Voces del Prado

Story-telling around the dining table

José Torreblanca Prieto, Grandson of José Prieto, Lead Concierge, 1936-1948

Try to imagine a cold house in Madrid, where the only place you can comfortably be is around the table with a coal heater under it, which was the only heat to warm your legs. You put a knitted shawl round you as that was the only way to survive. From 8 or 9 in the evening the family would get together and chat around that table with the heat. Because we talked. Because there was no radio. I still remember when we got our first radio at home. The first radio which you plugged in, no batteries, so you couldn’t carry it around. The radio was in one particular place. But that was later, it was a big step forward.
As I said, at night we would tell each other things, tell stories. I knew the stories of all my aunts and uncles from the village because people told them. There was a constant telling of stories about friendships, grandparents, uncles and aunts, cousins, even though they lived in the provinces of Almería or Valencia. It was an ongoing story-telling. That’s something very different.
I still remember when that ended as I saw how it all ended at home. We started to get on in life. The period of economic development started in Spain and when I was still living with my parents a gas heater appeared at home. The gas heater and the television meant that you could go into another room so you didn’t all have to be round the table. So now the focus of attention was the television, meaning that talking stopped. Families still got on but that family story-telling was going. It disappeared. I can say exactly when it disappeared as there was an intermediary moment with the radio, as we also listened to the radio as a family. We put the radio on and at night we heard the main programmes that everyone listened to: dramas, weekend programmes, competitions. Everyone listened and joined in. We listened together as there was only one radio and it was stuck in one place, rather than everyone taking a radio to their own room. All this meant that inter-generational communication broke down.