Spain

1988 -- Here we did stay for a while. In the town of Cullera of the Valencia province, my brother and I attended primary school. This was where we learnt Spanish. Damien and I were placed in different year levels -- separated by one grade. This is noteworthy because several years later we were in the same grade and then when back in Australia we ended up two grades apart.

By the time we finished school (about 3 months) we were fluent in Castilian Spanish. During that time we made friends with a lot of local residents, and we got to participate in the fiesta. Damien and I were dressed up in the tradition dress—there are photos as proof of this—then set upon the world. Well, not really. But we looked cute.

Damien and I made many friends at that school. All land-lubbers, we spent time in their houses, and our parents became friendly with theirs also. It wasn't really that harmonious, I have to say. There were some that we were friendlier with than others—my best friend was Teresa. Damien didn't have one … we just hung out with the others and played but they could not have been considered close to us. It was childhood. All in all it was a fun time where we learnt a fair bit about Spanish culture and my parents made friends with whom they continue to swap correspondence with.

One of the families are especially notable—Caroline and her brother Enrique and their family. They weren't close to us the children but their parents were with ours and so we were often thrust together. We were a few years apart and at that age a few years may as well be a few centuries.

Damien got lost in Cullera once, when ma, Damien and I went to the local supermarket called Mercadona. Think of it as the Spanish equivalent of Woolies. Somehow Damien was separated from us. Ma was to my eyes rather unconcerned—looked around for him a bit and then gave up, returning to the yacht. I was the one that worried, asking my mother if we should return and look for him. She said no, and that Damien would eventually get back to the yacht under his own steam. She was right. Damien tells me—asked him right then—that some guy a few years older threatened him with bodily harm for no reason at all, saying "Remember me? You were being smart to me the other day" in the classic confrontational way that young brainless (and not so young) males have. Damien backed down (what's a young boy of 6 to do?) and took off.

In Cullera we acquired our first and second cats. The first was a little ginger thing; a kitten almost. Not that I remember quite how we got him, but he was a scrap of a thing and dead scared of both Damien and myself. We were incredibly cruel to it; pulled its tail and bent it so that the vertebra was scarred (maybe even broke it, but somehow I don't think so). The little ginger fella was so afraid of us that whenever he heard us coming he'd run and hide. One spot he hid in was under the unused kitchen sink, and it would take us forever to get him out again as we'd have to pull out the tins of food and the like. He urinated and defecated in there a few times, much to our parent's disgust. He was lost while we were there, too. We think, and I stress "think", that he climbed up into a car's engine for warmth and was taken away when the car left. He was prone to doing things like that. Either he was too far away to come back or he was chewed up by the moving parts … though I prefer to believe the former.

Our second cat was also gotten in Cullera, though this one lasted a bit longer. Not too long after the ginger disappeared, we found Gatico Bonico (Valenciano for 'pretty cat'; Valenciano being a language similar to Spanish). Coming home from school one day, we passed the small dump and he was there. A tabby, but you wouldn't know it from the state he was in. Half his fur was gone and he was splotchy; we assume it was from some kind of chemical that the local children put on him. Damien and I felt sorry for him and brought him home, where he got better on a healthier diet. We kept that cat for years until we got to Martinique in the Caribbean. He'd have the most cutest way of moving with the way the yacht was bobbing. He'd stay standing but moving slightly to right himself as the yacht tilted. Another thing the cat would do was go up on deck to look for flying fish that stranded themselves on deck. At first we were worried that the cat would be swept overboard, but as time went by that anxiety faded.

But once Martinique came, we knew that we'd have to give the cat away before coming to Australia. That is the supposed reason for giving the cat away, but my parents decided then to give him to a fisherman that lived on an island near Martinique. Ma cried more than Damien or I about the cat leaving—in fact, we didn't cry at all. It was a sort of 'oh, we don't have a cat anymore' and that was the last we thought about it. Just a tad callous considering how long we had the moggie.

Travelling down the coast, we saw not very much, but Cullera is what springs to mind when I think of Spain. A lot happened there; some stuff I don't think I will share here, happy, sad. It was a large chunk of my life for a while, and certainly my time there taught me a lot.