My Spanish Year

by Ellen M. Whishaw

The bathing at that village was excellent, the best, I think, that I have ever known, though a trifle dangerous for any but strong swimmers when a stormy day left a heavy roll and undertow. The Balneario, which had a monopoly of the bathing-houses for about half a mile of beach, provided a sufficiency of buoyed ropes, and a leaky old boat was anchored a hundred yards out all the summer in case of accidents. This boat was only accessible by swimming, there being no other anywhere within range, and it had no oars, so its precise use on an emergency does not appear. It filled and sank whenever the sea got up, but it was always dragged out, emptied, and replaced in position by the men in attendance, by the time the sea was calm enough for the visitors to bathe again.

Although we never stayed at the Balneario, we spent several summers in the village, where we took a little cottage and furnished it with what our Spanish friends thought very bad taste, for it contained plenty of books and tables and not a single pier-glass. Here we attracted a good deal of attention by sitting out at all hours, when the sun was not too blazing hot, under an awning rigged up on a sandhill facing the sea, where we watched with an amusement equal to their astonishment at our eccentricities, the amenities of Spanish families taking their baths.

The first year we were there the women all wore heavy serge gowns right down to their feet, mostly edged with a broad frill of the same material. Strange to say, one of them managed to swim, and to swim well, in this most unsuitable garment. Her husband, who was lame and could only walk with a stick, also swam well. He used to fling his stick ashore as soon as he was in the water to his waist, and he and his wife would swim out to the old boat, her flowing robe ballooning largely behind her. Later on we came to know them and their family, and the eldest son, a nice boy of about sixteen, told us as politely as he could how dreadfully shocked the Spanish ladies had been that first summer at our indelicate bathing garments, consisting of blouses with short sleeves, knickers, and a skirt to the knees. No doubt our by no means modern bathing dresses surprised them, although we had no idea of it at the time, for that year even the men wore long trousers, sometimes trimmed with little frills round the ankles, while coats covered their arms to the wrists. True, the men so attired did not attempt to swim, but bobbed up and down with their wives and daughters, all holding on to the rope for dear life and never moving an inch from where the bathing-man had put them, until he returned, when he thought they had been in long enough, with sheets to envelop the ladies and bring them to shore again.

Yes, all the ladies were carefully wrapped in sheets when they came out, although no human eye could discern the form so carefully hidden under their voluminous draperies. The only creatures who were allowed to expose any part of their anatomy to direct contact with the water were the babies. They, poor little miseries, were carried down stark naked to the water’s edge and handed over to the bathing-men. These, no doubt with the best intentions, would take the screaming mite in one hand and dip it head first into a good big wave, using their free hand to disengage the frantic clutch of the terrified creatures when they came up in an agony of fright from their ducking and found themselves, choked and blinded by the salt water, turned upside down for a second dip. Three times was this brutality repeated every day, and if the piteous cries grew less the third time, the parents, watching the proceedings from the shore, would congratulate themselves that the child was beginning to enjoy his bath.

To me it seemed more likely that he was beginning to die from it, and indeed a summer rarely passes without at least one or two small children coming to an untimely end at the Balnearios. But nothing can convince the mothers that such treatment is too violent for babies. They themselves took their first sea baths under those conditions, and so did their parents before them, and therefore it must be the right thing and produce good results in the long-run, no matter how the little one may suffer in health and nerves at the moment.

Infant mortality is always high in Spain. In summer, I understand, it is higher than at any other time, and I do not wonder at it.

That first summer the lame Don Basilio and his wife were the only swimmers except ourselves. But the next year several schoolgirls begged him to teach them to swim, and as the season went on and they made progress in the new accomplishment the flowing skirts were exchanged for trousers, and the trousers gradually grew shorter until a reasonable amount of bare leg was displayed. One or two of the girls managed to swim out to the boat before their twenty-one baths came to an end, and indeed the mystic number was treated with unusual disrespect that year, and the limit often far exceeded.

And the following year, when we arrived rather later in the summer than usual, we found all the girls wearing bathing costumes which gave their limbs free play as they swam, and the old boat was the daily rendezvous of a crowd of laughing and chattering young people, scrambling on board and diving off again with as much energy as if they had been English.

I always maintain that Spaniards only want a lead to induce them to adopt modern customs and conveniences, for no people are quicker or cleverer at imitating new modes once they see that they are an improvement on the old. The only difficulty is to make them see that any such novelty is an improvement, and that, I admit, is a difficulty. The Andalucians have a saying against themselves, that they are “muy amarrados à la cola del borrico”—very fast tied to the donkey’s tail—meaning that they go along in a stupid rut of inherited convention which they find it very hard to get out of.

I think, however, that the speedy adoption of swimming knickers in place of flowing skirts, and the rapid shortening of these same knickers as soon as practical experience proved their convenience, argue that the rising generation have more common sense and less conventionality than their elders, and promise well for the future of athletic sports in Spain. But all the same the young people, although they have learnt how to enjoy mixed bathing in the sea on summer mornings, still sit with their parents at their ugly street doors after dinner, turning their backs on the beauty of the sea, the sunset, and the moon, while they watch the passers-by and talk of lovers and frocks.