La Eucaristía y sus metáforas

Women who wished to remain in Spain told a positive story about their life there and minimised any potential problems. I indicated in Chapter Four that a feature of the quest is the extent to which the central character can overcome ‘monsters and obstacles’ (Booker 2004). Missing family and overcoming this in order to have a successful and happy life in Spain, can be understood in the light of this and also in terms of having successfully negotiated family responsibilities (Finch and Mason 1993). When women talked of missing their families, this was told as something that was painful, needed negotiation but was bearable overall. These women positioned themselves as being good mothers and grandmothers in spite of not being with their children and

Celia excerpt 14

Maybe that wasn’t as hard because my daughter went away to university at eighteen, moved down south, and I didn’t see a lot of her, so the pull with her wasn’t there. Maybe sons and daughters, if they’ve lived near them, they’re used to seeing them day in day out, but I wasn’t.

Celia talked about the distance between them prior to her moving to Spain and suggested that this was a direct result of infrequent contact since her daughter left home to go to university. This was told in such a way as to minimise missing her daughter while Celia was living in Spain. She talked at length about her daughter and there appeared to be a number of troubling issues for Celia; there was physical and emotional distance between them, apparently going back to when her daughter went to university. She referred to ‘the pull’- representing emotional attachment - three times in her talk and in this way suggested that moving to Spain was relatively easy since she

already felt separated from her daughter. Celia appeared to slightly resent her daughter for moving such a distance away and for not seeing her very often. However, this had also given her the freedom to move to Spain.

In contrast, those women who wished to return to the UK, presented family and being a mother as overriding reasons to return. As indicated earlier, this can be understood as a shift in plot, from the quest to the voyage and return. For these women, the life renewing goal had not been achieved in Spain since they could not overcome the obstacle of missing family. For Vera, being a mother was the primary reason she gave for wanting to return to England since she was unable to manage being separated from her:

Vera excerpt 10

I miss my daughter. I miss my family, my sister in law, she’s very ill. My niece could do with some assistance really. It’s very hard for [niece]. Of the three daughters my brother had, there’s only one left in this country. One died and one’s in Australia, so it’s very hard for [niece] really ‘cos she’s working full time and she has to see her mother every morning, every night, and at weekend. Deidre’s sister as well, so there’s quite a lot of pull, and friends, we’ve friends who can’t come over here. We know a couple who’ve got two young children and they can’t afford to come so there are all sorts of reasons for going back. Plus we want to see the English countryside as much as anything we miss theatres and concerts and the things that

we used to do before we came here but my daughter is the main person.

Those who fit into the voyage and return plot typology talked about their social contacts in the UK as being deeper than the friendships they had made in Spain. If women had fulfilled the quest’s goal, that of a new home in Spain, their narratives de-emphasised the missing social networks in the UK and instead focussed on being able to have family and friends over to visit in their new home. It was clear that the place that was constructed as being home, either the UK or Spain, was also represented as the place where social networks were better or more meaningful.

Vera: excerpt 11

The social contacts that we had in England tended to be people we’d known a very long time that went way back, so the people that we knew in England were really tended to be family and long term friends whereas over here these are all obviously people that we’d met within the last couple of years .

For Enid, who lived in Spain for part of the year, her construction of the UK as home was evidenced through her talk of social contacts there:

Enid excerpt 5

Well in northern Ireland we have friends that we’ve had all our lives, since we got married. A small number I would say, you know husband and wife, and maybe about six or seven couples, but friends we’ve known forever.

For some women living in Spain on a part time basis, having the opportunity to be away for some of the time represented the chance to escape, albeit temporarily from the pressures and responsibilities associated with being part of a family:

Viv

Others had escaped on a more permanent basis. For example Myra, sold her house in the UK and moved to live in Spain full time. She used metaphorical language, ‘getting bogged down’ in relation to her life in England, denoting being trapped and unable to move or being restricted and limited by the weight of the pressure from her family since she was expected to care for her mother. When she said ‘so I sort of upped sticks’, again this was a metaphor for making a hasty exit or departure from a situation: ‘and run away to the warm’ – she literally described her move to Spain as running away with the sub-text being an escape from the obligations of her family. She portrayed herself as a woman who been left no choice but to make a bid for her own freedom:

Myra

I was getting bogged down and all my family thought I should be nursing my mother, and no, I don’t want to nurse my mother, so I sort of upped sticks and run away to the warm.

Myra presented herself as active, transgressing the gendered role of carer assigned to her and not bending to the will of her family. She talked about her mother becoming ‘a bit of a drag’ with the implication that she would have been overwhelmed by obligations and duty towards her and that it would have made her life ‘a real misery’. Instead though, because she had escaped, she had acquired a life in Spain:

Myra

My mother’s eighty-five so she, she was beginning to be a bit of a drag. My life was gonna be a real misery; so in actual fact I run away really. Now I’ve got a life. If I’d’ve been in England, no, I wouldn’t have.

Women who migrate manage and negotiate family responsibilities in their country of origin (Ryan 2004). This suggests that family could in fact be a potential source of support or something to escape. For those women who wanted to remain in Spain they told a story of successfully negotiating such responsibilities in order to fulfil the quest’s goal. For those who wanted to return to the UK, there was an additional element in that missing family meant that the quest could not be achieved.

Although all women acknowledged that, when in Spain, they missed their family, especially their grandchildren; several said that they were happy to relinquish responsibility towards them. In this sense, these women did not conform to the stereotype of doting grandmothers who lived their life through their family in their older age. However, it is important to acknowledge that this depended on whether their narrative was typified as the quest or the voyage and return as I have discussed. For those who wished to stay in Spain, missing family was minimised and rationalised as an obstacle that had been overcome to achieve the quest’s purpose, a better life, synonymous with a new home. However, for those who wished to return to the UK, family was cited as one of the main reasons for wanting to go back to Britain and this can be understood in relation to plot shift to the voyage and return.