ReachExtra
Paco Oliva´s new literary work his seventh, looks at the closed frontier years from beyond Four Corners, from La Línea de la Concepcion, through the curious eyes of a seven year old Gibraltarian child who spent many school vacations with his parents at his grandmother’s house, in the wonderful setting of a traditional Andalusian patio.
The author casts a nostalgic, personal and original look at the late 60s and 70s, conveying the reader to a world and a lifestyle that was very different to modern times, examining what it was like growing up on both sides of the divide and feeling equally at home, straddling emotions and experiences that enriched an otherwise grey period of enforced isolation.
Memories of fun packed summer holidays come alive in these pages, entire afternoons spent playing flipper machines and futbolines in La Linea´s popular pinball palaces, discovering Pink Floyd, Jimmy Hendrix and The Who records in old Wurlitzer jukeboxes, regularly attending theCinema Imperial gorging on endless sessions of spaghetti-westerns, Italo-Spanish horror, detective movies and early films of the ‘Destape’ period, all of which were wholly responsible for a burgeoning, burning passion for cinema that would explode in later life and later literature.
It was a pre-internet era and there were many great comics to read Hazañas Belicas, Creepy and Dossier Negro, but also much outdoor excitement to indulge in with his inseparable company of cousins. The La Linea fair was a yearly highlight, the Trofeo Ciudad de La Linea, his first taste of live international football at the Balona stadium was another annual treat, as were the motorcycling races with Angel Nieto, a young, up and coming star, burning rubber in the Ciudad Deportiva circuit.
Accompanying his grandmother to La Línea’s bustling fish market with its avalanche of smells, sights and sounds was another unforgettable experience that would be ingrained in the memory of an impressionable and inquisitive child.
There are also serious reflections contained in the book, a struggle to understand General Franco’s drastic decision to sever all communications with the Rock, cruelly splitting closely knit families in two. It meant that for the next thirteen years, hundreds of Gibraltarians in the same predicament, would be forced to cross the Strait in six and seven hour boat trips several times a years, to get to La Linea, in his case to his grandmother who lived a mere ten minute walk from the border, via the ports of Tangier and Algeciras, to be reunited with their relatives on the other side.
The book ends on a deceptively upbeat tone with the full frontier opening in 1985, a massive news story which the author, who was already working as a journalist, covered for a daily local newspaper. A momentous event which he laments, has led to 40 years of wasted opportunity and unfulfilled potential, a degree of separation perhaps even greater than that which existed when the frontier was closed and utter failure from those who should have prioritized the normalization of cross-border relations but pursued other agendas.
