The Best and the Worst of Times - FF IV

The fortnight since Fiona came to Guadianaland has been the most

fabulous since we first came here three years ago. The early rains followed by generous sunshine seem to have been perfect, and now with the afternoon temperatures climbing into the high twenties, the hillsides are a riot of wild flowers, and one walks along the riverside path as if in an enchanted garden. The visual impact is reinforced with exquisite scents, laden with orange blossom, while our ears are serenaded with constant birdsong. We especially enjoy the golden orioles, the hoopoes and of course, the nightingales, that fill the air with their glorious song also through the calm and spectacular moonlit nights, even as we sit in our candlelit cabin on the smooth water.

Alcoutim from Sanlucar (and spot the 'Anna M').

There is nowhere better to be for these delights than our mooring, but still we have spent some time at Sanlucar and at Alcoutim, and have been getting to know the 'expat' scene better. Most of them sailed into the river in the first place, then got stuck in 'the Guadiana Glue'; and a very interesting crowd they are. One guy is of Eastern European Jewish stock, whose mother managed to get to England while most of her family was murdered. Another guy had a Dutch mother but a German father, which was no fun at all, growing up in Holland after WWII!

Fiona chatting with Alex.

By and large the British suddenly find themselves very insecure and upset, not having any idea where this crazy Brexit is going, and very angry at finding themselves deprived of the status of members of the European Community, through no will of their own. It appears likely to cost them dearly in terms of reduced pensions, as well as health and driving insurance and so on; they could also find the money they have invested in property severely devalued. For many, this would be their life savings, or they might even have loans on it.
There are also less tangible losses, especially in terms of basic goodwill. After all, they mostly realise that the Spaniards and Portuguese have had to exercise not a little generosity and patience in sharing their countries, even the way things have been until now. One has had this way of coping with problems, as indeed with Gibraltar and Northern Ireland, known as the European Union!

Steve with his log house.

Has the sense of security that my generation enjoyed gone for good? Was it perhaps only a passing moment, an exception to the usual human condition? What steps can we take to remedy the gathering sense of insecurity? Is the retreat into nationalism any kind of rational response? What alternatives are there? We are going to find ourselves increasingly exposed, I think, to that 'Fractal Frontier' of which I have been writing. Have patience while I look back on my life; in the end I think some answers may emerge to the above questions!

PS Since I wrote the above, we have returned to Sherkin. Here's wishing you all a Happy Easter. 

I am looking for crew for the sail north from the Guadiana to Sherkin, or part of it, in late May/early June. There is the possibility of leaving/joining in Galicia.

Fractal Frontier IV

We baby-boomers born just after WWII tend to be regarded as a privileged generation these days. We have indeed enjoyed peace and rising prosperity in Europe, while there are grounds for doubting that these can be sustained in the future. But even though the dark memories were thrust away and on the whole ignored, they coloured our culture with a sense of brokenness in the years when I grew up. They were still only too close. In my family there was additional poignancy because my father was a quarter German himself, and seemed to me to have been particularly scarred by the war, though he hardly ever referred to it. His mother, my grandma, would however talk about Germany quite a lot, and it particular would be at pains to speak of her fond memories of visits to her cousins in Baden-Wurtemberg, of the beautiful culture there and the fun they all had at the wine harvest. There was also French blood in the family.

My father too spoke of his fond memories of his German cousin, and how he had canoed down the Rhine with him in the thirties. He also occasionally spoke of how he had been to a Nazi rally with him, had refused to do the Nazi salute, and been told by that cousin's mother that he must go home to England before he got them into trouble. 'There will be war', she had said sadly; 'they only think of war!' Her son fought all the way through it, Russian front and all, and then killed himself in a motor bike crash soon after he came home.

My Grandma maintained that those southern Germans had little time for the authoritarian and militaristic Prussian Emperor. Her father had left Germany as a draft-dodger at the beginning of the century. He made some money in America, and then went back to Reutlingen, intending to open a baker's shop there, but although this was years after the event, someone reported him as a draft-dodger, and someone else in the Town Hall warned him. He went to London and opened his German shop there. Back in those days, German things were fashionable there. Nobody imagined the catastrophes that were to come. Before they did indeed come, he had done well, but then of course he had to close. He died of a heart-attack in 1916, soon after my father was born.

Grandma had married a thorough-going Englishman, and now of course had to hear how the Huns were the Devil incarnate. She was the only one of my grandparents that I got to know well, and one thing that particularly interested me was that she did not buy into the prevailing myth that the struggle against them had been an archetypal battle between Good (us) and Evil (them). She would make dark remarks about the British not being perfect either. If she was alive now, I think she would be saying that if they put a fraction of the effort that they put into winning the war into building the peace, things would be different indeed. Anyway, it is rare to find an Englishman who can understand that it was no fun for the Germans to suddenly find themselves under threat from East and West, and it was a bit rich of the British to complain that they were out for world domination. Having set about 'ruling the waves', was it really so surprising that others wanted a slice of the action too?

The Astons, my paternal grandfather's family, had been as I make out 'upwardly mobile' lower middle-class Birmingham businessmen, of Baptist and socialist convictions. My great uncle Aston, as I learnt from his diary, had great hopes of the Labour Party. My grandfather was found to be too good at fixing aeroplanes to be sent to fight, and spent the war in Essex doing that. Grandma seems to have found the situation demoralising; at any rate she fell out with him and they were divorced. He died just before I was born. My father had a poor relationship with him, and evidently had a difficult time as Grandma struggled in London, working as bursar for Bertram Mills Circus. She managed however to send him to public school and to put him through Cambridge at Selwyn College.

So Dad was a victim of the 'German problem' before ever WWII came along. At Cambridge he read history and law, flirted with communism, decided then that though he was agnostic, in his words, 'if one was going to be a Christian one may as well do it properly and become a Catholic'. Afterwards he joined the Indian Army, looking for a bit of adventure more than anything else, as far as I make out. He met my mother, whose father was in the tea business in southern India, but they decided there was no future for the British there, and Dad got a job back in England through family in a needle business. There they were a few months, newly married, when my father was called up.

He spent several months kicking around northern France in the ‘phoney war’, but was lucky enough to be sent back to England to do a 'gas course' on Salisbury Plain just when the blitzgrieg came through. Having taken a destroyer back to Cherbourg and a train up towards the front (in a horse box with chevaux 8, hommes 20 written above the door), he was told to forget it and given a party of waifs and strays to shepherd back home the way he had come, because ‘his lot had been wiped out’ by a direct hit on the mess or something; so ironically, he owed his life, and hence I owe mine, to the fear of gas warfare.

He was to describe to me when we sailed back to Cherbourg in his boat, in one of those rare moments when he said anything about the war, their dispirited tramp through the streets, being booed by the French, who were feeling sorely let down. I never discovered until after he had died how his comrades in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment had been in the rear-guard of Dunkirk, and had the misfortune, surrounded and out of ammunition, to have to surrender to an SS unit, who unlike the bulk of the German army took Hitler’s orders to take no prisoners seriously, rounded them up into a barn and massacred them with machine guns and hand grenades. He never mentioned this. Such were the scars he carried in his soul, poor man!

The hope that such things could never happen again were of course eventually invested in that European Community. My father did not forget the humanity of those on the other side in the war, profound though his disgust was at the way they were misled. I would love to hear what he would say about these smarmy soi-disant patriots like Mr Farage! I like to think that my feelings of disgust and sadness at the way they are misleading their countrymen would have been something for us to have in common!