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’:
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 7th 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.
