My Memoires: The First Fifteen Years of My Life 1945–1960

By Ana Taboada Alvarez

During the first years of my childhood, I lived with my grandmother, María, the mother of my mother. Later my mother decided to place me in La Casa Cuna (The House of the Cradle). I don’t know exactly what my age was then, but because of the pictures they took of me and my grandmother, I must have been about five years old.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 23, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543431346

Ana Taboada Alvarez

My name is Ana Taboada Vega. I was born in Malaga, on October 26, 1945. My father was named José Taboada Calvo, and he was born in Padrón de la Coruña, Spain. My mother was named Ana Vega Moreno, and she was born in Alhama de Granada, Spain. My mother had nine children. Three of them died before I was born—during the Civil War of Spain. I am the third of six siblings. My siblings are José, Antonia, Salvador, Trinidad and Rafael. My siblings José, Salvador, and Trinidad died before I even wrote this book. My two older siblings, José and Antonia, were born in Galicia. After they were born my parents traveled to Malaga, and it was there I was born, and my other three younger siblings were born as well.

Book preview

Chapter 1

My Father

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M Y FATHER WAS BORN IN the village of Padrón de la Coruña, Coruña, Spain. He was a Galician, just as Franco was, the dictator.

My father was a tall and handsome man. He had a brown skin and brown eyes like me. I have a lot of resemblance to my father and my mother.

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My parents were never very religious; neither did they receive an education.

Neither of them knew how to read or write.

I cannot say much about my father. And the little I can tell about him is that he wasn’t a good example of a father for us.

In fact, he was quite the opposite. I cannot say much about my father’s family either, because I never got to know my grandparents from his side or his siblings. From what I’ve heard, my father had several siblings.

It was unfortunate that I could never call anyone uncle or auntie. Not from my father’s side nor from my mother’s.

My father wasn’t a bad person. But he was an alcoholic, who always fought with my mother when he was home. And in one of his drunkenness he wanted to kill my mother, the night when we ran away. But the other day he didn’t remember anything he had been doing.

For his drunkenness, my mother lived enduring mistreatment and abuse of my father during her whole life, instead of having separated from him and provide a better father for her children.

Those days, that was impossible because in Spain Catholicism was the only religion that existed and divorce was not allowed.

For that and other reasons we had a father who never took care of us. Who didn’t care of having six children, who he was obliged to look after. Not just to give us love, but to worry that we didn’t lack food and that we were in good health.

He had no excuse and deep down he wasn’t a bad person. The alcohol took him the wrong way.

My father had a good job. He was a cook on a merchant ship. But he never sent money home.

He was always abroad and spent all the money on drinks and women.

Only when a ship occasionally arrived at the port, did he bring some money. But he would also leave my mother pregnant with another child.

With my irresponsible father, unable to send money home, my mother not only lived a life of absolute misery. But she had to send all of us to orphanages.

Chapter 2

My Mother

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M Y MOTHER WAS BORN IN the village of Alhama de Granada, Granada, Spain, in the province of Andalucía. She was Andalusian, like me.

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My mother was the opposite of my father, she was blonde and had clear eyes. Sometimes her eyes looked green, and other times they looked blue.

She wasn’t very tall, but she was very pretty. Besides, she was very delicate and she had a good heart.

She gave others all she had, and that wasn’t much.

People called her, blondie

My mother met my father when she was very young. She married my father when she was fifteen years old, and ten months later she had her first child.

The first three children died in her arms. She would mention that they were three girls, and one of them even needed donkey milk just to survive.

During that time, my mother had money since my father was a soldier at war who sent her money. My mother said, I walked village after village, looking for milk with the money in my hands, but she died in my arms.

She named one of the girls after my grandmother, María. Her second child got the same name, but she died as well. For that reason, she named her third child not María, but Ana. That was me. My mom gave me her name and in some ways, we both have straggles to survive.

My father was to blame for the misery my mother lived in. Even though she worked different arduous jobs, it was not enough to live.

Very early in the morning she walked to the harbor to the fish market piers and helped the fishermen carry and clean the fish to see what she could take home.

She was never able to buy us any toys, not even a bicycle for herself so she could go to work. She went everywhere by foot. And because she had to go to work, she could never look after me.

My grandmother took care of me during the first years of my life. After living the first few years of my life with my grandmother, I spent the rest of my childhood in two orphanages:

In those orphanages, I grew up without the love of parents, brothers, and friends. I can’t tell any anecdote about playing with my brothers. I only remember that I stayed in my parents’ house on two different occasions.

After leaving the orphanage at the age of sixteen years old, I started to live more with my mother. It was by then I realized that I had no one who would give me food nor who would buy what I needed, and I had to go out in search of work.

My mother never complained about her bad luck. She lived her life day by day, without enjoying anything, not even able to raise her children. But she managed to survive in a very decent way.

She could have turned into an alcoholic, like my father. She could have worked as a prostitute to earn money. But no, she worked cleaning houses, one or two a day.

At the fish