But my husband’s job selling software to wineries was remote and we could relocate if we wanted to, and while the kids were little we thought it was probably now or never. So, we sold the house, the car, all our furniture, started the visa application and booked our flights to Palma, Mallorca.
I had been thinking of Mallorca since I lived there 15 years ago. It’s the largest of Spain’s Balearic Islands, it has a mountain range, picturesque historic villages and is surrounded by the clear blue waters of the Mediterranean. It’s beautiful and feels safe along with being full of life.
I also really wanted the girls to speak Spanish, something I have been learning for most of my adult life but still speak imperfectly and with an accent. I had read that there was a window in which you can learn a language fluently as a child and that it started to close at age 8, and so I knew that, with daughters aged 4 and 7, time was of the essence.
My love of Europe had started long before I lived in Mallorca. I grew up in the UK and had been fortunate enough to travel. My parents did business in Europe and so we were always being invited to people’s homes, which gave us more of an insight into how the locals lived.
We spent a lot of time in Germany, climbing steep mountain paths in winter to reach castles covered in snow, slipping back down again on the ice and swinging heavy tavern doors open to scenes of revelry, steins of beer flowing and bowls of goulash devoured. I remember being on the shoulders of my Dad at the Cologne Carnival, women cutting all the men’s ties with scissors as I reached for handfuls of candy being thrown from the parade.
My favourite TV show was, My Family and Other Animals, the televised version of the Gerald Durrell book of the same name. A young boy, Gerry, and his family move to the Greek island of Corfu, living in a dilapidated, charming villa on the beach. I don’t remember Gerry going to school, he just climbed trees, swam, and started his own zoo caring for any injured wildlife he encountered.
I could hardly believe my luck when my parents said we were going to Corfu. We arrived at our villa in the middle of the night one summer, everyone was asleep but we jumped into the pool to cool off. My nana and aunty making it their personal mission to feed all the stray cats on the island. Nana cutting her bloomers off at the knee so she could modestly swim in the sea, petticoats floating like a jellyfish, all of us trying not to drown for laughing with her. Town squares filled with long tables covered in food, setting suns, music and dancing, notes written to me by local Greek boys.
The heat, the sound of the crickets, the smell of the pines, the crystal clear waters teaming with fish. Playing with cats, riding donkeys, rescuing lizards.
When I was a kid it infuriated me having to wait for my lunch to ‘go down’ before I could swim again while the adults shared a bottle of wine and ate cheese under a veranda. As an adult I soon grew to appreciate that too.
As a child I was transfixed by the cheesy 1960's film Jason and the Argonauts retelling Greek myths with Gods and monsters behaving appallingly. I found it thrilling being in these lands, Zeus and Poseidon surely lurking behind the nearest rock.
I loved Indiana Jones, I can still remember the exhilaration of it coming on the TV on Boxing Day in the 80s when you had to wait to watch something rather than press a button on demand. The places Indi visited were so exciting. The history and geography were so much more vivid than what we were taught at school. Just being in these places was the education that spoke to me the most.
So not only did I want the beauty of Mallorca and the 2nd language for my daughters, I wanted the proximity to all these different cultures and experiences, because we couldn’t just nip around the globe from Australia on our budget.
When I started writing my series of children’s books, The Salvager’s Quest, I wanted to capture all of that. Make the world accessible. In my first book the heroes – two sisters from the Yarra Valley - travel into the Australian bush to rescue animals from the bushfires. In the second they travel up into the Nepalese Himalayas to rescue snow leopards. And they fly in a galleon ship attached to a hot air balloon, because Around the World in 80 Days really appealed to me as a child.
So, with a husband feeling the same about seeing the world, we knew we had to go for it. We arrived in Mallorca in May, found a house to rent in a beautiful pueblo called Pollenca, a 13th Century village in the north of the island, all narrow cobbled lanes, beautiful sandstone buildings that lead to a square full of cafes and a church built by the Knights Templar.
We decided to send our daughters to the local rather than international school to fully immerse them in the language and culture.
It was a very surreal first day at school as we led them to the old monastery doors and wished them luck as they entered a completely different world. I sat outside the building all day (I say all day but they finish school at 1.30) and just sent them love through the walls. When the doors opened I prayed their little faces would be smiling, and they were! Everyone is so affectionate here, so tactile. The teachers get down on one knee and hug my girls who now think of them as family. Children run up to them in the street and hug them. Initially we felt a little overwhelmed, now we hug everything that moves.
They made enough friends to be invited to playdates and birthday parties over the longest school summer holiday we’d known – 3 months! So in between swimming and hiking I home-schooled, attempting to keep the English education they’d been receiving in Australia alive. And we read and read, child friendly versions of the Greek myths and the Roman Empire. Asterix and Obelix, anything that gave their new home some context, a back story.
We took boat trips around the coast and imagined Cyclops hurling boulders at us. We climbed Roman fortresses and imaged Moorish invaders. We walked country paths and my four year old said of the stone wall, ‘Do you think the Romans built this?’ They undoubtedly didn’t, but the fact that she knows of the Romans and their infrastructure makes me happy.
We visit castles and search for dragons’ eggs. Because when you live in a land of castles it’s very easy to let your imagination run wild.
Now that the girls have been back at school for a few months they are starting to speak Spanish, and Catalan! At times I have literally no idea what they’re saying.
I like how when my daughter asks her teacher a question the teacher replies, ‘dime reina’, ‘tell me, queen’. That didn’t happen at my school. I like how everyone greets each other when they walk past someone in the street, whether you know them or not. I like how the kids just run around the town without adult supervision. How they walk to school together or ride their scooters and it feels safe because it’s such a tight knit community and because the roads are so narrow the few cars can’t pick up any speed.
I like how the town comes together to celebrate something seemingly every week. The biggest celebration in Pollenca takes place every summer when the town remembers the year 1550, when Moorish pirates from the Ottoman Empire – the Moros - invaded the island and the local Christian men – the Cristianos – fought them off led by a local man called Joan Mas. Every year the town re-enacts Joan Mas’ victory by staging a mock battle between the two sides and everyone joins in. It’s as respected to come as a Moro as it is a Cristiano.
We, and the rest of the town watch the battle from the sidelines. People have been serving beer and cava from their windows all day and everyone’s very merry by now. Needless to say our daughters are flabbergasted, it’s hours past their old Australian bedtime, there are cannons going off in the background and they’re in a field with grown men in fancy dress charging at each other and then stopping for a chat. For, while everyone is brandishing a muscat and wooden sword, it is the least aggressive event I’ve ever known.
The girls’ little friends from school are all there and they’re completely nonplussed having seen it all before. We end up walking with them to the playground at midnight when it’s finally cool enough to sit on a swing without needing a skin graft.
A couple of weeks later there are street parties where every household sets up dinner tables outside their house so the whole town can eat together. There are fiestas for grapes and olives, honey and fish, pastries and meat. Fireworks, streamers, dancing… giants walk the streets with huge papier-mache heads bobbing at families waving back from their balconies. It’s like living in a carnival.
It's winter now and most of the tourists have gone. After 6 months of heat and mayhem we are ready for the change. Now that the season has ended and only locals remain we feel like we’ve been promoted to Mallorquins. Old ladies – the toughest crowd to win over – say ‘hola’ to us from their doorways and tell the girls they’re guapa. Felipe in the deli sells us cheaper jamon and meatballs than he used to when we arrived and people in shops talk to us in Spanish where as previously, despite our best efforts, they’d reply in English, taking us for tourists. It doesn’t feel like a transaction now, we’re being treated to all the small talk.
Lucy's new book out soon!
It hasn’t been easy. Waiting for news on the visa
was agonising, I felt physically sick for months. Not being able to understand
anything at parent teacher nights is depleting, it’s too important for me to miss.
Helping with their Catalan homework is an exercise in role reversal, them explaining
it to me. Navigating the bureaucracy and administration, healthcare, utility
bills…give me strength, websites and logons were difficult enough for me to
navigate in Australia.
And sometimes we do think of Australia, we miss the people and the magic of the bush. But none of us want to return, yet anyway.
I wonder if the girls will feel Australian or Spanish when they’re older. Is it where you’re born, what your heritage is or where you grew up? Perhaps they’ll feel part Australian, part Spanish? I guess we’ll find out if the two countries play one another in international sport. Test matches were always fun in my house with an English dad and an Australian mum (!).
But
it is amazing to see these two little girls from Australia become part Spanish.
Their ability to switch languages, their mannerisms, hand gestures, their
accents – they lack all the self-consciousness I have when I speak Spanish. I
look at them in awe, how well they’ve adapted, how they already consider this
home. I don’t know how we found the energy to make the move, but I’m so glad we
did.
Lucy Hawkins is a writer and artist who has recently moved from Australia to Mallorca with her husband and two young daughters. She studies Journalism at the University of the Arts in London and worked at Cosmopolitan Magazine and The London Paper in the UK as well as newspapers and magazines around the world. Her original artwork, prints and homewares are sold across Australia and internationally.
Learn more by visiting her website or follow her on Instagram for more exciting updates about life abroad!
