TEACHING ENGLISH IN BARCELONA

When I was teaching English in Barcelona in 1984, people lowered their voice if the subject of General Franco came up. He had died almost a decade before in 1975, but it seemed as if he was listening still from the portrait in uniform that continued to hang on the wall in nearly every bar.

Barcelona from Park Guell.

My job with a school called Interlog took me every afternoon across the grid of parallel streets to various banks and corporate offices that offered English classes to their staff. English was the lingua franca of what was being called the global world and Brits maintained a reputation for courtesy and noblesse oblige – privilege that embodies responsibility, a concept that seemed vaguely colonial. Football hooligans, illegal wars and Perfidious Albion would peel the scales from European eyes and I was lucky to arrive in Spain at the tail end of the myth.

Teaching English – teaching anything – is easier when you add a dash of humour. I printed out political cartoons by Gerald Scarfe, JAK – Raymond Allen Jackson, and Steve Bell’s regular strip ‘Maggie’s Farm.’ The humour had to be explained, but that didn’t stop it being funny, and students would leave class with a smile for our ten-minute break in the nearest bar – never more than a block away in Barcelona and always more than ten minutes.

After a caña served cold from the barrel, the atmosphere lightened and students who had sat stiff and silent in the classroom found the words to discuss their lives, their reasons for learning English and, most important, their dreams for Barça. Futbol Club Barcelona was the religion replacing religion and it was assumed that I had inside knowledge seeing how the new man at the helm that year was Terry Venables, the dynamic English coach who ended up winning La Liga that season by a 10-point margin.

Barça was the life blood of the body Catalan, the key to the Chinese puzzle that united the city and its people. Chief executives when they arrived for work at the new glass palaces on the Diagonal would stop to chat with the doorman about their grandchildren, the traffic jams, the news that Antoni Gaudí’s unfinished cathedral, the Sagrada Família, had been made a World Heritage Site. All Catalans appeared to have insights and opinions on art. Shaking their heads, faces growing tense, they would then discuss the callous injuries and golden goals of team Barça.

The doorman in his peaked cap and the exec in a grey suit shared the same loyalties, the same aversions, and would have suffered or had families who had suffered in and since the Spanish Civil War – that long black cloud that still loomed over Spain in 1984 and, in some ways, still does forty years later. The English need little excuse to look back on the Second World War with a sense of nostalgia and national pride, a rare moment when the cast iron class system appeared to relax its grip. For most Spaniards, the civil war had the opposite effect and touched the raw nerve of national shame.

Teaching English & Learning History

Spain’s Second Republic – the first lasted briefly from 1873-1874 – had come into existence in 1931. A coalition of socialists, liberals and a handful of communists won two general elections, in 1933 and again, after three years of turbulence and insurrection, in February 1936. The alliance had stood on a platform of land reform, female emancipation and the creation of a national health service. It was the most advanced social programme in the developed world and was viewed as a profanity by the Church, military and monarchists.

The government had been in office for four months when General Francisco Franco led the July coup. It resulted in the three-year civil war in which more than a million Spaniards died or disappeared. The bloodletting came to an end on 1 April 1939 and Franco ruled Spain as the self-anointed Caudillo – the Leader – until his death thirty-six years later on 20 November 1975.

King Alfonso XIII had gone into exile in 1931 and occupied the Royal Suite at the Hotel Meurice in Paris. By design or coincidence, three decades later, Salvador Dalí and his wife Gala moved into the same suite for two months every spring when an invitation to Dalí’s regular Princes’ and Paupers’ pink champagne Tea Party was highly sought after by the Parisian beau monde.

Catalonia had broadly supported the Republic in the civil war and was the last region to fall to Franco’s Nationalists. The Republic’s ultimate headquarters was at Castell Ferran, the military fort on the hill above Figueres. On the days before the surrender, the town was bombed to rubble before Panzer tanks commanded by Germans mopped up the last meagre flares of resistance. As thousands of militiamen and Catalan families fled the twenty-five kilometres to the French border at La Jonquera, they were strafed by Italian fighter planes who had set up base in Majorca. The refugees had no food nor medicines. Those injured by bullets and shrapnel bled out and their dead bodies remained on the roadside for months.

Guernica

Mussolini and Hitler had supplied arms and manpower to Franco from the outbreak of war. Germany’s Luftwaffe was given a free hand to practise bombing techniques and infamously in April 1937 obliterated the Basque town of Guernica in an aerial attack that lasted two hours and killed 1,500 people, the first blitzkrieg of the modern era. Picasso’s masterpiece ‘Guernica,’ unveiled at the Paris Exhibition in November 1937, was described by critics as the most powerful anti-war painting of all time. Legend has it that a German official visiting the pavilion where the painting was on display asked Picasso:

‘Did you do this?’

‘No,’ he replied. ‘You did.’

While Germany and Italy had backed the mutinous Generals, Britain, France and the United States remained officially neutral and starved the Republic of arms, food and medical supplies. They made innumerable concessions to the fascist states and only as German storm troopers goose-stepped across Europe in 1939 did they acknowledge that the war on democracy in Spain was the dress rehearsal for the Second World War, concentration camps and the Iron Curtain descending over Europe.

King Alfonso had died of heart disease in 1941. After Franco’s death, the late king’s grandson, King Juan Carlos I, was restored to the throne and the new Spanish Constitution of 1978 established a parliamentary democracy. After a series of weak coalitions, the threat of military rebellion and rising unemployment, Felipe González in 1982 led the PSOE, the Spanish Workers Socialist Party, to power with a socially democratic agenda remarkably similar to that set out by the self-same political party in 1936.

When I arrived in Barcelona two years after Felipe González came to power, Franco’s shadow still fell over every café table. Students learning English were happy to discuss arts, soccer, the best bars and restaurants but never let the word Franco form on their lips, not out of fear, I came to realise, but because the divisions ran deep and no one knew what side their families had supported.  

oOo

You may enjoy my new novel WE SHALL PASS – a love story set at the heart of the Spanish Civil War. 

“Young idealistic British volunteers to the Spanish Civil War find themselves in a Guernica-like nightmare and an ever-rising body-count. Add a love triangle stretched across the extremes of the English 1930s class system and you have something very powerful.” PETER YORK

“We Shall Pass passes on every level. As a story of friendship, adversity and political commitment. A timely reminder, if ever we need one.” NEIL JORDAN

From Amazon – digital 4.99 / paperback 9.95 – https://mybook.to/qkiNQ