Old habits die hard in La Gomera, thankfully

THIS morning, in our village, 3km from the sea, on the terraced slopes of the Valle Gran Rey on the island of La Gomera in the Canary Islands, cocks crowded, blackbirds piped, and the fish van passed up the valley leaving skirls of sentimental Canarian music in its wake.

“Hay pescado, hay moreno, hay sardinas!”, the fishmonger’s voice chanted above the echoes bouncing off the steep cliffs half a kilometre apart on the valley sides. He parked above the village. What was initially an unpaved dirt track and then a tarred byroad is now a fine two-lane highway, with barriers over the life-threatening ‘drops’.

Ours was the first car to drive down the new road on the day it was opened sometime in the mid 1980s; it was also the first car in the valley to get a parking ticket. I should have kept the ticket as a historical artefact evidencing a step in the progress of the valley into modern times and modern regulations which, like the drink-drive laws in Ireland, still elicit a mixed response.

While the road has changed, local habits prevail. As the fish van stops for business, women we have known for years and have seen grow older — as we have ourselves — walk from their houses along the paths amongst the banana plantations, the mango and avocado trees, carrying plates to transport the fish fresh from an ocean. The farmers live up the valley, the fishermen down below. Blood-relations, they inhabit different worlds.

My wife or I have often joined these women at the back door of the van, exchanging news while the maestro balances fish against his iron weights. When we first came, we rented an old house, higher up the valley. It had no electricity, a cold-water bathroom one metre square with a cistern, a washbasin, and a pipe sticking out of the wall for a shower. The water was warm in the evening, the pipes heated by the sun. We lived there most of a year and were none the worse for it. The children loved it. We had good neighbours. We bought their produce, and fish from the fish van, from the father of the man who drives it now. There was a single cow in the valley, and we bought milk from the “herdsman”.

In 1981, we bought a small, roofless ruin in the lovely village of Casa de la Seda (The House of Silk; silkworms were cultivated here two centuries ago), and renovated it with the help of friends. We were teaching in London then; we saved hard and built more each summer. It was a slow but satisfying process. In 1989, we sold it to finance a home back in Ireland. Now one of our sons has bought a pretty little house here, and we are ‘at home’ again.

In the early 1980s, mobile phones hadn’t been invented. Landline phones didn’t reach isolated houses and hamlets in hidden valleys. Sometimes, in the afternoon silence, we would hear exchanges in the unique whistling language evolved in Gomera a millennium ago, not a system of whistled signals, as a shepherd might address to his dog, but a language capable of conversation across the deep volcanic valleys of the island. A farmer might whistle to a neighbour, working the fields across the valley, “Hey, Juan, bring back 10kg more of the spuds, Conchita wants some...” and Juan might whistle back, “Do I look like a donkey, do I have four legs and a tail?”

Now, with mobile phones everywhere, will there be no more whistling, only ring tones from Silicon Valley, another unique human facility evolved over millennia endangered, and then lost?

Perhaps not; recently tuition classes in “Silbo Gomero” have been set up for the children. The revival is popular. If the satellites fall from the sky, Gomeros will still be able to talk over distances. Like the unique Navajo Indian language used for unbreakable codes in World War II, the Gomero silbo may have another life to come.

The weather is not always flawless but better than an Irish summer. Yesterday, beneath the massive concrete piles of an old banana loading- station, we swam in a sea pool in Hermigua, a valley in the north.