Atlantic sea slowly disappearing out of view. My beautiful Island home has vanished.

I have never been on a plane before and am dead excited. We fly from Tenerife to Paris and from there we take a plane to London, and soon we are about to land. As we approach the airport I look out of the window to glimpse what new adventure lies ahead of me. I have never seen such shades of green. Patchworks of emerald-coloured fields stretch out before me as far as the eye can see. But I already miss my mountains, I miss the roar of the ocean, but most of all I miss my beach. England and the English are all one big mystery to me. How do they live? What do they eat? How do they communicate? I am about to find out.

To be continued......

 Next post 16th October: Watching The English Part I And II

 

Note: All written content is the intellectual property of this Author. Image material is drawn largely from Pixabay with some small additions from private family archives.