In 1980, I invited two Lagarteran women, Magdalena and Amada, to spend a few weeks in England. Here they talk about their impressions of the country and the English. They got on well with my mother. As they are very expressive, communication was quite easy, despite language barriers. My mother had also grown up in a small town, so she understood the constraints imposed by small town gossip. She grew up in a strict family that paid for her university studies, like many Lagarterans. They also got along well with my stepfather, an open, affectionate and organised man. Although he went out to work and my mother didn’t, he liked to do the dishes after meals, which impressed the two Lagarterans.
Amada and Magdalena with my stepdad
In Bristol, they met other English people, almost all from a university, city environment, where young people had economic freedom because of grants for those who had few resources, or who wanted to study for a doctorate. Their values were ‘liberal’ in the sense of valuing individual freedom.
Magdalena had already worked in Lloret de Mar, as a waitress, so she had already met young English people who came to Spain for a fortnight of sun, cheap booze, and opportunities for ‘romance’. She said: ”When they come here on holiday they’re very rude. The older ones are posh, they behave beautifully, they change their clothes for every meal and they behave well, but the youngsters are terrible. They’re very rowdy, they get drunk, ”if I feel like throwing my bacon into the pool, then I’ll do it”. I’ve seen English youngsters when we used to get up for work who came in drunk, and they didn’t even know where the hotel was, because they were so drunk”.
Magdalena had also met English pensioners. The cleaning ladies told me that they left their rooms clean, and never complained about the food in the hotel, no matter how bad it was. In contrast, for Amada, it was her first encounter with ‘northern barbarians’.
All three of us went sightseeing. They insisted on going to Oxford, and we went to Bath and London. We laughed a lot, as you can see in the photos. Here, they talk about their adventures.
At the Roman Baths, Bath
Amada: At that time the choir was going to the Canary Islands, which was also very attractive, but we said, we can’t miss this chance to go to England.
Magdalena: We had to choose, either England or the Canary Islands, and we chose England, though we didn’t know what it would be like.
Amada: Can you imagine three weeks in England? Letting our hair down!
Magdalena: Alison thought I was going to behave very quietly there, but I went there and behaved just as I did in Lagartera.
Amada: We were on a double-decker bus, and at the front, there’s a hole with the windows like this, concave, so that the driver can see upstairs, and we could see the driver downstairs
Magdalena: ”Woooh…. Woooh”, I said to the driver. We’d go past the first floor, then upstairs and then I’d look down at the driver and. say ”Woooh…Woooh”.
Amada: We had a really good time!
Waiting for the bus
Amada: When we arrived at London airport we had a setback. I had an address to go to and Magdalena had a different one, but we said we were going to the same place. The immigration officials made a big fuss, and they wouldn’t let us in.
Magdalena: They wouldn’t let her in. They let me in. Because that woman (Alison) got the addresses wrong. (One had Alison’s address, the other had her parents’ address, where they were going first.) On the boarding passes she had an address where she was going to live and I had another and we didn’t know they were different. We both said we were going to her house, and the men said that was impossible, because you have one address and she has another.
But are you coming here to work?
‘Me? I holiday, holiday. Why would I want to come here to work? ‘
Amada: The natives went in one queue and the aliens in another.
Magdalena: You got one man and I got another.
Amada: And what did you say? ”Come on, I’m with you.” And why did you have to say that you were with me, if we didn’t have the same address?
We had to show them our money, I had quite a lot because my friends had given me money to buy a skirt, or whatever… Well, our luggage was going round and round on the belt, just our two bags, the ‘elephant’ (Magdalena’s big bag) and my bag because this was happening at the counters near the belt. All the other luggage had gone, the other passengers had left and the two of us were alone there, with no way through. And our bags were going round and round, which by the way, if they’d opened them… as we’d brought chorizo, ham… they’d have confiscated the food.
Magdalena: We were carrying everything, tins of tuna, because we wanted to make salad, potato omelette…
Amada: So, finally, until Alison’s parents called us, they wouldn’t let us go. And the bags were more tired than we were And when I saw Alison I said, ‘let’s see, you first came to Spain with very little money’, she told us, ‘in Franco´s time, and he was meant to be a bad person, and I’d brought more than a hundred thousand pesetas and these guys wouldn’t let me through’.
Magdalena: And some people say that Franco was bad… ‘‘You’re hitlerianos, hitlerianos”, Amada called them ”hitlerianos”, hahaha.
Amada: Alison’s parents drove us from the airport to their house in Ascot.
After we got in the car, which was a white Jaguar,
Magdalena: Oooh, shut up!
Amada: we had chocolate for the road, we were eating chocolate in the car and, of course, as they drive on the left…
Magdalena: At night, the cars were coming towards us… it’s going to crash into us… and all of a sudden, wham, it passed us and then another one came, I said, this one will hit us… and it also went past us. and then it clicked; we must be stupid, they drive on the other side of the road here.
In Alison’s parents’ living room
Amada: We arrived at her parents’ house, a bungalow, lots of wood, white on the outside, painted all white, with lots of glass, you know they like the light there.
Magdalena: Back porch, very nice, big, beautiful garden.
Amada: It had a vegetable garden. A lad who tended the garden, a boy of eighteen, twenty years old, who was at university and earning some extra money. And he wore an earring. Everything was new for us!
I was already thirty or thirty-one years old. You weren’t thirty yet, but here, in Lagartera, we were very young, very innocent. Magdalena had seen Lloret.
It was October 1980, and in England there were already youngsters with their hair in crests, and wearing safety pins . And we weren’t meant to stare. How could we not stare at them!
Magdalena: We weren’t meant to stare, but what could we do? And Amada said, ‘’Look at all the friends that Marisol (1) has here, friends that she doesn’t know about”.
Amada: And the boys with shaven heads, which at first I thought was because they’d had an operation, so they’d been shaved for surgery, but then we saw more of them and I said, no, there can’t be that many operations, this has to be a fashion. And look, today we have this fashion in Spain.
Taking the dog for a walk
Magdalena: Her parents’ dog was called Whisky, and he took our chorizo sausages that we had hanging on the porch to dry. We went there in the morning and there were no sausages. I said, ”Where does the dog keep his treasures when he hides them?” There they were, he hadn’t eaten them, he didn’t know what they were. He’d taken them to his hiding place. And, we still ate them, eh.
English food was terrible, I only liked what your mother served us. Her ham with mushrooms was delicious. The second time I went to England I ate well, but the first time, it was terrible, everything was bad, there was nothing good. What I did adapt to was the bread. It was brown, but I quickly got used to the bread. I liked it. It was black, it was, bah, but I liked the bread. And the Christmas pudding that your mother gave me one day, which was very special there, with cream, I didn’t know how I was supposed to eat it. I ate the cream and the dog was next to me, so I gave it to the dog. The dog liked it more than I did. The food tasted strange to me.
Amada: The food outside your home was strange. It was all self service, that’s also true, you put your own food on your plate. We also ate at Bristol airport, Bristol, where the famous bridge is. I said to the man behind the counter, look, you don’t have any bread from the Canos’ bakery, or crunchy rashers.
Magdalena: The second time I went to England, I ate quite well, because I discovered fish and chips. I didn’t want any sauce, no, no sauce at all, because you had a good plate of fish and chips and it was a wonderful dinner. We would eat and have breakfast at almost four in the afternoon. We had breakfast and lunch at the same time. I really liked the English breakfast, it was always bacon, eggs and potatoes. I would ask for it at midday and people would say no, you don’t eat breakfast at this time, so I said, ”but if that’s what I like, what difference does it make?”. They gave me that and that was what I wanted. Even if it was at four in the afternoon. It’s just that it was good, I didn’t care that it was seen as breakfast meal.
Amada: Alison’s dad, I mean, her mum’s partner, took us to a supermarket and he bought wine, though it was very expensive. Things that we liked cost a lot. And her mother, I thought, I’ll stay with this woman and I’ll learn English perfectly, because she wanted me to stay, and help her set up a restaurant. She wanted me to stay to make the restaurant look nice. I mean, if I’d stayed I would have learned the language.
How does it taste?
Amada: Alison’s stepdad took us to Windsor Castle, where they change the crockery every month. And the ducks ring the bell with a rope at twenty past four.
Magdalena: It was beautiful. We were gobsmacked that the ducks rang the bell at twenty past four to be fed. And the ducks rang the bell!
Amada: He also took us shopping. We wanted to buy things and we managed it, we understood one other. We bought some pottery.
Magdalena: There was a ceramic jug in a second-hand shop, … two pounds, ”one pound for me, two pounds for you”, we haggled like that, Indian style, but we understood one another. and he gave us a discount, you bet he did, he dropped the price.
Amada: There were sneakers, filthy dirty in a shop window, and who was going to buy something so disgusting?
Magdalena: Well, people there do buy second hand clothes. I bought a parka there, because I was wearing Jorge’s, which his mum had given us to take to him. And as it was very cold, I wore it, but as soon as I saw one in a second-hand shop, wham, I bought it. It was nice to buy things there. We discovered second-hand shops, which we didn’t have here in Spain, and I was very impressed by them. And of course, you could buy things cheaply. Then there were normal shops, good shops, they were expensive, but they had good things for sale. It was a totally different world.
Shopping
Amada: After Ascot, we went to Alison’s flat in Bristol. She shared a flat with two other students, a lad, Peter, and a girl. They each had their own room, and shared the kitchen, bathroom, and living/dining room.
Magdalena: The lad who shared the flat with her was studying birds. He’d been studying birds for three years. I said, ”Look tweet tweet” I said ”there’s no need to study this, the men who work in the countryside in our village know what the birds are saying. ‘Agoquí, agoquí’, means water, rain is coming. And ‘chichipan, chichipan’, means good weather and plenty of food.” Three years studying something that men from in my village know from everyday life. (2)
And people were given grants to study all sorts of nonsense, and they lived off their grants.
When we went there, to her house, we slept in the living room. The first thing we had to do was a general clean up. We found a comb, and someone said, ”Oh, I’ve been looking for that for three months”.
Amada: There was a climbing plant in the window and it had grown downwards. It had taken root in the carpet. I said ”Bring me a pair of scissors and I’ll prune it.‘’
‘’Peter will be annoyed, as it’s his plant”
”So, let him get angry” It was very tall too. And I pruned the plant and then you could see around it, and the comb appeared.
The cooker was never cleaned. They jokingly said that when it was impossible, they’d buy another one. We raised our hands in horror. It was a beautiful cooker, it was a gas cooker, with a very nice grill. And they said that when it got so dirty, that you couldn’t bear to look at it, they’d buy another one.
Magdalena: And the fridge, there were three shelves, each flatmate had their own shelf, and you couldn’t touch someone else’s shelf. There was a thing with hair growing it, and it stayed there. It was a cake. When we arrived, I said, ”Throw this cake away, it’s gone bad.”
Oops, it was someone else’s so you couldn’t touch it.
At Alison’s house, we slept on a very old sofa-bed. One corner rested on a car battery. The English drink a lot of tea, and we weren’t used to that, so we couldn’t lie still and sleep. We were bouncing around. As we were moving so much, the sofa bed collapsed, and we ended up on the floor. So, from that night on, we went to sleep at Alison’s supervisor’s house. She and her family lived close by. So we slept two nights in Alison’s flat, and then we went to Jackie’s house, her supervisor’s house. It was a proper house, well organised, a tall, terraced town house with large rooms and a beautiful attic.
In Jackie and Will’s kitchen
Jackie had a permanent position at the university, and her partner, Will, only worked a few hours a week as a lecturer. She was very organised, while he was quieter and was happy to do the housework, cooking, cleaning, even changing nappies for their daughter. Will was a good cook. One day he made us a dish with baked sea bream that I loved.
We were also lucky that there was an Italian shop near their house, and Italians understand food the way we do. So we bought potatoes and eggs there, and we made a potato omelette and a Russian salad.
Amada: In England, women exploited men. They did it very well. The men swept, and mopped the floors, they did everything. And maybe the woman looked after their child. I thought, women are really good at exploiting men here. Men even changed nappies. They would change a nappy if the baby pooped. The man would get up to do this, while his partner stayed sitting talking to us.
We were there one day, and Will’s son from his first marriage came in. He was about eighteen, nineteen. He was with his girlfriend, and they went to his room. She seemed very young to us to be spending the night with a boy. That’s when it came up in conversation that we were virgins. The people there didn’t believe us. I said, ‘Look, let’s go to a hospital right now and we can prove it’.
Another thing that struck us as odd, when we were in Bristol, with your teachers. They said we were going to go to a pub. I asked about the different types of bars, like taverns, like the Cabila (3) in Lagartera? They said there weren’t any taverns. And in Lagartera, we had bars called ‘pubs’, like Lord Hamilton’s pub.
And when we went to a pub at night in Bristol, we were told that children couldn’t go into the pub, though dogs could. So people went to the pub with their dogs while the children stayed at home, with one parent staying at home looking after the child. We went to the pub, and after a while, one parent would leave to allow the other parent to join us. All of that was new for us.
Pubs were also divided into lounge and public bars. The lounge bars were more expensive and the public bars were cheaper, and had basic seating, while the lounge bars had more comfortable seats. That was also new for us.
And you could go out when it was dark and freezing cold in the street and there wasn’t a bar open, not a pub open, because they weren’t open at half past four. They didn’t open until half past six, and at half past ten they closed. At twenty past ten, they had a little bell, they rang the bell and we noticed that there were clients who lined up three or four drinks at the same time and in the twenty minutes left, they were going to drink them all.
Magdalena: When they rang the bell, you had to ask for whatever you wanted because after half an hour they wouldn’t serve you any more and you had to leave.
Amada: I asked for a tonic one night and they brought me a glass of tonic as if it were a glass of wine, my oh my!.
Magdalena: Another day you asked for a wine. I told you not to order wine there, as it was very expensive; a sherry, I mean, that’s going to be expensive, order something else. I asked for a whisky, it was very commonplace there, but a glass of that was very expensive, and then you started to ask for it too … I asked for a whisky and coke and they gave me a good glass of it.
And when we went to a disco, a black guy grabbed your bum. He said ”Sorry, sorry, sorry.” He touched you and that was that. And remember, there was a woman who was interested in me, do you remember? I wondered what she was after ”Can’t you see I’ve got tits?”. When I went to the ladies, I saw her and I thought, ”I’m getting out of here, this woman might grope me; gosh, she must be a lesbian and she fancies me!”.
At the rugby match
Magdalena: We also went to see a rugby match. I’d never seen one before and I wanted to see it. I’d seen it in the movies and I wanted to see a live match.
Jackie’s dad was a sports commentator so we got some tickets. That day we had lunch and dinner at seven o’clock in the evening, we had both meals at the same time. I liked the match very much, the stands were very good, I loved it. And that day we had a very good dinner. They made us a cream of tomato soup and a nice baked skipjack tuna, a tuna! I ate really well that day because Jackie´s dad was invited, but in the end he couldn’t come because he had an interview, but we dined very well that night.
Amada, Magdalena and Diana
Amada: While we were in Bristol, we went to see Alison’s boyfriend’s sister. She worked as a civil servant in the Ministry of Labour. She was married to a musician who taught in schools, and they had a son. Then we went to her workplace, because there was a colleague who was learning to play the lute, and he wanted to meet me because I understood music.
Amada with the lute
We also went to Bath, a very elegant city near Bristol, where there were good shops, and Roman baths.
Another day, we were in the canteen at Oxford University. I loved it, seeing everyone in capes. And the bicycles, they go about town like that, with their gowns on, like we see in the movies. They’re very traditional, they still do that today.
Amada: When we came back to the train station in Oxford, well, you always have to give the ticket back, you can’t keep it, you have to give it back to the collector, so you don’t throw it in the street or anything. And I was grumbling that it was a pain to hear nothing but English, and the ticket collector said, ”What’s up, what’s up with these Spaniards?” He was Spanish, so he understood me.
Magdalena, Amada and Alison in a train (The photo of Alison is by Amada)
Amada: When we went to London, we couldn’t go into the Tower because there was a bomb scare. We went to Downing Street, where Thatcher lived.
Magdalena: And she asked the policemen on duty to let her try on their helmets. And ”No way!”, they said, ”Not the helmet”.
”If you let me wear a helmet, we’ll dress Thatcher up in our traditional Lagarteran costume.” Thatcher was prime minister then.
They wouldn’t let us wear their helmets.
Amada: It was an unforgettable trip.
We’re on holiday!
Amada Lozano, Magdalena Iglesias and Alison Lever. Lagartera, Toledo, March 2025.
Photos by Alison Lever, except for Alison on a train which was taken by Amada
1) A ‘modern’ girl from Lagartera.
2) My flatmate’s study was published in 1980. It was about communication in general, especially ‘non tweeting communication’ (gestures and other forms of body language) in a species of bird found in Africa. They tell one other where there is food. Their success causes problems for humans who see the birds as pests as they can devour a lot of the harvest.
Back then, I was also living on a grant to study the modern history, economic changes, and the role of women in Lagartera. Now it is much more difficult to get funding for a PhD thesis.
3) La Cabila was a Lagarteran tavern. In Lagartera at that time, there were ‘pubs’ that imitated the ‘pubs’ in the tourist areas, for example the ‘Pub Lord Hamilton’. They didn’t look much like English pubs, for example, you couldn’t see daylight. The normal drinking establishments in Lagartera were the bars, where you could also have a coffee and breakfast. They were not as geared to alcohol as were English pubs. On Sundays after mass, married women and children would go to the bars to socialise.