The leaving of Pudding Island
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 25: After the Crisis
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Tony Barrell
THE FURTHER I MOVED away from the lush green meadows of Faverolles, towards the crispier Mediterranean Sud, the more obvious and, in many cases more shaky, I found the British expat presence. On Spain's Costa Blanca I found friends not seen since 1991: Rip and Sally Rippingale, who live in the mountains forty kilometres inland from Alicante. They met in the late 1950s at the University of St Andrews, where they first played golf – a pastime without which they admit life would be empty in Spain. In the '70s they bought a cheap holiday home in the French Ardèche and dreamed they would one day move there for good.
Rip gave up his day job to buy and sell rustic pine furniture, and drove around France in a van picking up farmhouse chairs, tables and corner cupboards which he would strip, wax and paint with floral designs to sell in their shop in World's End, that little extension of Chelsea into Fulham. At the time of the last big economic crash, in the early 1990s – just as they were thinking of quitting and heading for the Sud – they had to sell everything, including Ardèche and their Bayswater flat, to pay off the bank. It took years to get rid of their business, so they lived on a boat on the Thames at Limehouse. Eventually they ‘sailed' through the canals of France and on to Corsica, and then transferred to the vast marina at Alicante. After a few years cheek-by-jowl with hundreds of other yachties (many of whom never went to sea) they decided it was time to move back to dry land. They never considered returning to Pudding Island. Their best option in Spain was an eyrie a thousand metres up a mountain behind the almond town of Xixona, famous for turon, nougat and all kinds of marzipan.
Their mountain ‘community' isn't old and has no name. The ‘villagers' are foreign and Spanish retirees and holiday-homers in stucco ranches scraped into raw, steep land so far from the coast that the distant sea is often invisible. In 2007, a summer wildfire swept up the hill and singed the edge of their beautiful garden; in winter, fierce winds and torrential rain keep everyone indoors. Now that the value of their investments has shrunk, they are more or less stuck in the last house below the ridge, wondering what might happen should their health fail.
They take me down to Benidorm, to see coastal overdevelopment. Twenty years ago it was a tiny village; now its Gran Hotel Bali is the tallest in Europe. There are apartments and townhouses, concrete esplanades and car parks but, early in 2008, property prices collapsed, credit disappeared and dead cranes took over the skyline. By midyear there were 650,000 unfinished or unoccupied apartments, and by year's end thousands of real-estate agents had gone out of business, industrial production had slumped, unemployment was soaring (now around 20 per cent) and the economy was heading into recession.
At the Sunday market, English couples sell off their possessions or the bric-a-brac, furniture and clothing they've bought at local auctions. One woman of about fifty, deeply tanned and overweight, wearing the minimum for decency, tells me she too is hoping her health holds out. She and her husband are living in a caravan. She would rather be in Queensland ‘but it's too far'. Would she go back to England? ‘What, and live in Grimsby? No way.' Others tell the same story. A trailer park in Benidorm still beats Birmingham. Their faith in bricks and mortar as the basis of wealth, however, has taken a fearful battering. Selling out and scuttling back to Pudding Island means taking a heavy loss.
Few understand why. Most suspect they got here by luck, and it's hard to know who to blame now it's run out. No one wants to hear about the property bubble, about how the Blair-Brown team thought shifting costs off the national budget by privatising debt – cutting taxes, reducing state services, making the user pay and plunging into private-finance initiatives – was respectable economic management. Until last year what cash people had simply bought more in France and Spain.
Rip and Sal get by – but, they say, ‘any wine that costs more than three euros is out of our range'. Doubtless there are gourmet opportunities at Xixona's weekly street market but they are content with simple local ingredients twisted into mildly eccentric recipes eaten in the living room, on the terrace or next to their modest plunge pool.
Golf has expanded with the influx of the British – there are nearly a hundred and fifty courses in Andalucía alone – and KPMG reported in 2008 that Spain was still the most favoured location for golf ‘resorts': greens, fairways and clubhouses integrated into apartment complexes, although the trend in the past year was to forget the greens and just build the apartments. The day Rip and I go around the Bonalba golf course, between Benidorm and Alicante, he points out a new development of flats lining the back nine. ‘The year they were finished they all got flooded,' he says as we zip down the fairway in his electric buggy. ‘Now they can't sell them.'
At a group lunch at the clubhouse, the conversation moves from handicaps on the green to obstacles to easy living. A retired Scottish RAF sergeant says the services and daily expenses that used to cost less than half what he paid in the UK are now much more expensive. It's well known that members shower at the club to save on their home hot-water bills. Others who speak no Spanish or have little interest in Spanish culture (aside from sun and wine) have been slowly realising that unless you've immersed yourself in the new, alien environment, the paradise you dreamed of can evaporate as soon as things go bad.
Sal Rippingale admits that she used to be more ‘involved' in public and local issues, and was active in the British Labour Party and Amnesty; now, she says, she confines her political actions to ‘getting up the noses of the British club members who want to chop off the hands of thieves'. Her other activities are swimming, crosswords and rolling her own cigarettes. Neither she nor Rip is fluent in Spanish, but with the help of an English-speaking local Rip looks after community-association business (a job he says the local Spanish won't do), writing reports, checking the water supply, and processing requests and complaints from his neighbours.