the train for Barca de Alba on the Portuguese frontier. This, so far as we could see, carried no passengers other than ourselves and a few Portuguese labourers, whose standard of living was so low that they could actually work and save a little money in Spain to take home with them. Three of these displayed, with a touch of pride, ulcers on their arms that had developed from small wounds that had turned septic—probably, we guessed, as a result of malnutrition. Within minutes of setting out, the golden steppes of Spain had faded away and the landscape became green with intensive cultivation. At this our fellow passengers crowded to the window and smiled rapturously as they pointed out for our benefit the first vines and cabbages of Portugal.
At Barca de Alba we boarded the Portuguese train that awaited us. We were greeted by a group of mummers with faces painted in medieval style who muttered what we were assured was a welcome between outbursts of what seemed to us sinister laughter.
The train was even worse than the Spanish one, with compartments both cramped and sharply rectangular, plus doorways so narrow that a stout passenger had some difficulty in squeezing through. The carriages were high above the tracks and since there was no platform, elderly passengers—several of them sick—were surrendered to the desperate struggle of fellow travellers attempting to lift or drag them aboard. The compartments were always crowded, and we were obliged in the end to squat with our legs curled up among collections of baggage piled on the floor.
The little we could see of the scenery came as a disappointment. The mountainous slopes among which the Douro wound its way were so thoroughly cultivated as to render the river as insignificant in appearance as an irrigation ditch. Even the tongues of rock projecting into the water had in many cases been covered with soil and planted with vegetables, thus the landscape had been reduced to an enormous, rolling cabbage patch. Trivial, and to us even boring, the outlook was one that filled our fellow travellers with excitement. There was always competition for a place at the window and this was solved in what seemed to us an extraordinary fashion. A queue of three or four passengers would form and the viewing time for each checked by a watch that set off an alarm at the termination of what seemed to be some five minutes. The passenger at the head of the queue would then, if slow in his withdrawal, be taken resolutely by the shoulders by whoever followed him and thrust irresistibly aside. It was clearly a regular procedure, and taken in perfectly good part.
Apart from the application of the law of the survival of the fittest to the initial processes of catching and boarding the train, relations once the journey was under way were cordial. Conversation was general and food communally shared to the last pullet’s wing and crust of saffron-flavoured bread. Having brought no food with us this was a custom that caused us much embarrassment. This was the time when we were to learn that all the old courtesies and primitive social mechanisms surviving in Spain only as flowers of speech were still in everyday operation in Portugal. When a peasant on a Spanish train pulls out his bread and sausage and invites you to join him the single word employed is ‘Gusta?’ and the conventional answer, ‘Que aproveche’, besides meaning ‘good appetite’, also implies polite refusal. This is not the case in Portugal, and in these first encounters we were to realise that faced occasionally with such a refusal the offerer showed signs of feeling hurt.
Unfortunately although we could just about read a Portuguese newspaper, the rapid and confident gabble of the peasant world had nothing in common—as we had hoped it would—with the clear-cut verbalisms of Spain, and we were only too often reduced to mime.
There was only one incident among the many communal jokes and discussions which we could appreciate.
At Barca de Alba we boarded the Portuguese train that awaited us. We were greeted by a group of mummers with faces painted in medieval style who muttered what we were assured was a welcome between outbursts of what seemed to us sinister laughter.
The train was even worse than the Spanish one, with compartments both cramped and sharply rectangular, plus doorways so narrow that a stout passenger had some difficulty in squeezing through. The carriages were high above the tracks and since there was no platform, elderly passengers—several of them sick—were surrendered to the desperate struggle of fellow travellers attempting to lift or drag them aboard. The compartments were always crowded, and we were obliged in the end to squat with our legs curled up among collections of baggage piled on the floor.
The little we could see of the scenery came as a disappointment. The mountainous slopes among which the Douro wound its way were so thoroughly cultivated as to render the river as insignificant in appearance as an irrigation ditch. Even the tongues of rock projecting into the water had in many cases been covered with soil and planted with vegetables, thus the landscape had been reduced to an enormous, rolling cabbage patch. Trivial, and to us even boring, the outlook was one that filled our fellow travellers with excitement. There was always competition for a place at the window and this was solved in what seemed to us an extraordinary fashion. A queue of three or four passengers would form and the viewing time for each checked by a watch that set off an alarm at the termination of what seemed to be some five minutes. The passenger at the head of the queue would then, if slow in his withdrawal, be taken resolutely by the shoulders by whoever followed him and thrust irresistibly aside. It was clearly a regular procedure, and taken in perfectly good part.
Apart from the application of the law of the survival of the fittest to the initial processes of catching and boarding the train, relations once the journey was under way were cordial. Conversation was general and food communally shared to the last pullet’s wing and crust of saffron-flavoured bread. Having brought no food with us this was a custom that caused us much embarrassment. This was the time when we were to learn that all the old courtesies and primitive social mechanisms surviving in Spain only as flowers of speech were still in everyday operation in Portugal. When a peasant on a Spanish train pulls out his bread and sausage and invites you to join him the single word employed is ‘Gusta?’ and the conventional answer, ‘Que aproveche’, besides meaning ‘good appetite’, also implies polite refusal. This is not the case in Portugal, and in these first encounters we were to realise that faced occasionally with such a refusal the offerer showed signs of feeling hurt.
Unfortunately although we could just about read a Portuguese newspaper, the rapid and confident gabble of the peasant world had nothing in common—as we had hoped it would—with the clear-cut verbalisms of Spain, and we were only too often reduced to mime.
There was only one incident among the many communal jokes and discussions which we could appreciate.
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