June 2021 | Page 29

Short Read

Spanish blood , Spanish wood

On the day of my mother ’ s funeral I was sitting in a woodpaneled room in the residential care home where she had spent the last three years of her life suffering from Alzheimer ’ s . I was telling the Irish minister , who was going to conduct the service , that our ancestors were Irish , Cornish and Spanish .
There is a story in our family that a distant ancestor of my maternal grandmother had come over on the Spanish Armada and was shipwrecked off the coast of Cornwall where he married a Cornish woman . The rest is history , as they say . My family blamed any emotional outbursts on our Spanish temperament and , as my grandmother ’ s father and brother had jet-black hair and brown eyes , the story may be true . My aunty Nellie , with her long black hair , striking figure and blazing eyes , could have been a Flamenco dancer or a model for Velazquez !
The owner of the care home , a 16th century manor house , pointed to the wood-paneled walls and said , “ This is wood from one of the ships in the Spanish Armada .” As wood was expensive in those days , and most of it was used by the navy to build ships , the wooden galleons of the Spanish Armada were ripe for the picking . He then showed me a ship ’ s mast built into the staircase . This too was from a ship captured in the Spanish Armada . I was amazed . What a coincidence that my mother , with an ancestor in the Spanish Armada , died in a care home with wood from one of the ships . I had chosen a manor house for my mother ’ s final years because she loved stately homes . She was always visiting them . Although she had been born and grew up in poverty , she had exquisite taste , and filled her home with antiques from junk shops . Her room in the care home had french windows leading out into formal gardens which she would have enjoyed if she had not forgotten how to walk . the Armadas to invade Britain . I only discovered recently that there were four attempts between 1588 and 1601 to invade Britain and convert it to Catholicism . Many say they failed because the British navy was superior , but it was more likely the appalling weather and the canons they used . The creation of the blast-furnace enabled the English to mass-produce canons and balls with which to bombard the Spanish fleet .
The first and third Armadas sailed close to Cornwall and this is probably when my ancestor was ship-wrecked . Many more Spaniards were ship-wrecked off the coast of Scotland and Ireland . All were separated from their families in Spain and were not able to return . I would love to know where the descendants of my Spanish ancestor live but I do not even know his name . I only have his blood in my veins which , I ’ ve been told , will not even appear on a DNA test . Five hundred years is too long ago , but I like to think that by living in Spain , I am somehow completing his journey .
With special thanks to Geoff Hutt who gave a talk on the Spanish Armada in the Nerja Cultural Centre in 2015 .
MARILYN BARRY Marilyn Barry is a writer who lives in Nerja .
Her website is www . innerwayonline . com
P . S . Canela y Grano There ’ s a lovely new shop at the top of c / Pintada , Nerja which sells beans , grains , pasta , nuts , coffee , tea , and other culinary items out of sacks . Not a plastic bag or wrapper in sight .
I do not remember much about the funeral . I was crying too much . Nothing is more primal than the loss of one ’ s mother . I was not crying about her death or the disease which stole her memories , but her life . After the sudden death of my father she did not have the luxury of grieving . Instead she had to find work to keep a roof over our heads and put food on the table . I still cry when I think about her struggles and the worried look on her face when the bills arrived . She asked social services for help but they only offered to put me into care . She declined the offer .
Now that I live in Spain , I often think about my Spanish ancestor who was one of over 20,000 men recruited to sail in
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