Things ain’t what they used to be

ONCE they know I’ve lived in Spain for over half a century, everybody wants to know about the changes I must have seen in the years I’ve been here.

For decades now, I’ve given the same old answer, explaining that it’s like watching a child grow up. The changes you perceive are gradual, not dramatic.

Added to that, I was living in Benidorm which paints a hyper-realist picture of tourism in late-Sixties Spain but not the country itself.

The plane trees lining the Avenida del Mediterraneo were  saplings but women who still had to cover their arms when they went to Mass were able – if they wanted – to wear a bikini on the Levante and Poniente beaches.

Pedro Zaragoza Orts, the mayor who negotiated the bikini concession with the head of state Francisco Franco, was threatened with excommunication and Benidorm’s neighbours always called it Sin City, an elderly lady told me many years later.

The Spain I lived in was already in the grip of tourism although it had long been popular with the well-heeled industrialists who owned factories in Alcoy and members of Madrid’s professional classes who built villas along the Levante seafront.

If anyone has ever wondered why one half of the Benidorm prom has the postal address of Avenida de Alcoy and the other half is Avenida de Madrid, that’s how they earned their names.

Many of those villas were still occupied each summer when I arrived, although several were bars.  One allegedly belonged to Rommel’s photographer, and I remember that they made a satisfyingly large cheese roll which was perfect for eating on the beach when you didn’t want to go back upstairs for lunch.

By then I was living in an apartment in one of the tower blocks that were already going up  but are now dwarfed by today’s skyscrapers,

How did I get there?

It makes me cringe decades later, but I met my husband while I was on holiday in Benidorm. Instead of staying on as he suggested, I flew back to England and returned six weeks later.

“You must have been mad,” people exclaim, although they exclaimed far louder in 1968, not least my own family.  “And to think we paid for your holiday,” my mother wailed when I broke the news.

They were right, of course.  I have since heard countless horror stories about the way a latin lover-cum-prince charming could metamorphose into a demanding despot-cum-mummy’s boy once the marriage lines were signed and the Libro de Familia handed over.

I know firsthand about the autocrat who expected to have his underpants ironed – as if! – and the mother-in-law who would run a dust-detecting finger along the sideboard every time she visited.

I was spared all of that, which means my recollections are different from those of others, especially women who later separated or divorced.

My husband’s family were a long way off in Madrid and although I’d hesitate to define a typical Spanish family, I’m  fortunate that my inlaws didn’t conform to the usual pattern then and they don’t now.