Pablo de Ronda was thinking about death the other day. On 4 May 2022 his dad would have been 105. Here he revisits a memoire he wrote a year previously, recalling the impact of his dad’s death and the passing of other relatives, friends and acquaintances around that time.

John Albert Whitelock poses with colleagues on a Spitfire at RAF Chivenor in 1947

Tuesday 4 May 2021

My dad, John Albert Whitelock, known to family and friends as Jack, would have reached the ripe old age of 104 today. Alas, he died aged 68, of a massive heart attack. That’s a whole generation ago – 36 years!

The only existing photo of all 12 in the Whitelock family from Cilfrew, near Neath. John Albert Whitelock is on the extreme right in the rather Mafia-like white suit.

I think about him every year on his birthday (and at other times too, of course!), and I feel sad that he knew nothing about how my later life developed. He would have loved it.

He knew my daughter Amy briefly as a tiny baby, but not my son Tom. He didn’t know that their mum, Jeryl, and I divorced after 30 years of marriage. He would have regretted that, as he loved my first wife to bits.

He didn’t know that Amy went from a local comprehensive school to Oxford and got a 1^st in English and German, is married with two kids, aged four and one, and is the Chief Executive of Birthrights, a UK charity that champions human rights in pregnancy and childbirth.

Nor did he know that Amy became an accomplished amateur oboist who (in non-COVID times!) performs in several orchestras in the London area.

He didn’t know that my son Tom became a fine professional actor and singer. Tom did a singing diploma at LIPA, Paul McCartney’s Fame School in Liverpool, followed by a three-year actor/musician degree at the Rose Bruford College of Theatre & Performance in Sidcup, Kent.

Tom is not a household name, by any means, but he has performed some significant roles. Probably his most important one to date was as Pete Quaife, the Kinks bass player in the hit musical “Sunny Afternoon”, which had a long run at the Harold Pinter Theatre in the West End and won the Olivier Award for Best Musical in 2015.

As well as being a good enough bass guitarist to perform live on stage in the West End, Tom is an accomplished saxophonist and mandolin player.

My poor dad missed all this because he died so young.

Tom is also married. To Susannah Austin. Susannah is also a professional singer and actor. They have a one-year-old boy.

Su’s mother, Claire Hamill, is a well-known singer/songwriter who played with artists such as Jon Anderson, Vangelis and Wishbone Ash.

As I said before, my dad loved my first wife, Jeryl, to bits. He would also have been proud of her progress after his death in 1985.

After a successful career in the textile industry, she went on to become Professor of International Marketing and Head of Department at the prestigious University of Bradford Business School.

Not bad for the only daughter of working-class parents from Luton in Bedfordshire.

Although we’re no longer together I remain very proud of Jeryl; she was my best friend and she has been a brilliant mother to my kids and a much-loved “nan” to our three grandchildren.

After we divorced, she studied acting at the London Centre for Theatre Studies, took early retirement, became a professional actor and moved to London to be near our children and near to acting work.

John Albert, my dad, would have loved to have been part of all this.

He didn’t know that I stopped teaching after 15 years and became a schools adviser and inspector. He would have been so proud, him the son of a South Wales coal miner, one of a family of 12. I was the first of the children of him and his siblings to go to university.

Others followed in my footsteps, of course, but, he, basically a labourer, who bettered himself through night school classes to become a telephone engineer, was chuffed to have the first of the new generation with aspirations far away from the coalmines of the Swansea valley.

When I got a BSc honours in German and Spanish, followed by a PGCE at Sheffield, and became a teacher, in his eyes a respected profession, he was a very proud “taffy” indeed.

Then suddenly, on the morning of the last Saturday in August 1985, the 31^st, death came. Dad died peacefully in one of his favourite spots, in his caravan at Brean Sands in Somerset.

My dad not only didn't get to experience all of this, he missed out on my "second life", married to the lovely Rita, living in retirement in southern Spain, the owner of three houses. He would have loved all that, although he would obviously have been somewhat elderly.

What a shock!

On the afternoon of 4 May 2021, I popped into La Terraza, one of my favourite bars in Montejaque.

Sitting at a table were other “bar / restaurant people” that I knew. It was their day off. Among them was Sonia and her husband from Patatín Patatán in Ronda. That was the first Ronda tapas bar Jeryl and I ever visited back in 2000 when we came to Andalucía to celebrate our Silver Wedding Anniversary.

It quickly became our favourite bar. Delicious tapas at good prices, all on display, so you didn’t need to know what they were called to order them – you just pointed.

I asked how Fernando, her Dad, was. He’s the owner and I hadn’t seen him for a while.

“Falleció de Covid hace dos meses”, she said. He died two months ago from Covid. He was 67; a year younger than my dad when he died.

Well, I’m not ashamed to admit that I welled up. Fernando was such a nice man. Ever pleasant, always available for a chat. In our early days of owning a flat in Ronda, Jeryl and I were still working in the UK and could only come sporadically to Ronda. He always remembered us when we went to his bar. I was very sad to hear that news.

Local deaths

Then the group of us started remembering local people who had been snatched away prematurely by this damned Coronavirus.

Carlos, teniente alcalde de Montejaque, who died in April 2021 aged 58. He was as fit as a butcher’s dog. He was very well liked in the village, and the shock of his passing was palpable.

Carlos Ernesto Escalante Alza, teniente alcalde de Montejaque

Andrés, owner of Bar Peruco, just off the square in Montejaque, died in early 2021 of Covid-19. He opened every day at 7.00 am to provide coffee and chupitos to the workers, to the pensioners who couldn’t sleep and to insomniac me! He was in good health. A nice, gentle man. He was also about the same age as my dad.

His father-in-law had also died of Covid-19 a few weeks before.

Family bereavement

Then I started thinking about Andy Shepherd, the husband of my niece Nicki, who perished in a plane crash in Australia, where they had lived for a number of years. That was just two years ago, on 17 May, the day before my 70^th birthday. He was just 44 years old. He left a widow and two young children, Alex and Willow.

The second anniversary of his death was on 17 May, the day before my 72^nd birthday. That was a sad day too.

In a couple of weeks Nicki, Alex and Willow are coming over to the UK for a month. On 14 June the family is meeting up in Lympsfield Chart in Surrey to strew Andy's ashes in the same place as Nicki's mum's, Norma, who died young, and those of her grandparents. 

***

Epilogue

Two things are certain in life: death and taxes.

Taxes always come at the same time – in January in the UK and in June in Spain.

Death can come at any time, however.

Death in the afternoon… and also in the morning.

In our tiny pueblo blanco in the Serrania de Ronda there used to be 13 bars for a population of just under 1000 people. Not a bad ratio, I’d say. Over the last dozen years that number has fluctuated as bars have opened and closed their doors. The number has dropped by about a quarter.

Four doors closed for good

Bar La Cuesta and Bar Las Campanitas both shut their doors for good a few years back and Bar La Bodega closed around the same time and is now a private house.

A fourth bar closed in 2020 as a result of Covid-19. Andrés, the owner of Bar Perucho, where all the men used to go for early morning coffee, caught the virus and died. His widow Paqui had already lost her father to the bicho. Son Andrés also caught the Coronavirus, thankfully survived but had no interest in carrying on with the bar.

The caffeine addicts had to find another venue for their pre-dawn coffee, chupito and chat.

Bar Perucho has been converted into a private home.

Changes post-Covid

In the last couple of months there has been a flurry of activity. First of all José, proprietor of El Patio del Frasquito Pedro on Calle Nueva, decided to retire along with his wife. The place was up for sale but there had been no takers. “Happy Pepe”, as we called José because he rarely smiled, just shut up shop – he’d had enough after 30 years. Now he is to be seen out and about in the village all the time – smiling. He’s a very happy man!

Within a few weeks, however, to great joy, the place had re-opened under the name Bar Restaurante El Patio. The new tenant is 29-year-old Jacinto, from the village. A graduate in mechanical engineering, being a bar owner was not what Jacinto planned to do with his life, but the Coronavirus pandemic changed his perspective.

I’ve known Jacinto for three years or so. Displaced back to his home village by the pandemic he drifted from waiting at tables to construction. He even had a spell working in Germany.

The re-furbished establishment is in a good spot in the village. Its unique selling point (USP) is the large, secluded patio out the back.

At the recent opening, Jacinto’s dad, also Jacinto, was helping behind the bar, as they were doing a brisk trade. Other family members were working in the kitchen.

The new Patio has a younger vibe and an interesting range of tapas and meals.

From my point of view the re-opening of this centrally situated bar is a welcome addition to the hospitality on offer in the village.

Another door closes

Last Sunday at midnight, at the end of the local Feria de Mayo in the village, Pub Nazarí closed its doors for the final time. This was a great shame for all the youngsters and me, as it was fun and cheap, played good music and had Champions League football on the telly. The young landlord, Javi, was a great lad!

It was also a shame as the bar had only been open in this guise for about two years. Back then I wrote an article about the young entrepreneurs of the Serranía de Ronda. This is what I wrote about Javi and Pub Nazarí at the time:

“But the youngest of all our entrepreneurs is the admirable Javi, who was just 20, when he opened Bar Nazarí two years ago. In the heart of Montejaque, with good music, tapas and a lot of atmosphere, it could be the bar of the future in this village.”

Not to be the bar of the future, then. Since it closed, all the signage, the awnings, etc, have been removed and the façade repainted. It now looks like a normal house.

And another re-opens

On Friday night, Chiringuito La Terraza, the open-air bar just outside the village re-opened for the Summer.

This bar was also the brainchild of young entrepreneurs.

Borja, Cayetano and Rubén, three Montejaqueño friends in their twenties, were displaced by the pandemic from the hospitality industry on the coast. They decided to start an open-air chill-out bar with music and food just outside the village. In the middle of beautiful scenery is La Terraza, popular with all ages. They serve delicious tapas and raciones in a spectacular setting. It was an immediate success. However, because of the climate in the mountains they had to close for the winter. What to do?

Well, they took over a bar that had been closed for years and that place, also renamed La Terraza, is a big success. Rubén, 35, is a trained chef and has designed a sumptuous menu. It is currently our favourite eatery in the village.

Younger brother Borja, 30, takes care of front-of-house, alongside their pal Cayetano, 28.

The end of an era

The saddest door of all that is about to close for ever in August is that of Bar Armando in Calle Santa Cruz.

The licensee is Armando’s wife Pepi.  Both she and her man are about to reach retirement age and they want to move to the coast, where they already have an apartment, to be near their grandchildren.

Good luck to them, I say, but this closure will be a great loss to the village. It was the first bar I ever entered in the village after I moved in with my new sweetheart in 2008 and I hit it off with Armando straightaway. It was the night of the first leg of a Champions League semi-final between Real Madrid and Liverpool FC. Armando is a huge Real fan and I’m a fan of the Reds. Real were expected to win that match – but Liverpool prevailed on that night and Real lost the tie on aggregate 5-1. There were no hard feelings and we’ve been friends ever since. I even bought a house off Armando (and his three siblings) in 2020!

We fear that this bar, which belongs to Pepi’s nonagenarian Dad, will never re-open, as it no longer meets modern health and safety requirements.

***

By my reckoning that leaves the village with just 10 hostelries as we enter the month of June 2022. Maybe somebody will take on a couple of locales that have been shut for donkeys´ years, but I think it’s unlikely.

And what is the name of this village?

Montejaque (Málaga).

Further reading:

De tapeo in Montejaque

Early Morning Coffee

The Young Entrepreneurs of the Serranía de Ronda

The Young Entrepreneurs of the Serranía de Ronda II

The houses on either side of my casa de pueblo in Montejaque (Málaga) have both been sold this month.

If this had happened during the 18 months of sometimes noisy building work, I would have understood, but not now, when the drills, lump hammers and tile cutters are silent.

In actual fact neither house was occupied full time.

The first house to sell was the property to the right. The vendor has asked me not to write too much, so I'll leave it at that. Just to say that I understand that my new neighbours will be a Polish couple, who fell in love with this tasteful and stylish property the first time they viewed it. I've met them and they are buena gente (very nice people).

The house to the left is an old, surprisingly large village house in need of renovation. It was unoccupied but visited on a daily basis by one of the Spanish owners to water the large number of outside plants and to do a weekly clean. The new owners, two Spanish ladies, don’t live in the village, and I understand they’ve bought it as a weekend house.

House sales on the up

After 14 years of stagnation, caused by the financial crisis of 2008 and then the Coronavirus pandemic, the housing market in this area has picked up sharply. Since the turn of the year nearly a dozen houses have changed hands in Montejaque alone.

Buyers come from a range of countries, including Canada, France, Netherlands, Poland, UK and USA, as well as Spain. Prices range from under 100,000 to approaching half a million Euros.

Recently opened Andalucia Country Houses have played a prominent role, as has long-established local estate agent Montejaque Holiday Service. Most houses, however, are sold privately or using the traditional “corredor” system. Corredores (independent “estate agents”) typically charge a 2.5% commission, compared to the expensive 5% charged by agencias inmobiliarias.

Yesterday, Sunday 1 May, was International Workers’ Day, but the bank holiday has been shifted to today in Spain, the UK and many other countries. Not, somewhat surprisingly, in Germany, however. In that country, if a bank holiday falls at the weekend, tough! Workers lose that day. So, if, for example, Christmas Day and Boxing Day fall on a Saturday and Sunday, the following Monday and Tuesday are normal working days. In this example, New Year’s Day would fall on a Sunday also, so that would be a triple whammy in Deutschland – three days holiday lost!

International Workers’ Day

International Workers' Day, also known as Labour Day in some countries and often referred to as May Day, is a celebration of labourers and the working classes that is promoted by the international labour movement and occurs every year on May Day (1 May).

While it may belong to a tradition of spring festivals, the date was chosen in 1889 for political reasons by the Marxist International Socialist Congress, which met in Paris and established the Second International as a successor to the earlier International Workingmen's Association. They adopted a resolution for a "great international demonstration" in support of working-class demands for the eight-hour day.

The date had been chosen by the American Federation of Labor to continue an earlier campaign for the eight-hour day in the United States, which had been the cause of a general strike beginning on 1 May 1886, and culminated in the Haymarket affair, which occurred in Chicago four days later.

May Day subsequently became an annual event.The 1904 Sixth Conference of the Second International, called on "all Social Democratic Party organisations and trade unions of all countries to demonstrate energetically on the First of May for the legal establishment of the eight-hour day, for the class demands of the proletariat, and for universal peace".

The 1st of May is a national public holiday in many countries across the world, in most cases as "International Workers' Day" or a similar name

What happens in Spain?

Here in Spain, families will spend the day together, maybe going for a walk, a car excursion and/or eating with the extended family. As it’s a Puente, giving workers a long weekend, many Spanish will go away for a short break, either to the coast or into the mountains.

This year the Sevilla Fair starts on 1 May and lasts until Saturday 7 May. Curiously called La Feria de Abril, this is a week of serious dancing, drinking, eating and socialising, with late nights - or all-nighters - the norm. The sheer extent of the April Fair's spectacle is extraordinary.

From around midday until early evening - especially on Sunday, the first official day - Sevilla society parades around the Recinto Ferial (showground) in carriages or on horseback. There are also daily bullfights , generally considered the best of the season. Then the eating, drinking, and dancing continues into the small hours.

Famous painting

Dos de Mayo is also the title of a painting by Franciso de Goya. Probably his most famous painting, it was completed in 1814 and commemorates the Second of May Uprising of 1808 which took place in Madrid.

It was a rebellion by local civilians, alongside some military personnel, against the occupation of the city by Napoleon’s French troops, provoking a heavy-handed repression by the French Imperial forces and much violence, as depìcted in Goya's painting.

***

So, today is a big day in Spain for a few good reasons. Enjoy.

We are planning to walk the recently opened Caminito de Montejaque, also known as the Caminito de los Caballeros, followed by lunch either in the newly re-opened El Patio or in our favourite restaurant La Terraza, both in Montejaque.

The weather forecast is very good, so …..