Mad Dogs and an English Girl

by Caroline Waterman

  MAD DOGS AND AN ENGLISH GIRL

  CAROLINE WATERMAN

  MAD DOGS AND

  AN ENGLISH GIRL

  Copyright © 2007, 2008 Caroline Waterman

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study,

  or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents

  Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in

  any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the

  publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with

  the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries

  concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

  Matador

  9 De Montfort Mews

  Leicester LE1 7FW, UK

  Tel: (+44) 116 255 9311 / 9312

  Email: books@troubador.co.uk

  Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador

  A Cataloguing-in-Publication (CIP) catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978-1780889-535

  Typeset in 11.5pt Bembo by Troubador Publishing Ltd, Leicester, UK

  Printed in the UK by The Cromwell Press Ltd,Trowbridge,Wilts, UK

  Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  To all my wonderful friends in Spain, my family,

  and also my friend, Kate, for all her help and encouragement

  Ancha es Castilla y que hermosa

  La tristeza enorme de sus soledades,

  La tristeza llena de sol, de aire, de cielo.

  (Wide is Castile and how beautiful

  The tremendous sadness of its lonely places,

  A sadness filled with sun, air and sky.)

  Miguel de Unamuno

  Poet and philosopher who was critical of

  Franco and died during the Spanish Civil War

  CHAPTER ONE

  ARRIVAL

  The sweltering heat inside the railway carriage added immeasurably to my discomfort. Excitement, apprehension and the rigours of third class rail travel had all combined to make sure I had not slept a wink during the long night journey from Paris; and now, on top of all that, this suffocating, merciless heat! I was beginning to wonder how much longer I could survive.

  The air was filled with a cocktail of sweat, cigarette smoke, half-digested garlic and the stench of caged chickens. These unhappy creatures, crammed into the luggage rack above my head, pecked at the wire from time to time in protest at their imprisonment. Opposite me, a large woman occupying at least two seats, was attempting ineffectively to cool herself with an improvised fan made from a newspaper. She kept wiping her brow with her forearm muttering: “madre mía! madre mía!” to which the other suffering passengers would respond with sympathetic nods and grunts of agreement. At least it was reassuring to note that these temperatures were excessive even for Spaniards.

  I felt beads of perspiration trickling down my forehead into my eyes as I sat firmly wedged between the side of the carriage and a group of burly Basque workmen.They had boarded the train at a small, rather ugly village with a long, unpronounceable name way back in the foothills of the Pyrenees. Their faces were round and red under black berets and their shirts clung stickily to their muscular bodies. They spoke to each other in an unintelligible language but I noticed they switched back to Spanish the minute a civil guard appeared – which was frequently as there were several of them roaming about the train.

  After a while I felt compelled to ask the Basques about this strange language of theirs. The one sitting next to me looked quickly around before replying in a low voice.

  “Yes, this is our own language. Of course we speak it among ourselves, but now we have to be very careful, you know, because it’s forbidden.”

  “Forbidden? But why?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “That’s the way it is here. They don’t like it. A friend of ours was caught speaking it and they took him away. We found him next day unconscious in a back street: hardly recognisable.That’s how things are now.”

  This last chilling remark brought home to me that I was about to experience life in a Police State. I wondered what I would make of it.

  As soon as the other passengers discovered that I spoke reasonable Spanish they bombarded me with questions. I explained to them that I was English, nineteen years old and on my way to Burgos where I would spend a year with a family teaching English and hopefully, improving my Spanish at the same time.The fat lady opposite leaned forward and tapped me on the knee.

  “You are brave, señorita, to travel like this on your own. A young girl like you shouldn’t really be travelling alone, you know.” (How many more times was I to hear that!)

  “Have you come all the way across France?” she continued. “You must be tired.”

  “Yes, I am a bit,” I confessed, remembering those hard leather seats and the seemingly endless night; but here the wooden third class seats were even harder and the train much slower. I glanced down at my watch. Surely we must be arriving soon? I had already learned from a previous visit that the railways, like everything else in Spain, were blissfully unaware of the existence of Time. Nobody ever seemed in a hurry and it just wasn’t important. Ours being a mail train, we had stopped at every village and occasionally the driver stepped down onto the platform to stretch his legs and have a chat with the station master – so the realisation that we should have arrived at Burgos an hour ago came as no surprise.

  I decided that I too had to stretch my cramped limbs so I squeezed out of my seat and struggled towards the corridor which was packed with soldiers smoking, laughing and shouting to one another. They eyed me with curiosity as I pushed past them. Reaching an open window, I thrust my head out into the flow of warm air which rushed against my face, covering it with smuts. Gazing at the bleak landscape, glimpsed through clouds of steam, I wondered about Burgos. I knew nothing about the place except what a friend of mine, Julio, had told me: that it was an ancient Castilian city with a famous cathedral, lying in the heart of the meseta.

  I was reminded of this when I noticed that the countryside had changed considerably and not for the better. Gone were the wooded hills and rushing streams of the Basque Country. Instead I beheld a strange, monotonous panorama of yellow-grey stubble dotted with endless sheaves of wheat shimmering in the afternoon heat. The dust blew all about as the train passed and where there might once have been grass, it was now shrivelled and dead, exposing the rock-hard ground beneath. Workers could be seen toiling in the fields among their wilting crops. So this was the meseta, the Castilian plateau, a vast expanse of brown tree-less earth burning under a relentless sun. I had left my temperate homeland to come and live in this sad, impoverished wilderness. Madness! I thought: what was I doing?

  From time to time, small villages appeared. Made of the earth and stones around them,
they looked a natural part of the landscape, their small ochre hovels crouching under terracotta roofs usually clustered around a church belfry. Some appeared to have no roads linking them to the outside world – just earth tracks leading to the surrounding fields.

  Then, suddenly, I noticed in the far distance, stretching skywards, two graceful spires silhouetted against the dark blue. Could this be Burgos cathedral? Excited, I hurried back to my compartment to consult my fellow travellers. They peered out of the window, and confirmed that yes, we were indeed approaching my destination.

  As we neared the station, I started to assemble my few belongings, easing my case carefully down from between the crates of chickens. They resented the disturbance and clucked at me indignantly, poking their heads through the wire and pecking at my hands.The Basques laughed and came to my assistance.

  I felt sorry to leave my fellow travellers as their cheerful company had done much to enliven this interminable journey. Listening to their life histories, it was even possible to forget, occasionally, the heat and smells.They had shown me photographs of their girlfriends and mothers, wives and children, shared their pig-skin bottle of wine and even entertained me with Basque songs when they were certain that there were no civil guards around. As we pulled into the station they wished me well and invited me to stay with them in their native village.

  At last the elderly engine, to the accompaniment of creaks groans and hisses, ground ponderously to a halt and I clambered down onto the platform where the Basques handed me my case and bags from the carriage window.

  “Adiós!” they said, each in turn shaking my hand. “And be careful! There are a lot of them in Burgos!”

  With this parting warning they laughed heartily and waved me goodbye as the station master rang his bell. After a few seconds of last minute door slamming, the train, with a violent jerk, started off once more to continue its long, tedious journey to Madrid.

  Now I was alone, quite alone, standing beside my small pile of luggage, enveloped in the blinding smoke of the engine’s parting gift. I blinked and looked around wondering if anyone was there to meet me. I felt decidedly nervous as I knew little about my new employers.

  Julio had found me the job. He was a Spaniard I had met in London where he was studying: an eccentric character, full of himself, but in such an amusing way that I couldn’t help liking him. He fancied himself as an entrepreneur and was constantly throwing time and money at unsuccessful projects, convinced that one day he would become seriously rich. My own aspirations were more modest. I worked in tourism and believed that becoming fluent in Spanish could improve my chances of promotion so I asked Julio to find me a job in Spain. This he succeeded in doing on one of his visits home. He had recommended me to a doctor he knew slightly in Burgos who was looking for a girl to live in and teach English to his family. Julio returned to England with the good news and straight away I left my job in London and set off for Spain.

  Hearing a shout, I looked round and saw, as the steam gradually cleared, two figures approaching me. They resolved themselves into a middle-aged man and a young girl. The man, whom I took to be the doctor, was short, plump and swarthy. He had heavy features and small, black eyes that pinned themselves on me disconcertingly. I held out my hand.

  “DoctorVázquez?” I enquired. He took a step nearer. “

  Yes.” He looked me up and down in the way I had seen farmers cast their experienced eyes over cattle in a market. “How are you?Your train is late.”

  His podgy hand met mine and instinctively I wanted to recoil from him. I had been told that first impressions were usually reliable so this was less than reassuring.

  “Yes, I know,” I said wearily, gathering up my things, “I’m sorry you’ve had to wait so long.”

  The girl, who had been standing behindVázquez, now stepped forward and to my surprise, kissed me affectionately on both cheeks.

  “Don’t worry,” she said.“It doesn’t matter.The trains are always late. The main thing is that you’ve arrived safely. Welcome to Burgos!”

  “This is my assistant and secretary,” saidVázquez.

  “Anita,” said the girl,“my name’s Anita.”

  I looked at her. She was about my age and very attractive with short, black curls and lustrous, brown eyes. She was bronzed, her cheeks were rosy and she greeted me with a dazzling smile, displaying a row of pearly-white teeth. Her well-manicured nails were painted a delicate shade of pink to match her candy-striped dress.White stiletto-heeled sandals and gold earrings completed the picture and she smelt deliciously of some exotic perfume.What a sorry contrast I must make, I thought, hot and bedraggled, lank hair plastering my head, face bereft of make-up and covered in smuts, and a travel-stained dress clinging unflatteringly to my legs! But the warm and friendly manner of this girl won me over at once despite her irritatingly beautiful appearance and I had the feeling we were going to be friends.

  We walked out of the station into the dazzling sunshine. Vázquez’s car stood in the forecourt beside two shabby buses. One was a dirty yellow and the other of a colour that could no longer be distinguished. They were amazingly ancient and dilapidated, like exhibits for a transport museum prior to restoration. Several passengers, who had just got off the train, were climbing into the yellow one, this being in slightly better condition than the other whose driver was dozing in his seat. He looked up at us sleepily as we passed and then nodded off again. I later learned that these vehicles belonged respectively, to the two main hotels in Burgos, the Hotel España and the Hotel Ávila and between them they seemed to operate a kind of taxi service to and from the railway station.

  From the car, bumping its way over the cobbled streets, I gained my first impressions of the place that was to become my new home. There was little traffic at that time of day, just an occasional cart drawn by mules or donkeys. I was surprised to see there were so few cars. The streets were narrow with crumbling buildings on either side rising higgledy-piggledy, clustered closely together. Behind their roofs rose the grey cathedral spires, elaborate and imposing, dominating their surroundings. Everywhere windows were shuttered against the August sun and few people were about at this siesta time.

  A river ran through the town which we crossed by a wide bridge, entering a square empty save for a solitary policeman standing in the centre under a striped sunshade, looking hot and bored. He jumped to attention as we approached and waved us on with exaggerated gestures despite there being no other traffic. From the square we turned into a broad street where the car drew up beside a rather formidable doorway.We climbed out and Anita gave me another hug saying that she had to go but would see me again soon and introduce me to her friends. She tripped away and I was left alone withVázquez.

  “Come,” he said and I followed him through the doorway and up several flights of wide stairs. It seemed very dark, coming in from the street, but deliciously cool.

  “My wife is away at the moment,” said Vázquez, “with the younger children and the nursemaid. They are in Santander holidaying but we shall be joining them there shortly. At present there is no one in the house but my eldest son,Tomasín, and me – and the maid, of course.”

  The flat was large, gloomy and old-fashioned, with ornate furniture and heavy velvet curtains. First, he showed me the living room which was full of ostentatious knick-knacks and gilt clocks ticking away noisily. In one corner stood a large pianola surrounded by spindly, flower-less plants. The rest of the room I could barely distinguish as the blinds were down and my eyes had not had time to adjust after the dazzling brightness outside.

  Next, I followed him down a corridor to a vast dining room containing a long oak table. At the far end of the room was a conservatory filled with more plants and a silent canary perched despondently in a cage suspended from the ceiling.

  I saw a boy standing on the other side of the room. He looked about fourteen, tall and spindly like the plants, and obviously going through an awkward, gawky stage of adolescence. He looked precocious for h
is age and I guessed that, as the eldest son, he was probably used to having his own way.

  While his father and I talked, he stood nearby, lolling against the wall, chewing and staring at me, an insolent smile hovering about his lips.

  “You will give the boy lessons in the morning and in the afternoon,” said my new boss. “He knows some English.We had a girl before.”

  At that moment the maid entered the room to announce that lunch was ready. She was a small, shy girl with a quiet voice and downcast eyes. I noticed that she never looked at her employer and I had the impression that she was rather frightened of him.

  I was longing to have a shower and change my clothes but Vázquez insisted there was no time as the meal was waiting. The three of us sat down at one end of the long table and the maid, whose name was Rosa, bustled backwards and forwards bringing the food and serving us. There was soup strongly flavoured with garlic, then fish, followed by meat and fruit all washed down with a strong, red wine.

  I tucked in trying to ignore the fact that both Vázquez and his son kept staring at me while we ate, but I was hungry after my long journey and nothing was going to spoil my meal.

  When we had finished, I was allowed to retire and Rosa showed me to my room. She explained that there were two bathrooms, one for the servicio (the servants), and another for the señores. I would be allowed to use that of the señores which was through the corridor at the other end of the flat.

  “Have a good rest, señorita. I will bring you coffee later.” So saying she closed the door quietly behind her and I was on my own.

  I looked around the room but could see little as it was so dark. Walking over to the window I half opened the Venetian blinds and the light flooded in casting a pattern of stripes onto the bedspread. I saw that my room was sparsely furnished with a chest of drawers, a small cupboard and a wooden chair. Above the bed an image of the Virgin Mary gazed down at me with doleful, unseeing eyes. Not a happy Madonna this, but a sorrowful one, her arms spread out in a gesture of despair, tears rolling down her cheeks.