Taken from:
OUR 48 YEARS IN L’ESCALA (part one)
By Lionel Harwood

Once back home, we started selling all our assets and making plans for our great adventure into the unknown. I bought a small caravan and a bright yellow ford Zephyr convertible to tow it with, the car was very cheap as all the mains and big ends had gone, I will never forget laying under it in the street in the freezing snow putting in the new white metal bearings, (never again I hope). I drew up plans for 16 holiday flats to put on the plot intending to start to build them ourselves when we got out there. So I loaded my tools in the caravan, plus a wheelbarrow which fortunately came in handy later and we set off. Andy our son was thirteen months old and our daughter three years, it was February 1963. We decided to set up camp at the Camping site in Montgo. The family running it were most surprised to have any visitors at that time of year, also the Guardia Civil who came banging on the caravan door in the middle of the night with their machine guns at the ready demanding what we were doing there, one of them called Geronimo, later became a good friend, as did the family running the site who would regularly invite us to join them in their house for dinner. Asuncion the wife was an excellent cook who taught Delia to cook a Paella, which she said had to be cooked on an open fire to get the flavour just right, I would go up on the military land with Alejandro her husband and Geronimo with their dog Grufa on Sunday mornings to catch rabbits for Asuncion's special paella, what lovely memories of us all sitting around the fire in their garden singing and enjoying ourselves. Alejandro spoke a little English and German so we were more or less able to understand each other, he would make sure Geronimo had too much to drink carefully keeping him out of reach of his machine gun and pistol in case he got a little trigger happy in his drunken state. They had two boys of a similar ago to our two children who still live in L'Escala and are still our very good friends. I remember a very funny incident one evening, Alejandro invited us to his house to watch Real Madrid and Barcelona on his new coloured television. After clearing the live chickens off the seats we made ourselves comfortable to watch the game, his television had a strange plastic sheet in front of the screen which had the colours of the rainbow across it, when the T.V. was switched on the players were definitely in colour, but nothing like their proper strip, we often laugh about Alejandro's ingenious colour television he was so proud of.