Mari Pau Huguet: "When summer arrived, I was sorry that school was ending"

LleidaMari Pau Huguet (Estopanyà, 1963) is known for a professional life dedicated to Televisió de Catalunya. There she began her career and very likely it is also there where she will end it. But few know that she spent her entire childhood in the La Bordeta neighbourhood of Lleida. These were the sixties and seventies of the last century, when everything still happened in the street. “It was like living in a village, we didn't have a television and we spent the day playing outside the house,” recalls the journalist. These were times when she socialised with both boys and girls in all sorts of popular games, “like rope skipping, the handkerchief game and strong horse...”, she remembers.

In those years, she was a rather restless girl, “who didn't stop chattering and was a bit mischievous”, she admits. But paradoxically, she really liked going to school. “When summer approached, I was very sorry that the school year was ending”, assures Mari Pau Huguet. Part of the regret came because it was precisely in summer when her father made her go pick fruit or sell it at the markets. “I got up at four in the morning to help him – she assures –, I come from a very humble family where hands were needed for everything”.

But she remembers childhood as the happiest time of her life. "Especially because at school I learned a lot, I was always with my friends and I had a great time," she confesses. Her passion for learning was possibly marked by Miss Elvira, the first teacher she had at the national schools in the neighborhood.

Although nearly sixty years have passed, she still has fond memories of that teacher who looked after them when they were very young. “We loved her deeply”, she assures. She loved her so much that, many years later, when Elvira was almost a centenarian, they met again. The woman lived in Soria with a niece and had become practically blind due to glaucoma. Affected by her situation, Mari Pau Huguet used her good journalistic contacts with the ophthalmologist Joaquim Barraquer to do something about it. Unfortunately, they could not fully restore her sight, “but every day she called me to thank me and tell me that she could see a little better”, she says emotionally.

Teachers who left their mark

The educational system that Mari Pau Huguet experienced also involved severe punishments. Standing for hours, repeating endless sentences in notebooks, or even taking ruler slaps on the hands. Those were different times. Times when she also had good teachers. "I have a great memory of all of them and I would like to mention them all," she insists. But she would highlight Mr. Guiu, the typical teacher who knew everything; or Pere Miquel, who finally passed on to her a love for the French language and who would eventually lead her first to the Alliance Française and, then, to graduate in Romance philology from the University of Lleida. "Teachers mark you a lot in childhood," she concludes.

Languages have always been his weakness, although subjects like physics, chemistry, and biology also fascinated him. But of course, he finally opted for letters. "I liked history and even Latin and Greek, but since I didn't see much continuity with the latter, I decided on French," he explains.

Those times have changed. He assumes that many things from the past have now improved, but acknowledges that others should have been preserved. “I think children today need to be more outside playing and not so much in front of screens,” he opines. And he says this from the experience of seeing his friends' children. When families come to spend their holidays in Estopanyà, in the Aragonese Ribagorza, many children "become little savages, because there they discover a reality they don't have in the city".