Voices of the Old Sea

Have just read another cracker by Norman Lewis.

Voices of the Old Sea has something for everyone. Norman Lewis visited a remote fishing village in Catalonia for three years: 1948 – 1950. He calls it Farol but it is probably Roses between Perpignan and Barcelona.

It doesn’t matter where it is or how long he spent there. (He seems to go only in the summer.) Spain was recovering from a civil war and adapting to Franco’s regime. It was an unmodernised, poor country and nowhere more so than this fishing village. NL introduces the reader to the key actors, as they say nowadays: fishermen, priest, mayor, matriarch, etc. At that level alone it is worth reading but he fleshes out his picture of the village where there are only cats with rivalry with an inland village where there are only dogs.

Another theme is fishing and I’d be interested to know if The Flyfishers’ Club (founded 1884) has a copy on its shelves; it should. True, flies are not used but the piscatorial abundance of the Mediterranean is remarkable as are the methods of catching them. The author goes out on the boats and makes expeditions on his own or with a Catalan companion. He is an acute observer.

Inland from Farol there are extensive forests of cork oak.

“In 1947 oaks all over southern Europe had suffered attack by the caterpillars of the winter moth due to their hatching on the precise day (a coincidence occurring roughly twice in every century) when the leaf buds first appeared. The majority of the oaks eventually recovered from this loss of foliage, but in the Pyrenean forests many trees weakened in this way contracted a virus disease from which they subsequently died.”

(I mention this for the possible benefit of the one cork forest owner among the readers here.)

The most important theme is the introduction of tourism to the coast and the conflict between the deeply conservative fishermen and the men with money who either wanted to improve their lives or destroy them, depending where you stand. Rural Spain was a backwater in the 1940s and the Catalan coast he describes very poor, isolated and unknown. Today few haven’t heard of the Costa Brava.