A Love Story.
Any father who has a daughter knows that one day his little girl, in the blink of an eye, becomes a young woman, and he is reminded of his own youth.
Tennyson, put it this way: ‘In the spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love’.
In the words of a poet; in reality, young men are obsessed with girls and not for conversation. In 1994, I was justifiably anxious.
My daughter, Tayrne, was sixteen. She was going with Oliver, a good looking boy from Cala D’or. He was her second boyfriend, her first, Juan, at junior school, was more a good friend rather than an official boyfriend.
You could say, Oliver was Tayrne’s, first love. The one-year relationship finished in the following manner. Oliver suggested that they cool it for a while and reassess their feelings after the summer, they were too young for a serious relationship. This was young boy speak for:
‘Soon there will be lots of hot young English and German girls in Cala D’or on holiday and I want to go to the discotheque every night, but still have a girlfriend for the winter’.
Tayrne, meek young thing, gave the handsome Oliver his marching orders.
From my perspective, it was for the best, I didn’t want my little girl being messed around. I recalled one Saturday night, Oliver told Tayrne he wanted an early night and left for home on his scooter.
It was 11 Km, on a winding road, from our house to Cala D’or, a journey of fifteen minutes. After half an hour, Tayrne phoned Oliver’s home to see if he had arrived.
No Oliver! Tayrne rang back after twenty minutes, still no Oliver. By then, both Tayrne and Oliver’s mother were very worried.
There was justification for concern. The road to Cala D’or was both hilly and serpentine, bounded in places with solid stone walls ideally placed for collisions, and some perilous bends with sheer drops with no safety barriers. We had to go and look for Oliver. I didn’t want Tayrne to come in case I had to retrieve the poor boy’s body from a culvert, but she insisted. We went slowly, looking for signs of an accident, stopping on suspect bends to shine a light into the darkness below.
It took an hour to cover the route. As we entered the bright lights of Cala D’or I was split between elation that we had not found the missing Oliver, and apprehension that we may have missed the body. We drove to the nearest plaza to find a telephone box and contact Oliver’s mother; he was not at home.
At two in the morning, as we walked back to the car, the square was buzzing. There was a small group of local kids that Tayrne recognised chatting in Mallorquí. She asked them if they had seen Oliver, they pointed across the square to the flashing entrance of a subterranean discotheque. That made sense, ‘Chic’ was the centre of youth culture in the town.
We crossed the square and down the stairs to the discotheque. Tayrne explained the situation to the bouncer at the door who let her in to have a look round, the old man was left standing outside.
Five minutes later, Tayrne returned with a remorseful looking Oliver in tow. He was given a dressing down and sent home to his distraught mother.
So ended what I suppose was Tayrne’s, first love. It must have been a difficult time, but being in the Instituto, the high school, in Felanitx she had lots of friends. They spent the summer enjoying themselves in Porto Colom, Cala D’or and the Palma area. Oliver had a dim view of this, he was reported to say that Tayrne had fallen in with a bad lot.
Sometimes, Tayrne would have her friends over for pool parties at night. In the morning after these gatherings, the upstairs landing and living room floor would be littered with bodies; you had to take care where you trod when you got up for breakfast.
Nothing serious happened for Tayrne during the summer. She had a good time but confided in her mother that she would really like a boyfriend of her own. Plenty of young boys came to Mallorca during the summer, but she wasn’t looking for a holiday romance. She wanted someone permanent on the island. Sandy advised her to look for someone in her group of friends, someone she already knew and got along with, someone from her own culture. A nice Mallorcan boy, she should choose one and let him know about it.
Eventually, she chose a boy called Javi (pronounced Havi) and voilà, Javi had a thing for her but was too shy to tell her. So by early December Tayrne was courting.
At this stage, we didn’t know Javi, he wasn’t from the Cala D’or set but from a wider group of friends that extended to the Palma area and beyond. He lived in Establiments, a small village just outside and to the north of Palma. Javi hadn’t been to our side of the island much, and we had never met him.
Christmas Eve 1994, the formal introduction. The new boyfriend was coming to take Tayrne out for the evening. It’s an awkward business when a young man comes calling for your daughter. As a father, I wasn’t sure what was expected of me. It was different with Oliver, they were more or less both children, but time marches on. Although I still thought of Tayrne as my little girl, she had grown into a young woman. I was apprehensive waiting in the kitchen for the grand arrival. All I knew about this Javi was, he was born in Mallorca, his parents had come from Galicia in mainland Spain years before, and he could fly an aeroplane.
The dogs started barking, and through the window, I saw bright headlights arc across the garden as a car swept into our top field and parked. The back door opened and in stepped a tall rather smooth, (too smooth for my liking) young man with a South American appearance. He had dark hair and a dark complexion. He wore a long white coat that almost touched the floor, the type favoured by Wild West outlaws so they can keep a Winchester rifle concealed beneath it. In his hand, he held a single long-stemmed red rose.
‘Oh my God’, I thought, my little girl has got herself tangled up with a Colombian drug smuggler. He handed the rose to Tayrne who quickly introduced us, and then they were gone. I was not happy. Who was this white coated Casanova who had just taken away my daughter?
Little did I know at the time that the coat was borrowed. He was full of apprehension about our meeting, and that is why they left so quickly. Appearances can be deceptive.
Thus started Javi and Tayrne’s love story.
Javi was training to be an airline pilot and was enrolled in the flying school in Palma. As part of his practical flying instruction, he often had to fly around the island. A particularly frequent course was a flight out to the island of Minorca. Javi had to navigate to the island and then fly back to Majorca.
As a display of his navigation skills, Javi would first locate our farmhouse and circle it a few times until we came out to wave. Then, he would fly to Tayrne’s school in Felanitx. The sight of this latter-day Romeo, in a bright yellow Piper Cherokee, circling the school as a show of love caused disruption to classes. Once the word was out, Tayrne was asked, without success, to tell her boyfriend to refrain from such demonstrations. In the village there where several theories about the overflights: The Council was deploying new hi-tech surveillance to locate illegal constructions projects, for fines and extra taxation. Others thought the plane was providing security during visits to the island by the king or other members of the Spanish royal family. To my relief, nobody mentioned drug smuggling.
Javi’s unwanted aerobatics continued until an administrator at the flying school brought it to an abrupt end. He absconded with the school’s funds. The school was closed and Javi, to the relief of the Instituto de Felanitx, was transferred to finish his training in Madrid. Luckily, he was able to hitch free rides on weekend flights from Madrid to Palma and get Tayrne cheap flights the other way. Thus the relationship blossomed. The rest is history, today Tayrne and Javi are married with two sons Oscar and Hector, two of our six grandchildren.