Deadly Business

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‘Woof woof.’

That’s little Lily Simmers’ war cry. They were the first proper words she ever uttered, and on the day of her third birthday party they were still her favourites, even though she had amassed a much larger vocabulary by then, a mixture of the Catalan and Castellano spoken to her by her mum, Tunè Miralles, and her dad, Ben Simmers, and the English which she uses with her paternal grandparents, all three of them.

All the kids in Catalunya grow up bilingual, with two native languages, and around St Martí d’Empúries many are like Lily, picking up English or French as they grow up in the cosmopolitan community that it has become. My son speaks four, having learned French while living with his father in Monaco, then picking up the local lingos when we settled here, after his father’s death and my rebirth. He’s literate in all of them, more so than I am. I’m very proud of that because he’s … I almost said ‘only twelve’, but Tom Blackstone isn’t ‘only’ anything. I still think of him as my child, but he isn’t any more, not really. He’s a big boy, one metre sixty-two (around five feet four) already, mature for his years, and has taken the first steps into adolescence.

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