FFB - Ghosts of Spain

 

When this book was first published (2006), about 75,000 retired British people move permanently to Spain each year and there are roughly 300,000 already living in Spain, mainly on the costas. Since the financial crisis of 2008, those numbers have reduced and several thousand have returned to UK. Be that as it may, the original impetus for emigrating to Spain remain valid: they’ve moved to obtain a better standard of living (still the case in most areas), to enjoy more sun and less stress, or to get away from ever-encroaching Big Brother government. A fair proportion of them have not bothered to learn anything about the history and culture of Spain and, sadly, the vast majority have failed to learn even the basics of the Spanish language. Whether you’re thinking of moving to Spain or simply want to spend a holiday here, this book is a fascinating introduction to the country’s “hidden past,” as the sub-title suggests.

Spaniards generally still believe it is their absolute right – even their obligation – to enjoy themselves. This may be the reason, researchers suggest, why Spaniards live longer than other Europeans.  Of course their diet, heavy in fresh fruit and vegetables, fish and olive oil, helps too. Inevitably, there is a down-side as well: the Spanish are Europe’s biggest consumers of cocaine, alongside the British. 

There is a dark side to Spain’s recent history.  The atrocities committed by both the left and the right during, and most pertinently by Franco’s regime after, the Civil War of 1936-39 have to all intents and purposes been buried with all those thousands of bodies. Only now, over sixty years later are unmarked graves being exhumed and stories being told. Tremlett movingly follows this tragic journey of the good and the bad, the victims and the killers. Supporters of the communist cause were murdered and buried along countless roadsides. About 30,000 children of communist Spaniards were abducted and adopted. Even after the transition to democracy in 1975, it seems that a tacit agreement of silence was made about all this.  [Indeed, these events inspired me to write the short story ‘Grave Concerns, published in a magazine, and now in Spanish Eye (Crooked Cat Publishing), paperback available post-free worldwide here].

Civil wars are often worse than other types of conflict, as it’s brother against brother, neighbour against neighbour.  At the war’s end, 500,000 Spaniards were dead, not to mention the Italians and Germans who fought for Franco and those Russians and other foreigners who volunteered for the International Brigades. Thousands went into exile. Then the post-war regime systematically rooted out sympathisers of the enemy and sent them to labour camps or executed them. Now, though, you’ll be hard put to it to find a statue of Franco; even the national anthem has been expunged of words - Francoist words; only now are they considering writing new words for the anthem.

To balance the endemic networking and nepotism of the Spanish system, they have other values, such as nobility, fairness, valour and justice.  In Spain, the politically correct brigade is never going to reach the idiotic levels it has attained in the litigation-fearful UK and US.  That’s because the Spanish are radically opposed to banning anything ‘that smacks of restriction or prohibition, as it’s considered immoral, old-fashioned and fascist.’ When you’ve lived through one dictatorship, you’re unlikely to welcome another.

Whenever possible, Spain has grasped change with eagerness.  Their women won the vote in 1931, only three years after the UK and well ahead of France, Italy or Belgium. Granted, many of these freedoms were curtailed by Franco while he was in power. But now, for such an ostensibly male chauvinist country, women can be seen in all walks and all levels of life, including the Guardia Civil (since1988). It’s estimated that Spain has the highest plastic surgery rate in Europe, and one of the highest rates of organ donorship. 

 
Eschewing the mañana stereotype, Spaniards actually have a can-do attitude. For example, the Madrid airport is the biggest infrastructure project in Europe, three times the size of Heathrow Terminal Five. The builders won the project for Terminal Five fifteen years ago and work still hasn’t started; the same builders won the Madrid airport project four years ago and it is half-completed already. Yes, much of Spain resembles a building-site – but at least they get on with it!

From new buildings to old. The British Isles is rich in history and castles and many British tourists are saddened and surprised at the dereliction of many fortifications in Spain. But bear in mind that Spain has about 8,000 castles and other fortifications and hundreds of monasteries and convents.  It’s just impossible to allocate restoration funds to all of them.

Tremlett strives to learn what binds gypsies, jails and flamenco. He attempts to discover the attractions of legal brothels – night clubs. He travels throughout the Basque and Catalan lands in the hope of learning the reasons for their demands for separation from Spain, wondering why Galicia, who also has a strong case, is quite content to remain without autonomy. 

The foregoing is a random selection from an interesting, humane and well-researched book by a British journalist who married a Spanish woman and has lived in Madrid for over a decade.  Tremlett is clearly writing about a country he loves, a country and a people who amaze and mystify him. Spain’s history is still shaping him and his family and, indeed, all of those expats who have chosen to live here. [The book has been updated and revised since I read it. Latest print date, 2012]

 
It will also change several preconceptions about Spain and the Spanish. 

Spanish Eye e-book available from Amazon.co.uk here
Spanish Eye e-book available from Amazon.com here

A clean breast of it!

Censorship happens even now, though perhaps it isn’t so explicit as experienced in Spain during the time of Franco. A new book recounts the alterations made to movies and their posters by censors at the time of Franco’s regime.

After the Civil War, going to the movies was one of the main forms of entertainment for Spanish society. So movies presented a problem for the watchdogs of morality, and they were vigilant in stamping on any negative issues regarding religion, politics, and the army, and eschewed blatant reference to prostitution, divorce or adultery.  

The book, La censura franquista en el cartel de cine by Bienvenido Llopis, analyses forty years’ worth of censorship in Spain through films. The result was that cleavages were reduced, legs were covered up and scenes with beds in them were avoided.

Certain movies were banned, while others had scenes excised. It wasn’t just the movies, though – the censor had to tamper with the movie advertising. Major Hollywood stars who embraced the Republican cause – James Cagney, Joan Crawford or Robert Montgomery – had their names removed from Spanish movie posters, while any title that suggested a double meaning were changed.

A pre- and post-censorship image of actress Sara Montiel...

 

Llopis spent over thirty years acquiring posters, programmes and magazines that reveal the work of the draftsmen and censors of the era.

His book includes movie posters, magazine covers, comic strips, novels, news stories, photographs, postcards and collectible picture card albums showing the work of censors who managed to re-clothe Monroe, Lollobrigida, Loren and Gardner in less suggestive garments!

The final blow to Spanish censorship was delivered on December 1, 1977 by the government decree under Prime Minister Adolfo Suárez.

Based on an article by Aurora Intxausti, El País, December 30, 2013

Make a date - 1, 14 and 31 October

Some time ago I published a regular monthly column linking a set selection of dates in history. The series was popular. I'm busy coordinating the articles into book form. As today is 14 October, here are a number of linked events for that date plus two other October dates. To avoid repetition, I've simply indicated the relevant date in brackets. The three dates for this article are:

1, 14 and 31 October

October is supposed to be the scary month, a time of hobgoblins, ghosts and of course Halloween. They don’t get much scarier than those Nazi leaders who in 1946 were sentenced at the Nuremberg Trials (1). A couple of years earlier (14) Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, suspected of plotting Hitler’s assassination, was given the choice of a public treason trial and certain death by firing squad or suicide with honour. This much-revered soldier chose the latter.

A ruler who met a grisly end was Benito Mussolini; little did he know about his fate when in 1922 he became the youngest premier in the history of Italy (31). Familiar to all of us living in Spain, Francisco Franco, although a controversial leader, actually died in his bed: in 1936 he was named the head of the Nationalist government of Spain (1).

Benito Mussolini

 

Less fortunate was King Harold Godwinson, who in 1066 got one in the eye at the battle of Senlac Hill (14), seven miles from Hastings.

With one eye on history, Khruschev made several cataclysmic revelations about his predecessors in his 1956 speech, resulting in the body of Joseph Stalin being removed (31) from Lenin’s Tomb in 1961 because Stalin was suddenly a non-person.

A mere three years later, Leonid Brezhnev ousted Khrushchev (14), probably as a result of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis which began with a U2 flyover taking photos of Soviet nuclear weapons being installed in Cuba (14).

Indeed, October seems to be a month marked by achievements in transport.

To begin with, in 1811, the first steamboat set sail down the Mississippi, arriving in New Orleans (1) and the following year work on London's Regent’s Canal began (14).

In 1908 Ford introduced the Model T car (1) and a mere thirty-nine years later Chuck Yeager flew the X-1 plane faster than the speed of sound (14), heralding in the concept of the space-age. NASA was created (1) in 1958.

Chuck Yeager and the X-1

 

Eleven years later to the day, a passenger aircraft - the Concorde - broke the sound barrier for the very first time (1). Maybe it did become uneconomical, but what a beautiful plane!

Other technological things happened on our selected days in October too. The first electric lamp factory was opened (1) by Thomas Edison in 1880 and the first rectangular television tubes were manufactured on the same day sixty-nine years later.

Although refrigeration was in use at the turn of the century, it wasn't commonplace, but that was due to change when Acme Refrigeration (1) was incorporated in 1959.

Quite a bit of land changed hands this month, too. Alexander the Great increased his empire (1) by defeating Darius III of Persia (now Iran) in the battle of Arbela in 331BC and Spain ceded Louisiana to France via the Treaty of San Ildefonso on the same day in 1800.

Still on the same day, with the help of T E Lawrence, the Arab forces captured Damascus for the Allies in 1918, while thirty-one years later Mao Zedong declared the People’s Republic of China.

T.E. Lawrence

 

Eleven years after that (1), the British Empire was being given away - notably Nigeria and Cyprus gained their independence.

 
That favourite place for philatelists, the Gilbert Islands, lost the Ellice Islands when they took the name Tuvalu (1) in 1975. Independence occurred in 1978. Tuvalu means “group of eight” – there are eight inhabited islands in the group. In 2000 Tuvalu leased its internet domain name “.tv” for fifty million dollars (until 2012).

Four years later to the day – 1979 - America too gave back land, returning sovereignty of the Panama Canal to Panama. The canal was purchased by the US while Theodore Roosevelt was their charismatic president. In 1912, while campaigning in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Roosevelt was shot by a saloon-keeper (14) but even with the flesh wound and the bullet still in him, Teddy Roosevelt delivered his scheduled speech.

Of course teddy bears were named after Roosevelt.

Another kind of bear cropped up in 1926 when A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh (14) was first published.

 
An earlier landmark in the publishing of a continuing character was Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, published (31) in 1892.

A similar publishing phenomenon is Ian Fleming’s James Bond; Patrick Dalzel-Job, whose exploits were the inspiration for the famous spy, died (14) in 2003 while coincidentally on the same day in 1927 the movie Bond Roger Moore was born.

Further to the magic of movies, The Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson was born in 1961, perhaps appropriately on Halloween. Thirty-two years to the day later, Federico Fellini, the Italian director died. Magician Harry Houdini died the same day in 1926 after his appendix was ruptured. Houdini and Conan Doyle were acquainted; the former debunked spiritualists, while Conan Doyle believed in them.

 

The magic of Broadway was heightened by the great composer Leonard Bernstein, who died (14) in 1990 while two famous British singer/actors were born on the same day (1) - Julie Andrews in 1935 and Stanley Holloway in 1890.

So there’s probably something to celebrate among that little lot! You could even sing Celebrations! Cliff Richard was born (14) in 1940 but they don't know in which attic he keeps the painting. (Oscar Wilde was born in October too [1854] but two days later than Cliff).

Fruit of the Wise

The meal with a peel

Bananas and banana plantations figure quite a bit in my novel Blood of the Dragon Trees. During a visit to Tenerife, we visited a banana plantation, and gleaned much information from there; and also took several photographs. Here is a brief article I wrote, previously published, about the banana.

 

For the last ten years the banana has been the UK’s favourite fruit and it isn’t surprising to understand why.  It’s easy to eat, comes in its own bio-degradable packaging and is good for you. 

Driving virtually anywhere in Tenerife you’ll see the sun glinting off what look like huge man-made lakes – yet in fact they’re covered enclosures devoted to these exotic plants – the biggest plants in the world.  One eighth of Tenerife is covered in banana plantations. 

Banan is the Arabic word for finger, which is what the fruit resembles – and, what’s more, a clutch of bananas is called a ‘hand’...  The Spanish call them platanos, although this means “plantain”.

The banana was probably the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden; the Tree of Paradise in the Koran is also a banana.

Bananas were originally found in Java, South East Asia and India and this is where Alexander the Great encountered them in 327BC.  The fruit moved with primitive commerce and was established in Africa by AD 500.  By the first millennium it was in Polynesia where the people believed that human beings come from unripe bananas and gods from ripe ones.  As a creation belief, that’s pretty ripe...

Learned men in India used to rest in the shade of banana plants while they refreshed themselves with its fruit; thus it’s also called “the fruit of the wise men”.

The first banana plants were taken to the Canaries in 1402 by Portuguese mariners from the Africa.

In 1516 Thomas de Berlanga, a Dominican Friar, took the banana plant to the Caribbean and it soon spread to central and south America. 

Its first British appearance was in 1633 at a herbalist’s shop in London. 

In 1836 the Royal Horticultural Society presented a medal to Sir Joseph Paxton who developed a new variety of banana, naming it the Cavendish – the family name of his employer, the Duke of Devonshire.

Late in 1882 Sabin Berthelot introduced into the Canaries the Chinese or Cavendish banana originating in the Himalaya valleys, often called the ‘dwarf’ banana.

In 1887 the Canaries were a popular place for health cures of the rich.  While recuperating, a woman took a fancy to the fruit and her husband, Scotsman Edward Wathen Fyffe, noticed that the ships of the Elder Dempster line were returning to the UK empty, having delivered their cargoes.  So he used the ships to import bananas.  In 1901 the first refrigerated shipment arrived in UK; the fruit was still considered a luxury.

The United Fruit Company of New York eventually became a majority share-holder in Fyffes.  Unfortunately, at the time of the Wall Street Crash, United Fruit decided to close down the more expensive Canary banana export business in favour of the cheaper “local” Caribbean and Central American banana exports to Europe.  Fyffes’ operations in the Canaries were wound down, closing completely in 1936.

Ten years later, on 30 December, 1946, the first post-war shipment arrived in Britain.  The Land Army distributed one banana to every child and it’s highly likely that several older readers can still remember that little luxury today.

Also just after the Second World War, General Franco – who had been Captain General of the islands – introduced a mandatory regulation into the food rationing scheme throughout Spain.  One kilo of Canary bananas was to be purchased by every card holder each month.  Until then the banana was not widely known on mainland Spain.  This dictatorial move not only supplemented the country’s diet with a healthy food product, it saved the Canarian banana business from collapse.  Today Spain is the principle market for Canary bananas.

This most popular fruit is not a tree but a giant herbaceous plant.  It’s hermaphroditic, that is possessing male and female flowers on the same stalk and reproduces without pollination taking place.

The rhizome (like a large bulb), from which the plant grows, takes about eighteen months to produce the first bananas. It needs well drained ground, lots of water and it’s very susceptible to wind, hence they’re very often kept in breeze block covered enclosures.

When the plant flowers it’s in the form of a large spike growing out of the centre of the trunk and it quickly turns downwards as it opens.  The male flower, a red bud at the end of the spike, quickly dies.  The female flowers clustered around the stem form the actual bananas. The pistils are removed from the tips of each banana which then gradually turn up to the sun to fatten.  Each plant produces a bunch of bananas weighing an average of thirty kilos.

The plant’s rooting system is constantly producing new offshoots and when the original or parent plant is four months old these new shoots are cut away with the exception of one which is allowed to grow alongside the parent.  After a further four months this procedure is repeated and two months later the parent plant flowers and produces fruit.  After harvesting, the parent plant is cut down leaving the first and second generation offshoots which are now two and six months old respectively and the cycle’s repeated.

 

Within hours of leaving the plantation the bunches of bananas reach the local packing stations where they’re washed, graded, cut into hands and boxed and sent en route to dealers.

A banana contains about ninety calories and is exceptionally rich in potassium, a nutrient which promotes energy, protects against strokes and other diseases, and vitamin B6, which is good for the nervous system, and folate, essential for proper tissue growth. So if you want to boost your energy level, unzip a banana rather than take a glucose drink.

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