Doña Guadalupe, normally a quiet but cheerful old lady with a mischievous sense of humour, was distraught. Her weatherbeaten face creased in pain as she told us the news: 'She's been accepted,' she cried despairingly, as though her granddaughter Yami had just been enrolled in the Chicago mafia.
'But that's wonderful! Congratulations! There's a lot of competition for…'
'No, no, it's a tragedy. She'll be off to La Laguna, and that's it. We've lost her.'
La Laguna is the site of the university campus in Tenerife. Guadalupe wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her black widow's dress.
'But you must be proud of her, surely? What's she going to study?'
'Oh, I don't know. Something social.'
Social sciences, perhaps. It didn't really matter what she was studying, the point was that she was leaving La Gomera for a different life on a different island.
'But she'll come back here for the holidays, the fiestas…'
'Sí, sí, claro.' Of course. But Yami would be changed. She wouldn't want to stay. She wouldn't want to work the family farm, have babies, join the family meals at weekends. She would have ambitions, she'd want a career, and there aren't too many career opportunities on a small island. They'd lost her.
What triggered this decades-old memory was reading about the 2021 documentary series Get back about the Beatles. The group had a global hit in 1969 with their song of that title, which has a very simple chorus:
The song enigmatically features two characters called Jojo and Loretta, both of whom went away from where they belonged and perhaps they'd do better to go back there.
It all depends, though, doesn't it… Do they know where they really belong? Does anyone?
Not me, that's for sure. I was born into a restless family. My life began in the busy city of Nottingham in the industrial heartland of England but I'd barely learned to crawl before they whisked me away, bye bye Nottingham, all the way to genteel, elderly Bournemouth on the south coast. We left there after a couple of years to fetch up in Teddington near London, then Twickenham near Teddington, then…
We perched for the longest time in Windsor, home also to the Queen. I once wished her 'Good morning, ma'am' while riding a horse in Windsor Great Park. Both of us riding, she and I, so it was a memorable moment but she was already married to the Duke of Edinburgh so as a blind date it was a bummer.
The fact is I should have tried harder to find a partner with her feet planted firmly in the ground but instead I married another rootless wanderer. More by luck than judgement Janine and I finally arrived at the only place that has ever felt like home. If we belong anywhere at all, it's here in La Gomera.
I'm deeply grateful to the island for that, but also deeply envious of the true Gomerans. How wonderful it must be not only to feel you belong here but also to know it's an indisputable fact. An authentic Gomeran has roots reaching all the way down to the Spanish conquest in the mid-1400s, with surnames to prove it. And even further: some have surnames or first names donated by the original indigenous population, the guanches, and on average each Gomeran retains around 40 per cent of guanche DNA in their body's cells, with some as high as 90 per cent. How's that for belonging?
But we need to finish the story about Yami. Wise old Granny was absolutely right, Yami studied well and emerged with a good degree, won a place in the Social Services in Tenerife and stayed there, happily settled with a lifetime partner. She comes back for the holidays and fiestas, of course.
Get back, get back, get back to where you once belonged…
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The Beatles song
Population of La Gomera
Many granddaughters and grandsons choose to stay here, thank goodness, or the place would soon be empty. In fact the impression is that the island's population is slowly increasing - there are lots of babies and toddlers around - and this is supported by the figures. Wikipedia reckons there were about 18,300 inhabitants in 2001, which by 2020 had risen to over 22,400. Some 9,000 of these live in the capital, San Sebastián. A small part of the increase is due to newcomers settling here including South Americans, who fit in very well, and a few Europeans like us who speak Spanish a lot less convincingly but generally do our best.
Guanches
The island's original inhabitants are mentioned in several earlier stories, notably The tragedy of the broken bowl posted in this blog on 10 July 2018 and published as story 40 in the paperback book Do they still whistle?
The luggage illustration
I snapped this poignant bronze sculpture in the year 2000 on the concourse of Atocha railway station in Madrid.
