‘Guests’

Raid cans at the ready, oh yes, it’s that time of year again! The sun is on full blast and summer evenings consisting of late-night merriment are in full swing, and what better way to round it all off than a nice stroll home along the shady cobbled Mediterranean streets? Think again, you’re wearing sandals...

Being born in England I was not brought up with the cockroach and all its evil atrocities, in those days the good old spider was my nemesis, not any more. On a miserable March morning in 1991 I came face-to-face with my first roach in the toilets of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Cornwall’s Parade (I was the cleaner and also pulled the odd pint or two and got shouted at in Spanish by a chain-smoking skinny bloke with a wrinkled face.) My first three years in Gibraltar were spent living on a boat out on anchorage and apart from a one-off rat problem due to the famous rubbish strike* not one cockroach came on the boat. I gleefully set up my first home in the Upper Town and being naive thought it was okay to leave the windows open fully at the height of summer in a first floor flat... Fast-forward to the horror of finding a massive Bombay Runner in my bed (yes in my bed!) and sprinting down the hall screaming in terror into the arms of Mr Faller. Nobody likes giant cockroaches do they, not even big, strapping husbands. Mine said he could “smell them” if they were nearby. The hideous bronze specimen was duly dispatched with a few wallops of a slipper accompanied by loud swearing; a different expletive for each blow.

That flat brought a feast of delights climaxing in getting the place professionally fumigated, that was fun as they all come out of their holes and thus follows a grisly body-count.  I soon realised that one had to have at least two cans of spray at grabbing distance in different parts of the house plus plenty of ‘roach hotels’ hidden behind appliances and at the back of the boiler cupboard. My friend Sarah said she would never buy cans which had a photo of an actual cockroach on it as

a) It gave her the creeps.
b) Cockroaches could cleverly disguise themselves by camouflaging on their own image.

Sarah and I have had a lot of conversations about these things; we can’t even say their name any more. At first we would call them ‘six-legged unwanted guests’ and that later got shortened to just ‘guests’ always preceded by a raised-eyebrow pause.  e.g. “Last night I had a...’guest’ in my house”. We also sometimes call it a ‘visitation’.

Gibraltar has its hot-spots and the only way to deal with it while walking along at night is to either get really drunk or don’t look down at the pavement (or both). Castle Steps is one, any steps in the old town actually; the Piazza is a veritable moving procession and Main Street never fails to deliver. Sarah and I both lived in College Lane at one point, in different flats on different sides of the street but nevertheless we each had the shared panic of massive B52s ruining our lives. She had to resort to telephoning Coplaga and begging them to come to her rescue, an old Llanito with a cockney accent (but not the knowledge of English slang) turned up at the front door and said: “What’s the problem love, big cocks in your flat?”

*The great rubbish strike was in the summer of 1993. The refuse men stopped collecting (probably something to do with pay) and Gib was full of large piles of accumulated rubbish.  The place stank and there were rats as big as cats hanging off the bins in Marina Bay. The infamous Benjamin Salvage (Bespoke Scaffolding to the Gentry) was (so rumour said) paid by the Government to go round in his van and empty all the bins therefore thwarting the strikers.

Rebecca Faller July 2017