Ghosts of Spain (34 page)

Socialisation has remained an obsession for our children’s teachers. In the first years of infant school, the teachers seem to care more about ‘
formando
el grupo
’, ‘forming the group’, than, for example, maths. Reading is good, but can be viewed as a
suspiciously
solitary occupation. A child who seeks only their own company is deemed strange. They may find themselves up before that figure who looms large, the school psychologist. There is no white coat here, but there might as well be. Most parents meekly accept their judgements in the same way they obey their doctors.

One thing none of my children’s friends belong to is something that could, in any way, be described as a large family. Running through my mind, I can, indeed, think of only two or three who have more than one sibling. The huge families of the past, beloved by the Franco regime and its Catholic sponsors, are just that – of the past. Three siblings walking down the street in a chain are a strange, remarkable sight. Officially this is a
familia numerosa
, with special welfare and education rights. Have four, and people will immediately suspect you belong to Opus Dei – the ultra-strict, mysterious Catholic group who many Spaniards see, as they once saw freemasons, lurking secretly in the shadows of power.

Some of my children’s friends’ parents, however, can tell you what it was like to be one of six, seven, eight or twelve brothers and sisters. These were encouraged by Franco, who saw the
number
of families with four or more children rise from 116,000 to more than a quarter of a million during his period in power. The general verdict seems to be that it was not so wonderful to be lost amongst so many siblings.

If life has been getting better continuously, and rapidly, for Spaniards over the past three decades, one type of Spaniard has done even better than the rest. That Spaniard is a child. The
imperious
little princes and princesses of the, now typical, one or two child Spanish family are a wonder to behold. The centre of
attention
of parents, grandparents, neighbours, aunts, uncles and an endless list of admirers, their life is as golden as it can get. They issue instructions to adults in loud voices. A cry of ‘
¡Agua!
’, and water is brought. ‘
¡Galletas!
’ and biscuits appear. ‘
¡Cola Cao!
’
and
the chocolate drink that appears at almost any time of the day is brought out. ‘
¡Quiero ver la tele!
’ and the television is switched on. There are, of course, many exceptions but it seems that childhood is often an obligation-free experience. Adults tidy toys. Adults get food. Adults are there, in short, to serve. One of the Spanish words for spoil,
mimar
, hints at the idea that this may not be such a
terrible
thing. It also means to pet, coddle or pamper.

This is not to say that Spanish children lack manners, just that they have a different concept of them. Place a piece of chocolate cake in front of them and they will stare at it blankly until you have provided a spoon or fork to eat it with. Like their parents, they would not want to dirty their hands. In fact, like their parents again, they are acutely aware of cleanliness and tidiness – even if they may be blissfully unaware of how the latter is achieved. My office at home, for example, is an object of awe for some of the visiting six-year-olds. Piled high with newspapers, magazines and books, chaos and mess are an inherent part of its life. It is a very homely sort of a mess. One regular visitor, however, had
obviously
never seen anything like it in his six years of life. ‘
¿Qué ha pasado aquí?
’, ‘What happened here?’ he asked in a shocked, high-pitched voice on one visit. ‘
¿Quién ha sido?
’, ‘Who did this?’ he asked on another. When I gave the office a massive spring clean, I invited him in. There was no comment. Normality had obviously been achieved.

Spanish visitors to Britain are often shocked by what they see. No showers, carpets on bathroom floors – a sure-fire focus for infection-bearing germs – and untidy clutter are alien and
worrying
characteristics. Spain, after all, must have a per capita
consumption
of bleach – applied daily to tiled floors and liberally sloshed around bathrooms and kitchens – that is amongst the highest on the planet. One playground discussion at our school saw a mother regretting having put wooden skirting boards, rather than a row of easily bleach-cleaned tiles, into her
apartment
. The problem, she explained, was the fluff that got stuck behind it. ‘There is only one way to get it out,’ she complained. ‘You have to use toothpicks.’

Her children, however, were unlikely to be wielding the
toothpicks
. Spanish children already watch as much television, and suffer from nearly as much obesity, as those arch juvenile couch potatoes – their British and American counterparts. But what, in Britain and the US, is laziness is, in Spain, indulgence. If
prohibition
, saying ‘no’ to someone, is already broadly unacceptable when that someone is an adult, then it is doubly so if they are a child.

This is not, however, without its benefits. This was driven home to me one day, on a return visit to Britain, in a Devon pub. The landlord not only refused our infant children entry but, as we ate his wretched food in a light drizzle in the pub garden, he stood in his doorway and regaled us with stories about why pubs were better without kids. The sign outside his door, ‘no dogs, no
children
’, just about summed up the status of British children and, by association, their parents.

Whereas small children turn British parents into social lepers, they elevate Spanish parents into privileged human beings. You, the parent, have achieved a sublime status. You have created your own family and your reward is to have some of the absolute indulgence shown to your children rub off, also, on you. In restaurants, for example, rather than be shown the door or taken off to a ‘families only’ quarantine zone, you find the waiters’ attention and efforts doubling. There will be crayons, colouring books and delicacies for the kids. And when your child
karate-chops
his glass of
mosto
, sweet grape juice, onto the tiled floor, the waiter appears not just with a mop, but with a smile and a new, full glass. If the children then choose to roll around the floor practising infant all-in wrestling, well that is just a sign of robust, endearing good health. Other diners are likely to agree.

My own children have grown up crawling over bar tops, being manhandled by waiters – even, in one regular watering hole, encouraged by the owner to pound away at the till to make it go ‘ping’ and send the money-drawer shooting out. How could one explain the ‘no children’ rule to Jesús, the owner? And what would one say to a stranger who wandered in and exclaimed, as he
helped one of my muddy-footed boys walk up and down his suited trouser leg: ‘Aren’t children wonderful?’

You have to accept, of course, that your children are in some way public property. A father out on his own with a baby on a winter’s day will, almost inevitably, be told by some busybody grandmother that he has not wrapped the child up well enough. Strange men not only expect to be able to talk to your children, they may want to touch them too.

In
Prospect
magazine, Bella Thomas told the story of an elderly Spanish man, resident in Britain, who had spontaneously befriended some children on a Surrey high street. A cheek was pinched here, some hair ruffled there. This is standard,
affectionate
behaviour in Spain. The dynamics of what is a simple, virtuous circle are easy – and should be unnecessary – to explain: the elderly man is indulgent to the children; the children bask in his
admiration
; and the man goes away with a warm glow, feeling he has done a good thing. In Britain, the police were called. The old man was taken to a police station and made to explain himself. Not surprisingly, unable to understand a world where male strangers are suspected paedophiles and single women are potential
baby-snatchers
, he decided to move back to Spain.

There is a central enigma to the way Spaniards bring up their children, which I have never been able to solve. How is it that the spoiled, rude under-tens later turn into such polite, agreeable and self-confident teenagers? The surly adolescent is a relatively rare sight in Spain. Teenagers may grumble about their parents, but they do not go for full-out generational hatred. Teenage rebellion, in fact, seems virtually non-existent. Spanish teenagers, when polled, have no trouble pointing out that family is the most important thing in their lives.

If a Spanish childhood is such an indulged, golden thing, then it is no surprise that young Spaniards should try to stretch this stage of their lives out. What it does not explain, however, is why so many of them are determined to stay living with
mamá
and
papá
for as long as possible. Most remain at home into the second part of their twenties. A significant number are still there after
their thirtieth birthday. It is difficult to decide whether it is
Spanish
parents who do not want their children to grow up, or young Spaniards who dislike the idea of becoming independent adults.

As Spain progresses, socially and economically, at a dizzying rate, one might expect all this to be changing. But the figures show that, rather than move out earlier, Spanish children are now staying even longer at their parents’ home. In 1990 a quarter of twenty-six- to twenty-nine-year-olds were living at home. Within a decade that figure had risen to a half. Women leave slightly earlier than young men, presumably because they know how to cook and do their own laundry. By 2000, 50 per cent of men were still living with their parents at the age of twenty-nine. New figures suggesting a fall in the age at which people leave home are, I suspect, largely a reflection of the fact that many immigrants are in this age group.

Young men and young women remain at home, if they can, until they are forced out by circumstance – often by marriage. Personal, and unscientific, observation makes me think that the higher up the class scale, the more likely they are to stay. It takes a job in the US, Paris or London to prise young merchant bankers, doctors or engineers from the parental home. The bigger the apartment or house is, after all, the more facilities it offers. It is those squashed into the tiny flats in Madrid’s working-class
suburbs
who are most keen to find their own place.

Even legally, it seems, a Spanish childhood can last well into a person’s twenties. Occasionally, reminders come from the
newspapers
. Barcelona’s
La Vanguardia
, for example, informed me one day that a judge had ordered a divorced man to pay his ex-wife 225 euros a month to cover his twenty-five-year-old son’s upkeep while he did postgraduate studies. The judge ruled that the son was ‘not at such an advanced age for finishing his academic
studies
’ and had ‘not yet gained his own financial independence’. Another case saw a fireman from Lleida forced to pay similar upkeep for a twenty-seven-year-old who had still not managed to finish his degree. ‘When is a father allowed to stop supporting his children?’ he asked.

Young Spaniards complain that a lack of jobs, cheap housing and
university grants are to blame for this situation. But, with Spaniards getting wealthier at such a dizzying rate and new jobs attracting millions of immigrants, that does not wash. The truth is that most only leave their parent’s home when they think they can move into something as good, or better. One betrothed couple, a television cameraman and production assistant from Barcelona, proudly announced to me one day that they had bought themselves a
car-parking
space near the apartment they were buying together. The apartment had, like many of those that spring up around Spain’s cities, been bought on an architect’s plan, but they had put down a deposit and were already paying a mortgage. It would take several years for the building that houses it to go up. In the meanwhile, it was more important for them to secure, for several thousand euros, a spot to put their car when they got there, than to pay for a rented flat away from their parents.

Some desperate parents have gone to court to evict children in a bid for what has been billed ‘parental emancipation’. María and Mariano Giménez convinced a judge in Zaragoza that their two sons, twenty and eighteen, had forfeited the right to live at home by treating them abusively. The couple’s lawyer warned, however, that eviction was not generally an option. ‘The law establishes that the parents’ obligation to feed and house can only be suppressed under extreme circumstances,’ he said. That obligation only disappeared when a child moved out or started earning their own money, he explained. (The state, which has never been generous with
unemployment
pay, also benefits from this system whenever recession strikes. The young unemployed usually have someone to look after them.) Children’s rights over their parents do, in fact, continue until these are in the grave. A Spanish parent may not write
children
out of their will. A rule known as the
legítima
establishes that children are
herederos forzosos
, ‘forced inheritors’ – automatically sharing out a large part of the estate when the last parent dies.

Again, however, there is an upside to this endless Spanish
childhood
. Young Spaniards also stay at home because they either love, like or tolerate their parents. A recent poll, in which even Spanish researchers defined ‘young people’ as being anything between
fifteen and twenty-nine years old, saw 96 per cent state that they were happy with their families. The feelings are, obviously,
reciprocated
. The children are protected from the sometimes brutal rites of passage of eighteen-year-olds in other countries, where they are forced to fend for themselves in some alien or new
environment
. Most will remain close to their parents even when they do move out. Those still lucky enough to enjoy two-hour lunch breaks may turn up for lunch several times a week. And their
children
, too, will come to see their grandparents as a natural, and close, part of their family.