Franco Gone These Fifty Years

There’s a Spanish word which has a very special meaning – or had at least, half a century ago – and it sounds odd to British ears: El Generalísimo, which might mean something like ‘the generaliest of all the generals’ practically a (what comes next – a field marshal?).

Anyway, I’m talking about El Caudillo, the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, who after forty days and nights in the comfort of the intensive care unit at the Hospital de la Paz in Madrid, finally succumbed to his woes on November 20th these fifty years ago.

Not that you’d think it with all these fascist idiots still running around the city squares half a century on and giving what used to be called a Hitler salute.

There’s a story I like: Franco is in his hospital bed and there’s a crowd outside shouting. Franco – who is losing his facilities by this time – asks the doctor, ‘What are they saying?’ The doctor goes: ‘They’re saying adiós, adiós’.

‘Really?’ says Franco, ‘Where are they all going?’

In those times, Mojácar where I lived with my parents (when I wasn’t travelling somewhere) was a quiet and forgotten village with just a sprinkle of eccentric foreigners.

We never thought about Franco, and the Guardia Civil were chummy enough.

My father used to drop off a case of wine in the police barracks in next-door Turre every Christmas. It never hurts to have friends with silly hats and a pistol.

One day a few years before, back in 1971, the cops had come by on their mopeds and sorrowfully told my father and me that we would have to report to the local lock-up in Vera – a cavernous room under the ayuntamiento – as punishment for sawing down Mojácar’s first billboard, which had been erected by a Corsican fellow who had just opened the pueblo’s first souvenir shop.

He could obviously see which way things were going.

All we had with us was a bottle of Spanish lemonade (filled with vodka), a change of underwear, a couple of Ian Fleming novels and my dad’s radio. He liked to listen to the BBC’s World Service and appeared to be very disappointed when they failed to mention our incarceration.

We spent three days in the clink (I was just seventeen) and were due to face further punishment, but the British ambassador saved the day, and we were forgiven and our names removed from the records.

In Franco’s time, it helped to have un enchufe – a ‘good friend’ – and the ambassador had been to school with my dad. A few words in the right ear…

By 1975, Franco was on his last legs, and word reached us from the far-away outpost of Jávea in Alicante that the Swedes (I may be wrong about this) had decided to have a demonstration of their love and respect for Spain and so held a celebration with the famous, albeit fascist slogan Arriba España, which they had unfortunately translated on a large banner as ‘Up Spain’.

At last, El Caudillo finally died, and Spain entered into strict mourning. The bars were closed for three days, and solemn music was played on the radio and the one TV channel.

My father and some other foreign residents, being appraised of this tender moment in Spain’s history (as above, they found the pueblo’s only bar was unexpectedly shut), decided the thing to do would be to go to mass in our local iglesia and show our respects.

The priest was surprised to see us, as there was (as usual) no one else in Mojácar’s house of worship except a few old girls in black.

As we left, pulling off our neckties (those that still owned one) we found the mayor and a collection of irate locals waiting for us. Y’see, Mojácar had been a communist holdout during the civil war, and consequently, no one was sorry to see the old gangster go to his reward, such as it no doubt was.

‘Oops’, said my dad.

The tension grew until the Mayor Jacinto saved the day. ‘Antonio, go and unlock the bar. The foreigners are thirsty’.

I’m not sure, after all it was exactly fifty years ago, but I think we all drank champagne.

I Always Wear a Seatbelt (I'm wearing one now)

I needed a rag to check the oil on my old banger so I was looking under the kitchen sink for a discarded tee-shirt.

There’s a pile of them down there, maybe my wife thought slinging them under the sink was easier than chucking them in the washing machine. Especially the sillier ones which I appear to have collected over the years.

This one was from some restaurant and had a large black diagonal stripe on it, looking like – if one was driving – a seatbelt. A treasure from back in 1975 when the new law came in.

I took it down to the restaurant to tease them, but it fell apart in my hands. After a mere half a century of neglect plus the work of a few moths: I call it poor quality.

Since I was there, I stayed for lunch.

Had a few drinks with the owner, Juan, and a couple of others.

Driving home (yes, yes, with my seatbelt fastened), I thought I’d take the secret back-route that only I (and a handful of local drunks) are familiar with. It’s a bit bumpy some of it, and I know I need to slow down on a particularly nasty stretch, but I got home safely, while my friend Ángel (not his real name, he’s actually called Eluterio) who took the main road got charged by the cops for driving with his eyes crossed. In Spain the legal limit is 0.5mg of alcohol per ml of blood (they want to drop it to 0.2mg). To compare, in the UK the limit is 0.8mg. I know, they claim Spain is a tourist paradise. Poor Ángel: five hundred euros, (250 if he pays up sharpish) and four points docked from his driving licence.

He’s a changed man these days…

Indeed, we sometimes call him up to be the designated driver. These days, he sits there in the corner twitching gently while playing with his mobile phone looking for the WhatsApp police-control warning page.

One day, they’ll invent self-driving cars and I’ve started a savings jam-jar in the kitchen to be ready. Imagine: ‘Helloo Car, my old mate (hic!), take me home via the liquor-store’.

Up in The Smoke, the traffic-tzar is an old blue-stocking who has been tightening the screws on all aspects of driving for several decades. Right now, as far as he’s concerned, a capful of una clara (beer with lemonade) will pretty much do the trick.  

It’s all right for him though – he has a chauffeur. He can loll around in the back singing some popular number from Manolo Escobar (perhaps his catchy 'Somebody's Stolen my Donkey and his Cart') while the driver grinds his teeth and negotiates the M-30 in the rush-hour.

Mind you, and to make a point – you don’t need to drive ‘under the influence’ or indeed even completely sober for that matter if you live in Madrid or any other city in Spain. They have buses, taxis, trams and metros. You don’t even need to own a car.

And besides, there’s always a bar downstairs. Just use the lift (it’s free) to get home.

No, it’s us country-folk that have to take our lives (and everybody else’s) in our hands every time we go out shopping or to have lunch with a friend… and answer me this – how are the country-restaurants, with their reduced number of clients and their high social security outgoings, expected to make a dollar on their cheap menu del día and a glass of water?

So before you go drinking, always remember to plan ahead for your trip home.

…

My niece, who is a lawyer, tells me I must put a postscript here to say that I created the whole above story out of the cloth of fiction and that I don’t associate with drinkers and indeed I haven’t myself had a drop myself since the English won the World Cup: an admission which (except for the bit about the diagonal tee-shirt) I am happy to do.

 

The Road to Nowhere

It has been an apple in the developers' eyes for several decades - a ring-road from the gas-station heading south designed to relieve the pressure on the thin two-lane beach-road with its many attractions, turn-offs, roundabouts, cyclists and zebra crossings.  

The first problem, back in the early nineties, was a painfully rare plant called the limonium estevei that only grows there (but nowhere else in the world). The obscure plant is also known as the Mojácar Sea Lavender. The other point was the beleaguered tortoises (which, in point of fact, are doing just fine around here). 

Thirty years ago, the leader of the local Izquierda Unida, Carlos Cervantes (who later became mayor) managed to stop the plan for the road by more or less standing in front of the bulldozer.

 

He later showed me some limoniums - growing in the sand over by the Cruz Roja on the beach. I remember he gave one plant what could only be described as a fond kick.  

The ghastly project found its way to Seville (PSOE in those days) and was squashed. 

Now we are back. The land where the new road, most of which was built last summer - and to hell with the limonium - has now been secured for planning permission, and we can only wonder who has been buying it all up.  

It seems that the road can't be finished since the Junta de Andalucía won't allow it to go down to the sea (rather a disappointment for all those vehicles which had been diverted from the road along the playa). Indeed, it is planned to stop at a narrow roundabout below La Paratá and then filter down a miserable lane to the Gaviota. The several roundabouts completed along the way will no doubt find their use in the seasons to come. 

Of course, if the new hotels, apartments, restaurants, clubs and souvenir shops are all built, then there'll be a lot more traffic creeping along our beach road and elsewhere. Maybe they'll put in a tram.   

From Ideal, The Mojácar PSOE (there only seems to be one of their councillors active) has complained of the mayor, Francisco García's, "mismanagement". The party believes he is "on track to plunge Mojácar into debt over a 'useless' road". It seems that 'fresh expropriations' are necessary, leaving the town hall and its taxpayers some 7.5 million euros out of pocket (plus another three million already spent). "The result is now a useless, dead-end road that will turn the end of the route into a traffic bottleneck and a monument to waste", says the PSOE.   

Later: An article in Diario de Almería has more.  It begins: 'José Luis Sánchez Teruel, a member of the Andalusian Parliament representing Almería for the PSOE, has denounced the eleven-month standstill in the construction of the so-called Road to Nowhere. This project, included in the Andalusian Transport and Mobility Infrastructure Plan (PITMA), has been completed for some time but remains unopened to traffic. He has demanded that the Andalusian Regional Government abandon "its silence and efforts to conceal the reasons for this delay, which could lead to cost overruns due to improper handling of the expropriations." 

Sánchez Teruel, who visited the area with council members and residents of the municipality who expressed their discontent with the situation, explained that the project "is completely finished, except for a final 300-metre section that is not even paved and whose construction has been halted for many months..."

 He also noted that this infrastructure does not meet the technical requirements to be considered a bypass, since "it does not connect directly to another road, but rather ends in the middle of the countryside, in a dead end, and links to the beach area through narrow lanes and residential streets."

"We are dealing with a road that is unlikely to improve mobility on the Mojácar coast, since it ends in the middle of the mountains and does not connect directly to the beach road..."'