New years Eve 1986
I just had been searching for the whereabouts
of my daughter Helen for sixteen years. That was a pin in my heart and it hurt.
Silly of me all that time wondering and thinking and being restless. When I
boarded that plain in Barajas only had an address in Epping obtaining though a
letter from a relative in the Telegraph a year before or so. The Bolton’s were a close knitted family, had
a kind of allegiance stemming from their old clans. They were mixture of Welsh
and Irish. I took a plane with a meagre sum of a few pesetas ignoring that the
standard of living has gone up, too. England had joined the Common Market, an I
remembered – how could I forget- that New Years Eve, Edward Heath being
premier, it was an obscure day with an early sunset and London looked a ghostly
town, and it went to bed English and dawn found the big nation European.
However they never ceased to be British. Union Jack, John Bull, Christmas
Pudding, bacon and eggs, porridge, the bath on Sunday Evenings and Psalms, and
No Sex, please, we are British, as the title went of a famous comedy by Michael
Douglas Hume staged at Soho
theatres in may days, the good old days. Off course, England went European but the Red Lion
continued non-stop in its insularity. Yes I remember that Sylvester Evening of
73. Loneliness at my digs and I went looking for Helen.
My life those days was a recipe of mischievous sequels
of complains and grudges without following the recommendations of never
complain never explain. Suzanne who was a good observer made a good remark
about us. “You are a bunch of complainers or quejicas, she said it in
Spanish and to a certain extent she hit the nail right on the head.
Nevertheless our lack of constancy, our apathy that certain tendency of blaming
somebody else’s for our own failures is nothing compared with perfidy the
passionate coolness of John Bull looking at every one with high brows. The
British could be very supercilious and hypocrites. We, Spaniards, are big
liars.
Thoughtfulness had been one of my defects, but,
full of courage of determination, I felt like an Spanish conquistador when
boarding that Jumbo full of madrilènes going, as usual for the Christmas
shopping Oxford Street like in the good old days and English Nationals from
mixed families.
The woman next to me was a teacher in
Torrelodones and I think she was going through a bad patch on her marriage
coming back to mother I suppose. Innocent and careless as I always used to be
and thinking that everybody is cheerful and in a good mood – in my youth I read
a lot the Gospel and thought that the true life had to be the perfection Jesus
taught in his parables thus I became an utopian a dreamer and also naïf or
rather a practitioner of panphilia (in the Greek meaning of the word)
and that believe or philia turned to phobia when I grew older but I cant get
rid of those spells of good expectations and believes in mankind, they
sometimes appear when I feel in good mood. With that attitude you are bound
to disaster, Hillary. You build walls without countermark. Houses of sand but
the Lord forgives you, idiot
I also thought and was mistaken that planes
going to Heathrow were like those friendly trains I took when I was living in
Doncaster where everybody talked to each other offered cigarettes and partook
sandwiches with cups of tea from the thermos apart of confess to strangers the
sins of your life. So here you are again sitting in a plane that is taking
you to Perfidy Albion. I always
liked impossible things; perhaps was the reason of my infatuation with that
country. In the University took Anglo-Saxon for speciality and dreamed of that
paradise of robin hood’s wood, full of bishops, courtiers, minstrels, castle,
the lady leaning out of the window, Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare, the chants
of the Beowulf, English tea, Alec Guinness, London fog, the shoes of a bobby,
Alf Garnett, the carry on films, pints of bitter, rides in the double-decker
bus, travel with my aunt, squalid living in digs, the smokes of a pipe,
Anglican priest and sextons extinguishing candles in old cold churches neither
cibary nor remonstrance no images nor saints no rosaries the cult of the Lady
finished, Our Lady’s chapel closed for good. Henry the Eight and Anna Boleyn.
Crammer and Thomas More. I had confusing idea of all that. May be my perception
was misgiving. Bur I always was the odd man out. I liked things my way. Larry,
you are going to be dashed to pieces. No. England was much less convivial. The good
old days of the post-war year the swing sixties and the couldn’t-care-less
seventies had given way to the iron days of the Iron Lady the flogging of the
TUC and the mind of the I am alright Jack. More individualistic and rich mouths
became more reserved.
I did not try to chat the bird but I explained
to the woman that I was going to England trying to meet my estranged family.
Oh God perhaps she was in the same boat. Her marriage was falling to pieces
like mine was years ago and I could not recover from the psychological impact
on me. I gathered she hated the Spaniards. She talked to me in Spanish but when
the plane reached the English aerial dominion she shifted to her mother tongue
and became derogatory and incriminating almost rude.
“Oh
dear. Larry, you always get yourself into trouble. Better you should have kept
your mind shut”.
We went into an aerial bump and the whole plane
started to shake. Bad omen. We landed in Gatwick with nearly an hour delay. The
schedule was a Heathrow landing but three was something wrong with one of the
engines or the wings the pilot did not explain and the crew were also a bit
shaky. It was a freezing day. Took one of my expensive cigars and started to
puff in the middle of the arrivals area. People looked at me startled as if I
were a Martian or something.
“People
don’t smoke tobacco nowadays in this country. Only cannabis”
“Oh
dear Larry you always landed into trouble. Su said that you always land in your
feet –it was one her favourite ready made phrases evaluating me-.
But elle etait trompé. I have been an
unlucky sod most of my days but it serves me right for moaning all the
time as if I were Jeremiah. Never explain never complain, the old adage goes.
We live in a classless society and, since childhood, the Spaniards of our
generation believed in rank, hierarchy, suffered from piles, insecurity complexes
and guilt and were under the rod of confessor-maniac. We had no principles,
only those of the Catholic Church. And those big words and ready made speeches
deliver to our under conscience in remorse, oh you dirty rascal, you have wet
dreams and scatology by degrees. We believed in rank, hierarchy, principles,
those big words and ready made speeches delivered to our subconscious in long
academic evenings of tedium only to fodder our indomitable ego.
Needless to say, excited as I was in that
winter morning [December brings with the dew of the cold night melancholy of
time past] in 1986 a year after than we moved house and went to live outside Madrid before the flood of immigrants in
our capital and I felt on top of the world. At last travel as in the good old
days. I have become a no person since Franco died. But now I was roaming the
spaces holding tight in my pocket that letter in which a Heagerty, senile, with
bending and not so firm scripture, gave the address of the Hughs. Pie and the
sky around the world was mine. Trouble with you matey is that you have
watched many a film and through that you lost contact with the real world.
The image of Britannia o Baodicea ruling the waves represented to me. I was the
lord and master of my destiny. I saw looking below the big waves like tiny
spots of froth and the Ocean a big mass of dark blue magma, the morass where
our fight began. The vertical pond hiding the Infinite. The horizontal flatness
portraying the idea of endless purposeless. It must be cold down there. There I
was riding the storm. Very excited
