GOODBYE NOELA

I am a damn fool. I should have recorded her words. Noela, the mother of one of our dear­est friends, has died. She is a case in point, one un­com­fort­ably close to home, of why we sim­ply must find a way.

Widow Noela let us into her past, into an age fad­ing fast from liv­ing mem­ory. To walk with her and her daugh­ter Conxita through Aris­tot, the re­mote vil­lage so high in the Pyre­nees, where Noela grew up in the cat­a­clysmic 1930s and early 40s - to be told how it was within such a tight-knit, self-re­liant farm­ing com­mu­nity one-step re­moved - is some­thing we as a fam­ily will never for­get.

What I have sug­gested, what I so hope can hap­pen, is we cre­ate some sort of Cata­lan lis­ten­ing pro­ject. This is how…

Young peo­ple in their final post-exam weeks at their schools, just be­fore the long sum­mer break, are briefed to go out into their vil­lage, town or city barri.

They take with them their mo­bile phones and, ide­ally, are loaned a sim­ple means by which to hold it steady and be able to record a voice clearly.

With clear guide­lines, de­fined by the school and the local vil­lage coun­cil, and im­bued with an un­der­stand­ing of the sig­nif­i­cance, they in­ter­view a se­nior per­son from their com­mu­nity. The topic is life, ex­pe­ri­ences, mem­o­ries. Two minds meet – a young one ripe with cu­rios­ity and the tech­no­log­i­cal ca­pac­ity, and a se­nior one rich in ex­pe­ri­ence and re­flec­tion.

These short films, col­lated by local li­braries, will then be­come an in­valu­able store of souls and truths, a win­dow into the past, an ed­u­ca­tion. And it will bring the young and old to­gether, a learn­ing pro­ject as much as a lis­ten­ing pro­ject, a cel­e­bra­tion of life and a record which will steadily mul­ti­ply.

Will schools, coun­cils and li­braries con­sider it? Per­haps the gov­ern­ment needs to be the cat­a­lyst. I vol­un­teer to help make this hap­pen. Who is with me?

Noela’s fu­neral in Vilade­cans was a poignant cel­e­bra­tion of a long and typ­i­cally re­source­ful life on the land, both in the moun­tains but also right op­po­site the cre­ma­to­rium, on the prime, fer­tile fields that once ran all the way from the Serra de Mi­ra­mar to the sea. When the ser­vice was over, three of us crossed the old main C245 road to the site of the fam­ily farm. It is now lost be­neath a fast food out­let and a plethora of in­dus­trial units, but we found the old well and touched the earth.

How dif­fer­ent it must have been when 17-year-old Noela was sent from the Pyre­nees to work at a rel­a­tive’s masia south of Barcelona, then a world away. The young farmer on the neigh­bour­ing granja, Ramon, handed her flow­ers. Later she took his hand in mar­riage. And how hard they toiled to­gether for decades, Conxita told me, often leav­ing at 1 a.m. to take their pro­duce to the whole­sale mar­ket in Barcelona.

Cat­alo­nia has such a vital bond to the land. The na­tional an­them and folk­lore de­fine it. The peo­ple who work it are the roots, the foun­da­tion of na­tion in so many ways.

The record­ings must en­com­pass all, but I have in mind es­pe­cially the peo­ple I live among, the page­sos.

As Vir­ginia Woolf said so well – “The peas­ants are the great sanc­tu­ary of san­ity, the coun­try, the last strong­hold of hap­pi­ness. When they dis­ap­pear there is no hope for the race”.

Visca.