EDWARD THE CONFESSOR
By Antonio PARRA-GALINDO:-
When I went to England for the second time in October 1966, the whole country was in celebration and ephemeredes of the founder of English monarchy, Edward III the Confessor.
I arrived late to the school where I was supposed to teach Spanish in two secondary schools one was run by the state and the other was catholic an it was first there I me the philistine Paul Preston; he was my pupil in the sixth form a sort of very thick bloke but very conceited as an assistant four days late. I nearly got the sack.
The headmaster was mad for my lack of punctuality. Oh boy these Spaniards always siesta drinking sangria, thinking of sex, eating olives and oil and riding donkeys. Hull up north by the Humber was the dullest town an inhospitable of my whole life. What a grotty place! Also I starved.
The grant I received from the Government was insufficient: if I paid the rent, I did not eat, and if I ate I was always in arrears with my grudging landlady who was an old bird who spend all her days looking through the windows panes at the traffic of Beverley road very scarce on those days. All her meagre pension went, as she was an animal lover and member of the Society of cat lovers, and feeding seven cats one of them was a civet cat big and fat it was castrated, randy sort of devil who went courting and womanizing in the freezing January nights and got involved in fights with rival males, received scratches and one love-quarrel left him one-eyed.
It seems that the poor eunuch was the favourite. Its name was Persha and she talked to it as it the poor fleecy feline was her baby.
Miss Simpson was lonely and quiet very thin and grudging she left written notes and posted them underneath the threshold door. Always complaining of the misdemeanour of tenants.
One day she passed away. I think she starved herself. Her budget was much in fags, and little in solid food, I think she only ate biscuits. We had to find other abodes. The house was close on her decease.
She had lung cancer and heard her suspicious cough many a night downstairs. The England I encountered had nothing to do with the old merry England I dreamt ad learnt in books: cathedrals, cottages, nice pubs and songs, Shakespeare.
There was no cathedral in Hull a town which had been destroyed by the Luftwaffe bombers during the blitz: the harbour was horrid and still in ruins. I never have been in such grotty places. Hull held the record for the ugliest women of the world and most horripilate tarts in the whole planet. You smelled poverty every where.
Most of the men were on the dole and still there was rationing.
In Beverly a mile away there was a Minster but the cathedrals in England had nothing to do with the idea I preconceived from them. They were monuments to British patriotism. Britannia was a religion.
I realized that since God is an Englishman. Anglicanism became a sort of religion based on the Bible and the hatred to the pope. The Beatles blasted their songs. English wives ran away with the milkman. Mr Harold Wilson lived in number ten Downing Street and there were strikes and Trade Unions. And sittings in and anti Vietnam War demos. Make love not war. Those were the sixties. Where was Edward the Third? No where. People stopped going to church on Sunays, and parsons preached to empty congregations.
I bought myself a transistor and heard my favourite programme Ten of the pops. Girls dressed mini skirts and there was black and white TV. There was David Frost with that was the week that was, Alf Garnet and the Two Ronnies.
I understood the congenial English but could not follow the conversation in the Yorkshires dialect. We are blunt and down to earth you know. Where was Edward the Confessor? Where the old merry England of my dreams? I had read many books on Medieval England but even the British medievalists they drive on the left and they had their own peculiar ideas and won’t tolerate a foreigner to tell them what to do and things are they are. I was looking for Edward the Confessor and I found Perfidious and fastidious Albion. And milk ´goat. The Brits are milks goats. They don’t mix with anything. Good insulars. Abroad they hold on the balance of power and they don’t have friends but interests. That’s it British interests. Pride and prejudice that was a rule in the character of those northerners and they are proud and prejudiced and they could become nasty and xenophobic. In the staff room the other masters looked at me with a chip on their shoulder. Oh dear I never could become an Englishman. What disillusionment. I never shall become one of them.
At the doldrums, I spent half of the time reading since all half my allowance went to the book shops and the other half in beer and chasing the mini skirts.
Without boasting the thought I was an Italian and they got romantic and sang to me the song oh Antonio selling good lollipops and ice cream. Your lodgings or mine that was the question on the Saturday night. And we tossed a tanner in the air and it was love at first sight. Please not the whole way. I am not in the pill. A dissipated life I lead and I sinner I was those days but it was easy to score in those days of the swinging sixties looking Italian speaking good English and without being too handsome having feeling. On their arms I felt like a gigolo. A man object I felt. And the one of the first words I learned was wily. How is your wily, mate? Ready for Virginia, then. Let’s go. Come on. Your place. My place.
Hull and London girls liked Latin lovers. They used me like a disposable nappy. Mea culpa. Mea culpa.
But where was old the confessor? That year was the ninth centenary of the battle of Hastings. The British defeated the Danish.
King Edward the confessor 1004-1066 lived in the dark middle ages when the bishop of Rome died by poison. He tried to raise the standards of English Christendom. He built the abbey of Westminster. It was the time of the investitures. His personality has come to us shrouded in the mist of myths and legends.
All we know for certain is that he defeated the Vikings and had to suffer exile and the misunderstand of her mother- terrible shortcoming, the king had to put up with his maternal ingratitude and became a saint by means of tolerance and patience- who married Knut his best enemy who plundered with the Vikings all the coast of East Anglia.
Edward descendant of Alfred the Great spent most of his live in the exile in France and was crowned in the abbey of Westminster.
He married another saint and queen Sancta Edita.
In my apartment of Beverley road, damp with falling wall paper and with a gas heater which cost me a fortune you had to keep patenting shillings in the slit and hardly and went that terrible winter of 66 without electricity for lack of payment, I meditated shivering underneath my craggy blankets and half starving about this mysterious king.
He was a kind o of anticlimax. I thought that the confessor of the Faith was only in my head. He did not exist.
Nearly naked or in rags like most of poor students, I bought clothes at pawn shops and dowdies.
I smoked woodbine and N.6 horrid cigarettes and mean and down to earth like the Northerners I came across. They made you cough and no wonder they gave lung cancer to my good landlady. I was a regular at the Bull a rough pub at the intersection of Beverley and Nottingham road. My teaching was a disaster.
I had a fight with that Paul Preston because of Franco. He is now a very renowned historian of the Spanish Civil war. Preston hated Spaniards. I could not stand him.
In spite of that I saved my pennies for tickets at local pubs and the dancing halls. There was one dancing called the Locarno I remember well... There I met nymphomaniacs. They liked quickies in the street alleys too call or on the back of a car.
But where was Edward the confessor? Not in Hull the dull. That king was a sort of fiasco. All England was a kind of fiasco. I learnt the language and I learned love and the facts of life the hard way.
Of course England had me in a way but it was tough and very disappointed in those bad old days.
