BREXIT 47 AÑOS DESPUÉS YO ERA CORRESPONSAL AQUELLA TRISTE NOCHEVIEJA CUANDO INGLATERRA QUISO EUROPEIZARSE. LA RETIRADA DE DON BORIS PUEDE SER EL PRINCIPIO DEL FINAL DE LA EUROPA DELOS MERCADERES Y DE LOS USUREROS
FORTY-SEVEN YEARS OF BREXIT. I was there in the las night of 1972 when England joined the EEC
NEW YEARS EVE 1972 was quiet and sad for me. My brother Xavi and I travelled up in the Circle line from South Ken to Hornchurch in Essex bringing the Christmas’s presents to my daughter Helen.
I was a dangling man and estranged father in that glorious England of the seventies but we were denied access. Livia my ex had just undergone an operation and was convalescent she hated me because she thought I had left her dismounted house at Doncaster and moved back to Spain I wanted to get a job and I got it when Vicente Cebrian chose for the bureau Pyresa in the British capital. My idea was the reunion with my English family, but I had become the odd man out.
I just had started sending my first dispatches and was in lodging in a basement in Marble Arche paying for it the whole of my wages nearly.
My landlord was a Jew survivor of Auschwitz. I wrote his portrait which was nasty like the one of Dorian Grey.
The scene was an incident that happened near y lodgings one afternoon on Good Friday in a Dickensian way. Read the episode in my novel “Corresponsal en Londres”.
He spoke English with a German accent not a bad chap but tight with his money. Mi Little Helen “Pickle” had been declared by a magistrate of Old Baily in wigs Ward of Court. They treated me like a criminal.
Back to the City we heard striking midnight in Big Ben, a few girls plunged in fountain of Trafalgar square. Admiral Nelson looked down impassive to the crowd. The two stone big lions guarding the solemnity of the square like two real wardens of the empire looked supercilious and void of emotion. There was not an air of celebrations at all but of defeat.
“We have joined the Common Market we are going continental” said a girl in miniskirt. She was a bit tipsy. He kissed me, and others of the bystanders near the fountain, happy new year.
Then Xavi and I walked down from Picadilly along Oxford Street to my digs in Marble Arch. exhausted after the long walk we toasted for the year new born.
There was and there was hope in that champagne cup. I felt deceived by the denial rebuking me the right of access that had like any father to see my baby on Christmas Day. But that was the law of the land and accepted de judge decisions as a punishment for my sins O Lord forgive me. New years day came without hangover. There was an air of mourning in the streets of London. The Press criticised the decision of the Callaghan executive. The British lion had been tamed by the bureaucrats of Brussels and the English bulldog had lost its teeth but knowing the English as I do we knew that they won’t ever surrender to Germany od France and I posted my first despatch to Madrid with that idea: England will do what she ever has done in foreign policy ▬ balance of power: to counterfeit, to oppose, the whole nation is counterpoise▬ the never surrender in politics they are tough, no friends only interest. Either they will make the Common Market as their own mould or they shall be leaving. In that dispatch describing the dismal circuit I encountered in London at the first day in the EEC I ushered an omen. It was really a prophecy signed and sealed forty-seven years afterwards, and a month. So, I congratulated myself for my perception as a journalist. Brexit had been the beginning of the end of the venality. They tried to build a Europe of the merchants, racketeers and usurers under the motto “I will buy you” out leaving aside the Europe of the cathedrals
