A Spanish Class at the Instituto
Cervantes
Until very recently (October
2016), the Instituto Cervantes inhabited a grand building in Eaton Square (I
judge the grandness from the out-of-date photo on the institute’s website). As
is fitting for a state-sponsored cultural organisation, it was near the Spanish
embassy. Whether it was because the lease ran out (freeholds round there tend
to be owned by the Duke of Westminster) or because Spain sold off the grand
building for a huge sum, perhaps to a hedge fund or its owner, the Instituto
has moved – to a far more interesting part of London.
Devereux Court, its new home,
is hard up against the western edge of the Temple, between it and Essex Street.
The Court is opposite the Law Courts. So the Instituto is invested by
barristers, either in the Temple proper, in Devereux Court itself, or in Essex
Street. The latter, although an outlier from the Temple, is home to pre-eminent
commercial chambers (Brick Court) and administrative law chambers (Blackstone).
Devereux Court, although narrow
and not long, finds space for three pubs (a marked improvement, one of our
teachers commented, over the rather bare resources of Eaton Square). Indeed, it
seems to be the case that, on Fleet Street/The Strand, there is a crowd of
coffee and sandwich shops, whilst just off those roads there is a crowd of
drinking dens.
Many of the buildings and
thoroughfares of the Temple and its environs have not changed much since the
time of Cervantes. So it is fitting that his Instituto has come to rest in a
Renaissance court, named after a favourite of Elizabeth I, whose London house
was here. (He was, unfortunately, executed for treason, no longer favoured.)
Getting to Devereux Court
from Embankment Station takes one on a pleasant stroll through Embankment and
Temple Gardens (the latter not to be confused with the gardens of the
Temple..). “Embankment” refers to the great Victorian project of extending the
northern bank of the Thames away from the slopes down from The Strand, and the
edge of Somerset House, so that a grand sewer, and later the underground, could
be put in below and a road above. The Gardens decorate the surface between the
old limits and the road.
The Gardens are attractive
and quintessentially Victorian. They contain many monuments, mostly to those
who are not much remembered now, but who were Doers of Good Works – Sunday
schools, elementary education, temperance – and the Camel Corps, an army unit that
fought in the Middle East in the First World War.
Thus one walks through
Victorian history to a late medieval/ early modern quarter to find the
Instituto. But, whereas Cervantes might
recognise the geography, and even some of the buildings, near to Devereux
Court, the interior of Instituto’s premises could not be more anonymous.
There is no clue of what the
building’s function was before the coming of the Instituto (something to do
with the law would be a safe guess). Once one steps over the somewhat high
threshold one enters a place of bare rooms, obviously newly partitioned, most
set on narrow corridors off an extremely closed-in stairwell. This houses the
building’s lift down its middle. There’s not really room for people to pass on
the stairs.
The whole effect is of a
downmarket suite of temporary offices, the sort that can be rented by the day
or even by the hour, although not possessed of much in the way of computer
docking stations.
Each classroom has chairs for
students but no desks. Instead, a tray swivels out from on of the chair arms,
as if in readiness for an airline meal. The tray is counterpoised in a manner
that cunningly ensures that the tray will flip into its folded position,
scattering everything, if too much weight (such as a full coffee cup) is placed
on its outside.
There is no common room or
canteen for students.
The disappointing lack of
attractiveness and comfort is more than offset by the quality of the teaching.
I had signed up for a week of learning Spanish for beginners, six hours a day:
10-1 and 2-5. This was pretty stamina-sapping for students; but must be even
more so for the teachers trying to coax linguistic plausibility out of varying
degrees of linguistic stubbornness. They were good humoured, patient and sharp
(but they never committed the crime of disparaging us students, no matter what
obtuseness we offered).
The teaching consisted of a
mixture of live conversational exercises (“Como
te llamas?...me llamo..; donde vives?.. vivo en …), some written work (but
not homework, given the length of the classroom day) and a measured input of
traditional grammar.
Although the teachers tried
to conduct as much of the classes as possible (given our level) in Spanish,
they made no fetish of this. We could always ask questions in English and get
replies in English.
There were only six of us
students (three men, three women) but we could hardly be a more diverse bunch,
including Welsh, British Asian, black French, Taiwanese and Northern Irish (and
me, of Anglo-Irish and American-Irish descent).
It was the week of the High
Court Brexit judgment, given just across the road at the top of Devereux Court.
Our temporary multi-national little world was some comfort when contemplating
the Little England fury of the Brexit press’s reaction to that eminently
reasonable and legally sound judgment.
November 2016
No comments:
Post a Comment