Paul Malpas

Yesterday I was writing about the winter of  1972 which set me thinking of other things that happened in that year.  During the summer of 1972 I went on my one and only package holiday, four of us and two kids went to Majorca.  These package holidays were only just starting up and myself and three members of the Conservative Club decided to try it out.  There was Trevor, a local builder, Judith, his wife, and their two kids and Cliff, a retired fish and chip shop owner, from Northmoor Road and myself, an unimaginable quartet.

We landed at Palma and we were bussed out to our hotel, the El Cid, in Can Pastilla, a few miles out of Palma.  To us men from Longsight, it was a remarkable, clean, luxury hotel, nothing at all like the smelly boarding houses in Blackpool that we were used to.  We were certainly not used to such splendour and service.  Majorca was still in its peasant stage and had not yet become the tourist Mecca it now is and I think it was better off for it.  We spent two days riding in the hills in the centre of the island in our sheepskin coats like a couple of bushrangers under the sweltering Spanish sun.

One night, after organizing a hotel babysitter, the four of us went to Palma for a night out and after a drink in a couple of bars, where we were eating slices of meat cut off hams hanging from the ceiling and having thought that we had mastered the language, we felt emboldened enough to enter a night-club which had some entertainment.  Entry was free and it shows our naivity, girls brought us unsolicited drinks and sat with us.  However after half an hour of this spoiling we asked for the bill.  It was astronomic; we refused to pay; the management was threatening us with all sorts of nonsense, the brave new sign language had gone out the window.  We said in a voice getting louder by the sentence that we would pay a fair price but they could not understand and their numbers were getting larger and more aggressive.

Trevor and myself had gallantly pushed old Cliff and Judith to a position of safety and facing up the management, we were discussing tactics out of the side of our mouths, knowing we were in for a fair hammering but wondering how many we could take out in the beginning so has to reduce the number of blows we would have to take later on.  After all they were only dagos but there was a lot of them.  When all of a sudden the police arrived, but there was still a language problem.  So like the police the world over when they do not understand the criminal, they arrested us and put us behind bars with a few unsavoury regulars.  We managed to persuade them in some very basic words that Judith and Cliff were innocent bystanders and they released them.  Judith was now frantic thinking of the kids in the hotel , so we bade our farewells and expected the worst.  After a few hours an interpreter arrived and brought order to chaos and after a little negotiation and a few more hours captivity, we settled for a fair price, the key went in the lock and we were on our much chastened way back to the El Cid.

The next couple of days we spent within spitting distance of the hotel, not daring to chance Palma again.  I was rooming with Cliff who snored so loud that the ships out on the Mediterranean thought he was a foghorn and were preparing to do battle with this unsuspected micro-fog.  I gained some relief by sleeping in the bath behind a locked door but the reverberations from the snores continued to echo round the empty tile-floored corridors of the hotel.

One afternoon, two or three days into the holiday I decided the best cushion against this nightly bedlam was alcohol, so for about nine hours that evening I proceeded to tie one on, but unfortunately this treatment only succeeded in wakening me in the early hours with a bilious problem.  So to Cliff’s glorious cacophony I grabbed a glass of water and threw in two Alka-Seltzers, drank the brew down and returned to bed and tried to sleep in the clamour and uproar that was our bedroom.

Imagine my horror the next morning when I discovered the tablets I had taken were Cliff’s Steradent tablets which he used for cleaning his false teeth, but notwithstanding the griping pains I suffered over the next 24 hours, this dosage certainly cleared out my insides.  It was like having an enema in reverse, but it worked.

Was I glad to be back in Manchester, even though I had no work to go back to and I never darkened the doorstep of the Balearics again.