Learn Spanish with: The boys who stole melons
I have already told you in some of my other posts how difficult life was in the early 80s in the village where I was born. Water and electricity cuts, lack of money.... but we were never short of things to do and fun. We always had a good time in the street.
Calle Postas was a street with dozens of children where we learned from the older ones and taught the younger ones. Playing in the street makes you much more ¨espabilao¨ and prepares you for social life from a very early age. Playing in the street is falling down and getting up, it is crying and laughing, it is running and lying down wherever you want, it is asking for water in a bar because you are thirsty, it is ringing any doorbell and running away, it is throwing stones at lampposts, it is having stone wars (pedrea) with the neighbourhood next door, it is arriving home late, tired and with bloody knees but knowing that you have had a good time, day after day.
Postas Street was the last street in the village, I remember that when I was little it was not asphalted and that behind the block of flats there were no more houses but a field, a field that in summer we used as a refuge and we lay down in the coolness of the fresh wheat, we made huts, we went out to catch crickets and we stole melons from an orchard.
Stealing is wrong and I wouldn't want to inculcate stealing in any of the students, God forbid, but it's one thing to steal for the sake of stealing and another to eat a melon. In that orchard there would be thousands of melons and taking 5 between a few friends to eat them didn't create much loss for the boss and the children would eat fresh melon, organic melon that they smashed against the ground. Great memories.
One day, we went to pick melons with 5 friends. El Mofeta, El Pepino, El Sandalio, El Ciruela and me. We were very thirsty and hungry and we knew that what would satisfy us best was a melon, so we went into the countryside to get to the orchard. And there we began to select melons, we would pick one each and take it to the neighbourhood where all the kids in the neighbourhood would eat it.
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That day, the guard or farmer of the orchard was there and he saw us picking the melons and came out after us on his motorbike. Let's run! Running in the countryside is nicer than running in the street or on the athletics track but if you are chased by a motorbike with an angry guy it's not cool at all so you have to run through all the fields where the motorbike wouldn't be able to cross, and that's what we 5 boys did with five melons in our hand.
As you may know, whenever we did any misdeed we always took off our shirts so we wouldn't be recognised during the day, it was like a survival instinct.
We arrived in the neighbourhood before the guy on the motorbike and our friends who had already seen us running knew about the problem so they encouraged us and prepared the scene for the disguise.
They took the melons and put them on the ground (as if they were football goals) and on top of the melons they put T-shirts so that the guy on the motorbike couldn't see them, we were put in the doorway of the block where a few people lived and we only came out of there when one of our friends called us when the guy on the motorbike had left. The guy left and we came out of the doorway, hugged each other, took the melons and distributed them among the more than 30 children who were there that day.
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