Avoiding the Sagrada Família

The in­no­cent abroad

I have been green with envy since en­coun­ter­ing Home to Barcelona some years ago, for it is the great, comic novel about Eng­lish teach­ing I tried and failed to write. In 1980s and '90s Barcelona, the bosses of crummy lan­guage schools ripped off the teach­ers and the teach­ers de­frauded the stu­dents. All a po­ten­tial owner needed to do was rent a flat, buy a few chairs and ta­bles and hus­tle fly­ers round the neigh­bour­hood. If you could per­suade the stu­dents to pay a term in ad­vance be­fore they found out how crap the “teach­ers” were, even bet­ter.

Teach­ers? No prob­lem. A gag­gle would be knock­ing on the door every Sep­tem­ber for jobs with­out con­tracts or so­cial se­cu­rity. Most teach­ers know noth­ing about ed­u­ca­tion, but hap­pen to have been born in a coun­try where Eng­lish is the main lan­guage. I know, be­cause I was one of them. For many years, we or­gan­ised within Comis­sions Obr­eres a sec­tion for lan­guage school work­ers. Trade union or­gan­i­sa­tion was an up­hill bat­tle. The “Ex­pa­tri­ate Man­i­festo” in Home to Barcelona catches the mood: “We are not morn­ing peo­ple. We are not ath­letic, though rarely are we fat. We have above av­er­age in­tel­li­gence, but are chronic un­der­achiev­ers… We often have a spe­cial re­la­tion­ship with al­co­hol.”

Ferry is easy-going, in­gen­u­ous, the in­no­cent abroad. He knows no Span­ish or Cata­lan and hangs out with other “Eng­lish teach­ers” in Irish pubs. He starts wak­ing up in strange places, cov­ered in shit, after al­co­holic black-outs. He has fled a con­ven­tional fu­ture and lousy job in Cal­i­for­nia for a life out of con­trol and a lousy job in Barcelona.

Home to Barcelona has count­less anec­dotes and cameos. Here's one: Ferry meets Mar­tin, a smooth Bel­gian who gives him ad­vice on how to de­velop a sex life. Easy, just find a woman read­ing alone on the beach and start chat­ting. Ferry tries. He feels too white and podgy to take his clothes off. Sweat­ing, he sits down on the sand next to two oil-glis­ten­ing top­less bathers. “Have you got the time?” he asks, his voice com­ing out too loud. He re­alises he's wear­ing a watch. He looks round at a male bather star­ing at him and jabs man­i­cally at his wrist. “Roto,” he shouts. The young women are al­ready pack­ing up. It's a very funny scene, much fun­nier in the orig­i­nal than in my sum­mary. It is, too, a poignant, melan­cholic mo­ment. Ferry is not ill-in­ten­tioned; he's even like­able. But he is inept.

If you can't sort out what to do with your life, you can go any­where and teach. The peo­ple you meet are like Kylie (from Syd­ney, with “dirty, blonde hair”), Clarence (Amer­i­can psy­chopath) or Gor­don (acned Eng­lish­man “with a wry smile screwed on to his face”). Then there is Wi­chitom, the 60 year-old fan­ta­sist who's lived a life in teach­ing, tour­ing the world's cities. Richard Man­ches­ter pin­points many Eng­lish teach­ers' at­ti­tudes: hat­ing the job, crit­i­cal of Cat­alo­nia, con­temp­tu­ous of their stu­dents, lov­ing to show off newly ac­quired local knowl­edge. Sev­eral comic riffs deal with the re­al­ity of get­ting through classes with a hang­over and no ma­te­r­ial pre­pared.

Hello Its Eng­lish Time!

The au­thor is, of course, much sub­tler than Ferry, his first-per­son nar­ra­tor. The writ­ing is plea­sur­ably vivid, with sharp de­scrip­tions of the city's con­trasts and tone-per­fect di­a­logue that catches the lost for­eign­ers' inanity, ag­gres­sion and lone­li­ness. The book ap­pears to ram­ble through anec­dotes, but its struc­ture is tighter than at first ap­pears. Ferry's Cal­i­for­nia fam­ily is pre­sent in the back­ground through­out and the end of his story (in­volv­ing in­evitably bot­tles of al­co­hol in the small hours) packs a pow­er­ful punch.

Cata­lans are satirised, some­times with ter­ri­ble clichéd ‘jokes', but his main tar­gets are the ghastly teach­ers. The hu­mour is often ado­les­cent; the char­ac­ters, al­ways self-in­dul­gent. His jokes about lan­guage are painful and some­times painfully good. It's a book with added value: draw­ings and pho­tos are scat­tered through­out. Sur­real car­toons par­ody the Head­strong books (sound fa­mil­iar?) used at the Hello Its Eng­lish Time! (sic) school. Pho­tos of beer lor­ries, de­mo­li­tion and slums (Ferry's de­ter­mined to avoid see­ing any tourist sites) ac­com­pany Ferry's jour­ney to the end of the night.

Did some­one say Barcelona was glam­orous? Kylie tells Ferry the score: “We're here be­cause of fear, re­sent­ment, patho­log­i­cal un­hap­pi­ness. We say op­por­tu­ni­ties, ed­u­ca­tion, ex­pe­ri­ence — but every­one is here be­cause some­thing where we were went bro­ken.”

Kylie's gram­mar's a bit off, but the mes­sage is clear. Life's a com­edy with a tragic end­ing, say the philoso­phers. For Richard Man­ches­ter's “teach­ers”, Eng­lish teach­ing in Barcelona is a com­edy that ends in sack­ing, ill­ness or de­pres­sion. Ferry and his col­leagues want to es­cape their lives and rein­vent them­selves on the shores of the beau­ti­ful Mediter­ranean. But their lives ac­com­pany them.

* Cor­rec­tion: In July's issue, my mind slipped side­ways and I an­nounced this title as Homage to Barcelona, which is in fact Colm Tóibín's non-fic­tion book about his dis­cov­ery of the city