Alfredo GARCIA

Alfredo GARCIA

• General Notes
  • Recollections of my Father
    
    My dad was born in La Linea where my grandfather had moved to for reasons I don’t know. Although my father lived in La Linea he was educated in Gib by the 'Christian Brothers' in what is now, or used to be when I live there, the boys Grammar school. The Christian brothers were the catholic order responsible for all boys’ education in Gib right till I was a teenager. They were hard disciplinarians and I remember getting the cane treatment from them for many trivial infringements, most were Irish and they hated the British and anything British with a passion, to the extent they used to make English boys life a misery. I’m sure it must have been the same in my father’s day.
    
    The Christian brothers had a forming effect on my fathers character and he remembered may of the their teachings and parables about life to the extent that he mentioned them to me may times when I was growing up, these related to personal behavior, respect for humanity and all that stuff, it also had the effect of giving him a passion for literature and he liked to read the classics and historical novels mainly in Spanish.
    
    When we lived in the isolation hospital (more later) in a nizzen hut that used to be part of the prisoner of war camp, he installed a wood/coal burning fire in the toilet and in the cold winter evenings he used to read to my mother and I long passages of the Spanish classic romantic novels of the 19th century.
    
    I’m not sure where this fits in the timeline, I suspect it’s before he married and was evacuated because by the time the war started the dockyard was already completed I believe.
    
    When the dockyard was being built the walls of the dry docks and most other surfaces was lined with large blocks of granite, so where did they come from? Some were brought over by ship from England but most were quarried from the area called Rossia bay, in fact this area till recently was known to everyone as the 'Quarry' and I believe some  call it that to this day. To take the quarried stone from Rossia bay a railway line was built from there to the dockyard (today its the road you drive to go to Rossia bay through the two small tunnels) a steam engine was used to haul the heavy load and my father was the engine drivers assistance, somewhere we had a picture of the engine with my father as a young man standing near it.
    
    My mother was born near Malaga, I believe the small church where she as baptized still stands, she came from a large family and during the civil war, the whole family became refugees and to escape the Franco troops they walked with many others all the way from Malaga to La Linea, in later years my mother used to recount what a traumatic experience that was, walking as a small child in a long column of refugees having to endure the constant bombing and strafing from German planes. She never forgot the young girl that was hit in the neck by shrapnel which severed her artery causing a fountain of blood to gush out.
    
    During the war they were evacuated to London with many other Gibos. They were housed in the ''Park Royal hotel' with may other refugees and Gibos, I don’t know much about that period except that to better himself he did an apprenticeship in an aircraft factory making bombers for the war effort. He had a very good training which served him well in later years when he got a job in the Gibraltar Dockyard. (Somewhere you have his papers and ID for this period)
    
    He did have another job when he was in England and that is the one that really interested me when I was a child. I don’t know which job came first, this on or the aircraft factory apprenticeship, but anyhow this job was as keeper in a huge jail holding American soldiers who had committed really serious crime such as rape murder bank robberies etc. There were a great may of them my father used to tell me and they were all waiting to be sent back to the US in prison ships for execution or long jail sentences
    
    I remember some of the stories he told me, my father had a very easy personality, was a good listener and had the kind of personality that made people be at ease with him and want to tell him all about themselves. One story he told me was that one young GI had committed murder somewhere and was awaiting repatriation for execution, he liked my father a great deal and as a memento he gave him a gold ring he was wearing. This ring was wide and in  the shape of  a belt, my father wore it all his life and later my mother wore it till recently when Mum took it from her for safekeeping....I really hope mum has it, I will be very sad if its lost because my father treasured it.
    
    Another story was about anther prisoner he had befriended how had been jailed for armed robbery and was waiting to be repatriated to serve a long sentence in a  US penitentiary. He told my father that he had such a long sentence to serve that he would never be able to get back to the UK so he gave my father the plan were he had hidden his ill gotten gains a fortune by all accounts, My father kept the plan for many years but would not go anywhere near where this fortune was hidden, I remember it was hidden in a park in London at a certain location buried in a chest near a huge old oak tree. I wonder if its still there, If its ever found and in the press you know what its about.
    
    Again I’m not sure of where it fits in the timeline but he was in the merchant Navy during the war traveling on the North Atlantic convoys and I remember he telling me the ship he was on had a direct hit right though the funnel and the ship sank, all the crew were rescued from the freezing water of the North Atlantic just in time. He was in the merchant navy after the war and when I was young, I remember him telling me he had been in Brazil and had traveled up the Orinoco river in a canoe for days putting his had in the water now and again, when the guide spotted him doing that he lounged at my Dad and pulled his hand out of the water and told him not to do that again since that was the way most people in the river were snapped up by crocodiles and dragged into the river and drowned
    
    I remember as a toddler the arrival in Gib of the liner taking us all back to Gib. I remember the liner went to the back of the rock and anchored there for ages and I remember the rumor and panic amongst the passengers who thought the delay was because there were still some rogue German submarines lurking around
    
    Back in Gib my father worked with the RAF in the airfield workshop as a mechanic at some time we lived in the Nizzen huts which were crammed in the area across the road from the civil cemetery. Later he worked in the dockyard again as a mechanic I don’t remember where we lived at the time
    
    Restless, he dreamed of a better life away from Gib and somehow convinced my mum that Argentina was the place of the future full of wonderful opportunities so off we went. It broke my heart to sell all my toys especially a pedal car that was my pride and joy.  One clear day, early in the morning we boarded a Taxi in Gib and made the hair raising journey to Cadiz where we boarded a liner full of immigrants to the land of honey, we were traveling 3rd class of course which meant we bunked with hundreds of others crammed together in bunks 3 level high in the cargo hold of the liner, emptied and clean for the purpose. I remember the teaming mass of humanity in the cramped quarters no different to the films you see about emigration in the 1900s.
    
    Traveling on the ship but first class of course was a famous Spanish flamenco (name later) dancer and singer with her troupe going to Argentina for a tour. We used to go to a coffee shop/lounge and a few times the singer happened to be close and I remember the passengers convincing her to sing a song and entertain the people for a while. The trip took 4 weeks and eventually we arrived in Buenos Aires traveling up the muddy waters of river plate.
    
    We moved in with a cousin of my grandmother, my father’s mother. They were caretakers of a large building located in Number 7 or 9 (I can’t remember) ‘Calle Suipacha” (or a street called Suipach) close to the centre of the city and near a wide avenue not far from the port. The building was a sports club for the elite; it had a huge well equipped gym we kids played in.
    
    He found a job very quickly in the General Electric factory making electric Irons. He became foreman and the local workers resented him for making it so quickly to such a relatively high position. On night coming home from work he was mugged but nothing was stolen, he ended up with 2-3 broken ribs. He got the message the locals were trying to give him…Quit! So he did although the management wanted him to stay.
    
    I had to go to school and my father wanted me to have an English education. The only place was the English school in Buenos Aires run by the Christian brothers, to his great surprise the headmaster had been a teacher at the school in Gibraltar where my father had his education! My father was overjoyed to see his old teacher again who by now was an old man. The headmaster offered a place for me a this school but it was a boarding school  but he could neither afford it or have the heart to put me in it.
    
    It was a large family living in the house and after a while I remember we got in each others pockets so my father decided to move out. He found the new town that was being built outside Buenos Aires; I remember we had to go by train a long way. It was at the edge of the Pampas, the wide grassy plains of Argentina which was gaucho (cowboy) and cattle country. The town was a nothing place just a stopping place for the gauchos inhabiting the huge cattle ranches in the area, they used to come to town now and again driving their cattle and roasting meat by the campfires, singing and playing guitars well into the night. When they came to town and made their camps near where we lived my father used to take me to see them and I used to sit at the edge of the camp watching these hard men resting from a hard life, their huge knives always at the ready and willing to slash someone’s face who had said the wrong thing
    
    It was cowboy town as I said and nothing for my father to do, no industry no nothing. Eventually he got a job in the local garage repairing tractors and farming equipment but that was not him. My mother had a hard time too. Although it was a large new house it was situated amongst a number of other unfinished houses and unfinished roads, of the few that had been finished not many were occupied but for my father it was a dream, so he paid his deposit to a gun totting owner of the land and we settled in.
    
    Right close to the house the pampas stretched to infinity and all you could see was flat grasslands and corn fields as far as the eye could see. My mother used to send me, or take me to pick corn cobs from the fields across the road, the biggest corn cobs you will ever see and we had corn for breakfast, lunch and dinner. To this day I hate corn!
    
    Eventually, it was clear even to me this was the wrong place to live and my dad decided to ask for his money back and go back to Buenos Aires.
    
    I can’t remember if the sequence is right and I can’t remember whether this happened before or after we left for the country but in 1950 full of adventure and excitement he joined the last great whaling expedition before the world ban on whale hunting. I think it was a Norwegian whaling fleet, for sure the crew of the small whaler he was in was staffed by Norwegians who drank anything resembling alcohol that they could find including boot polish. During the long waiting times he carved penguins out of killer whales teeth and we have some of them to this day.
    
    The fleet was based in the Falkland Islands or Malvinas as the Argentineans call them but the main processing plant was in an island further south called South Georgia. Today it’s uninhabited, but at the time it was a thriving whale processing plant full of wreckage of great ships. One of them he told me about was the wreck of this massive iron ship with huge masts and propellers and he was sad to see such a handsome ship aground and rotting in the shore. Many, many years later this ship, the famous SS Great Britain was rescued and take to Bristol where it was repaired and now stands as a museum and a monument to the greatest engineer who ever lived in my opinion. Islambad Kingdom Brunell. This was the largest ship of its time and the first ever all iron and propeller driven vessel.
    
    Somewhere along the line he was shipwrecked once again and this was a major event in Argentina, he never told us but wrote to his Dad sending him newspaper cuttings, given where it was that the shipwreck happened he was lucky to come out of it alive. I never knew this till many years later but he would not talk about it.
    
    Eventually we had to return to Gib. Being short of money he had arranged with the crew if a British merchant vessel at the time in Buenos Aires harbour to take us on board hide us inside a lifeboat till the ship was well out to see and then surface, that way we would get to the UK free but my mother would have noting of it. Eventually we boarded a grand liner and this time returned to Cadiz in style with our own cabin and all the trappings of traveling in a decent class. We had been in Argentina for approximately 9 months I think.
    
    
    On return to Gib again he ended up in the Dockyard and we lived in a single room right at the top of what was the Loreto convent later to become the Grammar school for girls in Gib and that’s the school Mum went to. And is now Government house.
    
    The room where we lived had a small patio at the front with a good view of the bay. I remember once or twice  year the Nato fleets used to come to gib for a few days, hundreds of ships and from the patio we had  a grand view of the ships coming in. In the evenings hundreds of sailors rampaged through the city American, Canadian, British etc, it was a time when the Gib mums locked up their daughters.
    
    Later we moved to the Laguna area so called because right up to the war the area was sea and you had to go through a causeway to go to La Linea or the airport. Today its the area where the Laguna estate now stands, a collection of 50s style government housing but at the time we moved there, it was an area where a series of Nizzen huts were laid out in a grid with grass areas and neat pathways between them, during the war it had been a prisoner of war camp where captured Italian soldiers were housed, when we move there the outside fence had been remove but little else had changed. Adjacent to it was an area which was fenced off as an isolation hospital where sailors or visitors who had communicable disease were held in quarantine (some years ago I bought a photo from the shop at the end of main street which showed this area at the time i live there, I don’t know what happened to it maybe you have it or its at home somewhere)
    
    I remember we had a small kitchen and  my father being a great handyman, fitted it out from bits and pieces of wood we found or scrounged from somewhere, we had a bedroom a living area and a toilet. The toilet became his workshop and the place where we congregated in winter by the wood burning stove he had installed. He was well read and the highlight of the day was him reading to my mum and I from some romantic 19th century novel with us huddling by the stove. He cut a section of the Nizzen hut off by the toilet and built a small door to give access to a small area by the side he had converted to our garden/patio. He built a high fence around it and built a shed which is where we lived most of the summer. We had no running potable water in the beginning and my mother and I used to go with buckets and collect it from a central distribution tap which was only unlocked a certain number of days a week.
    
    At this time he worked in the dockyard as a fitter. He liked to be in the open and have no fixed place of work, he worked in the main workshop for a while and felt like a caged animal so he was transferred to the group of fitters that had to go to where navy ship was in harbour requiring repairs, this group of people were also the team that stripped a warship bare when it came to Gib for a 1 or 2 year maintenance and overhaul. He was part of the team dedicated to stripping all the pipes and machinery from the engine room or boiler room so it could be sent to the main workshop for overhaul and repairs. (I did the same job when I became an apprentice in the dockyard and later a fitter like him)  (again, somewhere there are papers for this period)
    
    During the war a tanker called the Denby Dale had been torpedoed by Italian frogmen working from Algeciras. It was severely damaged so all the machinery and engines were stripped for other use and the hulk kept in Gib as oil storage tanker. I remember when I was very young he used to take me on board and he used to show me the cavernous area was the engines had once stood. And he used to tell me he was part of the team that had to work day and night to strip it all out.
    
    My father got itchy feet again and when he heard that a tichy small tanker based in Gib that was used for supplying oil to warships in the harbour was going to replenish the Royal Yought Britannia during the world tour the young Queen made in ........... he pulled all the stops to join the crew as an engine fitter.
    This tanker was tiny and it was to go to the Azores, a group of islands in the middle of the Atlantic and wait for the Britannia to arrive and replenish it with fuel oil. I remember how excited he was and we spend hours looking at maps and write-ups about the Islands, a wild semi tropical paradise, there were monkeys and pineapples volcanoes and all, I remember I made him promise to bring some back and he did.
    
    His arrival back in Gib was on a dark winter evening cold and with a tropical rainstorm, i ran to the ship as soon as it docked but he had already left for home. he brought pineapples ...hundreds of them and we had them hanging all over the house for them to ripen, we had pineapple for months, a  real treat and rarity in those days.

Details of Alfredo's family with Fransisca PEREZ