17. Departure and Hindsight

Galiciana's newspaper archive is not a good source of local news for the year 1965 because its digital files, where Ferrol is concerned, are either sparse (eg. no Ferrol-based newspaper) or spoiled (unreadable).

However a fair-enough picture of what Ferrol was like between 1954 and 1964 has already been given. Every reader should of course bear in mind that there was no freedom of expression. Press censorship was enforced strictly and any dissent or veiled criticism had to be couched in terms acceptable to the dictatorship; consequently a mindful reader must read between the lines and extrapolate any "bad news" that did get published.

Even the government admitted that Spain was an underdeveloped country. For a long time the official excuse was that the widespread poverty and hushed hunger were the fault of the "Reds"; the "Reds" had drained the Central Bank of its gold reserves during the Spanish Civil War and sent the bullion to the Soviet Union in exchange for armaments. This was a tacit admission that Spain would not be able to pull itself up by its own bootstraps and that salvation had to come from abroad. Eventually it did. Spain's membership in the European Union, the influx of expatriots' money and American aid, to a lesser extent, finally yanked Spain out of the medieval mud pit it wallowed in for many years following the end of the Spanish Civil War.

In addition the official excuse that widespread poverty and hunger were the fault of the "Reds" begged the question: why had Spain been equally backward when the Central Bank's gold reserves had lain intact and the "Reds" had not yet come to power? For in late July 1913 a capitalist Russian journal, Promyshlennost i Torgovlya (Industry and Trade), deplored that Tsarist Russia's index of economic development rubbed elbows with Spain's,

Our industrial and commercial satraps declare that "it is at first glance paradoxical" for Russia to be among the great and advanced powers as far as her output of iron, oil and a number of other items is concerned, while her level of per capita consumption (i.e., the total amount of important items produced per head of the population) "makes her the neighbour of Spain," one of the most backward countries.

(V.I. Lenin: "How can per capita consumption in Russia be increased?" in Works, 19, pp. 292-294. First published August 3, 1913)

The year 1965 was for Spain similar to the previous two. The general standard of living continued rising slowly. The government devalued the currency periodically, so the wiser households took to buying goods like home appliances on credit.

September 1965 was traumatic for me, a sinkhole you never again want to parachute down into. The changeover to British culture, the England which Spanish textbooks taught us to always remember as La Pérfida Albión (Perfidious Albion), the changeover to an unfamiliar language and to a novel school system was particularly deleterious. Hardly off the boat I was arbitrarily put three years back academically. In the batting of an eye I became a twelve-year-old grade-fiver and no one seemed to care either at home or in the school except for my Grade 5 homeroom teacher who provided additional assistance with the English language and encouraged me. He did this after school hours many afternoons on unpaid time. Furthermore he catapulted me into the sixth grade halfway through the 1965-66 Canadian school year. Now I lagged two years behind the pack. Thank you very much, Mr. Ciuffo, wherever you are!

A Jewish schoolboy, seeing my utter loneliness and alienation in the schoolyard during every recess, generously introduced me to his pal, Mark, and we three played soccer regularly using a tennis ball. Jerry Lotterman, that was his name, even invited me to his house. I went. Subsequently I asked Mom if I could reciprocate. She turned me down. Why, you may ask? Perhaps a sense of her inferior social standing in Canada, and fierce Spanish pride. Perhaps the vestige of a lifelong exposure to Roman Catholic anti-Jewish diatribe, printed and verbal.

Surely it is no secret that Spain had and still has a very strong social undercurrent of antisemitism, the bequest of centuries, which surfaces, like a Loch Ness monster, when you least expect it.

A year later it would emerge inside me under the incitement of a fellow Portuguese-Canadian schoolboy, and I turned on my benefactor! But this should not surprise anyone familiar with the morality of Imperial Rome, an empire lauded to the skies on the pages of my primary school textbooks, an empire whose criminal culture steeped the colonies it once possessed. Weren't the Indians who welcomed Christopher Columbus later slaughtered by the admiral's fellow countrymen?

Thankfully Canadian education served to vaccinate me against the injected virulent strain of Spanish/Portuguese antisemitism.

What made the changeover from Spain to Canada particularly onerous and rankling was the absence of a convincing explanation as to why we were emigrating. "I did not leave Spain for political reasons," Dad told me emphatically more than once. An economic motive perhaps? Nope, he entered Bazan-Ferrol as an apprentice and trained to become a draftsman. This was a secure lifetime job in a key state enterprise.

As we landed in Canada and subsequently travelled to Toronto on one of the special immigrant passenger trains that regularly covered the Halifax-Montreal-Toronto route, Dad turned into an unemployed forty-year-old man on a desperate quest to find a job. An initial string of jobs proved too tough for him and he had to quit them all. The family was heading toward bankruptcy—a dizzying prospect—and the home environment frazzled.

Unexpectedly a "small miracle," a chance meeting, pulled our family back from the brink of the abyss. Sometime later another "small miracle" lifted me out of the sinkhole. Seven to eight years after deboarding the train at Toronto's Union Station Dad bought a semi-detached house on credit and drove to a permanent job in a brand new car. Meantime I and my two brothers attended the University of Toronto.

All that harrowing adventure lay distant and unknowable in the summer of 1965. As the month of September loomed irredeemably nearer and nearer, I kept hoping and praying that Dad's migration project would somehow derail, refusing to accept that we were going away for good. Even after boarding the white railbus set to leave Ferrol I clung to the slim hope that the train's engine would malfunction and not start. For two or three anxious minutes this seemed possible, for the scheduled hour of departure had passed and the train not budged. Some individuals were engaging the station master in busy conversation on the platform. Then, to my horror, the station master raised his red baton and blew the whistle; the railbus engine ceased idling, the carriage lurched forward, the wheels clicked, and my heart sank.

The ghost of September 1965

To close this chapter I pose my takes on two relevant subjects, Franco's Spain and emigration. These are ad-lib opinions, not the fruit of academic research but the froth of childhood recollections plus the banes and boons of emigration. The reader should keep this Galician refrain in mind, Cada quen fala da feira según lle foi nela ("Everyone assesses a country fair by how well he fared in it").

Franco's Spain. The casual reader may well ask why this webpage glorifies Franco's Spain in several crannies. There is a hyperlink to a musical salute to Generalissimo Francisco Franco right away in the Introduction, a second hyperlink to Cara Al Sol the anthem of Falange Española in the news item for November 20, 1955, hyperlinks to several pieces of the Youth Front songbook, and even a hyperlink to Falange's adaptation of the German National-Socialist Party anthem, "Horst Wessel Lied," in the news item for November 20, 1954.

Dear reader, these songs voiced the regime's ideology and every literate student had to memorize minimum the lyrics of Cara Al Sol.

Falange's adaptation of "Horst Wessel Lied" proclaims unequivocally, forthwith, the synergy amongst Falange, Franco's regime and Hitler's Germany. This affinity was conveniently forgotten by everybody after Hitler's defeat. The once-compulsory Roman/Nationalist salute was set aside, but Spain's absurd timezone, a legacy of that synergy, remains entrenched to this day (September 29, 2023).

The common thread running through most Fascist songs is the warrior's bravado, the virile defiance of death, the exaltation of Spain to almost the level of a national deity on whose sacred altar the common soldier must shed his blood in a redemptive holocaust if the swings of geopolitics should require it. The songs do not hold out the promise of a redistribution of Spain's landholdings or of the dominant classes' amassed wealth, the elimination of widespread illiteracy, the curtailing of hunger, destitution and homelessness, the abolition of exploitation in mines, factories or tilling fields. The songs do not recognize Spain's diversity nor accept its various languages. In one sentence, the songs shun social content.

At least the lyrics of The Internationale, the archenemy's anthem, promise relief to the poor, to the exploited and to the oppressed—it is a rousing hymn to social justice—it puts forth social content—but those other songs promise nothing. They are flamboyant warrior chants which the Roman legionnaires of two millennia ago could assimilate after trading "Spain" for "Rome" or for the god Mars.

In consonance with the lyrics of the warrior songs one pillar of Franco's Spain was the military ethos and discipline. The lower your rank the harsher the discipline and the probability of enduring verbal or physical abuse. The higher your rank the more numerous the perks, greater the respect and the disposition to overlook peccadilloes. A small girl was stripped naked in the closet room of my primary school by the head teacher. I overheard a couple mentioning this incident, hush-hush, to my parents on a Ferrolian street. My parents did not react, nor did anyone else; the little girl's trauma went unpunished; evidently she hailed from a family belonging to a dispensable social class. That is one example of the military ethos and discipline exercised by Franco's regime that I recall. The children of the upper class perceived their privileged status and some took advantage of it. In another incident two well-heeled children, crouching behind a hedge, badgered a guard of the Municipal Park with insults. I was with them, "thanks" to Mom's deference to theirs. I was petrified because my Dad's draftsman rank would not shield me from a good thrashing if all three of us were nabbed. We scampered out of the park. Twenty or thirty minutes later, on the bank of a road under construction near the old Canido cemetery (see May 5, 1963), the two rascals picked up the gravel and started pelting me with it. Luckily they missed. I returned home by a long roundabout way. I mentioned the incident, but my parents shrugged it off. Had one of my retaliatory throws hit and hurt one or the other aggressor, I probably would have received a good thrashing at home. That is a second example of what the military ethos and discipline of Franco's regime meant. Fie on Franco's Spain!

Another well-known pillar of Franco's Spain was the Roman Catholic Church. This webpage does not hide it. Note: Pope Pius XII vested General Franco Knight of the Supreme Order of Christ in 1954 (End of Note).

The third pillar was American backing (see, for example, "Shipyard News" of Chapter 12, "Bazan Magazine for the Year 1960"). Note: U.S. President Eisenhower hobnobbed with General Franco in 1959 (End of Note).

Emigration. Between the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the next, normal Galician emigration flowed westward to South America primarily.

After the nineteen fifties the main stream began to veer north toward West Germany and Switzerland primarily. Northward remains the most logical direction of "emigration" today, i.e., to the wealthier fellow members of the European Union. South America poses a serious security risk and North America teems with illegal migrants and legal immigrants.

The best way to emigrate to anywhere in the world is always with a guaranteed contract or firm job offer under your belt. Upon arrival you will be warmly welcomed because the host country considers you a boon, not a burden.

The best time to emigrate on an adventurous whim is when you are young and single. If you are over twenty-five years old, think it over. From a prospective employer's perspective you are already getting "old"; the host country almost certainly has many young people with qualifications similar to yours. If you are married, think it over twice; it is not uncommon for a spouse to resent your move. If you are married with children, do not go without a good job contract and good housing in waiting; even then your children will probably resent the shunting of their education and the loss of their friends.

If you decide to tread on my Dad's footsteps and emigrate to Canada you can vet your expectations online. You can watch Youtube videos posted by previous immigrants (example). You can browse the federal and provincial government websites for pertinent information. You can browse job banks, here is one. If you master Canada's two official languages, English and French, you will have a definite edge in your quest for employment. Likewise if you have a skilled trade in high demand. Before you step on the boarding stairs you can keep up to date with Canadian news via mainstream or alternative media like Viva Frei or Jordan B. Peterson. And you can also keep abreast of the current weather across Canada.