Letter from my terrace in Palma 31 'The passing year'

 

                                                                                12 February, 2021

The passing year

As I look back on those happy years when I taught English in Palma several events stand out. They became the milestones as we passed through the year. They were perhaps not the most important things but they gave a shape to the year, and we had a sense of progress as we went from one to the next.

In those days our year began in September and it finished at the end of June. This was the school year and that’s how we worked. July and August were summer, and in summer life changed. It was much hotter and we were much slower. We walked more slowly and we thought more slowly. but let’s begin at the beginning. I said we started in September but as time went on, September become hotter and hotter and students became loath to return to classes until it had passed.  I would phone students in mid-September, and they would answer politely but firmly, “Ah yes. Thanks for getting in touch but I think I’ll leave it a little longer. It’s still quite hot, you know.”  At the end of June we still said, “Goodbye. See you in September” but October always arrived before the first class had been arranged.

So we got down to business in October. Timetables were set and subscriptions were paid. And we began. With most students we had to go back a stage or two. The months of summer had been long and hot, and their English had been relegated to that part of the brain reserved for matters of much less importance.  So in October we started with what we had done in May and we carried on from there.

The first event of our year was on 20 October the night before the ‘Fiesta de las Vírgenes. ‘The fiesta of the virgins’  This sounds quite dramatic and there is now, I believe, a movement to change the name but it simply referred to the evening when every young man went out into the street  and sang to their girlfriend who stood on their balcony. Then the girls provided a glass of muscatel wine and ‘buñuelos’, which they had cooked that afternoon and had ready and waiting A buñuelo is a sort of doughnut made from potato, eggs and sugar, and was given as a recompense for the visit and the song. Whether more was provided than a buñuelo, I do not know.

So in the class before ‘las Virgenes’ the young men would be asked about their plans and then on the first class afterwards everyone would discuss how things went and what their reception had been and how good the buñuelos had tasted.

After Las Virgenes the next event was Todos los Santos at the end of October. This is All Saints Day and is a public holiday. In my early days before I had learnt the customs, I naively asked after this holiday, “And so what did you do yesterday?” “We all went to the cemetery,” was the reply. This is the time when families go to put flowers on the graves of relations. The cemeteries become a mass of flowers. I never again asked about what students did on Todos los Santos.

Two things are changing around the end of October. Traditionally All Saints was the day when Mallorcans put on their new winter coat for the first time. They bought a new one for the occasion and wore it proudly. But the custom has lapsed, I’m afraid.  The summers here are becoming hotter and now it is impossible to wear any coat at all at the end of October.

The second change is the growing popularity of Halloween. The children love it but for many it is more evidence of the McDonaldization of Mallorca. Enough said!

My students were many and varied.  Some came because they needed English for their work. These were doctors, lawyers and people in the all-important tourist industry. They came with great motivation and clearly defined objectives. We worked hard on the type of English their work demanded but sometimes I would slip in a poem or a short story at the end of a class with a lawyer or executive just to plant a flower by the path of their language acquisition. Other students came out of personal interest and a wish to increase their knowledge of the world. Some were no longer young. They had studied French at school and now it was English that they needed. It was in the late 70s when the secondary schools changed from teaching French to English. Some students came because they enjoyed travelling and needed English to see the world. Others came so that they could understand the lyrics of pop and rock in English. Some came just for company.

As the group classes changed over the years to private classes for just one or two students at a time, so the relationship with the students changed too. They often became friends rather than clients. They would explain family disagreements, their hopes for their children and even health problems. I did my best to listen because that is what they needed.

I still have contact with some of my old students today long after I have retired. One, a lawyer specializing in internet issues, just comes every two or three months for a cup of tea. I lay the table with some fruit cake brought from England and some Bournville biscuits and we chat for an hour or so and I catch up on the work he has been doing.

But to return to the year, which we left at Halloween. In mid-November came Dijous Bo in Inca, a town in the centre of the island. Dijous Bo means Good Thursday and it was and still is a highlight in the year for the whole of Mallorca. It is a mixture of an agricultural show and a reunion for families and friends from Inca and all the villages around. The university in Palma stopped work for the day as most students and teachers made their way to Inca. It was not an official university holiday but everyone knew that there would be little activity on campus. Hundreds went by the old train from Palma because it was impossible to find a place to park in Inca that day.     Every year Dijous Bo seemed to creep up on us without warning.   It arrived and the reaction was “Wow, it’s Dijous Bo again. That was quick. Where did the year go?”

After Dijous Bo came Christmas. We had a special file of teaching materials for Christmas. It was a fat file, bulging with papers because we would add activities, stories and carols whenever we came across them. For the last days of the term we would go to this file and rummage around for useful material. Every class was different and what would succeed with one group might not work with another but there was always something seasonal which worked well.  Such is teaching!

Year after year I used some selections from Dylan Thomas’s ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales’. There were pen and ink illustrations and the cassette recording had been made by Richard Burton. It became a tradition and when I fished out the photocopies and the cassette I felt that Christmas had arrived.  The advanced and intermediate students enjoyed it, and so did I. What Dylan Thomas described in Swansea was very like my own Christmas in Somerset. Well, Swansea and Somerset are really not far from each other. They are just across the water. As a child I looked over the Bristol Channel to Wales every night through the gap between the curtains of my window. Through that gap I could also see the light of the lighthouse as the beam went round and round on the island of Flat Holm.

Christmas was also heralded by a change in the commercials on television. Three stood out year after year.

Freixenet, the firm that makes cava, the Catalan champagne, put on a show of dancers in glittering gold costumes opening bottles of cava. More than a TV commercial it was a mini song and dance show.  

Then there were the turrón commercials. Turrón is the size and shape of a big bar of chocolate and is made from almonds and sugar. Traditionally it was either very soft or extremely hard. Over the years new flavours appeared and some were even chocolate covered. The best turrón commercial was for a company called El Almendro. The music and the lyrics were the same year after year. “Vuelve, a casa vuelve por navidad”. “Come back, come back home for Christmas”. This accompanied scenes of the son or daughter, returning from studying or working in Madrid or Barcelona, opening the door and surprising their mother at home as she was laying the table for the big meal on Christmas Eve.

The third Christmas commercial was for the lottery, la loteria de navidad. These were eagerly awaited each year. The most famous was one shown every Christmas  between 1998 and 2005.It featured ‘el calvo de la loteria’ “ the bald man of the lottery, a sort of mysterious magician figure who somehow guided the winning tickets to those most in need of Christmas cheer. The actor was in fact British, and the commercials he made are still fondly remembered by many Spanish people.

The lottery is on 22 December and is a Christmas institution. It is on TV from 8 in the morning until lunch time. Children sing the winning numbers in a hypnotic chant that never varies. As you walk along the street you hear their voices from the TVs in every bar you pass. People who never normally buy tickets always do so at Christmas just as in England people who don’t normally bet on horses always have a flutter on the Grand National.  The custom is to buy a lottery ticket and then share it with a friend.   The idea is that if you win, your friend wins too and everyone is happy.

Another tradition is Palma is visiting the belenes, the Nativity scenes. These appear in churches and in banks, in bars and in shops. There used to be a particularly good one in a chemist’s in the big Avenue that encircles the old city of Palma. These scenes occupy a whole room and do not restrict themselves to the holy family with the shepherds and the Three Kings arriving in the distance. There are also scenes of Mallorcan life in the villages and in the fields. All the trades and occupations of Mallorca are included. There are often moving figures.   The cobbler is hammering the sole of a shoe and the baker is kneading dough. There are sheep, goats and cows in the fields and a fishing boat unloading the catch in the port. The windmills are raising the rainwater from the wells to irrigate the fields. They are marvellous scenes and whole families from the grandparents to very young children come to look at them. After seeing half a dozen of these it is time to stop at a bar and have a glass of Rioja.

 

A week after Christmas comes New Year’s Eve, with the champagne and the grapes. Let me explain the grapes.  Just before 12 midnight each person prepares a plate with 12 grapes. Then when the old clock in the Puerta del Sol in Madrid strikes midnight, and everyone is watching it on television, you have to eat one grape for each of the 12 strokes. This is not easy but over the years you get better at it. The older hands pick out the smallest grapes at about half past eleven and hide them on a saucer ready for midnight.

Then on the night of 5 January comes the third feast, Reyes, the feast of the Three Kings. In every city and town in the country, however humble, the Three Kings, dressed in all their oriental splendour parade in a long procession with their retinue of attendants and page boys and groups of dancers and musicians. The children watch the procession in the street and, before they go to bed, they put out some corn for the camels and a glass of brandy for the Kings because both need some sustenance after delivering presents to every house in the town during the night.  In the morning the children open the presents which the Kings have left. The next day is a holiday to recover from the long revelry of Christmas and on 7 January the children go back to school and life becomes serious again.

The second term went by quickly. From Christmas to Easter. It is the coolest time of the year. In March there was the pollen from the pines. Also the processionaria.

Then Easter led to the summer and almost before you realized it the heat began and the tempo changed and everyone moved more slowly and did less each day. Summer had arrived once more. There were the end-of–term exams, the hours correcting them and handing them back. Finally came the end-of-year meal with the class.  I remember one of first of these meals that I went to. Some of the group were criticising a nun who had been particularly strict at a school in Palma that several of them had attended.

“Do you know her?” I asked the student next to me, who had so far said nothing.

“Yes, she is my aunt!” she said.

I realized then that the island is a small place and that it is never safe to say anything to anyone about anybody. But all was well, and the talk at the meal moved on to travel plans for July and August, and promises were made to come back to the English class after the summer.

Formerly Palma closed down in August. There was, and perhaps still is, an expression ‘Estar de Rodriguez’, ‘To be Rodriguez’. This referred to a married man who stayed working in the city while his wife and children were on the coast or staying with the grandparents in the “pueblo”, the home town. The wife used to take the children away in early July, and then they all spent July, August and September away from the city. Yes, three months! Those were the days! What Rodriguez got up to in the hours of his loneliness is best left to the imagination.

But now times have changed and for the better.  Today, both parents have jobs and families take their summer holiday together. And that holiday is much shorter than it used to be.  Now Mallorca is connected by computer to the rest of the busy world and such a lull of activity cannot be tolerated. Today Palma is almost as busy in August as in any other month. It used to be deserted.  A few years ago companies closed and shops closed. Almost everything closed.

After the summer, in late September, there were stirrings of normal life. The children went back to school. People thought about going back to English classes though despite these pricks of conscience, nothing really happened until October and the approach of the feast of el Pilar on the 12^th.  I was told that at the University of Zaragoza, the city where the Pilar is the most important fiesta of the year,  nothing really started until after the 12^th October and so some students didn’t turn up for lectures until then.

And then we were back at the beginning of the year again.