Why the French insist on all starting their holidays on the same day is beyond my comprehension. Surely logic would point to the advantages of leaving a couple of days earlier, or later. Having relinquished Claret on the last day of July, we have little choice. The radio prophecies are realised: from Narbonne south, traffic on the route nationale is at a standstill. In one hour we progress less than 20 kilometres. From Perpignan we can take the autoroute, joining all the other French and German and Belgian and English cars heading for Spain. Nonchalant border guards wave us through as through we’re just another French family en vacances.
The Pyrenees is a forbidding frontier. From a distance, they’re just a gentle range of hills on the far horizon, softly blurred in the afternoon haze. Their immensity gradually reveals itself as they rise above the plain in all their bleak angularity, and it seems impossible that there could be a way through. Once on the Spanish side, however, the slopes are greener and gentler, and I see the familiar silhouette of the Veterano Osborne bull high on a hilltop. On my first visit to Spain, I imagined Osborne as a particularly famous bull, a veteran of the arena, a bull whose verve and valour are legendary. It’s disappointing to discover he is merely a brand of sherry.
We have a Spanish map and a French–Spanish phrase book but no insider knowledge, no tips as to the region most likely to have plenty of cheap accommodation. I’m fixed on the coast. I feel as though this is a holiday, unlike the earlier months in France, and a summer holiday without sea, sand and sun is unimaginable. In any case, I remember the reassurances from the Barcelona tourist office.
Just over the border in Figueres I peruse the ‘For rent’ offers in real estate windows. Apartments are not quite so cheap as I anticipated. The least inexpensive on the Costa Brava is the equivalent of 2000 francs a month, far more than our budget can safely bear. Confidently following a naïve logic that assumes rents fall with latitude, we continue down the autoroute and find a hotel at Villafranca del Penedes, south of Barcelona and only 20 kilometres from the coast.
Villafranca is an unexceptional Spanish town but it’s different to French villages, and I can’t wait to explore. In a shop close to the hotel John finds new sandals for only 410 pesetas, about 24 francs, just as the old sandals that he rescued in Caromb start to fall apart. Wine is ridiculously cheap; a large glass of cold white wine costs just over half a franc. It’s a measure of the extent of our naturalisation that in Spain, as earlier in England, the base for comparison is France. How much is it in francs?, I ask myself as I do a quick conversion. Not many, is the usual answer. The advantages of a summer in Spain are not difficult to appreciate.
Arriving at Sitges the next day I start to understand the pressure on coastal towns and their inhabitants from summer tourism. The town is teeming with foreigners. Even though I know it’s a futile quest I ask about hotels and apartments, but the lady at the tourist office simply shakes her head. Continuing south we arrive at Villanueva y Geltrú, which seems less touched by the August influx. Directions in Spain, we notice, are nowhere near as frequent nor as logical as in France, and finding the tourist office is not easy. Totally bamboozled, I ask directions from a small travel agency. It’s blindingly obvious why I want to visit the tourist office and the man has an automatic response. You’re looking for a hotel, a pension?, he asks, and starts rifling through a stack of cards, the names of people willing to rent out rooms for the summer. Immediately he makes a phone call, and from what I understand of Spanish it seems there’s something suitable.
After a few minutes a woman arrives, and we follow her to a neighbour’s house where we can possibly rent two small adjoining rooms for 600 pesetas a night, about 35 francs. It’s time to be realistic: this is as good as we can hope to find, and we offer to stay for 10 nights, until 14 August. As for the second half of the month, I cross my fingers that by then apartments will be easier to rent. With negotiations all done in Spanish, of which I catch perhaps every fourth word, I’m not quite sure whether our landlady-to-be accepts us or has to talk to her husband before confirming. But with accommodation more-or-less settled, we head off to the beach. It’s the same Mediterranean, but the sand is whiter and the water less shallow than at Palavas, and the children are happy to be out of the car.
Next morning our Señora is expecting us. She is concerned about the arrangements we have made for feeding the children, giving them proper meals. Communication is cumbersome, but at least this much I understand. Timorously I show her my own pan and ask if I might sometimes cook them some eggs in her kitchen. Impossible! She will have none of this and shows me the kitchen, indicating it is far too small for two people. I would like to say that I would only use her kitchen at times when she didn’t need it but by this stage I have completely exhausted my vocabulary and need to consult the dictionary. I also recognise that people can be very proprietorial about their kitchens.
Later, with the help of the dictionary but more through guesswork and gestures, we agree on a mutually satisfactory solution: Señora will cook breakfast and dinner for the children. The kitchen, I understand, is out of bounds. I’m not entirely happy but for the sake of maintaining good relations I decide to go along with the arrangement and try to ask Señora what it will cost. Either she doesn’t understand my rudimentary Spanish, or I don’t understand her rapid reply, and we’re at a stalemate until her daughter Mercedes arrives. She’s a nurse, and has learned enough French for us to be able to converse. My mother acts as godmother to all the children in the neighbourhood, she explains, and that now includes your two. Money doesn’t come into it, you’re to treat this place as your own. Humbled, I thank Señora as best I can.
Señora’s house is in the old part of the town, halfway between the medieval castle and the town centre with its rambla leading to the waterfront. A broad, tree-shaded boulevard, with shops and cafés and parks, the rambla is the heart of the town. By now we’re thoroughly familiar with the logic and layout of French towns, where the boulangerie and the charcuterie and other food purveyors are clustered together, and with the customary range of each particular one, but in Spain there’s a different paradigm. No charcuteries, no crèmeries, but we come across a formatgeria, a kind of épicerie with cheeses and sausages and canned goods, unexpectedly including IXL sliced pineapple. Formatgeria is not in the Français-Espagnol phrase book; I realise it’s a Catalan word. After Franco’s death at the end of 1975 the Catalan language is slowly reasserting itself. Villanueva will soon revert to its Catalan name of Vilanova i la Geltrú.
We fall into a gentle routine of breakfast, beach, lunch, home for siesta, late afternoon stroll, glass of wine, and home for the children’s dinner for which Señora cooks an omelette, what she calls tortilla. Lunch is a picnic from the formatgeria. The first time we cross the seafront esplanade to the shady park and lay out our spread, I am startled by a whistle. It’s the Guardia Civil officer, and he’s looking at me. Perhaps the lawn is out of bounds? No, I see others on the grass. The children, bare bottomed? He approaches us, points at me and wags a disapproving finger. Bikinis are not allowed in the town, he’s telling me, and although we’re less than a hundred metres from the beach I have clearly crossed the boundary between hedonism and civility. I quickly add a shirt. Villanueva is not Bondi.
Unlike resort towns such as Sitges, Villanueva has a life without tourists. It has a fishing industry, and sometimes our stroll takes us to the port area, full of fishing boats and surrounded by seafood retailers and restaurants. At the daily afternoon market fishermen stand in groups behind their day’s catch, which is beautifully arranged in wooden boxes. The neatness of the fishermen’s displays is testament to their efforts to provide this food and a mark of respect for their harvest: small fish, silvery and glistening, all of a size, the heads all facing the same way; miniscule, transparent squid with black beady eyes; giant red gambas and concentric circles of crabs on flat wicker trays.
Walking in a different direction one afternoon we stumble across the Museo Romantico Provincial and, since it’s open and cool inside, we go in. We are perhaps the only visitors, and a kindly guide takes us from room to room, explaining the history of the house in heavily accented French mixed with Spanish and German. Built by a wealthy town merchant and landowner at the end of the 18th century, it was sold to the state in the 1950s totally intact, with all its furniture and art works, as if its inhabitants had just stepped out for the day.
More than just a house, this estate is almost a village, breathtaking in its splendour. No expense was spared in its furnishing. The main bathroom boasts a bath sculpted out of a solid block of white marble, while Mademoiselle’s bedroom has a four-poster bed of solid silver; elegant Sèvres porcelain sits on a magnificent secretaire inlaid with marble. Yet it’s still a family home, a home for entertaining, for concerts in the music room, dancing in the vast ballroom; a home where men congregate in the billiard room with its marquetry table or in the arms room, hung with hunting trophies, boar’s head and stag horns. All the rooms are heated by portable braziers, and I imagine the hard-working maid whose task it was to refill all the braziers with hot coals. On the ground floor are the working areas—the bakery; the oil room; the larder where hams and sausages, herbs and garlic were stored; the grain store and the wine cellar; the horse stables and carriage room; and then the peacock-studded gardens. Wandering from room to room I am transported back to the 19th-century and reminded of the pleasures of privilege.
In August Villanueva celebrates its festa mayor and the big parade passes near Señora’s house. It begins with giants: first a dragon and two horses then enormous puppet figures, several metres tall, representing historical or legendary characters. Their immobile faces are astonishingly alive, with big, all-seeing black eyes. Bands of musicians alternate with groups of dancers, boys dancing with batons that they knock against one another to the beat of the music, and girls in embroidered white skirts circling around the boy who serves as maypole at their centre. Then come the acrobats, in dazzling white trousers with wide black sashes around their waists. Tension mounts as they start to perform, building a human pyramid: first a solid base of interlocking backs and shoulders, a second and then a third tier on top. I can see the strain in the legs and arms as the base steadies itself. Younger men, lithe and limber, clamber over the backs of the lower levels to form a fourth tier, and finally a little boy, no more than seven, climbs to the very peak of the pyramid and stands tall, like the angel on a Christmas tree. I am spellbound; never have I seen such a demonstration of audacity and trust. The audience claps and whistles as the pyramid gradually dissolves and melts into the crowd.
We’ve fallen on our feet here, I say to John as we head off to the rambla, as we do every evening once the children are asleep. It’s the centre of the festivities, the whole town congregating for the carnival. People are spilling out of cafés and snack vendors do a brisk trade in paper cornets of pumpkin seeds and salted broad beans, churros and wedges of fresh coconut. Bigger stalls festooned with hams and sausages sell their salty specialities on thick rounds of white bread while men of North African appearance grill spicy brochettes. We have a taste of everything with a glass of wine, finishing with some churros.
Perhaps it’s just the combination of sea and sun, but it feels very much like a holiday. And we’re only halfway through August.