Free White Boots & Miniskirts by Jacky Hyams Page A

northern Europe. Alas, the demand for these holidays didn’t match the ability of the Spaniards to fulfil their side of the contract, i.e. build the new hotels in time for the arrival of the tourist hordes.
    Back then Spain was a very different place, still under the thumb of the dictator Franco, who had ruled with an iron fist since the 1930s. The hunger of Spanish businessmen and hoteliers to start making good money from the new tourism could not match the reality: this was the land of mañana . They just couldn’t build the hotels fast enough. You’d book from the picture in the brochure, a beautiful brand new building, complete with swimming pool and palm-fringed, sunny terraces and pay for the holiday, only to discover at the eleventh hour that the builders were still very much on site. Or on extended siesta. If, indeed, they’d started working on the hotel at all.
    I’d had this experience on my first Spanish trip with my friend Shirley. We’d arrived at Alicante airport to be met by the rep. ‘Er… the hotel you booked isn’t ready.’ Shrug. ‘We can put you up somewhere else. But it won’t be what you booked. So sorry.’ No hotel? What did they think we were there for? Today, with all those outraged holidaymakers going crazy, there’d be an irate and very public Twitter storm, with MDs making hurriedstatements at frenetic press conferences out on the steps of their headquarters, surrounded by nervous advisers. Yet then, with the package tourism industry still in its early stages, people understood less about their rights, their entitlements, so they tended to stay meek and go where they were told. Unless, like me, they were of the instantly militant type. I ranted. I shouted. I whipped up a storm of fury, helped by a few of the accompanying group of package tourists.
    It worked. Within an hour Shirley and I were hustled onto a coach taking us to one of Benidorm’s finest hotels, the Gran Hotel Delfin, on the edge of the amazing Poniente beach. To us, it was terribly luxurious. It proved to be a fairly uneventful fortnight, just loafing around the hotel pool in our bikinis with uncomfortably wired tops, wandering around the palm-fringed terraces, and venturing into hot, dusty Alicante for a few hours on a coach trip. Yet the dry, barren expanse around us, the huge tracts of undeveloped land and the sheer sense of the long history of this vast landscape where the sun burned down relentlessly, was the beginning of my decade-long love affair with Spain and its scented islands.
    That was all I’d known of travel. Compare that to the idea of crossing the Atlantic to work and find a home, essentially alone in the Manhattan jungle. I’d blithely overlooked some hugely important things that I needed to consider, my homework if you like.
    Jeff, of course, was constantly dismissive of my plan.For a start, he didn’t like the Yanks, as they were called. Amazingly, given their huge presence in London in wartime and the impact they’d made on many women’s lives back then (the GI bride was a post-war phenomenon that lingered on in British minds for decades), he was like so many of his generation. These were the guys who were too young for war but had had to do two years of national service in the 1950s and still harboured disdain for Americans. Or, come to that, his rejection of the idea of most people who didn’t come from our sceptred isle. ‘They think they won the war’ was his view on all Americans, ‘but they bloody didn’t.’ And so on. Or I’d get: ‘You’re a Londoner, what do you need to go there for?’ ‘And you’re my bird, anyway. You don’t really wanna go.’ And so on.
    Yet when the moment came for my big medical at the American Embassy, I turned up and had the obligatory examination and chest x-ray. I was going, and sod Jeff. Even so, I told no one else about the plan, apart from the other girls in the flat. But that was it – not my parents or girlfriends. Even my best friend,