6.2 ANÁLISIS DE LA CALIDAD DEL INSTRUMENTO

In Chapter Two I discussed the romantic and nostalgic discourse surrounding community (Delanty 2004); which is seen as something which has been lost but is yet recoverable and many women found this to be so in Spain. This is a key point since the romantic discourse surrounding community, the idea of a Mediterranean idyll and building community out of context has significant contemporary parallels – some of which are ironic (Hardhill 2006) and resonate with the Labour Government’s agenda in the UK. The idyll is idealised and the place representation of community is ‘idyll-ised’.

There was a sense that community represents the security of a less troubled bygone era which can lead to it being endowed with romantic and almost mythical properties but for pragmatic reasons, as the following excerpt

illustrates. Vera idealises the UK in the past and draws parallels with Spain in the present so time and space are chronotopically linked here:

Vera – excerpt 5

I suppose for me the concept of community means more to me in Spain than it did in England. I think it’s idealised and romanticised because we all need a feeling of safety and security. In England when I was growing up there was a bit of a sense of community it felt and when I was growing up after the war when people were all in the same boat and things were quite bad and people had sort of pulled together through the war and there was still a bit of community spirit. I think that disappeared in England because of re-housing and all sorts of things like that um also that when I was growing up it was still the thing to do to go to church so there was a community around the church but over the years I think that sense of

community has died. It’s a difficult concept to get a handle on is community. I suppose community to me it’s not a geographical thing it’s having kind of, I don’t know, a safety net if you like, a kind of back up and I think that disappeared in England. The sense of belonging, that safety net aspect of it, the feeling of being part of something, or the feeling that maybe there’s something there, even if you don’t need to use it all the time. The statutory services took over from what used to be a community thing at one time. You were poor and you couldn’t afford to go into maternity homes, there’d be somebody in the street who could deliver your baby. There’d be somebody that you could call on but obviously that disappeared when national health came in and when social services came in, so I think that need for that sort of community to some extent died, whereas coming to Spain, I actually feel that that community to some extent has come back but again it’s through, if you want to use the word adversity, in the sense that you’re living somewhere where you don’t know where to go for help, you don’t know, you don’t know the language, this that and the other. You rely on each other, so from that point of view I do feel a sense of community here, I do feel I can actually turn to neighbours whereas in England I wouldn’t have.

Vera used the first person singular and then plural to signify the perceived inclusiveness that ‘community’ engenders. Vera talked of ‘everyone being in the same boat’ in Spain and not speaking the host’s language heightened this and created a sense of isolation from wider society.

I argued in Chapter Two that overarchingly, community embodied ‘belonging’, and that a sense of belonging could engender a feeling of safety, and,

although both belonging and safety were both intangible and elusive – or imagined - they were also simultaneously experienced as ‘real’ and used pragmatically when necessary. Vera drew parallels between Spain in the

present and the UK in the past by referring to everybody being ‘in the same boat’ denoting imposed common hardship. Although community for Vera means more in Spain than the UK, her earlier comments about ‘where her heart is’ suggest that the UK is the place to which she feels belonging. Vera’s narrative illustrates that place is still the context where belonging is

experienced.

Some women specifically addressed what they felt community to be: in this way it was tangible and ‘real’. For example, community was thought to ‘exist’ as Deidre’s quote illustrates:

Deidre

Well purely and simply because someone has had to come up with a word, the word community, there has to be such a thing.

Here the use of language as both representing and constructing reality is important and significant as discussed in Chapter Three. In this sense, the concept of community describes something and simultaneously constructs it (Riessman 1993). For others, community was rooted to a place where there was a long standing familiarity with those living there, so, community could not therefore exist in Spain. Community in this context was predicated by place which acted as a context for social interaction:

Joy

Well community to me I suppose, must mean somewhere that you have lived for a long time.

Nostalgia was most apparent in the women’s accounts when they talked about the sense of ‘community’ experienced in Spain being reminiscent of past times in the UK. Women talked about community in the UK having disappeared but felt that they had found it again in Spain. These women represented community as something that had been lost through modern life in the UK but as having been recovered – by them – in Spain. A strong sense of community was sometimes associated with the period following the Second World War. Lamenting the loss of community in the UK could be understood

as an indictment of current UK society in that alienation, crime, immigration (ironically) and individualism were identified as negative features of the present situation in the UK. Here, women were positioning themselves in terms of their age and me as a younger person who could not know this from my own lived experience, so in effect I was being informed and educated.

A sense of community in the UK during the period following the Second World War was also compared to contemporary Spain in terms of there being

something to mobilise against. Both periods were synonymous with hardship, although the nature of such hardship differed. Women in Spain conveyed a sense of ostracism, by being diasporic, likening their situation to perceptions of minority ethnic groups in the UK. Community was therefore a reaction to hostility and threats and constructing it and perpetuating a belief in it emerged as a defensive strategy. Community was also seen to be arrived at through adversity and hardship in that migrants had to work hard to thrive in their new environment.

For example, Mabel drew direct comparisons between the community minded atmosphere during and following the Second World War in England and their life in contemporary Spain:

Mabel

It reminds me of the London blitzkrieg in the Second World War. I hoped that the atmosphere that was there during the war would remain. It didn’t. Within eighteen months it had gone. Yes, just gone. Why did that die? Everybody was friendly, everybody thought that tomorrow they might be dead - not that we think that in Spain - but it was a kind of camaraderie, which is quite prominent here in Spain.

I found it again in Spain.

In Mabel’s talk there is a time and space dimension; during the war in the UK the atmosphere ‘was there’ and then it ‘was gone’. In the later quote it ‘came back’ decades later, in Spain:

The UK was seen to have ‘moved on’ and community was consigned to the past – for these women, there was no contemporary use of community in the

UK, it was something that denoted a bygone era. For them it was easier to recreate it elsewhere than to revive it in the UK. The subtext here was that idealising and romanticising community constructed and created something; a feeling of safety in a place through a shared sense of belonging and

attachment to it. Both Vera and Mabel were rather wistful and nostalgic about the loss of community in the UK. They discussed it in terms of ‘community spirit’ and ‘atmosphere’ (see above) almost as if it were ephemeral, although it did seem ‘real’ in that its presence was ‘felt’ - it was ‘there’, then it had ‘gone’. Both women felt that community for them had been recovered in Spain, for Vera it had ‘come back’ and was ‘here’, and Mabel again talked about the atmosphere which evoked that which was present during the Second World War. Although they used opposing adjectives – ‘adversity’ and ‘camaraderie’ - they were talking about the same thing but from different angles. Vera felt that a sense of community in Spain was brought about as a cohering force

stemming from (perceived) adversity since migrants were not part of

mainstream society. Mabel focused on the effects of such cohesion – ‘a kind of camaraderie’ in the excerpt above.

Celia talked nostalgically about recreating a bygone era that would actually have been outside of her experience:

Celia- excerpt 5

We’re doing sort of a bit like old time music hall really in December. We’ve been sorting the song-sheets out for this old time singing and I’m hoping that people’ll come dressed the part. I’ve got a feather boa and an old fashioned outfit.

Community for these women ‘existed’ and it was also imagined and this recurrent theme will be further explored throughout the following chapters. It could be used as a counter to danger and threat and also provide an indicator of the quality of one’s life. Moreover, it was experienced both in the past and the present so there was a time as well as space dimension. Community could be seen as being born out of adversity and as a product of these women’s position on the margins of Spanish society where they were forced to commune with one another. I revisit this both in relation to social networks

and identity in the following two chapters and discuss the inter-relatedness of place, social networks and ethnic group in Chapter Eight.