The recent revelations in Spain about the tens of thousands of babies who – at the hands of doctors and the Catholic Church – were stolen from their biological parents for both ideological and pecuniary reasons, and in a period that stretched from Franco’s ascendancy to power to as late as the 1990s, is still reverberating terribly in my self.

As we do in such moments, there is a tendency – almost a primeval impulse – to review one’s whole past.  A veil does indeed drop away – and in its place we suffer from the darkest of shadows.  This post will not, therefore, be a considered piece.  For what I need, right now, is somewhere to register disorganised thoughts.

For example.  I remember, shortly after my firstborn was born, how I decided to reduce my working-hours to only ten.  In the light of the fact that my boss – an affable but occasionally dictatorial Frenchman – was a notable member of Opus Dei, lived in the flats which this Catholic religious order had in the city I was living in at the time, was well-known for his kindnesses to children in general and had himself a large family as befitted such a profile, I thought nothing of asking him if I could work fewer hours for a while – in order to take care of the new addition to our family and spend that precious time we could never regain.

This request was, of course, granted – I felt with grace and certain favour.  And thus it was that I thought nothing more of it.  Until, that is, a Spanish friend from my Russian class told me – in confidence – that she’d been told that someone had contracted a private investigator to follow me around.  The alleged motive?  To ensure, essentially, that I was actually looking after my son and not using the spare time to set up a company.

This was so laughable I simply did not believe it.  Could not believe it.  Refused to believe it.  I was a humble English teacher with barely four years of experience; had only ever taught in a small night school which, essentially, was going nowhere.

It’s true I had only recently joined full-time the company I then began to work for.  And having joined full-time, at that time in Spain’s history, a sudden request by a man to reduce hours to carry out childcare responsibilities was possibly going to be judged a little out of the normal.  But enough to get involved in all this other stuff?

And yet if someone were capable of doing things like this, what else did they know, do and sanction?

Later, I heard stories of bags of cash crossing the Spanish-French frontier.  All sorts of strange behaviours which my English upbringing simply didn’t prepare me for.  I was driven to a nervous breakdown by the behaviour of the Frenchman’s Spanish successor, who weaved an oppressive and unhealthy friendship with myself to the point where all the reality which I perceived was denied – as he suggested I was going slowly mad and would shortly need to see a psychiatrist.  The reality was, however, as I had seen and perceived it – for even one of his unwilling business partners once buttonholed me in the street, saying:

“I don’t know how he does it.  I go into a meeting with him – ready to threaten him with a red card.  He sits there, owing me payments which go back months; even years.  And yet, twenty minutes later he’s told me a few sob stories – and, like twenty times before, I’ve gone and believed every word.”

And this Spanish successor, who fooled us all for so long, who claimed for so long to be my friend, who in a sense played the same oppressive role which my own English upbringing had – in part – apported my sensitive soul … well, it was a mantra of his that – almost proudly – he would repeat over and over again: how, as an ex-bank worker himself, he knew how to fool the banks into believing he was still solvent: how he moved money from here to there; oh, he knew how they never looked at the detail: just looked at the movement, the movement here and there. 

He thought he was so clever as he built an empire on the sands of inside behaviours.

Which is why, as I think back over these unhappy and connected people I knew, I just can’t help beginning to think that if 300,000 babies were really stolen from their biological parents by the Spanish Catholic Church, by the doctors that is, by the very people we should expect to be able to trust, how then is it even conceivable that these people who once called themselves my colleagues and friends knew absolutely nothing about what was really going on?

As a footnote to this curate’s egg of a post, another random thought.

We took our firstborn to the nuns’ kindergarten pretty early on in his life – as, indeed, is still the Spanish custom.  All through the first year, he cried when we left him and he cried when we picked him up.

Every time we picked him up, he carried with him a strong smell of cologne.

We never noticed this really; never wondered to ask.

Until late on in the year when one day we discovered he’d been placed in the naughty corner for not drinking his orange juice.

This was when we discovered he’d spent the whole year being forced to drink an orange juice he didn’t want – only to then sick it up as children do.

And so instead of telling us what was happening to this barely two-year-old child, the nuns spent the year covering up the evidence with judiciously applied cologne.

We took him out of the kindergarten the following year and placed him in an excellent one nearby – run by kind, professional and loving young women.

Two things you should know, before I finish today: the first, my eldest son has never – and I mean never – drunk orange juice since then.

And the second?  If your child cries when he is out of your sight, and cries when he sees you on his return – don’t wait a year to see if it’s your fault.  Your child needs your love – not the cologne of a nun.

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