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thinking deeply and didn’t hear it.
    But a strange happiness was to enter our house very soon, announced by Jaume. King Alfonso XIII had left the country and the Republic had just been proclaimed. I didn’t see this as any great happiness to speak of, but Jaume’s joy flowedfrom his lips and hands and it was contagious. He grabbed me and took me out onto the street where people had gathered to talk. It was still cool but a sleepy spring sun was shining. I was blinded by so much light and overwhelmed by the sound of the word on everyone’s lips – Republic.
    A rumour went round that someone would come up from Montsent that evening to the school to explain what this change meant. The next day Tia told me that as she went into the school the Augusts were coming out, swearing and purple with rage. She was just in time to see Jaume jumping down from a table with the King’s portrait in his hand. All that was left on the wall was a light patch and a nail.
     

     
     
    In spring and autumn, when it has rained enough and the sun has warmed the earth, two types of mushrooms that are good to eat grow in rows in the meadows.
    One sort is earth-coloured and delicate-looking , with a long straight stalk and a cap with dense gills underneath. The other is white and sprawling. It has a short thick stalk and the gills are a brownish colour. Carreretes and moixarrons are highly prized for eating raw, but both are also left to dry in sieves and are a precious resource in winter when there are none. Dried, they lose much of their smell and weight but just a handful gives an excellent flavour to rice or any rabbit, chicken or beef stew.
    The meadows near the village yielded mushrooms , carreretes mostly, but not in great quantities. When we went to graze or divert the water from one part of the meadow to another,everyone would gather the ones they found in their meadows. But to have a year-round supply it was necessary to do a day trip.
    That May of 1931 a fair-sized group of women from Pallarès gathered to pick carreretes and moixarrons on the mountain. On the way, we collected Jaume’s sister-in-law, Agnès, and two or three other young women from Sarri came with us. Jaume had let them know we would be going that Wednesday. There were around ten or eleven of us.
    I had met Delina beforehand and we brought two baskets each. Would we fill them? In the smallest we were carrying the food. Bread and ham. And we would find lots of water.
    We left at daybreak and at the beginning we were as excited as little girls because we had finally enough time to talk to each other properly. When the going got steep, though, we held our tongues to save our breath.
    I liked this outing. I was in the meadows, following the darker grass of the tracks thinking about nothing except finding a big patch of mushrooms and filling my basket. The walk was hard but, after going up so far, it was easy enough to walk down again. From where we were you could see all the villages as if they were close by, with the black slates of the roofs and the occasional plume of smoke revealing signs oflife. We stopped at the top to eat, red-faced and with a light wind on our necks, before we started the painstaking search for mushrooms. Who would want to serve the stew of the Festa Major without carreretes ? For those who really knew how to enjoy mushrooms the moixarrons were the great prize, and we would make omelettes with them raw.
    Elvira had wanted to come with me, but I told her to stay and help at home. She was becoming a young woman now and only her wretched jealousy marred her sweetness. When Delina and I were talking about her, Delina told me something that shocked me. Before I’d had Angeleta, she’d heard how the women who chatted in the plaza – Mrs Sebastià, Mrs August, old lady Jou, the baker’s wife and others – used to tell the children that if they didn’t have siblings they should make the most of it because when one did come along, boy or girl, they