Last Days of the Bus Club

by Stewart, Chris

  ‘It certainly is,’ I replied.

  ‘It’s really small,’ one girl observed.

  ‘Actually it’s a bungalow, innit?’ suggested another. ‘My gran’s got one just like this.’ Which surprised me. I hadn’t imagined that northeast London went in for vernacular Alpujarran architecture, topped with grass rooves.

  ‘Well, I suppose you’re right; it hasn’t got an upstairs. And yes, I guess it is rather small, but then there’s only the two of us, and we don’t take up that much space. And most of the time we live out here on the porch; the house is just a place to go and get things from.’

  A kilo or so of crisps vanished in fifteen seconds flat, and then there was Ana’s exquisite home-made lemonade in a multicoloured selection of plastic mugs. There were cries of delight. It wasn’t fizzy, but it was fresh and lemony with mint and cinnamon and really like no other lemonade. It, too, disappeared in a matter of minutes.

  At this point Ana laid out two enormous and beautiful omelettes – deep, deep yellow from the home-laid eggs and bursting with peas, onions, potatoes and mint. They were works of art. And to top them off was a huge salad bowl with the richest selection of salad leaves and herbs all gathered fresh that very morning from the garden, and garnished with the most dazzling array of petals – purple malva, blue borage, and bright yellow and orange marigolds. It looked so beautiful, it almost broke your heart. Amina, Rukhsana, Jim and I gasped in utter delight.

  ‘Eugghh! I’m not eatin’ that. You can’t eat flowers. Yuck,’ said one of the boys, as I had expected.

  There was a mutter of general agreement. ‘Yeah, flowers are poisonous; everybody knows that,’ added another well-informed soul.

  Somehow we managed to persuade the kids of the harmlessness, and even the desirability, of eating these particular flowers, and, helping ourselves to tortilla and salad, we adults went to sit at a distance with our beer and wine, leaving the kids to thrash it out for themselves. In the event the food made quite an impression on them, but they didn’t eat an awful lot of it, mainly because they were already so stuffed with oranges and lemons. Also they were pretty excited and wanted to get off and fool around on the farm. Jim, Rukhsana and Amina tucked in happily – it was a fine moment of respite after all their labours, first in finding the necessary funding and permissions for the trip, and then shepherding their gang of pupils to Spain.

  ‘Please, Chris, can we ’ave a go on the tractor?’

  ‘Please, Chris.’

  ‘Sure, take it for a run,’ I said. The teachers gasped in horror, as one.

  ‘It’s OK,’ I reassured them. ‘They’ll never start it.’

  ‘I bet we can,’ said Jessica. ‘I bet we can start it. What about a hundred pounds if we do?’

  This was a cool kid. I looked her in the eye and said: ‘Make it a thousand.’

  The teachers and Ana looked at me in consternation. Actually, if there was one moment at which the day started to take a slightly darker atmosphere, it was the moment of that injudicious bet. Of course, I was on firm ground: there was not a snowball’s chance in hell of their starting the tractor, even though the key was in the ignition. With the Massey Ferguson 135 you have to have the transfer lever in the neutral position to get the starter motor to turn over; the stop button must be in, and I always leave it out when I turn the tractor off. If they did manage to fathom out those two anomalies, then there was probably not enough go in the battery to start it up. There wasn’t much fuel in the tank, either. But, even so, if there were by some chance enough battery and enough fuel to get the engine running, they would have to raise the heavy cultivator on the back, then switch over the hydraulics to raise the front end loader. Then, and only then, would they be able to move the tractor. My money was safe.

  But Jessica galloped off shouting that I had offered them a thousand pounds if they could get the tractor going. They could share the money between all of them.

  We adults were on to our coffee by now, and we sat in the warm sunshine and talked, while a strange quietness settled on the farm below. The whole gang of them were gathered round the tractor, pooling their combined knowledge of mechanics to try and get it going and thus clean up on the thousand quid.

  They started to appear in twos and threes, confabulating earnestly in whispered tones.

  ‘We’ve got it going,’ someone said … but I knew they hadn’t, for I was listening with all ears and I hadn’t heard a thing. Then Jessica appeared on her own and in tears.

  ‘They say they’re not going to give me any of the money because I didn’t have anything to do with getting the tractor going,’ she snivelled.

  ‘Yes, but you brokered the deal. You’ll be the one who distributes the money … in the unlikely event that it comes to it,’ I assured her. Thus comforted, she dashed back down the steps to where the action was.

  Somebody else came up.

  ‘It ’asn’t got any oil in it,’ he said. ‘We’ve ’ad to put some oil in it, an’ then we got it going.’

  I suppose this should have sounded a warning bell, but I assured him that they had not got it going as, if they had, I would have heard it.

  ‘We did; we did.’

  ‘No, you didn’t.’

  Only then did I start to realise that I was up against some pretty shifty kids, who would stop at nothing to get that money off me. I wriggled a little uncomfortably in my chair.

  There was the sound of some excitement from down below, and a few minutes later a delegation arrived, muddy and ruffled and slightly malodorous, with the news that Mustafa had broken off the ignition key.

  ‘Well, bang goes your thousand pounds, then,’ I said. This wasn’t quite as bad as it sounded, as another one of the anomalies of the Massey Ferguson 135 is that you can switch on the ignition with the dipstick.

  ‘No, but we got it going before he broke the key. We put some oil in the tank and started it up. It didn’t have any, but we found a barrel marked “oil” and we put that in the tank and then it started.’

  Being absolutely certain there were no barrels of oil in the vicinity and that none of the barrels anywhere on the farm were marked ‘oil’ anyway, I simply smiled at this. Clearly the kids were so steeped in subterfuge, they no longer knew where the truth lay.

  ‘That’s quite enough horseplay for now,’ intervened Amina, surveying the wretched state of their clothes and grimacing a little at the mucky farm odour they seemed to give off as a group. ‘It’s time to wash your hands and get ready to head back.’

  Luckily there was the trailer ride back to the pick-up point to distract the kids from their disappointment of ‘being robbed’, as they saw it, of a cool thousand quid. And with all the rumpus of the first ride, subdued just a tiny notch through tiredness, we carted them off the farm.

  On the way back I went down to have a look at the tractor and inspect the broken key. There was an odd, yet familiar, smell coming from the vehicle that I found hard to place but which started me wondering, as I should have done earlier, about this ‘oil’ they had got hold of. I wondered some more for a while, and then I saw it. Next to the tractor was a white plastic drum that the kids had somehow dragged up from the garden. This was quite a feat, as it was actually a forty-litre drum, although by no means full. It was empty now.

  For my Valentine’s Day present four years ago, Ana had given me, along with a little pot of pansies, a zinc bucket. The bucket was to pee in, and the idea was that I would pee in the bucket every day and in the evening pour it into a drum. Here the priceless urine would ferment and eventually become a fantastic nitrogen-rich (and impressively malodorous) compost activator. By this means I would be returning to the soil something of what we took out of it. It was a really wholesome sort of ecological scheme, and the beautiful simple ecological logic of it thrilled me. It had taken a long time to fill the forty-litre drum. Then I had hidden it in a shady part of the garden to ferment before I poured it on the compost heap. It had reduced by half over the years and was by now an unsp
eakably vile, brown, thick, smelly liquid.

  With some trepidation I unscrewed the cap on the fuel tank and sniffed at the contents. The Massey Ferguson 135 is powered by that miracle of British engineering, the Perkins three-cylinder diesel, an engine that will run for ever under whatever conditions of maltreatment you care to subject it to. I was dead sure the children would have been unable to start the engine before, but now I was absolutely certain; even the doughty Perkins would be hard put to start with a tank full of well-fermented piss.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  SANTA ANA

  NOT SO LONG AGO THE IDEA of a book group in Andalucía would have seemed about as likely as an orchid in a peat bog. But times have changed and it seems that a whole generation who would not have thought of picking up a book are now avid readers and eager to meet authors at readings and literary festivals. And it’s not a pursuit limited to the young, either, for whom Harry Potter opened the magic door. All ages are at it, and there are book groups everywhere, from the fabled cities to the humblest of pueblos.

  When my books were first published in Spain, the invitations came in thick and fast – and, of course, at the start I went along to them all, delighted at this acceptance of my writing in my adopted home. But as any author will tell you, book events demand a whole lot of time, for not very much return. You do them for love and duty, or because something catches your eye. And so it was with the invitation from the reading group of Domingo Pérez, a village hidden amongst the cornfields to the north of Granada. Their letter reached me at one of those times when I was casting around – as I do from time to time – for an excuse to down tools and take the day off. I looked idly at the map and realised that Domingo Pérez was near Fuente Vaqueros, the birthplace of Federico García Lorca, the great poet and dramatist murdered by Franco’s henchmen in the civil war. I could make a pilgrimage of it, turn it into something of a literary trip.

  So, in the fierce heat of August, with a hot wind pouring through the open windows, I pulled out of Santa Fe and drove between fields of tobacco, maize and asparagus towards Fuente Vaqueros. The rutted road was laced by channels of the most unappetising and evil-smelling grey water in which a few frogs croaked. Very occasionally another car passed by, but it was getting on for lunchtime and nobody with any sense was out under that bleached white sky. There were some tobacco-drying sheds gathered in a huddle round the edge of the town, then some houses, not that different from the tobacco sheds, and finally the town itself.

  My talk to the book group was not due to start till six, and Domingo Pérez was only an hour’s drive away. The afternoon hours stretched out ahead of me. How best, then, to honour the great poet?

  I parked beneath the shade of a plane tree in the square, put my hat on and climbed out of the car. A couple of bars were doing no business; there was nobody about. There were hamburgers and pizzas on offer but it was just too darn hot to eat, and a pizza seemed a poor way to mark a visit to Lorca’s town. I set off walking down the road, heading to nowhere in particular, ducking in and out of the shade of the plane trees. On and on I walked, beyond the main street and past a scattering of deserted tobacco sheds. Tobacco, it seemed, was the thing in Fuente Vaqueros. The sun beat harshly down on my hat and shoulders; a fly kept station with me and settled from time to time on my nose. I screwed up my eyes against the glare and trudged doggedly on. As I neared the poplar grove outside town, I turned along a track, intending to make a square of my walk back into town, but the track petered out in a farmyard and I had to go all the way back and retrace my steps. With the best will in the world, this was hardly the sort of walk to conjure up poetry.

  Coming back into town, I finally came upon Lorca’s house. It was closed, predictably enough, and nearby was a bar with a woman stacking chairs and taking them inside. She told me that times were hard and there was not much custom. I could have told her that. She said she would serve me a drink, but I didn’t really fancy sitting there on my own while the chairs were stacked up around me. I thanked her and returned to the car.

  Fuente Vaqueros was as dead as towns get in the Spanish summer – and I knew its neighbours would be no different. But there is something about these one-horse towns, deserted in the afternoon sun, that is oddly appealing, and I set off for the nearby Dehesas Viejas, with the idea of lunching there. I had been there many years ago with Domingo to buy barley straw and had not imagined that I might return. Domingo told me later that his sheep wouldn’t touch the stuff. He reckoned the straw had been stored downwind of a dung-heap and been tainted with the smell. We’d been had, he said, although my sheep tucked into the straw enthusiastically – or, at least, as enthusiastically as one might tuck into a meal of barley straw.

  In the bar in the plaza, a short man and his son, who had an arm in plaster, sat on stools and half-heartedly watched a huge television at top volume.

  ‘Do you want a menu del día?’ shouted the youth behind the bar.

  ‘Just a ración of something, nothing too substantial.’

  ‘We’ve got carne en salsa,’ he said.

  So I had meat in sauce, and a clara, a shandy, and went to sit beneath an awning in the deserted plaza in order to avoid the moronic drama on the telly. As I sat down, in an excess of consideration, the youth behind the bar switched the sound through to the external speakers, in case I felt lonely eating out there all on my own with nothing to listen to.

  It was the hottest hour of the day and the meat was salty and the bread like cardboard, but the clara was cool and sweet. I took a notebook out and thought about what I might say to the book group, but it was difficult to think straight. A dog slunk down the street; a cock crowed; a fly settled on the remains of my meat in sauce; the sun burnt through the thin awning. Sleep came stealing down upon me.

  I managed to fight it off; I had some way to drive and then I would need to summon up the energy for my talk. So I left Dehesas Viejas and drove east along a minor road that wound through the cornfields. The harvest was almost ready, the oats and barley in ear and casting that wispy sheen across the folds of the hills. In the distance on all sides were mountains, barely visible in the heat haze. The sun, still almost vertically overhead, blazed down, so that the wind that blew through the windows was laden with the scent of herbs and hot corn. Occasionally the blank whiteness of the fields was relieved by silvery green olive groves, but there was no sign as far as the eye could see of towns or villages.

  I ought to come upon Domingo Pérez soon, I thought, and then suddenly there it was, hidden in a hollow, a little red-roofed town gathered along a dry river flanked by ilexes. I cruised slowly through the empty streets. It was five in the afternoon and I still had an hour to spare, so I headed up the river in search of a spot for a siesta. There was a blanket in the back of the car, and a cushion, kept there for just such eventualities and, after a few unpromising starts amongst the thistles and the burrs and thorns, I established a base in the shade beneath some willows. I lay down on my back and slipped straight into a deep hot sleep.

  When I came to, I experienced one of those glorious moments of nothingness and unknowing, when for an infinitesimal span of time you are utterly liberated from your earthly identity and have no idea who or where you are. Above me there were willows, and the whispering of a warm breeze in their leaves. I squinted up at them, wondering what I was supposed to be doing here, and all too soon remembered … and, oh lawd, it was nearly six o’clock and time for the talk to the readers of Domingo Pérez. I hauled myself to my feet, brushed the burrs and thorns from my shirt and trousers, splashed my face with a bottle of spring water, hot from the car, and headed off to do my turn.

  I reflected a little on the literary life as I wound slowly among the ruts and potholes of the country road. Here I was, a writer driving through a summer afternoon in Andalucía to give a talk to a reading group. The notion seemed bizarre; I had lived for most of my life from manual work and I still find it hard to think of writing as ‘proper work’. And yet, books have played a
huge part in my life. At school I rarely read more than was required, but because Margie, the love of my teenage years, lived in rural Dorset, I developed a passion for Thomas Hardy. Together, Margie and I would moon around the beautiful Wessex countryside with blanket and books, steeped in glorious adolescent lust and doomed bucolic romance. It might not be too far-fetched to think that Hardy steered me towards becoming a shepherd; modelling myself, in the way that one does when one is young, on Gabriel Oak in Far from the Madding Crowd. And, perhaps because I was so steeped in rural romances, I did not read any political stuff until much later. So when my contemporaries were manning the barricades in Paris in 1968, I was lolling in the long grass with Margie on the chalky downs of Cranborne Chase. I couldn’t help it; I didn’t know … and you have to read the books to know.

  And then came the book that cast the die for me: Laurie Lee’s As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, his irresistibly romantic account of walking through Spain in the summer of 1935, in fierce heat and on the eve of war. From then on my path was set. I would become a bohemian, write poetry, go wandering in strange lands – and most specifically Spain. I wasn’t the only one. Laurie Lee had that effect on probably hundreds of young people back in the 1960s and 1970s.

  I owed my fascination with Spain to two other books, too: Gertrude and Muirhead Bone’s Old Spain and Gerald Brenan’s South from Granada. The latter, at least in part, directed me to the Alpujarras. Brenan settled in 1919 in the village of Yegen – then several days’ mule ride from Granada – accompanied by a library of two thousand books. There he read and wrote feverishly, and entertained the likes of Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey from far off Bloomsbury.

  Old Spain I came upon by chance in Guildford, when I was labouring on a nearby farm. The town had an antiquarian bookseller called Traylens – one of those bookshops that was not obviously open to the public, with a bell you had to ring to seek entrance. As I passed by, my eye was drawn to a huge leather-bound book, propped open to show a pen-and-ink drawing of a courtyard in the Alhambra. I rang the bell and, after a respectable lapse of time, the owner opened the door and peered at me without enthusiasm. I told him I wished to look at the book in the window.