Poignancy

All Saints Day. The day after Halloween. You could tell here in Madrid, if only because some of the people we saw had clearly not finished celebrating from the night before.

Halloween revellers in the Madrid metro
Heading home late the morning after

We were in Madrid because that’s where my company’s offices are. My ex-company. That ‘ex’ is the reason I had to visit the office at all. Because, while an event that should have happened on Halloween didn’t, one that shouldn’t have, did.

31 October was the latest date that Britain was to leave the EU. This was absolutely clear. To Boris Johnson, Prime Minister, it was a matter of ‘do or die’. Indeed, he said he would rather die in a ditch than accept that he had to get a further extension to the Brexit timetable.

But he didn’t do Brexit by the deadline he set. Nor did he die. A ditch? No trace of one in his existence yet. It’s enough to make one wonder whether one can entirely trust his word. Many tell me that you know that Boris is lying by the fact that he’s breathing. However, as my American friends can no doubt testify, you just don’t get pathological liars leading major nations.

Do you?

So no Brexit. Or at least not yet.

On the other hand, the event that wasn’t supposed to happen was my brusque and involuntary departure from the company. Halloween was the day of my latest redundancy. But at least, on this occasion, I’m going out on a high. This was undoubtedly the best job I’ve had, with the best boss and the best team. What’s more, a great many people with whom the team worked have written to say how much they’re going to miss us. My quarrel isn’t with anyone I know but only with people who haven’t the faintest idea about what the team was doing. Just a pity that, despite knowing so little, they were the ones taking the decisions.

Good memories accompany my departure, and contacts I hope will endure, with former colleagues who are also good friends.

We took advantage of our presence in Madrid to see our sons and their partners and, in particular, our new granddaughter Matilda.

Matilda appreciating life

It was on our way to one of those visits that I was struck by a statue near the metro station we were using. It’s dedicated to the “Atocha lawyers”. They were members of a group involved in the defence of workers’ rights in the early years of democracy, after the death of the dictator Franco. On 24 January 1977, far right terrorists attacked them, leaving five dead and four injured.

Monument to the Atocha Lawyers

The main targets of the attackers were trades union leaders from the Communist Party, at that time still banned. Ironically, its legalisation was accelerated by the attack. That’s the response we should all have to terrorism: when our rights are attacked, we should respond by strengthening of those rights. That’s not always the case: since the murder of Labour MP Jo Cox in England, the momentum for Brexit, which she loathed, has if anything increased.

The statue in Madrid is a moving reminder of how costly it can sometimes be to defend rights. And how important.

Equally touching was a pair of paintings I saw in one of my favourite galleries, the Thyssen-Bornemisza. The first was a portrait of Quappi in a Pink Jumper, full of affection but also of forceful personality. 

Powerful, intriguing portrait by Beckmann
Quappi in a Pink Jumper

I hadn’t previously come across the painter, Max Beckmann. He was German, but he died in the US, and the painting was dated 1932-1934. Which places it in just the time Hitler was coming to power.

Max Beckmann in one of his many self-portraits

Later, I looked him up. When Hitler denounced ‘degenerate art’ in 1937, many of Beckmann’s canvasses were seized and some were included in the degenerate art exhibition of that year. He fled with his wife to Amsterdam, where he somehow managed to survive the war and German occupation, in the course of which the attempt was made to force him into the German Army, even though he was 60.

In 1948, they left Europe for the US where he renewed a successful career not just as an artist, but as a teacher. Far too short a career, as longstanding heart disease killed him in 1950 at the age of 66 (my own age, so I can testify that it’s far too young to die).

According to his widow, he had been on his way to see one of his paintings in an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

And who was that widow? Why, the Quappi of the painting. It seems that the affection it radiates isn’t simply art. It reflects a real sentiment.

Degenerate art? How could the failed painter Hitler have any idea of what was good or what wasn’t? And what a disgraceful abuse of power it was to oppress men like Beckmann, as it was to murder the Atocha lawyers.

The US gained by Germany’s attempt to crush Beckmann. As the Spanish Communist Party benefited from the right-wing attempt on some of its leaders. A lesson worth remembering at a time when many in America, or Britain, seem indifferent to the value of tolerating opposing views to one’s own.

My Halloween trip was full of poignant moments. Leaving a much-loved job. Seeing some much-loved family members. And admiring two works of art dedicated to the protection of much-loved freedoms.

The trouble with Halloween...

For a long time, I found Halloween attractive in a slightly perverse way. 

It provided me with an annual opportunity to be terribly British and tediously older generation.

“What?” I would say, “when I was a kid, the thing we celebrated at this time of year was Guy Fawkes Day. What is this Yank custom we’ve imported? Do we have to do everything they do in the States?”

Then I’d go all misty-eyed and nostalgic as my audience wondered how to vanish, or shut me up, without actually being openly rude.

It’s true that Guy Fawkes celebrations of my youth were special. We’d make Guys, of course. Well, those of us who could bother would. Misshapen effigies of a human being made of straw, old clothes and a balloon as a head, with a hat glued on top. Get it done on time, and you could wheel it out on the street for a few days beforehand and ask for a “penny for the Guy” from all the passersby. That wasn’t begging because it was tradition.

I never could be bothered to make my own Guy, so instead I went to other people’s Guy Fawkes parties. They were wonderful. Huge bonfires with someone else’s Guy perched on top. This was an uplifting allusion to the burning to death of the original Guy Fawkes, who’d had the shocking idea of wanting to blow up Parliament, with all the politicians in it. That’s an idea which no one today could contemplate with anything but horror.

The nice thing about the bonfire is that, if it burned fiercely enough, it would make the rain drops evaporate around it. So if you could stand getting close enough, you kept reasonably dry, only getting soaked when you stepped away to eat one of the burned sausages which people carbonised for you in the flames.

Ah, the joy of the Guy Fawkes bonfire!
Great for getting one side of you burned while the other froze

The other great benefit of the fire was that it meant only one side of you was cold (the festivities take place on 5 November, after all). The other side could get itself toasted. When you couldn’t bear the first degree burning of your face any more, you could turn around and get your back seared while your nose froze off.

Oh, wonderful times, wonderful times.

These days, instead of this time-honoured and cherished tradition, we get Halloween. I’m given to understand that in the States this is managed in quite a civilised way: it happens in daylight, with kids up to about 8 or 10, and they only call on houses of people who have set up a pumpkin in their windows. This indicates that they’re happy to be “trick or treated”, a curious notion, since treating to avoid the threat of a trick sounds pretty much like the text book definition of extortion.

Britain has a long tradition of enjoying extortion. As in “nice little country you have here. How about giving us monopoly access to your markets? You wouldn’t want my Royal Navy here to do anything nasty to it, and I have trouble controlling its commanders, in the face of uncooperative behaviour.” 

So when we introduced Halloween, it took rather a nastier edge to it than the kids’ party in the States. Why, this year there was a regular riot leaving four policemen injured, over a Halloween “scum party” in London, which sounds altogether less gentle than the US model.

Of course, it doesn’t help that that the celebrations start when it’s dark over here. The clocks go back a week or two before, so it’s pitch black by 5:30. That makes it a little harder to conjure up a family atmosphere.

Still, I have to admit that round here, it’s become nicer over the last few years. Little kids go out in witches’ costumes or dressed as cartoon zombies, and they knock politely on the door to ask us to chuck some terribly sugar-rich, nutrition-low sweetmeat into their baskets. The whole thing takes place under the watchful eyes of their mothers, so the threat level stays agreeably low.

As a result, Danielle and I have been adapting to the occasion. Getting into the spirit. We buy lots of tooth-rotting produce in the run-up to the 31 October. I’ve become less curmudgeonly and actually welcome the arrival of the kids. I hand out largesse with gusto and enjoy the pleasure of the children in response.

Why, I even apologise for the behaviour of our assault poodle Luci, who likes to go flying out making a terrible racket and looking as awe-inspiring as a dog six inches tall can. It doesn’t seem to matter, as the mothers like to stroke her anyway, describing her as cute, while I concentrate on the kids’ baskets.

Indeed, such was our enjoyment of this event, that we were disappointed last year when we ran out of goodies by about 8:00. To make sure that it didn’t happen again, we got extra stocks in this year.

And then – the unimaginable happened. We only had three parties of kids coming to our door. We were left with a large quantity of unclaimed merchandise. I’ve had to give it away to the grandmother next door, who assured me “it won’t go to waste.”

I can’t believe it. What’s happened? Aren’t people taking Halloween seriously any more? Where’s their sense of tradition? Don’t they see the importance of maintaining links with the culture their ancestors formed for them?

I’m sure it wasn’t like that in my young day.