Kidding Around: Tales of Travel with Children by Hilary Bradt James Lowen

Author:Hilary Bradt, James Lowen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784771058
Publisher: Bradt Travel Guides
Published: 2020-02-06T16:00:00+00:00

A Winter in Menorca

Kirsty Fergusson

23 April 2001

It’s time to go. For three-and-a-half months my three youngest children and I have been living on a windy, blue and white island in the Mediterranean – residing, working and going to school in a place we have all come to think of as home. Now the cases are packed, the farewells have been said and in a few hours we will be climbing aboard the ferry that will take us to Barcelona on the first leg of the long journey home to Dorset by land and sea.

We came to escape the British winter and find a bit of breathing space, post-divorce. In the event, we found a great deal more than any of us had anticipated.

Our artist friend, Ken, had said a strange thing when we arrived. ‘You’ll find Menorca an oddly confrontational place to live,’ he said. ‘I don’t mean that the people are confrontational; it’s the island that challenges you. It’s a bit like living in New York: you have to live with it, rather than in it. Maybe it’s because it’s an island; maybe it’s to do with the extreme winds we have to live with; maybe it’s the intransigence of the landscape. I don’t know. But live with it, Kirsty, and you’ll never want to leave.’

Well, it’s true, I don’t want to leave – and the children feel the same way. Of course, we’ve missed our friends and family, our animals and every soggy square inch of our lovely Dorset valley, so our homecoming will be as joyful as it will be noisy. But – and this is the ‘Big But’ – when you have lived in a place you love, a part of your heart gets left behind. And this despite it getting attached to the strangest – and seemingly most insignificant – things. Anyway, according to our friends we’ll be back. Oh yes, they say, with knowing looks, you’ll be back. And not just for your holidays, either.

Mind you, it’s not been easy all the time. My thirteen-year-old son has found it tough going being the only English boy at his secondary school in Mahon, which lies a bus ride away from our clifftop suburb of Es Castell.

‘Mum, what does guiri mean?’ he asked, flinging his rucksack down with venom, as he came in from school one day. ‘It’s my nickname; everyone calls me guiri.’

‘It means foreigner,’ I said, ‘but they don’t mean any harm. It’s like us using “grockles” for the tourists in Dorset.’ He sighed. ‘But it means you don’t belong, doesn’t it?’

I knew what he meant. We weren’t tourists, but we weren’t residents either and our groping attempts to speak Spanish only served to emphasise our foreignness. We’d been on the island four weeks and the lady in the bread shop still hadn’t smiled at me. I was going to Spanish classes two evenings a week, yet stringing a sentence together that I hadn’t had time to prepare remained beyond me. The children seemed

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