People often ask about how the old place is doing and whatever happened to so-and-so. Perhaps they spent a year in Mojácar on the piss when they were twenty-three back in 1971 and they have somehow made contact with one of the few remaining survivors from that time that still live here. That would most likely be me – I was a kid then.
Most of us died from too much booze, consumed for too long. Every night there were endless parties as, really, there was little else to do. No television, few English books, probably no contacts or friends outside the tiny émigré circle.
We were in Spain, yet we missed almost everything that this fine country had to offer. Perhaps we managed a few trips down to Torremolinos or Gibraltar (via Tangiers for much of the seventies), or a drive to Granada to ski in the Sierra Nevada or to wander unescorted around the Alhambra.
Almeria City was almost unknown (and rightfully so – it’s a dump), but we would sometimes mix with the spaghetti-actors in the faded luxury of the Gran Hotel, drinking vodkas and smoking Ducados.
No one ever went back to the UK if they could avoid it.
So, how is the old place now, thirty or forty years on? Well, first to say – most of those great characters of our youth, the ones that stayed up all night, that broke the jail door, that drove repeatedly off the cliff without any lasting damage, the ones who would swap a painting for a month or two of board and lodging and the house-sitters that would clean out the drinks cabinet (except for the banana brandy) when we went down to Gibraltar to change money; they are all dead. The queer pied-noir cook, the drunken Shakespeare actor, the plumy air vice-marshal, the cockney barrow boy, the Swedish trollop (who slept with everybody except me – I was, she said, too young), the ballet dancer from the French resistance… all of them have passed on.
As for Mojácar, I think it has stood pretty well against the last four decades. The pueblo hasn’t changed much, although it looks a little cleaner and a bit fuller. The beach, where my parents laughed at the chance of buying land at one peseta per ten square metres, has now upped its value significantly. Doesn’t matter, don’t go there.
The surrounding towns have become more recently taken over by the British. The identity of some villages such as Bédar has changed completely. From a small ‘Andalucian white village’ with the population of ex-miners gently dying of old age salted with a tiny number of hippies experimenting with lysergic acid and cheap brandy while dining erratically on lentil soup, the town today has morphed into an over-restored core surrounded by a large suburb of British-owned houses. In the interior of the province, there are still no hotels, so there’s not much tourism. All those people you see having lunch in the town restaurant, just like we used to all those years before, why, they are all residents.
In Zurgena, a small town in the hills, which used to be a railhead up until the mid-seventies, there is now an English councilman in the town hall. Like Mojácar, the proportion of foreigners to locals is high. Mojácar is said to be 53% foreign (by which we more-or-less mean ‘British’) and that’s only counting the ‘registered’ ones. Bédar, Albox, Turre, Zurgena and other towns are going the same way.
My dad, together with some drunken buddies, made their way up to Zurgena once, about thirty-five years ago. Beer was a penny a glass and a decent double-tot brandy cost the same. ‘Say,’ said my father to the slightly harassed looking barman, ‘whadaya do for fun around here?’ The barman answered ‘there’s not much action in this town; you should try a place down on the coast. It’d be perfect for your sort. It’s called Mojácar’.
So when they return after a lifetime away, having cut short or just plain lost their hair and after working in a bank for thirty years, or becoming a captain of industry or a teacher or a hotelier in Fez or a cineaste or even a graphics computer designer for the BBC, I tell them that Mojácar hasn’t changed a bit; but if they should want to remember old times, then to take a walk around our beautiful cemetery. There are some great memories there.
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