By: JENNY GRAINER
istjustme@portugalresident.com
ONE OF my favourite pastimes is studying people. It’s a perfectly normal pastime for writers because people provide most of the inspiration they need to write.
They can become characters in a book or article, they have adventures, can be funny and sad and of course, those who choose to go into public life with its many outlets are the core of material for newspapers, magazines, television and cinema.
Of all the people I have studied in my life to date the Portuguese remain my favourites. Because I’ve spent most of my adult life here I have followed the tremendous changes that have been brought about throughout the generations and the changes have been of a gargantuan nature.
Bear in mind that when I first came here in 1964 for a holiday, the Algarve had no airport at Faro, was under a dictatorship with minimal education for children and poverty of a type which is hard to imagine today existed everywhere.
Each time I arrived, having just left a sophisticated London with its theatres, restaurants, nightclubs and the general vibrancy of the capital, we would travel down on the train from Lisbon along with an extraordinary cross section of the Portuguese population and I would be struck anew with the sheer poverty of the country as we travelled through it.
Welcome
We travelled in first class, because by our standards it was so cheap, along with businessmen or aristocracy in their impeccable handmade suits, white shirts and silk ties all ingratiatingly polite, lifting hats and smiling broadly.
Well-dressed ladies, with milky white skins that never saw the sun, dyed backcombed and lacquered hair that not even a hurricane could move, often accompanied by uniformed maids, sat decorously with gloved hands folded or feverishly fanning themselves depending on the time of year.
Few could speak English although most were fluent in French and to do this day foreign women are frequently called Madame. Nevertheless, they always politely made us feel most welcome even if we dressed a little informally for their taste.
In second class were the commercial travellers, middle class businessmen and probably families taking their annual holidays. Their clothes would be pretty much the same but a little shabbier and the women looked tired and worn. You could tell by their hands that life was hard and many sacrifices had been made to be able to be on the train and travelling south.
Third class wasn’t really a carriage at all it was more down to finding a space you could stand in along corridors, inside toilets or in the parcel wagon. Among the passengers would be farmers often with live produce, migrant fruit pickers and very often soldiers on weekend leave, desperately trying to see family members before being shipped off to Africa for another couple of years defending Portugal’s rich investments that never seemed to improve the lot of the working class.
While we could dine in the first class dining room, with all its comforts, white tablecloths and a simple but good a la carte menu attended to by servile waiters thankful to have such elegant employment, the other passengers picnicked on food they had brought with them among their hot sweaty fellow travellers on a train journey that often lasted up to six hours.
Laughter
Although the journey could be uncomfortable for them, no one complained. There was lots of laughter and crying children were passed around among total strangers to be pacified and entertained. Wherever we went and whatever poverty we saw it seemed that nothing could really destroy the will to just get on with the work of living and sharing in the communal act of survival.
Over the years, since the 1974 revolution, the gentle easy going Algarveans have been taken over not just by the tourists who have flocked here to enjoy the beautiful part of Portugal that had been ignored for so long but also by the Portuguese from all parts of the country, who have also migrated down here in search of employment.
Today’s Algarvean is a blend of the many different cultures and customs of all the Portuguese counties and hamlets, through intermarriage. That includes those members of the overseas colonies that fled their homes when Portugal ended the wars and handed them over to become independent countries. Today, multiple foreigners have added to the mixture and made this Paradise their home.
The short very dark-skinned fishermen or the hard working farmers, with wives and mothers doubled over from sowing and reaping the fields or repairing nets on the beaches, have been replaced by taller lithe and well educated children and grandchildren due to proper diets and a modern health system in many ways better than the NHS in the UK.
The older generation with their gentle ways and great family reunions on country farms are rapidly being exchanged for city life and the ‘must have and must have it now’ way of life. The old country farms have all been bought by foreigners desperate to have the quiet peaceful life that the young people want to leave behind and good luck to them.
Just the same
We live in a different world now. Happily the instinctive kindness of the population has not changed as has recently been demonstrated to the McCann family over the mysterious disappearance of their daughter Madeleine. The nosy questions asked by the elderly and the morbid medical details they just adore to relate about births, deaths and gory operations are still the favourite conversations amongst women, young or old, and the men still rule the roost as the women persist in raising their sons as superior creatures to be waited on by their sisters.
So while a lot has changed in a very short space of time an awful lot has stayed just the same.
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