- Poverty in Madrid was at what are now considered Third World levels
- Spanish employers were even more ruthless with employees than they are today
- All mayors and priests were fat.
- Parents believed they had a right to tell their children what they had to do with their lives.
- Priests were either feared and obeyed or detested and ignored
- Priests commonly had 'nieces' who lived with them. Wives, even.
- People ate paciencias, which no one in my bar recognises but which is described by the Royal Academy as: Un bollo redondo y muy pequeño hecho con harina, huevo, almendra y azúcar y cocido en el horno.
- The daily wage for new bank clerks - after a year of earning nothing while on probation - was less than 1 peseta. Or 25 pesetas a month.
- Families were large
- Merluza (hake) was as popular a fish as it is today.
- Cocido (stew) was eaten every day by the poor, put on in the morning and left to stew all day.
- The midday meal took place at 12 noon, not 3pm, at least in poor houses and in the villages
- Monkey nuts and roasted chick peas were also as popular as they are today. Well, the latter anyway.
- Night watchmen patrolled the streets, bawling the hour and the weather.
- Poor farmers pulled the plough themselves
- His uncle only shaved on Thursdays and Sundays - As priests do.
- The cruelty to bulls in villages was beyond belief, if not description.
- Poor, starving, terrified teenagers pretending to be toreros were regularly gored in the villages.
- Barea's uncle belonged to a race of men which has almost disappeared; he was a craftsman [a blacksmith] and a gentleman.
- Cobwebs were placed over cuts and grazes.
- Poor relatives fought like cats - in front of the notary - over the estate of their not-so-dear departed.
- Corrupt priests still sold indulgences and benedictions 'blessed by the Pope'. And double, triple or quadruple charged for the same Mass for the dead.
- At picnics in the villages, sheep and rabbits were strung up in the trees and skinned.
- Young boys from Galicia came to Madrid on foot with a tin box full of thin rolled wafers [filloas?] slung around their shoulders.
- Corporal punishment was routinely dished out to kids, not only by parents and relatives but also by anyone in the street who took offence to their activities or words.
- Park keepers beat kids with a stick if they transgressed
- Carpenters, masons, tailors and the like barely earned enough to keep death from the door of their families
- 'Hide and seek' was called 'I spy' in Spanish.
- Town councils and the Catholic Church fleeced you when you had to move a body from its temporary grave
- What is the modern Lavapies barrio in Madrid was then called El Avapies. It contained within it the desperately poor 'quarter of the injuries'. Or El barrio de las injurias which looked like part of modern day Calcutta. Where naked gypsies squatted in the sun killing the lice which the swarthy fingers of their mother or sister plucked from their hair, one by one.
- Priests told boys in their care: Playing with your parts is fornication. And Woman is sin. For the sake of Woman the human race fell from grace, and all the saints suffered the temptations of evil. In short: Woman is evil. Men who sleep with them go to Hell. It is a sin to come near a woman.
- Village priests forbade the teachers to show children how to read and write.
- The first question asked of a new employee - much like today - was: Who got you in here?
- Two banks - Banco de Urquijo and Banco de Vizcaya - had made themselves masters of the Public Utilities of Madrid and of almost all the industries of Bilbao.
- Banks sometimes forced their clerks to work from 7am until 1 in the next morning. Albeit probably with a short break for lunch and dinner. Certainly the lucky clerks had a coffee bought for them each night.
- Notaries - as they still are - were God.
- The Parque del Oeste was known as The English Park, at least by Barea.
- Men 'killed the worm' by drinking brandy or 'cheap spirits' with their first coffee of the day. As they still do in villages.
- People went to the pictures (movies) at midnight, as they still do.
- All male clerks were being replaced by very much cheaper young girls. As were the attendants in shops and department stores.
- People with many years of low-paid service were summarily sacked if found to be a member of a trade union.
The book is beautifully written and very well translated. A representative paragraph: The sunlight, speckled with flies, streamed through the small square window above my head. The room smelled of the village, the sun-dried grain in the corn-loft opposite, of furze burning in the kitchen, of clinging reek from the chicken coop and of dung in the stables, and of the mud walls of the house, baked by the sun and covered with whitewash.
Returning to the present day . . . When I went to get an up-to-date certificado de empadronamiento from the Poio town hall, the nonplussed lady clerk was incredulous that I didn't have an ID card, only a by-now tattered A4 sheet which confirms I am a resident and gives my NIE number. Lenox of Business over Tapas has advised that we Brits are in this unfortunate position because a couple of Brits compained a few years ago that we were above ID cards. The result is that most of us now have to carry our bloody passports around. Or at least a Spanish driving licence. They should be shot.
Don Quijones reports that: The Euro Group President, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, has managed to offend just about every Southern European nation with the following comment (in reference to recent EU bailouts), at a time when relations between Europe’s north and south are already strained: “You can’t just spend all your money on alcohol and women and then ask for help.” DQ adds that: It’s fair to say that Dijsselbloem was not speaking literally, but he could have chosen a far better metaphor to illustrate his point — preferably one that doesn’t depict Southern Europeans as alcoholics and prostitutes.
Oddly enough, I also read yesterday that going to a brothel is now de riguer amongst Spain's 20 year old males.
Today's cartoon:-
Finally . . . An interesting article:-
Erdogan threatens a
summer of chaos for the EU: Roger Boyes, The Times
The street-wise but
pious kid from Istanbul’s harbour district is both a victim and a
fighter. According to the film The Chief, the young Tayyip Erdogan
was a frequent mosque-goer, protested when a referee refused to
interrupt a football game for prayers and was chucked into jail for
reciting a poem that goes: “the minarets are our bayonets, and the
faithful our soldiers”.
Across Europe’s
Turkish communities, where the film is being shown this week,
audiences may well be dabbing their eyes and declaring: “That’s
our boy!” President Erdogan’s spin doctors certainly hope so.
There are four million registered voters outside Turkey and the
referendum on April 16 — over boosting the president’s powers to
near-Putin levels — is looking as if it could be a near-run thing.
If he wins approval,
the Turkish constitution will be changed, handing executive powers to
the president. Mr Erdogan will be able to hire and fire ministers,
rule by edict and curb parliament. In theory he will be able to rule
until 2029, giving him the chance to enter the 1,100 rooms of his
long-awaited new palace and inspect the silk wallpaper. That sounds
like a further, decisive lurch towards autocratic rule, and it is.
One of many concerns is that he will use his extended powers to
declare all-out war on the Kurds, thus sprinkling kerosene on the
Middle East bonfire.
Mr Erdogan’s
supporters say he is creating a strong state and correcting the 1982
constitution. Drawn up at a time when the Turkish general staff
thought itself better placed than any civilian government to define
the country’s interests, the constitution gave a crucial role to a
national security council half-filled by army officers. Mr Erdogan
believed he had tamed the army — but then came last July’s
botched coup.
The past few months
have seen him unleash an extraordinary purge. Critical academics have
been sacked, newspapers closed down, journalists jailed; it has
become a society of snitches who denounce those with suspect
loyalties. There is a hysterical undercurrent to today’s Turkey, a
touch of King Lear about Mr Erdogan himself and a lick of black Dario
Fo-style farce about the behaviour of his followers. A Turkish
farmers’ association said it would respond to the recent Dutch
deportation of one of Ankara’s cabinet ministers by expelling 40
Holstein Friesian cows. One farmer even chose to slaughter his Dutch
cow in protest at the Hague’s supposed neo-Nazi high-handedness.
The Chief may be crude
propaganda but it does at least recall why Mr Erdogan was once rated
by the West: he was a moderniser, someone who wanted to redress the
balance between Islam and Kemalist secularism. We were so sure that
Mr Erdogan had got that balance right that we held up his brand of
political Islam as being a desirable destination for the rebels of
the Arab Spring.
That has vanished now
and the big question is: who lost Turkey? People still ask the same
question about Russia. When Vladimir Putin appeared in 1999-2000 it
was all about engagement: getting him involved in the G8, signing him
up for the Nato-Russia strategic council.
It seemed to be going
that way with Turkey at the beginning. Turkey signed an association
agreement with the EEC in 1963 and became a formal candidate for the
EU in 1999. By the time Erdogan became prime minister in 2003 it
seemed as if he was going to be the man to make it happen: he agreed
to scrap the death penalty, to move towards an independent judiciary,
to protect Kurdish rights.
And yet we never really
wanted Turkey in the club. Turkey’s swelling population, its Muslim
identity, its proximity to troublespots, made it a difficult
proposition. Then came the terror attacks in Madrid and London.
Centre-right parties discovered Europe’s Christian identity and
failed to break the bad news to Mr Erdogan. Instead he was offered
weasel words such as “privileged partnership”— by which point
it was clear to the Turks that they were destined to remain, as they
had always been for Europeans, The Other. The more dependent the EU
becomes on Mr Erdogan to act as a holding pen for refugees, the more
uncomfortable this Otherness becomes. Last week he was campaigning
against the European Court of Justice ruling against the wearing of
headscarves and religious symbols in the workplace. Christian Europe,
he said, has “started a struggle between the cross and the
crescent”. Mevlut Cavusoglu, his foreign minister, recently barred
from the Netherlands, warned: “You have begun to collapse, Europe .
. . holy wars will soon begin in Europe.”
It is the migrant deal
with the EU that allows Mr Cavusoglu to declare: “Turkey is in
command.” That flawed bargain, sealed in a moment of desperation,
is about to fall apart. If he wins the referendum in April, the
Turkish president will see himself at the pinnacle of his power. He
will be tempted to take one of two options: to abandon the deal
altogether and watch the EU struggle with 15,000 more refugees
washing up every day, or to release migrants in controlled doses that
end up crippling Greece and Bulgaria, piling pressure on Brussels to
give Turks visa-free access to Europe.
The Mediterranean is
getting calmer; drought and famine in Africa is driving people
towards the sea and the German general election is approaching fast.
Forget Russian cyberhacking, Mr Erdogan has in his hands the most
disruptive weapon of all: the ability to demonstrate that European
governments cannot control their borders. Prepare for a summer of
chaos.
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