My life as a con man

Ted outside Blanes station

In 1951, when I was struggling to stay alive in Paris, the newspaper I had just started working for shut down. They were generous and gave me three months’ pay in lieu of notice. It wasn’t very much, but it was more than I’d ever had in my life. I decided to take a holiday in Spain. I packed two small suitcases with clothes and a typewriter and took a train to Barcelona. Then, knowing nothing at all about Spain or anyone in it, I looked at a map of the Costa Brava and got on a local train to a place with a name that appealed to me. It was called Lloret de Mar.

When I got off the train it was almost dark. A man in very worn clothes came up and seized my suitcases.
“Hotel?” he asked.
I didn’t want help, but he wouldn’t let go, and I spoke no Spanish beyond “Si” and “No”.
So I said “Si” and he began walking along the platform which was open at each end.
So then I said “No”, and pointed in the opposite direction. I wasn’t going to be hustled. Not me.
So he turned and we went the other way. He led me to a small, two story hotel with a tiled facade and put the luggage down in the hall.

A motherly woman came to meet me and somehow we agreed on a room. When I turned round to give the man something he had disappeared. In Paris you had to tip for everything so I was mystified and determined somehow to uncover his racket. One day I will write more carefully about that episode and many other strange and wonderful things that happened on that holiday in Franco’s Spain. All I need say now is that Lloret was the most primitive of fishing villages. The only structure on the beach was a wooden shack where I drank cafe con leche. And after two weeks I proved, conclusively, that the man had carried my bags out of the goodness of his heart. Nothing less.

Two decades later Lloret became famous as the most egregious example of what package tourism can do to ruin a beautiful place. I heard about the cheap hotels jammed shoulder to shoulder, of the pubs, the fish and chips, the arcades, the souvenir stalls, the mobs of sun-blistered British holidaymakers orgying and vomiting on cheap wine.
For fifty years I have been regaling people, at bars and in restaurants, with the story of my arrival there, and what it was once like. Probably, in my expansive way, I have been encouraging them to top up my glass or snatch the bill from my none too eager fingers. But I had never been back . . . until now.

I was in Girona with Angel and Teresa and told them too about Lloret in 1951, and they insisted that we go and see how it was today.

As we approached it was obvious that Lloret had grown from a village to a large town.
A tourist information office confronted us and I went in to ask a girl behind the counter where the railway station was.
“There is no station,” she said.
“Well, where it used to be then.”
“There has never been a station in Lloret.”
“But I came here by train.”
She glanced helplessly across to an older woman dressed in rather businesslike clothes standing to my left who was talking to someone in French. She plunged into the argument and seemed quite offended, as though I had uttered an insult.
Vehemently she contradicted me.
“I assure you, Monsieur, there has never been a station.”
“But Madame,” I ventured as pleasantly as I could, “I myself took the train here in 1951 from Barcelona. How can you be so sure there was no station here in 1951?”
She grew even more heated.
“I may not have been here in ’51…” after all, that would have reflected badly on her age “… but there has never been a station in MY village. That is quite certain. The day a train comes to Lloret I will go to my grave. The nearest station is at Blanes, 8 kilometres away.”
And so, I’m afraid, it proved to be.
We went to Blanes and took a picture to prove that this time, at least I had been there. There was no time to hunt around for familiar landmarks. It was obvious that everything for miles around had changed, but it did begin to seem probable that I had never been in Lloret after all.
So what, you may say?
Well, I can only say that it feels very peculiar to know that I may have been getting free drinks for fifty years on the basis of a piece of fiction.
Living a lie, so to speak.
Sorry about that, chaps.