Cantabrian Summer, Baltic Winter

By Mike Bent

A chance encounter while shopping in a northern Spanish fishing port draws delectable, half-French, half-Polish Tamara von Rosenberg into friendship with Martin Haynes, a freelance writer and translator living in a nearby village. Their relationship, kindled through mutual intellectual interests, soon blossoms into caring, passionate affection. Tamara's idyllic holiday in Cantabria is brought to a premature and unhappy end when news reaches her that her widower father is dying following an inexplicable road accident on a remote Polish country lane.

Tamara and Martin try in vain to solve the mystery of Ruben's death. Meanwhile, Tamara's perseverance with her late father's ambition to transform a derelict 19th century mansion into a nursing home is met with spiteful opposition. Certain individuals will resort to radical means to wrest the property from her hands.

Poland plunges into a bleak and bitter winter of political turmoil and economic chaos amid growing opposition to the government's positive stance of future European Union membership. Nationalistic sympathies run high, and there is a renaissance of historic feuds. Tamara and Martin soon discover that staying alive in remote Rybkowo is a formidable challenge.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Oct 3, 2005
• ISBN: 9781412226011

Mike Bent

Dr. Mike Bent was born near Manchester in 1956, but spent most of his formative years living in deep rural Somerset. He read Geography at Downing College, Cambridge, and Transport Studies at Cranfield Institute of Technology, Bedfordshire. In 1987 he abandoned England in favour of northern Spain, then spent three years in northeast Poland. Having endured many years teaching various foregn languages to increasingly recalcitrant pupils (both in spain and Poland), he is now a full-time correspondent for a number of European rail transport and technology journals. He has also written several books on Norwegian and Spanish public transport history, as well as a guide book to northern Spain. At present he is preparing a series of books in Spanish on the regional history of Spanish railways, as well as working on a second novel. In his spare time (frustratingly limited) he enjoys gardening, cooking (and consuming the end products thereof), walking, reading, and exploring the byways of rural Europe by car and train. He lives in an old house of great character and much woodworm in an Arcadian valley in the Principalidad de Asturias, in northern Spain.

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About the author

Dr. Mike Bent was born near Manchester in 1956, but spent most of his formative years living in deep rural Somerset. He read Geography at Downing College, Cambridge, and Transport Studies at Cranfield Institute of Technology, Bedfordshire. In 1987 he abandoned England in favour of northern Spain, then spent three years in northeast Poland. Having endured many years teaching various foreign languages to increasingly recalcitrant pupils (both in Spain and Poland), he is now a full-time correspondent for a number of European rail transport and technology journals. He has also written several books on Norwegian and Spanish public transport history, as well as a general guide book to northern Spain. At present he is preparing a series of books in Spanish on the regional history of Spanish railways, as well as working on a second novel. In his spare time (frustratingly limited) he enjoys gardening, cooking (and consuming the end products thereof), walking, reading, and exploring the byways of rural Europe by car and train. He lives in an old house of great character and much woodworm in an Arcadian valley in the Principado de Asturias, in northern Spain.

Also by Mike Bent

Coastal Express

Conway Maritime Press, London, 1987

The history of the Hurtigrute-the world-famous passenger and cargo shipping service along the Norwegian coast between Bergen and Kirkenes, and its extension to the remote Arctic archipelago of Svalbard. Complete with illustrated fleet lists and pen and ink sketches by the author. Probably only available in specialist secondhand bookshops.

Steamers of the Fjords

Conway Maritime Press, London, 1989

Bergen, Norway’s second city, where for over a century countless steamer services operated by a multitude of companies, often fierce rivals, provided the main means of local transport. Fjordside communities where daily life was geared to the steamer timetable and revolved around the steamer quay. A definitive history, together with detailed, illustrated fleet lists, of the unique and complex local transport networks which evolved-and subsequently declined as the road network expanded-in western Norway. Pen and ink sketches by the author. Check specialist secondhand bookshops.

Exploring the Cantabrican Coast Ediciones Estudio, Santander, 1991

From the Ebro valley and the Picos de Europa in the south to Bilbao in the east and the Asturian coalfields in the west. The first detailed guidebook in English of one of the most popular and scenic parts of ‘Green Spain’, where the author chose to make his home in 1987. Detailed itinerary suggestions, maps, over 80 colour photos. Copies still available, price 16.53 euros, from the publisher, whose website (in Spanish and English) is: www.altair.es

Narrow Gauge Rails through the Cordillera Semaphore Press, Brighton, 1998

A definitive English-language history of the countless narrow gauge railways, both public and industrial, of northern Spain. Numerous detailed large-scale maps, together with many previously-unpublished photos. Copies may still be available in specialist bookshops.

El Ferrocarril de Ponferrada a Villablino y la Mineri’a en el Bierzo Monografias del Ferrocarril, Barcelona, 2000

Co-authored with Manuel Alvarez Fernandez, Daniel Perez Lanuza, and Lluis Prieto i Tur. An exhaustive history of the rail transport systems of the Bierzo, a compact and beautiful region of orchards, vineyards, crumbling old villages, and mining industries in decline, surrounded by mountains of over 2,000 m altitude, in northwest Spain. 23-page English summary, countless photographs (some in colour), detailed maps and plans. Available from the publisher at: www.monffcc.com

In preparation...

Carriles por la Espaha Verde Ediciones TREA, S.L., Gijon

Four regional volumes on the history of railways in ‘Green Spain’ (from Navarra and Gipuzkoa in the east to the westernmost extremities of Galicia). Spanish text. Publication of the first volume scheduled for mid-2005. Available from: [e-mail]

A Mine called Wagner, A Maid called Minerva Trafford Publishing (Europe) Limited

Pablo Gutierrez is second officer on board the Afon Dulais, plying between Swansea and Bilbao carrying coal southbound and iron ore northbound, and running the gauntlet of German U-boats, during the First World War. The son of an Asturian indiano from Ribadesella who in the 1870s sought his fortune in Britain rather than in the Spanish colonies, he is trapped in a loveless marriage to the daughter of a Methodist lay preacher from Swansea. Freedom comes in an unexpected manner when the Swansea-bound Afon Dulais is torpedoed in the Bristol Channel in the autumn of 1917.

Being a fluent speaker of Spanish, Pablo is asked by Raymond Jessop, the director of the Dyffryn Cellwen steelworks company, which owned the vessel, to travel to the Bierzo region of northwest Spain. His mission is to explore the possibilities for collaboration with a Spanish industrial partner in developing a steelworks there using local sources of coal and iron ore. Jessop fears that once the war is over, the struggling Dyffryn Cellwen works will lose its remaining trade to the large, new steelworks complexes being established on the South Wales coast; a radical solution is required for the survival of the company.

Pablo embarks on an intrepid journey from South Wales to the Bierzo. At the height of the submarine blockade, his voyage from Newport to Santander, on board a Spanish-registered coastal ore carrier of modest dimensions whose crew are novices to the Welsh run, is not without incident. On arrival in Spain he endeavours to establish contact with the mineralogist Julio de Lazurtegui, a visionary among myopes, who has been campaigning unsuccessfully for over three decades for the establishment of an integrated mining and steel-producing industry in the Bierzo. This would rely on the as yet untouched, high-quality ores of his Coto Wagner concession, in the mountains to the southeast of Ponferrada.

Travelling by train through the mountains from Oviedo to Ponferrada, Pablo becomes acquainted with shy, talented Minerva Amandi, the only daughter of an impoverished farming family from the Aller valley, who is taking up employment as a waitress and chambermaid at the recently-opened El Urogallo Berciano hotel in Ponferrada. This chance encounter will transform both their lives.

Ponferrada, Pablo soon discovers, is poised to become a boomtown. Deprived of cheap imported coal and foreign manufactured goods on account of the First World War, Spain is now striving to develop her own mineral resources and industries as rapidly as possible. A Madrid-based mining company is making preparations to exploit the Bierzo coal reserves on a massive scale. Representatives from foreign and national industrial concerns are sniffing round the heather-clad moorlands which conceal the Coto Wagner iron ore lodes like dogs after a bitch on heat. It looks as though Lazurtegui’s hopes will at long last be fulfilled-but with all this reawakened interest in the mineral deposit will Pablo manage to persuade the eminent mineralogist and concession-holder to enter into partnership with Dyffryn Cellwen, rather than with other foreign industrial concerns?

The fierce inter-company wrangling over possession of Coto Wagner is not the only threat to Pablo’s and Minerva’s happiness together. On 15 October 1918 the first case of a killer influenza epidemic is reported in the Bierzo...

Fact and fiction interweave subtly in this fast-moving adventure story set in South Wales, northwest Spain, and the turbulent waters in between during the closing months of the First World War.

MIKE BENT

CANTABRIAN

SUMMER,

BALTIC

WINTER

©

Copyright 2004 Mike Bent. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

Contact the author in care of Trafford Publishing.

Note for Librarians: a cataloguing record for this book that includes Dewey Classification and US Library of Congress numbers is available from the National Library of Canada. The complete cataloguing record can be obtained from the National Library’s online database at: www.nlc-bnc.ca/amicus/index-e.html ISBN 1-4120-3370-5

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13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

‘I feel like a ghost wandering in a world grown alien.’

Sergei Rachmaninov

For Danka, with love and gratitude

All the people in this story, apart from certain

historical characters, are imaginary.

Some of the other creatures, such as the tame monkey at Celis, Lucas

the parrot, and Brutus the boxer dog, do (or did) exist.

My thanks to Mike Baggs, who told me to get myself published.

My cows will be happy,’ reflected a grinning farmer with the complexion of a ripe walnut, who had evidently never seen the inside of a dentist’s surgery in all of his sixty-plus years, as we waited in the tepid drizzle for the SPAR supermarket to open, ‘but somehow I doubt whether the summer visitors will!’

Long-awaited relief had been brought to the sun-parched, cow-cropped meadows by yesterday evening’s deluge, the first significant precipitation in over three weeks. Such prolonged droughts are something of a rarity in August in this northern extremity of Spain, sandwiched between the Bay of Biscay and the 2,000-metre high range known as the Cordillera Cantabrica. It is not without justification that the local fishermen call the narrow fringe of coastal lowlands ‘La Trampa’-’The Trap’-since the rain-bearing Atlantic lows swooping in from the northwest have no option but to pile their clouds up against the formidable mountain barrier, which offers them no easy escape southwards into the interior of the country. However for the past month or so a massive anticyclone comfortably ensconced like a broody hen over central Europe had afforded the depressions no opportunity whatsoever of doing this, instead sending them scuttling up past Scotland to Scandinavia to give the Hebrideans, the Shetlanders and the Norwegians one of their coldest, wettest, most miserable summers in living memory.

While the Cantabrian farming communities and their bovine livestock might have welcomed the return to climatic normality, the snail-like eastbound progress of traffic along the N 634, the main road which links the coastal resorts all the way from the French border at Hendaye to the ri’as of Galicia, testified that this abrupt volte-face of weather patterns had prompted many veraneantes to embark a little prematurely on their homeward-bound exodus. It was nevertheless the final Monday in August, and with the dreaded re-take exams at the schools scheduled to commence nationwide on 1 September-the following Thursday-many holidaying families would have already been reluctantly contemplating packing their buckets, spades, bermudas and bikinis into their bags in readiness for the retreat to the cities.

Inside the supermarket, Mari-Paz switched the lights on, then extinguished her partially-consumed cigarette on the tiled floor with a deft twist of her heel, while Chusi came to unlock the door. I helped her push up the heavy metal grille which protects the plate glass windows from the attentions of wanton engravers. This shared activity has become something of a ritual on the three mornings a week when I come down into Santa Engracia to do my shopping. We chant ‘One, two, three...PUSH!’-probably the only words in English Chusi ever uses nowadays-and up goes the grille, usually clicking home snugly into the housing above the entrance. On the rare occasions when neither of us is feeling particularly strong, and also on the mornings when I do not go shopping, a final shove is necessary with a steel pole to ensure that the grille does not slowly slide down again under its own weight during the course of the day onto the heads of unsuspecting customers.

Chusi, who lives in Serdio, one of the many bucolic villages in the hills to the south of Santa Engracia, is a strapping lass, a giggling, gurgling bundle of fun with a luxuriant mane of chestnut hair which brushes her bum as she walks. An ex-pupil of mine from the early 1990s, she had struggled valiantly to learn sufficient of my native tongue in order to pass most of the secondary school exams, but without much lasting success. French, she had informed me, came to her far more naturally. She had been taught some of its rudiments at the primary school at Pesues, which at that time had still not acquired an English teacher, though her efforts at pronunciation in the Gallic tongue were, to say the least, hilarious. She shared my opinion of them, though I never dared tell her how naughty her bluntly Spanish phonetic rendering in French of the numbers ‘10’ and ‘18’ (especially ‘18’) sounded to English ears. Ultimately, however, I had had to convince her anxious mother that it was tantamount to cruelty to keep her on at the Instituto when all she really wanted to do was become a shop assistant and earn a bit of money she could call her own with which to enjoy the marcha on Saturday nights in Santa Engracia and in nearby Unquera. So Chusi had swiftly secured herself a job looking after the fruit and vegetable counter in SPAR, bought herself a motor-scooter on which she rode the seven kilometres into work from Serdio, hair flying in the wind in flagrant disobedience of the then-new traffic regulations regarding the wearing of crash-helmets, and embarked on the serious business of chatting up Enrique, who, together with his parents, runs the ironmongery shop next door to SPAR.

Enrique’s local knowledge, much of it of a dubious and frankly unprintable nature, has earned the family ferreterfa the reputation of being the ‘alternative’ tourism office for the town. Another ex-pupil of mine, his English is remarkably rich in vocabulary, if despairingly impoverished in grammar. A few years ago I advised some visitors from Lancashire to go to the ferreterfa if they wanted some information on the district. I was returned some odd looks, and felt obliged to explain that a ferret-that vicious little needle-toothed creature lovingly nurtured by the working-class northerner in days gone by-is known by the name of huron in Spanish. ‘Ferro’ is iron, hence the title of the shop.

Following Chusi’s debut in SPAR the quality and variety of the fruit and vegetables improved in leaps and bounds, and during the years before I moved out of a rented flat in Santa Engracia and into a pair of tumbledown cottages in La Nuez de Arriba, where I have since become self-sufficient in growing my own organic produce, I was never sold a browning cauliflower or a yellowing piece of broccoli. Long may she reign there.

Living up in the foothills of the Cordillera, I regard the thrice-weekly, tortuous, twelve-kilometre drive through the lanes to Santa Engracia for shopping, post, photocopying, and film developing with somewhat mixed feelings. The social contact one gets in a small market town cum fishing port with a wintertime population of just under three thousand souls is welcome, especially if one has been part of the community for the past fifteen years or so. There is the temptation of an early morning coffee and sobao in one of the many cafeterias, or towards lunchtime a bianco and free tapa in one of the even more numerous bares. But time spent enjoying the urban delights of Santa Engracia and exchanging news with the locals also means time spent away from one’s work, and it is the work which brings in the shekels. Not that I am complaining. I work for myself; I am my own boss, and I thoroughly enjoy what I do.

Shopping during the short summer season is, as far as I am concerned, a rather more disagreeable matter. The temporada alta invasion makes it imperative to get everything in town over and done with as early as possible and with the utmost haste, while the veraneantes are still abed contemplating the insides of their eyelids. Car parking is a nightmare, even first thing in the morning. Mondays can be especially dire, on account of the Saturday shelf depredations carried out by the numerous self-catering and camping visitors. Under normal circumstances I would never have chosen this Monday to come into town, but an urgent translation job for the Ayuntamiento in Infiesto had kept me at my desk for most of the day on Friday, while I always avoid Santa Engracia on summer Saturdays, when the presence of the weekly open-air market has a further adverse effect on the limited number of parking spaces available.

At first it had puzzled me why the town hall in Infiesto, an unpretentious little Asturian market town by-passed by the main road to Oviedo, should have been in such a hurry to print a brochure in French, German and English extolling the delights of walking in the vicinity of the Sierra del Sueve, the great limestone massif that separates the delightfully Arcadian consejo of Pilona from the Atlantic littoral, when the high season was drawing to a close. The mayor’s secretary had subsequently informed me that they were (for Spaniards) being remarkably forward-looking, and that the brochures were actually intended for distribution the following year. Spain is indeed moving with the times. ‘Diferentes, pero menos’-’Different, but less so’-was the title of a survey of social trends which appeared in one of the national newspapers a couple of years back. Europe no longer ends at the Pyrenees. Though when you look at some of the basura-such as fast food (together with obesity), techno music and the dreaded compensation culture-greedily absorbed by Iberia from the rest of the modern world over the past couple of decades, this is in many respects a sad thing. Not always is progress a positive phenomenon.

*******

Shelf restocking was just getting under way as I made my way towards the butcher’s counter at the back of the supermarket, which is situated on the ground floor of a five-storey block of flats built into the solid rock of the steep hillside. This gives the place a cave-like quality-refreshingly cool in summer, welcomingly warm in winter. With the new football season having commenced, a heated, high-volume debate on the merits and demerits of Racing Santander was in full swing between the butcher and the two lads who were wheeling in a pallet loaded in a somewhat casual manner with plastic-wrapped boxes each containing a dozen litre cartons of milk. A mere customer expecting to be served with fillets of veal, pork loin and shoulder of lamb would (understandably) be obliged to take second place to a learned debate focused on the finer points of Spain’s national sport, so instead of futilely hanging around in front of the tastefully-arranged selection of meat (some Spanish butchers are artists in animal flesh presentation) I went in search of milk, wondering whether last week’s oferta at 78 pesetas for a carton of the so-called full cream variety was still valid.

I could buy my milk more cheaply-and it would be far better quality, too, with an impressive head of genuine, rich cream-from the lechera who calls at La Nuez de Arriba each morning, her elderly Citroen van laden with churns filled at one of the local farms. One drawback is that I only use the juice of the cow somewhat sparingly-in tea, coffee, cereals, and occasionally in cooking-and the anaemic boxed variety, even after being opened, has a longer shelf-life, especially in warm weather, than the real thing. Another snag is that the milk lady forms part of traditional Spain, and her highly variable hour of arrival in the village is dependent on the length of time she spends chatting at her previous ports of call. Yet another deterrent (for me, at least) is that our lechera is an extremely popular and loquacious one, and if you find yourself at the back of her milk queue you can be kept waiting for eternity while local gossip is exchanged.

The sad remains of the oferta were scattered randomly at ground level, allegedly full cream rubbing shoulders with semi-skimmed and skimmed. While crouched rooting among the debris, I heard a sudden gasp of horror, then felt something heavy strike my left shoulder before thudding onto the floor at my side. Had the trajectory of that 12-carton, 12-litre and hence rather more than 12-kilo pack of milk been slightly more precise, my next stop that morning would almost certainly have been the queue in the health centre, which is conveniently situated right opposite SPAR. Several more packs followed the first in quick succession, narrowly missing me. Surrounded now by containers of tumbled cow juice, I spun round, almost overbalancing in the act, and glanced up.

A pair of liquid brown eyes regarded me with great concern from the far side of the unattended, wobbling pallet, which must have shed at least half its unstable load onto the floor around me.

‘I’m so s...sorry,’ apologised the owner of the eyes. ‘That was the last thing I expected to happen. I.I do hope I haven’t hurt you!’

‘Don’t worry; nothing’s broken, so there’s no need to call a doctor,’ I laughed, straightening myself up and flexing my left shoulder to ensure that all was still functioning as it should be. ‘Just as well, what with it being a Monday morning, which is always the busiest time of the week at the centro de salud.’

From my new position-I am somewhat under two metres in height-I was still looking slightly up into those expressive, vivacious eyes, which were edged with long, curving, fluttering lashes.

‘I was t.trying to remove a carton of milk from one of these packs, and the whole lot simply overb...balanced,1 she explained, spreading the palms of her hands in a gesture of innocent helplessness.

A soft, melodious voice, cultured, devoid of any easily-identifiable dialect or accent. The hesitant stutter, which I was soon to discover vanished as she found herself becoming at ease with the person she was talking to, was particularly endearing. She definitely did not look English, though nor in fact do I, since my late mother’s grandparents emigrated to England from Sicily in the 1890s and the genes on that side of the family have always run strong. Why she should have chosen to speak to me in English was therefore a little puzzling.

Certainly her rather neat style of dress-beige trousers, a matching light jacket, and a coffee-coloured blouse, complemented by a silk scarf in various shades of brown draped casually around her neck-suggested to my eyes, inexpert in such matters, that her origins lay somewhere not too distant; quite probably beyond the Pyrenees but most definitely not on the other side of the English Channel. While most Spaniards run circles round the Brits when it comes to matters of dress sense, the French effortlessly circumnavigate the Spaniards in turn.

Her clear, lightly tanned skin indicated both a healthy diet and much time spent in the fresh air. She wore not a trace of makeup or jewellery, either. Her heart-shaped face, with prominently high cheekbones and a neatly-formed chin with a delightful little cleft in the centre, was framed by straight, glossy, but unruly hair of shoulder length, which had a tendency to invade her eyes, matching the latter in colour. Steel-framed, thick-lensed glasses and dense eyebrows, these inclined towards her neatly-proportioned, slightly retrousse nose, above which they almost met, contrived to give her a vaguely feline air. The extremities of her rosebud lips-invitingly kissable-were twitching uncontrollably upwards into an impish smile, presumably at visions-unfulfilled-of having to escort her milk-soaked and badly bruised victim into a crowded health centre.

‘Blame it on the delivery men,’ I replied. ‘By rights they should have finished unloading and stacking that milk ages ago, instead of going on all morning about yesterday’s football results.’

‘You speak good English,’ she observed. ‘In fact, you’re the first person I’ve met here who actually speaks anything properly other than Spanish.. .and I wouldn’t be able to judge whether they were even speaking that correctly, since I don’t understand more than a few words of the language.’

‘I am English,’ I corrected her.

I felt it wiser not to mention the fact that English, after a fashion, could also be heard in Enrique’s ‘alternative’ tourism office in the neighbouring ferreterfa, and that Enrique himself would need little persuasion to spend the rest of the morning in his favouite role as raconteur of local gossip, especially with such a delectable audience.

‘Your English is pretty good, too,’ I continued, ‘but I have a sneaking suspicion that you aren’t from the other side of the Channel. And from what you’ve just told me, you’ve admitted that you’re not a Spanish veraneante either. In fact you don’t even look like a typical holidaymaker.’

‘Two out of three of your deductions are correct. I’m not English; neither am I a Spanish veraneante-whoever or whatever that may be-but I am here on holiday. I arrived yesterday evening, just as it was starting to rain. I’ve never seen a deluge like that in all my life! I was soaked to the skin by the time I had walked from the bus station to the tourism office, and at my wits’ end when they informed me-in very poor French-that all the hotels here were full. Then the woman in charge there started making a few phone calls, and in the end told me that she had found me a room in one of the flats near the harbour, on the other side of the river. I asked if there was a possibility of getting a taxi there; they reckoned that because of the queues of traffic on the main road it would be much quicker to walk. So I did, and crossing the bridge over that river was one of the most frightening experiences of my life, what with the rain, the thunder, the wind and the traffic. Is that normal summer weather here in northern Spain?’

It was my turn to smile. ‘If it didn’t rain sometimes, we wouldn’t be able to promote this region as ‘LaEspaha Verde’-’Green Spain’-would we, now? Until yesterday evening, we were having an exceptionally dry summer, and the farming community was getting pretty miserable about it, even if the veraneantes-the summer visitors-were having the time of their lives. It’s not every year that we get so much sun in August; usually it is just warm, cloudy and humid most of the time. Mind you, here in Cantabria it can do simply anything; on occasions we experience summer in midwinter and winter in midsummer, and sometimes even all four seasons in one day, while a three-month autumn merges subtly into a five-month spring. Just imagine that! Fresh snow on the Picos de Europa in July and August, and being able to sunbathe on the beach in December and January.’ ‘Really?’

There was a hint of incredulity in her voice.

‘I’m not joking. Such climatic conditions really do occur here in northwest Spain-and not infrequently.’

‘I wasn’t doubting you-not in the least; it sounds marvellous, but the weather could never do eccentric things like that where I live, more’s the pity.’

‘And where do you live?’ I wanted to know.

‘Osterode-or rather, Ostroda, as it is called nowadays-in northeast Poland, formerly Ostpreussen. A region of short, hot, humid summers, with plenty of mosquitoes thanks to the lakes, and long, bitterly cold winters, when the lakes freeze and the cunning mosquitoes take refuge in the cellars, ready to strike again the following spring. Summer usually leaps abruptly into autumn at the end of August and from then on the days get shorter very quickly, the trees start turning colour, and you can sense winter approaching. There’s not much springtime either; during one week in mid-April the daytime temperature can be only a few degrees above freezing, while during the next it’s up in the mid to high twenties and Nature’s working frantically to catch up with the change in seasons. Not so the mosquitoes; as soon as the weather warms up they’re out and about, pattering on the windows just like rain after dark. And as for the noise they make in the trees in the evenings-it’s just like an electricity generator!’

My knowledge of central-eastern European history and geography is rather superficial, so her reference to place names which no longer existed meant little to me at that time. From her dress and physical appearance I would have placed her origins somewhere in southern France. It was therefore something of a surprise to learn just how far off target I was.

‘I take it you dislike mosquitoes.’

She looked momentarily distressed; pathetic almost.

‘Unfortunately for me they thrive on my blood...and I in turn suffer the consequences. Earlier this summer when the weather was too hot for me to sleep with my bedroom window closed they gave me so many bites while I was asleep that they made me feel quite ill. What with that on top of hay-fever and sinus problems.’

‘You poor thing, you. Ah well, you’ll be pleased to know that we don’t get that many mosquitoes in coastal Cantabria. The only plague I can ever recall was in the summer of 1994-nasty little things they were, too, with a bite out of all proportion to their size. Nothing to worry about since then, though. And thanks to the sea air, hay-fever is pretty uncommon. You should find that being near the coast helps your sinus as well.’

‘Thank goodness for that. I’ve already noticed that I can breathe somewhat more easily here than in Ostroda, which lies about a hundred kilometres inland from the Baltic, and which is surrounded by farmland and forests as well as by lakes. From what you’ve been saying, I would imagine you must live here. Am I correct?’

‘Yes, though not actually in Santa Engracia; my home’s in one of the villages, about twenty minutes’ drive inland, up in the hills.’

It was very tempting to prolong the conversation, and she seemed delighted to have someone to talk to in a language she could understand, but the delivery men, having exhausted their post-mortem of Racing Santander’s performance, were now anxious to finish stacking the milk precisely where we were standing. Furthermore, the supermarket was steadily filling with customers, so we went our separate ways to complete our respective purchases; hers, I noted while I was dealing with the butcher, consisting of a carton of milk, a pack of tea bags, a small jar of instant coffee, a large bottle of mineral water, and a pack of biscuits. While thinly disguising the fact by browsing among the shelves, she was evidently contriving to wait for me, and we met up again a few minutes later in the queue which had already formed at the check-out presided over by Mari-Paz.

‘No further accidents?’ she smiled.

I reassured her that the butcher, though irate over Racing Santander’s defeat at the hands of Osasuna of Pamplona the previous afternoon, had restrained himself from venting his anger on me with his lethally sharp carving knife, and asked her if she had managed to find everything she wanted to buy. She replied in the affirmative. Wondering if she had already made plans for the morning, I tentatively suggested that we might go somewhere for a coffee, which she readily agreed to, explaining that so far she had had nothing to eat or drink for breakfast, apart from some tap-water, which had tasted unpleasantly saline. One of the weak points about Santa Engracia, in common with most of the coastal towns and villages in this region, is that the underground springs in the limestone are tainted slightly with seawater. The further inland one goes, the better the quality of the water. In La Nuez de Arriba it is delicious-and there are no added chemicals, either.

* * * * * * *

While we had been in the supermarket the drizzle had intensified, so we were obliged to dodge the puddles in the uneven paving slabs as we dashed for the shelter of the soportales, the arcades which surround two sides of the plaza, heavily shaded by dripping plane trees, and entered the steamy warmth of ‘El Principe’ cafeteria. ‘El Principe’ is a cut above most other similar establishments in Santa Engracia, being furnished with comfortable leather armchairs and sofas, and low tables, much favoured in winter by the card-playing and gossiping tertulias. The proprietress, who every other year (when she puts her prices up) gives me the task of up-dating the English, French and German versions of her menus, insists that-unlike in many Spanish refreshment places-neither the radio nor the television should intrude at high volume on her customers’ conversations. Here, if nowhere else in town, we would be able to chat in relative peace without being forced into having a shouting match.

At the bar we ordered coffees and a couple of slices of the deliciously moist, home-made almond tart that the proprietress of ‘El Principe’ has earned herself a reputation for, and settled ourselves at a corner table near the entrance, from where we could look out through the dense foliage of the trees to the main road, where the homeward-bound holiday traffic was threatening to snarl itself up in the mother and father of jams.

Such congestion is commonplace nowadays even during winter public holidays and weekends, and no easy solutions are at hand. It is caused by a variety of factors; the four right-angled bends of the main road as it crosses the ri’as of the Brazo Mayor and La Maza on long bridges and weaves its way through the town centre, the proliferation of pedestrian crossings (though few Spanish drivers observe these), and the need for vehicles to leave and enter the main flow of traffic in search of, or having given up searching for parking spaces. The media, even at a national level, delight in reporting on the size and progress of the queues that form on either side of Santa Engracia. A coastal motorway is being built, but in western Cantabria only the surveyors have made their presence felt so far, with pegs stuck in the ground along the proposed route. Traders rightly fear that once the new road is finished they will be deprived of much passing trade especially out of season. Folk who live in the town centre count the days until they will be able to enjoy a night’s sleep undisturbed by the constant roar of gear-changing HGVs. Traders who both live and have their businesses in the town centre currently suffer from insomnia on two accounts.

I asked my companion if this was her first visit to Spain.

‘Yes, it is,’ she replied. ‘I’ve travelled a great deal throughout the rest of mainland Europe, but Spain and Portugal have never really appealed to me that much.’

‘And why’s that?’

Though I reckoned I could predict the answer.

‘Because of the image put across in most of the publicity one reads. For the majority of Germans, Poles, and other north Europeans, Spain consists only of the Mediterranean coast and the islands, a cheap, fun country for rowdy nightlife, beach parties, bodies roasting in the sun, junk food just like they enjoy at home, free-for-all sex.not my idea of a holiday, not in the least.’

‘Nor mine! You might not believe it, but for quite a lot of folk from up north here the ideal holiday is a couple of weeks down there. It doesn’t half make life difficult for those of us who spend our lives trying to promote tourism in the remainder of the country,’ I added.

‘Is that what you do for a living?’

I explained to her how, after leaving university armed with a potentially useless doctorate in urban and rural planning and land use, I had found myself unemployed in the dismal, cash-strapped Britain of the early 1980s, and had-with my late parents’ blessing-sought an alternative future abroad. I had learnt some French and Spanish at school-the traditional way, which always worked, with a strong emphasis on grammar, writing and translation-and reckoned that with this knowledge I could at least make a start on my own in a foreign country by earning a pittance teaching English. My biggest challenge was to find a region where there were few resident foreigners already tapping the market, and where the climate was agreeable without being intolerably hot or dry. Using an Inter-Rail card I had travelled slowly down through central France and interior Spain by train, stopping off at promising-looking small towns, but usually departing dissatisfied with what I had found there.

After three fruitless weeks I had ended up at Ferrol in the northwest corner of the Iberian Peninsula, wondering what on earth I should do if I found nothing suitable within the final seven days’ validity of my travelcard and was forced to return jobless to the British dole queues. In resignation, I had travelled back eastwards along the Biscay coast on the narrow gauge line (where Inter-Rail cards were not accepted but where fares were laughably cheap), and having by then read a couple of Spanish-language regional guide-books, decided to spend at least a couple of nights at the picturesque fishing port of Santa Engracia.

Having noted a complete absence of advertisements there for ‘5e Dan Clases de ingles’, I had made enquiries of the bookshop proprietor in the plaza concerning the potential local market. What a stroke of luck that had been! He had two teenage daughters who were struggling with English at school, and who were desperate for a private tutor. Apparently the nearest English person lived 30 kilometres away, in Puente San Miguel, and she gave classes in excessively large groups, while her Spanish husband taught English at one of the secondary schools in Torrelavega, providing her with an inexhaustible source of clients by deliberately failing his pupils in exams until they got the message and opted for additional tuition with his wife.

So, on my very first morning in Santa Engracia I had picked up my first two clients, at five hundred pesetas an hour each, with classes twice a week. Before the day was over, I had negotiated the rental of a small flat on the far side of the Brazo Mayor, in the barrio known as Soto del Barco, adjacent to the quay, and had been tracked down, in the restaurant where I was having dinner, by four more parents, all anxious to improve the language-learning abilities of their offspring. Word spreads quickly in a small community like Santa Engracia, especially in the autumn, when there are few visitors. I felt like I was under surveillance wherever I went-but it was not a disagreeable feeling!

In the mid-to late 1980s, Santa Engracia was a delightful place to live in. Outside the summer season everybody knew and let on to everybody else, and it was like being part of a huge family, which met together in diverse groups at various times of the day in the bares and cafeterias. There was practically no crime, no vandalism, and only the occasional scrawl of politically-motivated graffiti. Naturally, there was the annual invasion of veraneantes to be tolerated, but it was brief-five or six weeks in July (once the San Fermines in Pamplona were over) and August at the most; even shorter if the weather proved disagreeable. Most of the summer visitors were regulars-the same families, the same routines, and even the same places on the beach, year after year, generation after generation. The building boom-the construction of summer flats for well-heeled madrilenos-had not yet taken off, and the steep hillside above the harbour was still a paradise of drystone-walled orchards and meadows and a maze of narrow paths.

In the spring and autumn there was a growing influx of foreign visitors, mainly retired and predominantly British, thanks to the twice-weekly Plymouth to Santander car ferry. Sustainable tourists-the sort of people who prefer exploring to lying on beaches, and who do not moan at the occasional rainy day. Right from the start I had been struck by the almost complete absence of foreign language guide-books on northern Spain, and as I gradually got to know the local area better, I started compiling typewritten guides, photocopies of which I distributed to the hotels favoured by the users of the ferry.

The teaching had, meanwhile, gone from strength to strength, especially once I decided to offer one-to-one tuition in my clients’ homes, a ploy which in addition to (incidentally) making life easier for my young clients also (and more importantly) guaranteed the regularity of their attendance and payment. As soon as knowledge of ‘Elingles’ had spread to the surrounding villages, I had found it necessary to acquire a car-initially a clapped-out Seat Panda-to attend to the needs of pupils living outside Santa Engracia. By the early 1990s I was working a six-day week with five hour-long teaching sessions each afternoon, and driving well over a hundred kilometres each week in the bargain. I also wrote and typed up my own grammar notes and translation exercises, spurning the new-fangled, ineffective and horrendously expensive course-books and audio-cassettes dumped on the non-English-speaking world by avaricious publishing houses in Britain and the States.

Then the fracaso escolar had set in-all of a sudden schoolchildren seemed to lose the ability to learn. Perhaps the educational reforms of the period were partially to blame; more likely it was the ever-increasing domestic diet of television, video and computer games robbing the youngsters of any imagination and creative ability they might have otherwise inherently possessed. Almost certainly the growing preference for junk food among the younger generations had something to do with it as well. Sluggish, sleepy-eyed, overweight sixteen year-olds now struggled begrudgingly to come to grips with what lively, alert, possibly undernourished eleven year-olds had competently mastered two decades earlier. The trendy educationalists, in their warped way of thinking, still insisted on calling this ‘progreso’, though even the kids, powerless to do anything about it, could tell you that it was not. To cope with the learning crisis a new, sinister creature emerged, the academia, or in blunt English, the homework-help centre. Santa Engracia was by no means spared the invasion of these curses; within the space of a year three had sprung up, offering economic package deals in all subjects, guaranteed (and how?) passes in exams, and sympathetic, enthusiastic, young Spanish teachers. My once so reliable market (I had never needed to advertise my services) started to dwindle alarmingly.

It was at that point that my guide-pamphlet writing started to prove its worth. I invested in a computer, scanner, and printer, in order to produce more professional publications, a goal which I eventually achieved after turning the air in the flat blue with expletives, in both English and Spanish-the latter language being far more picturesque in this respect. Computers, despite being the most complex pieces of desk-top equipment imaginable, come without proper instruction manuals, telling you what to click the mouse on, which side of the mouse to click, and how many times to click it, in order to achieve the desired results. I refused to submit to the indignity of computer classes to learn the sorts of things I had no need of. In the end I mastered the one-eyed beast in the manner that I wanted to. And as far as I am aware, I was one of the first people in Santa Engracia to boast an e-mail address and personal website.

The early to mid-1990s saw the start of the ‘turismo rural1 boom in Spain, essentially replicating what was already being accomplished with great success in France with gites and chambres d’hotes. Town halls and regional tourism boards began producing a landslide of brochures and information leaflets extolling the scenic wonders of interior, off the beaten track Spain. As the teaching waned, I was able to spend more and more time developing a speedy, high quality translation service for these organisations, who responded enthusiastically. This eventually evolved a stage further into the construction of foreign-language websites for internet users, and even a subsidiary consultancy role, whereby-parading my doctorate to some advantage at long last-I offered advice and suggestions on what should, and should not be included in the original Spanish versions of such documents and sites. Requests for assistance even started to flow in from the other side of the Pyrenees and the far shore of the Mediterranean (Morocco, specifically). There have been numerous occasions when I have been invited to meet the people for whom I have been working, to discuss projects and their contents. As a result, in the course of my work I have explored far more of rural Spain than most Spaniards have, and my business is still trying to expand itself, in spite of the ultimate constraint of there being just twenty-four hours in a day. It is, I must confess, far, far more enjoyable than teaching. Although much of the work involves routine typing, no two days are quite the same, and I am always learning something new. I can never complain of boredom, even though I often do of loneliness.

My companion informed me that her sudden interest in Spain had been awakened by investigating several such websites in German and in English, and on the knowledge gathered from these she had planned her travels.

‘But none of you website creators ever wrote anything about the terrible weather!’ she accused me, with a mischievous grin.

‘Not exactly good form