Almost as we watched, the starveling creatures started a dim blooming. Their sunken sides filled out and their ribs disappeared, the scorched and patchy fur took on a lustre as some vestige of feline pride returned, and they even began to groom themselves.
Cats should have names and, for some reason best forgotten, these became Brenda and Elfine. Elfine, as her condition improved, started to develop what cat-lovers call ‘personality’. One cat is much like another to me but I couldn’t resist a sneaking affection for her. Brenda, the mother, was too far gone to bother much with personality development and remained something of an embarrassment to her more socially mobile offspring until one fateful day in the summer when a generous visitor was good enough to bring us a cold-bag full of smoked salmon. The mechanism of the cold-bag failed, or someone left the lid off in a hot car, with the result that the contents were declared to be ‘suspicious’. Brenda died shortly afterwards of a surfeit of smoked salmon. Smoked salmon is, by a long head, my favourite food and I like to think that she departed this life with a gratified smacking of lips.
Elfine continued to thrive, and when she wasn’t dozing she became, indeed, a great ratter. Or at least we think she did. The presence of rats and mice had been evidenced by their turds, little black pellets dotted about all over the house and terrace. Soon they disappeared altogether, which led us to one of two conclusions; either she was killing rats and mice very effectively or she was eating their turds.
That spring and summer of our first year were stockpiled with projects. We had a home to rebuild and equip to modern tastes, an irrigation system to learn how to use, vegetables to nurture through to their first harvest, trees to prune, and fruit to pick. All of these were absorbing and necessary tasks and would have commanded our undivided attention had we not taken a walk along the riverbed one dewy morning and coincided with the weekly visit of the poultry man.
Every Saturday a large, cheerful-looking man in a big white van would turn up at first light at El Granadino, having driven all the way from Ciudad Real, three hundred kilometres distant. His van was equipped with special compartments stuffed full of every sort of poultry you could possibly desire: partridges, chickens of every description, ducks, geese and guinea-fowl, turkeys and quails, even peacocks. The first time we met him it brought a sort of poultry mania upon us. We drooled over the life-enhancing possibilities of these creatures that we could – for only a few pesetas – admit into our family orbit.
Returning home that night to give the dog and cat something to eat we were both struck by an indefinable feeling of loneliness, as if the farm had become somehow depleted in our absence. Beaune and Elfine did the best they could. It simply wasn’t their fault that they couldn’t lay eggs.
The next Saturday we bought a couple of guinea-fowl and some quails and sped home, eager to introduce them to our circle. A few days later, Bernardo, moved by our poultry-keeping zeal, donated some chickens. Apparently they were rather special ones imported from Holland. They were fat and white and beautiful – for chickens that is – and the meat of them was said to be quite sublime. They were also supposed to lay eggs faster than you could count them.
‘You’ve got a run prepared for them?’ Bernardo asked.
‘Yes,’ I answered, thinking of the roughshod contraption I’d prepared in the stable below the house, ‘all ready to go. But how shall I get them home?’
‘We’ll tie their feet together and make a loop in the string and you can carry them by that. How’s that sound?’
‘Alright,’ I said, not altogether convinced.
‘Right, ready? I’ll go in and grab them and pass them out to you. Don’t, whatever you do, let them go.’
Amidst a cacophonous cackling and squawking Bernardo insinuated his well-nourished frame through the tiny doorway of his chicken-run. He grabbed two, we tied them up, and I set off across the valley to the new Valero poultry-house.
It seems silly to be so sensitive in the matter of chickens but I found this method of transport rather barbaric. The confusion of the poor creatures as they sped along upside-down, heads just above ground level and feet pinched by the string, caused me distress. So I raced back across the valley with them, stumbling over stones, leaping over the rocks and hurtling across the uneven ground, keeping the chickens as steady and level as I could. Home I ran, alone in a grotesque egg-and-spoon race.
Arriving at El Valero, I scrabbled with the knots on the strings and feverishly loosed the cruel bonds. The chickens clucked and scuttled off into the shadows of their new home, quite unperturbed by the whole episode. I watched with pleasure as they made themselves at home, and then went to spend a pleasant hour delving in the ‘eggs’ chapters of my cookery books. ‘Elizabeth David reckons there are 685 ways of dressing eggs in the French kitchen,’ I announced.
The fever was truly upon us. Next to arrive were a couple of pairs of palomas – stock doves – which Old Man Domingo gave us. They arrived in a shoebox. In they went, into the stable beneath our bedroom where they gladdened our nights with their interminable clucking and shuffling and flapping and cooing. Old Man Domingo had said that it wouldn’t take them long to get used to their new home.
‘Just feed them inside for a few days, then open the hatch and let them go. They’ll be back, you see if they aren’t.’
So for a few days they joined in the chaos of our mixed bag of poultry, and then with trepidation we left their hatch open. Of course, nothing happened. However, after three days, they at last managed to find the hole, fluttered out and sat on the roof, blinking in the sunshine; a black one, a grey one and two white ones. They launched off into the plains of air above the valley, soaring and wheeling and stumbling in the currents with the unaccustomed use of their wings. Then they came back to sit on the roof and think about it, and then whoosh – off to do it again. They were a wonderful sight. They really did seem to get as much pleasure from flying as I like to think I would. I spent hours watching them, nature’s perfect complement to these little white farms high up on the sides of the valleys. But the next day a hurricane came, and as it thrashed and tattered the leaves of the eucalyptus and the ivy, it blew the poor little things away. I was desolate. However, a few days later three of the birds limped back home from wherever the wind had blown them. The other had been eaten, we reckoned, by an eagle.
Pigeons are supposed to breed amazingly fast. Old Man Domingo had calculated that with the two pairs he’d given us we could expect over eighty squabs a year, and that they should start breeding within a month. But things didn’t seem to work out quite as planned. We waited for weeks for one to go broody, watching eagerly for signs of amorous activity. It became apparent that the dark one, at least, was different from the others. Its two companions would sit together on the roof, while the dark one, who was slightly bigger, would sit some way off on its own and eye them up. Then it would sidle towards them nefariously, at which the two would jump off the roof.
‘Do you suppose he’s the male, Ana, and that this is what passes for an amorous advance in the pigeon world?’
‘Yes, I’m pretty sure he’s the male. But it doesn’t look very promising, does it?’
Nonetheless, the male slowly began to get more insistent, and the females more compliant. This resulted in his jumping on them and pecking them ferociously in the back of the neck. It all looked rather unpleasant and we stopped observing them. However, some weeks later an egg was hatched and produced a live baby pigeon. This tiny creature was the first domestic animal born at El Valero during our time there – a poignant moment in its way. I was feeding the poultry and pigeons in the morning when I discovered a scrawny, damp little thing in the nesting box and raced up to tell Ana.
‘Guess what? I think there’s a baby pigeon at last!’
Ana was as excited as I was and dropped everything to come and investigate.
‘It’s no beauty, is it?’ she commented. ‘Do you suppose it really is a pigeon?’
‘Well, its father’s a pigeo
n, its mother’s a pigeon, and there it is sitting in a pigeon’s nest – I can’t see what else it could be!’
‘Maybe it’s a cuckoo . . . ’
Ana had a point. It was a most unprepossessing bird, blackish-brown with tatty feathers and very peculiar proportions as to the head and body. It was hard to believe that it could have sprung from the egg of such a pretty creature as a pigeon.
‘No. Cuckoos lay their eggs in nests in the wild – not in stables. I think it is a pigeon.’
It was indeed. It had taken about three months for our pigeon population to increase from four . . . to four. I began to see Old Man Domingo’s forecasts as an optimistic target. At this rate we would be lucky to dine on one pigeon pie a year. In fact, it began to dawn on us that the poultry department as a whole was failing to thrive. We were putting in a fair quantity of the recommended input but there didn’t seem to be much output at all. A general reluctance to breed or increase or grow, or even to lay eggs, had taken over. Clearly something was amiss. We did some observing, and some thinking, and came to the conclusion that it was mutual antipathy that was affecting performance.
The quails, the smallest of the menagerie, were frightened of the chickens; the chickens didn’t like the guinea-fowl or the pigeons, though they could live with the quails; the guinea-fowl were indifferent to the pigeons but were terrified of the quails and hated the chickens; the pigeons were affected by the guineafowls’ terror of the quails, nervous of the possibility of a chicken –quail alliance, piqued by the indifference of the guinea-fowl, and shared everybody else’s dislike of the chickens.
It wouldn’t do; action needed to be taken. So we designed and built a contraption that came to be known as the Quail Recreation Facility – QRF for short. If we could get the quails out of the equation we might be able to make some sense out of the rest of it all.
We consulted a number of works on the subject and slowly a design appeared. The three factors we had to bear in mind in the construction were happiness, security and portability. In order to get maximum performance from our quails we decided that we needed to simulate, as far as possible within the confines of a wired-in box, the conditions they enjoyed in the wild.
We came up with a sort of portable ark with an enclosed nesting-box and night-quarters at one end, served by a cunningly contrived trapdoor. The other end was wired in, but the bottom was open to allow the incumbents access to whatever piece of ground the thing was standing on. A mesh skirt, weighted down with stones, surrounded the outside area. The finished thing seemed to me to be the very acme of modern, enlightened poultry-keeping.
The quails, sadly, had other ideas. When we introduced them to their new home, they beetled straight into a corner of the nesting-box and there lurked disconsolate and depressed. Then after a week or so of this unpromising behaviour they at last managed to experience one of the few conditions that quails enjoy in the wild, that of being eaten by a fox.
The removal of the quails was insufficient to settle the disharmony in the poultry-house. The cross-currents of mutual antipathy continued to affect performance. So we prepared an appealing home for the hated chickens, an attractive, traditionally built stone chicken-shed with spacious outside recreation area and fox-proof door. In went the chickens and shortly afterwards we were thrilled to be presented with our first egg.
I gave the egg full culinary attention according to the French manner as retailed by Elizabeth David. First I plunged it in fiercely boiling water for a minute, then I took the pan off the heat and left it there for a further five minutes, then I rinsed it with cold water, and ate it. It was like no other egg I’ve ever eaten, done to exquisite perfection.
Unfortunately, as I was eating the egg, a stoat or a weasel was eating the chickens. And it was not very many weeks later that first the guinea-fowl and then the pigeons went the way of the others. Foxes, snakes, stoats, weasels, martens, wild cats, rats, were all lying in wait to discourage any move we made in the direction of poultry-keeping. Our skills and our facilities were not up to their onslaughts. However we tried to mend and patch the walls and wires of our poultry-places, the creatures of the wild outwitted us.
Reluctantly, we gave up the project. We had too many other tasks bearing down on us – not least the rebuilding of our own home – to spend any more time feeding fresh fowl to visiting predators. I consoled myself with the thought that this was only our first attempt. There’d be other chances to get it right and become the proud owners of the sort of happy and secure poultry-yard that you find in children’s books.
BUILDING THE HOUSE
FOR SOME MONTHS A STOCKPILE OF CHESTNUT ROOF-BEAMS had lain under a tarpaulin on a piece of flat land behind the house. It was a reminder to us of urgent work ahead, yet neither of us could summon up enthusiasm to get started. The leaks Domingo had forecast with the spring rains had not been so bad and placing a few buckets in strategic positions seemed a much easier solution than the wholesale dismantling of our home.
As summer arrived, however, a new problem presented itself, and one that finally goaded us into action. The hosts of creatures that had moved into the cane and brush ceiling in our bedroom began to breed and multiply, scuffling and skittering not six feet above our upturned and tremulously wakeful faces. As the heat of the night increased, the breeding and multiplying above us became ever more frenzied, and soon, as the population soared out of control, we found ourselves spattered with larvae, maggots and other young deemed surplus to requirements. This was hardly conducive to a good night’s rest. The roof would have to go. And while we were about it, we argued, we might as well make a few small adjustments to our living space.
Since moving into El Valero we had billeted ourselves in the larger of the two stone buildings. This stood on a steeper part of the rock with its tinao, or covered terrace, looking out across a wide sweep of the gorge with the rivers snaking below. To one side was the bedroom and to the other a small, windowless box of a room that passed for the kitchen, the surprisingly appointed shower room, and another long narrow room which shared the same fine views as the terrace and bedroom but had no glass in the windows. This rather limited its function as a sitting room and on inclement days, when we were forced off the tinao, there was little to do but sit disconsolately on our bed and stare out of the window.
Pedro’s old quarters, just below and to the east, were of humbler design and in much worse repair. They consisted of two interconnecting rooms: his kitchen with its hearth, and the dark, airless storeroom where he housed his hams, his tools and his bed. We hadn’t yet found a use for these rooms so we decided that they would be the best place to begin rebuilding work. If we knocked out the internal wall and added an L-shaped extension we could create a living room large enough to spread out our worldly encumbrances, and a kitchen for all weathers. Once we’d moved in we could start work on the rest.
Even in the wilder wilds of Spain you need permission to start tampering with external walls so I went to open negotiations with the town hall. Within the week a municipal policeman was dispatched to make the necessary investigations. He arrived on foot one hot May morning, the heat and dust of the valley having made no obvious impression on his impeccable uniform. His shoes still shone, his shirt remained perfectly pressed, and he positively bristled with authority and efficiency. We offered him coffee as a restorative and he told us that if ever we needed a friend in high places then he was our man. We were very impressed.
‘So it’s just one storey then, is it?’ he asked settling down to business. We described what we had in mind.
‘And you’re not going to use any asbestos in the construction?’ We assured him the idea was abhorrent to us.
‘Well then,’ he said, handing the coffee cup back for a refill, ‘you’ll be alright. You can do as you please.’
With the bureaucratic obstacles out of the way there seemed nothing to prevent our getting on with the work . . . except that I hadn’t a clue how to go about it. In my former life handyman-ism ha
d been hateful to me. I was the sort of man who would baulk at putting a hook on a door, preferring to wait until someone happened along with the tools and talent for the job. At El Valero it was all going to be different. I would have to do things for myself. I looked around for some simple task that I could tackle as a way of easing myself into my new role as builder and site manager.
The stone walls of the little house were stuck together with mud, and much of the mud seemed to be falling out. Repointing the walls seemed rudimentary enough. On my next trip to Órgiva I bought a couple of sacks of cement, a heap of sand and a trowel. With a little hand-pick I scraped as much mud as I could from the joints between the stones and then set to with the trowel, refilling the cavities with a strong mix of sand and cement. It was satisfying in a tedious sort of a way, but it took me nearly a week to finish one stretch of about ten metres.
Just as I was stepping back to admire my work Domingo appeared.
‘I’m repointing this wall,’ I told him brightly.
He looked at the finished section through narrowed eyes as he sucked on a stem of grass.
‘What do you think, then?’
He shook his head and walked over to run his hand along the surface.
‘It’s twisted,’ he announced.
‘What’s twisted?’
‘The whole wall is twisted.’
‘So?’
‘It’ll have to come down . . . if you want, I’ll come over and give you a hand.’
Two days later Domingo arrived with tools and trestles and a set of straight-edges that he had just had made up in town. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘first we’ll take the roof off, then we’ll knock the wall down.’ And he pitched into the work like a wrecking machine. By the afternoon of the first day we found ourselves standing on a pile of rubble where a tolerably good and rather pretty house had stood a few hours earlier.
Driving Over Lemons Page 12