LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 29 – Easter Monday, 13th APRIL

In the best traditions of British Bank Holiday Mondays, it is pouring with rain here in Catalonia.  The one difference, I have always maintained, is the lack of spitefulness in holiday weather in Catalonia so that there is always a possibility of seeing some sunshine during the day – it may not be much, but it will be there.

     Today is the damp calm before the invisible storm as the majority of the working population in designated but non-essential jobs are urged to go back to work, taking what ever microbes they have with them into the crowded metros and buses and trains as they commute. 

     The fatal proof of this economic pudding will be in a couple of weeks time when the mortality figures for Covid-19 will be examined to see whether this ill-thought out initiative has been as deadly as feared.

     It is a salutary experience to discover that in purely economic terms, we citizens are merely collateral damage, acceptable wastage, the angels’ share, surplus to requirements or any other mealy mouthed form of words to cover up the judicial execution that such a policy is going to mean.

     ‘Mean’ is a key word for something linked to the crisis that I hope is fake news, but have been told is actual fact.  In Catalan history the year 1714 is a key one.  On the 11^th of September 1714 Catalonia surrendered to the Bourbon King Philip V after supporting the Hapsburg Charles in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714): Catalonia lost its distinctive independence as it was subsumed into the Bourbon Crown; Catalan was demoted as the language of government; the walls of Barcelona were destroyed; Catalan territories over the Pyrenees were lost.  And all round disaster; but, in the typically Catalan way, 11^th September became the National Day of Catalonia and 1714 a date which is constantly seen, I have a hoodie with the year on the back and the Catalan flag on the front!

     It is therefore pushing coincidences a little that the National Government of Spain sent Catalonia exactly 1,714 thousand masks to be used in the present Crisis!

     There is no love lost between Madrid and Barcelona and the measures that are going to come into place tomorrow have met with stiff opposition from Catalonia and the Basque Country, with the Catalan President asking Sanchez, the Spanish Prime Minister, to send him the documentation of the scientific advice on which he based the decision to allow people to return to work.  Catalonia is in favour of a continuation of the strict lockdown, and I have to say that I think that is the more persuasive approach.

     Politicians should be increasingly nervous about the inevitable Public Inquiries that are going to take place when this crisis is over.  Their mismanagement is killing people and they should be held responsible.  And please, do not accuse me of pre-judging: hospitals without equipment are a simple fact; hospitals continuing to be poorly supplied with PPE are a simple fact; people dying are a simple fact.  The Conservatives have been in power for a decade: the fault lies with them – and they must pay.

The Poems In Holy Week (PIHW) period is now over and I have managed to write drafts of poems for each of the days, all of which can be found at smrnewpoems.blogspot.com  This year has been obviously different as we have been under strict lockdown and the ‘holiday’ aspect of the period has been a little ‘abstract’ to say the least.  It is a continuingly odd time as we are surrounded by literally deadly danger, yet continue to lead ordinary, safe, if isolated lives.  It is not like the Second World War where even my childhood home in Cathays in Cardiff was graced so I was told, with one (unexploded) German bomb: something tangible from the air raids.  But for us in Catalonia, at least where we are, it is like a continuing Phoney War; we go on with our restricted lives, and the medical horror is taking place elsewhere, out of sight, though vividly alive on television screens.  I think the unreality of it all is what is most obvious.  Yes, I know that the virus is real and the deaths and illness are actual, but our direct experience is limited to our own little inconveniences, not to a mortal struggle.  It’s odd and, as I’ve said, something where the actuality is difficult to take in.

     I have now printed out a draft booklet of the Poems in Holy Week and have done a few edits to get me going on the revision that they all have to undergo before publication.

     I have not yet decided on a title, but I’m working on it!  The most difficult part, I find, is writing an introduction for the collection – it forces me to look at the collection as an entity and write something that makes sense of the totality rather than individual poems.

     I also have to think about illustrations and that is always challenging.  Still, if nothing else, I do have time to consider these challenges!

The police in Spain have said that the ‘return to work’ for non-essential workers when off normally.  An interesting choice of word for anything but normal times where, surely, normality is not the way to respond to the extraordinary!

My faith in Catalonia took a knock today.  The poor weather lasted the entire day and I was not graced with even a moment of proper sunshine.  I am prepared to extend my faith to tomorrow – but anything after that and I will slip into heresy!

Lost!

Sometimes a harsh reality can break through the façade of domestic tranquillity.

 

It did tonight.

We had both just suffered through an evening meal of such unrelenting austerity that a cup of tea or coffee appeared to be an absolute luxury.  I was shuddering my way through the tales of terror that make up the stories in The Guardian nowadays, lurching in despair from the lunacy of 45, through the on-going self-harm of Brexit, via the laughable ideas of democracy and justice in Spain to various natural and man made disasters, when the front gate intercom buzzed into life.

We do not usually have unannounced visitors at night time so picking up the intercom to answer is usually tinged with concern.

It was our next-door neighbour who had found a small girl wandering the streets, lost and without a parent.  She wanted to know if anyone spoke Russian, as the little girl appeared not to speak anything else.  We could only offer Spanish, Catalan and English, with a smattering of French.  No use!

But after, regretfully putting down the phone, I thought of the large detached house opposite, which has, in the past been occupied by Russian speakers, so I slipped on my coat and went down to the street.

Our next-door neighbour was walking along with a very small child taking one hand and carrying a small scooter in the other.  She was accompanied by another neighbour from a few doors down with whom we had yet to speak.  The little girl was distressed and close to tears but she was comforted by my next-door neighbour with motherly hugs.

Obviously the police had to be informed, but my suggestion of trying to get someone from the big house on the corner to speak to the kid was taken up and, as I had seen lights there from our kitchen window which is at first floor level, I knew that there were people at home.

We buzzed through and we were greeted with an entire family exiting and our discovery that the kid did speak Russian and so did they, but they did not know who she was.  The son of the household was obviously asked if he recognized her and he replied in the negative.

Although the Russian family offered to take the girl in and contact the authorities, I felt that as the police had already been called, it was important to wait for them and a neighbour went to the outside of our houses and eventually brought the police back.

It then appeared that the police knew where the mother was and that the kid had wandered off and managed to put ten blocks between her mother and herself before she was taken into protective care by my neighbour.  Neighbour and girl were asked into the police car and with much happiness and thanking on all sides, they slipped away into the darkness.

Throughout this incident, I kept thinking how my own mother would have reacted.  And then stopped myself because it was too distressing to contemplate.  Even in its hypothetical state and allowing for the fact that my mother is no longer around to be concerned.

My parents told me that I had to be watched at all times when I was smaller as, given any opportunity, I would be away like (as my father used to say confusingly) “a long dog”! 

My crawling ability was legendary and my mother told me that I had to be “attached” to the sides of my crib to keep me in it.  This didn’t always work, as on one occasion I was found to be out of the crib, crawling along with a side still attached to me.

As soon as I could walk I was put in reins in a desperate attempt to keep me in the same locality as my parents, but again, my mother said that letting the reins slip from her hands or putting them down for a moment to pick up and examine some article she needed to buy in a shop was an opportunity for escape that I never rejected.

The only time that I can recall that I “escaped” by mistake was when I was too small to see over the counters in M&S.  As a six foot adult I find it difficult to think back to a time when I was so small, but I know I was because my early memories of M&S were of the wood veneer of the sides of the counters, of nothing interesting to see, and of light in the store that was far too bright.  On one occasion I was standing next to my father and when his trousers moved so did I.  I must have been in a mood of mildly sullen obedience as I traipsed around with nothing more than featureless material to keep my attention.  Eventually I got bored with this textured landscape and looked upwards towards my Dad’s face.  And it wasn’t him.  I had been following a strange man’s trousers!

I can still remember the bemusement I felt, but not how quickly the situation was remedied.  Knowing my mother, and her constant observation and monitoring of my potential fugitive propensities, it must only have been seconds.  But seconds are not what the event felt like.  I can remember no panic.  Which is interesting.

When I was a small child in the 1950s in Cathays in Cardiff, I was allowed to play out on the road with my friends - and this, remember, was with a mother who was close to paranoid (no, make that clearly paranoid) about my safety.  But I was allowed to play, and nothing much happened to me apart from the usually scratches and cuts.  There were also very few cars around then and the streets were generally empty.

I could be playing streets away from home, but I was trained to listen for my father’s distinctive whistle and reappear in double quick time.  Which I did, sometimes disappearing from a friend’s house in mid-sentence at the sound of the whistle!  

When we had a dog, the same whistle was used for her, but I have to say that I was much more responsive than she ever was.  Well, she was a pedigree Labrador!  And everyone knows what they are like!

So, the small girl is now reunited with her mother.  How will the kid think about this experience in the future?  As an interestingly confused experience with a group of people she saw once, with police and people speaking different languages, something to think back on and giggle?  Or something altogether more serious: something that threatened her worldview that showed her just how fragile what she thought she knew was?  Who knows?  Nothing happened, but what might have happened is too awful to contemplate.

And what of the mother?  As I’ve said, thinking of my mother sends shivers of horror down my spine.  I know that my mother would, instantly, have thought the worst and suffered indescribably until my return, and then she would have blamed herself and . . . well, you get the idea.  The delight of reunion would have been overshadowed by the dark imaginings of what might have been.

But let’s be positive.  The girl is safe and has been returned. 

And who knows what memory will make of what has been?

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If you would like to read drafts of my recent poems please go to:                                                smrnewpoems.blogspot.com