MY FAMILY IN SPAIN
Some 20 years ago my daughter Celine rang me from Spain, something she had never done before. After a couple of minutes I said it was great to speak to her, but I was sure it wasn’t just a social call. It turned out that her landlord has asked if she was interested in buying the flat she was renting in the old part of Valencia. ‘How much are we talking about?’ I asked. ‘It comes to £3,000’, she said. ‘That’s the down-payment, I suppose’. ‘No’, she answered. ‘That’s the price’.
Admittedly the area, the barrio del Carmen, was seriously run down at the time, with some fairly dodgy characters around, but the chance for Celine to buy her own place for three grand was too good to miss, and I happened to have the money. I remembered the city, from a brief visit in the mid-sixties, as a place full of life and good food; and when I visited Celine later that year I saw why she raved about it.
A few years afterwards, following her mother’s untimely death, she came into some money and was able to buy a bigger, more salubrious place, situated between the great Central Market and the Plaza Redonda, an enclosed space which has been home to haberdashers for centuries. Anything she wants can be found within a minute or so, the absolute basics within seconds.
She shares the flat with my first grandchild Lucas, who’s coming up 12. It’s an important time for him because he has been offered a baseball scholarship at a quite prestigious secondary school provided (a) that he passes the physical, which shouldn’t be a problem and (b) that his grades and homework record improve, which is less certain.
Lucas speaks three languages: English with Celine and my side of the family; standard Spanish (castellano) with his father, Carlos, and the rest of his Spanish family; and valenciano at school. (Valenciano is actually a form of catalan; but speakers of valenciano are fiercely possessive of their language and, anyway, tend to be looked down on by the people of northern Catalunia.
For more on the subject go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valencian).
Carlos, with help from his mother, Ana, and brother, Bernardo, runs the family vegetarian restaurant, La Lluna (‘the moon’ in valencian). It’s in the Calle de San Ramon, parallel to the Calle de Ripalda, where Celine used to live.
I go over to Valencia every year, sometimes with Jane, sometimes alone. One of the treats is that Carlos always takes me out for a special meal. As a chef he know who’s who and what’s going on, so I’ve had some pretty special meals over the years. One memorable evening was the result of some serious planning on Carlos’s part. Together with a small group of friends we visited nine separate bars, all renowned for their tapas and the quality of their wine. In the first four we had seafood tapas, accompanied by white wine (all pre-tested by Carlos, of course). In the next four we moved on to meat tapas, with red wine. Bar number nine was where we sampled a variety of desserts, brandies and liqueurs.
It was touching to see how concerned the rest of the group - a generation or even two younger than me - were about my ability to make my own way home. Not sure what the Spanish for ‘Young pups! I could drink the lot of you under the table’ was, I confined myself to thanking Carlos effusively and making as dignified an exit as possible under the circumstances.
Another treat associated with a visit to Valencia is to go out to the family’s place in ‘el campo’, the countryside. Much of the great ‘huerta’, the huge area of market gardens where rice, vegetables and citrus fruits are traditionally grown, has been encroached upon with the expansion of the city. (See the attached link for a selection of excellent maps, photos and explanations).
http://www.cma.gva.es/contenidoHtmlArea/contenido/57726/cas/081126_paneles_1-5_ing.pdf
But it doesn’t take too much time to find peace and quiet. The little place where members of Carlos’s family spend most Sundays is maybe 40 minutes out of town, heading north-west. Ana, Lucas’s grandmother, has been going there for the best part of half a century now, since she and her husband, both in their twenties, found a bit of land and gradually built on it. Most of their neighbours did the same, and they have seen each other’s children grow up and have children of their own. The gardens are lush and well tended, especially where the owners spend all week there, rarely venturing into the city. When I was there two weeks ago, the immediate neighbours invited us in to see the new ducklings, and we went off arms bowed down with fresh broad beans most of which we ate raw on the way home.
Valencia itself is blessed with an unexpected abundance of greenery, all of which resulted from a massive flood which swept through much of the central part of the city on October 14, 1957. This was not the first time that the river Turia had burst its banks, and the city council decided it was time to divert the river around the city. This, however, meant that the city was bisected by a permanently dry river bed. What to do with it? The knee-jerk reaction was ‘build a motorway, of course’. Luckily, public outrage caused the city fathers to backtrack, and now the people of Valencia can enjoy a long, meandering park filled with lawns, trees, flowers, football pitches, baseball diamonds and children’s play areas. Not only that: the southern part is filling up with some of the most breathtaking new buildings in Europe, many the work of local boy made good, Santiago Calatrava.
(To get a feel of what it is like going down the Turia park, check the following aerial adventure posted on YouTube by a resident of Valencia).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LkiO5akmxo&feature=related
My final Valencian memory, and one of my favourites, is of heading to the park, but not actually reaching it. Jane and I had offered to take young Lucas for a walk, which normally takes 10 minutes. But this visit coincided to the week with that magical time in a child’s life when those strange black symbols you find in books and magazines, or written on top of shops and on the sides of vans started to make sense. Up or down, high or low, Lucas started making out words. Below his feet was a round metal plate with one word really standing out. ‘A’, he said (as in ‘cat’ with a Leeds accent), then, two seconds later ‘G’ (as in southern English ‘gun’ without the ‘n’). A slightly quizzical look, followed by a resounding ‘Ag!‘ Then, staring fixedly, he brought out a long ‘ooh’ sound, which he added to the first two sounds to produce ‘AGOOO’. Just one to go, which he experimented with a few times: ‘AGOO ..A’. ‘AGOOO ..A’. Then finally, triumphantly ..............AGUA!!!
If only it were that straightforward for little children trying to become literate in English. But the English equivalent of ‘agua’ is ‘water’. And that rhymes with ‘porter’, ‘bought a’, ‘caught a’ and ‘daughter’. Well, at least that keeps teachers of English like me in work.
Click here for photos of Valencian places
Valencia: Spain’s secret city.
Wednesday, 26 May 2010
