Andrew

We were 3 girls in our family, so my father was outnumbered with female company. I don’t think he minded at all. Apparently the day that I was born and they found out I was another girl (I am the youngest), my sister Julia was asked what they should call me. Andrew, she said. But she’s a little girl, they said. Nope, Andrew she insisted. So they called me Sally and that was that.

Nicola, Julia and I, Storrington UK

Sally wasn’t a name you could really shorten, so growing up I was called Wheeze (bronchitis as a baby), my father called me Sally Louise (my middle name) and that was about it.

My father graduated in Horticulture in the 1960s and was sent by a flower company to the Canary Islands to manage their nurseries. Not speaking a word of Spanish, my mother very proudly piped up that this would be no problem at all. She had studied some Spanish at school and felt confident they would get by. Don’t worry Darling, I speak Spanish she said.

Side note. In all the time my parents have been together, my mother has called my father, Darling. Sometimes Sweetheart, but never, ever John.

So they arrived in the Canaries, my mother happy to help my father master the Spanish language.

In almost 60 years of living on the island of Gran Canaria, my father speaks fluent Spanish, my mother is a different story. I suppose because she was a teacher at a British School on the island, she didn’t get a chance to really use her Spanish. My mother reinvented a whole new language, a wonderful way of speaking Spanish with a strong English accent, mixed in with great vocab (years of reading the local paper) and a sprinkling of dodgy grammar.