When I was a child, I thought a poinsettia was a breed of dog, but now I know it’s a magnificent red and green plant. Every poinsettia I’ve ever owned begins to die as soon as I accept it. This one was no different and I could hear the leaves dropping off as I typed.
But that Christmas I was given another gift. The most unexpected, welcome Christmas present I could ever wish for. A gift that would probably change our lives for ever.
11. News
“Mum?”
“Karly, what a nice surprise! Are you okay? Is Cam okay? What time is it in Australia?”
“Um, ten o’clock at night.”
“Oh. Early morning here.”
“Mum...”
“Yes? Karly, what’s the matter?”
Hushed voice, full of wonder. “Mum... Mum, I’m pregnant, we’re going to have a baby!”
“What? That’s FANTASTIC news!” I dance round the room, squealing. “Joe! JOE! Karly and Cam are going to have a baby! Karly’s pregnant! They’re going to have a baby!” Then, more soberly, “Karly, are you sure?”
“Yep! I did the home test and it came up positive. We kept staring at it and didn’t believe it so I did another test and it still came up positive. So then I made Cam do a test.”
“You made Cam pee on the little stick?”
“Yes, just to make sure it looked different. And it did.”
“Wow! That’s just the best news ever!”
“I know...”
“Gosh! I’m going to be granny...”
“I know...”
“So, when is it due?”
“I’m not sure, August I think. It’s about the size of a poppyseed at the moment.”
“Oh my! I can’t believe you’re going to have a baby!”
“I know! Neither can we! I wish you didn’t live so far away.”
“Don’t worry. I’m definitely coming over. Even if we can’t both come, I’ll be there.”
“Are you sure? It’s such a long flight and so expensive.”
“I’m sure.” Wild horses wouldn’t stop me.
“When I’ve had my doctor’s appointment and had my first scan we’ll have a better idea of dates.”
“Okay, I’ll wait to hear from you, then I’m booking that flight to Australia.”
12. Deaths
‘At five weeks, your baby is the size of an apple seed. It is starting to form tiny organs...’
In January, while we were warm and snug inside at night, our chickens still insisted on sleeping outside in the elements. Creatures of habit, they ignored the cosy perch inside their coop, and insisted on flying up to the exposed outside perch. Whatever the weather, neither harsh winds nor freezing rain would induce them to sleep on their rail under shelter.
“Daft birds,” said Joe one morning as the chickens flapped down from their perch, soaking wet and shivering after a stormy night. “How can they be so stupid? Our last batch of chickens always slept inside under cover, why won’t these?”
We tried to break the silly habit. We spoke to them severely, explaining it was for their own good and that they’d catch pneumonia if they stayed outside. Poor Sick-Note’s cough grew worse and we were convinced the cold nights outside were the cause.
One night we watched a documentary on TV about brains. It seems a chicken’s brain is about the size of a wine-gum so perhaps our expectations were too high. It was very likely our hens were incapable of reasoning that roosting under shelter was a much better idea. Through the window, I watched the clouds thickening as night fell. The temperature was already down to freezing; it would probably snow.
“Let’s manually put them on the inside perch for a few nights,” I suggested. “Perhaps they’ll get the idea then.”
That night, as it began to grow dark, we caught them one by one and put them on the perch. There they sat, locked on, until we turned our backs to catch the next one. Then down they jumped, ran outside and up to their accustomed outside perch.
“This is getting ridiculous,” said Joe, lifting Venus down for the third time and carrying her protesting inside. “We need to wait until it’s dark.”
Chickens can’t see in the dark at all, so it was a good plan. When night fell, Joe’s routine was to ‘put the girls to bed’. He plucked each girl from the perch and took her inside. Seven times a night he repeated this action until every chicken was safe and sound inside. Our thinking was that the girls would wake up in the morning, realise that they’d had a pleasant night and choose to sleep inside in future.
Not so. Our chickens weren’t the brightest bulbs on the Christmas tree. For weeks Joe continued the nightly ritual. He trudged down to the bottom of the garden, lifted each chicken off the perch and put her inside. But they never learnt.
“That’s it!” said Joe one day, toolbox in hand. “I’m going to remove the outside perch, then they’ll have to use the inside one.”
I heard the sounds of drills and hammers and demolition work coming from the chicken coop. Joe came back in, pleased with his work.
“I’ve removed the perch completely,” he announced. “I think we’ve finally solved the problem.”
That night we waited until the garden was in darkness, then visited the chicken coop. Were our girls sleeping inside, snug and warm?
They were not.
The inside perch was empty, but outside, huddled on the ground in an untidy heap of feathers under the place where the perch used to be, were the chickens. Exasperated, we took them inside the henhouse and placed them on the perch.
Sleeping outside proved to be too much for Sick-Note. Sadly she died that week and we buried her on waste ground near the cemetery. The evening ritual of putting the girls to bed continued all winter, ferrying the chickens inside.
But, months later, when the weather had turned warmer and the ferrying wasn’t really necessary, our girls surprised us one night.
“Well, cut off my legs and call me Shorty!” said Joe. “You won’t believe where the girls are perched now!”
With no warning, the girls decided that their indoor quarters were preferable after all and we never had to move them again.
When I finish reading a good book, I always experience a sense of loss. It’s exactly the same when I’m writing. When the final chapter is completed, I’m left with a void, a gap that needs filling. That’s how I felt when ‘Ole!’ was finished that winter, but I felt reluctant to start the next book. I had all my notes, photos and material poised for Camel, but I just didn’t want to start it. I think that year in Bahrain shocked us more than we realised and I wasn’t ready to relive it all.
So, at the beginning of 2012, I was looking for any excuse not to write, but I needed a project. And it appeared, as if by magic and it had been buried in our house all the time.
In 1993 my parents both died within three months of each other. Neither of them talked much about their childhoods or family, but I knew that my father was the youngest of several siblings and that my mother was an only child estranged from her mother.
What I didn’t know was that my father’s eldest brother had been an adventurer and explorer and was proclaimed by the newspapers of the 1930s as ‘the World’s most travelled motorist’. (My mother hid a huge, much darker, more shocking secret too, but I wouldn’t uncover that for another twelve months.)
I’m ashamed to confess that we still had boxes stored from our move to Spain in 2004. They remained unpacked and unexplored until the day I decided I really should sort through them and throw away useless stuff. The first box I tackled was filled with odds and ends that had belonged to my parents. Some china ashtrays, a few pictures, kitchenware and odds and ends. But at the very bottom was a bound manuscript, brown with age.
I read the old-fashioned copperplate writing on the cover. ‘Horizon Fever’ by Archibald Edmund Filby. I guessed this was the work of my uncle Archie, who had died long before I was born. I opened the manuscript and found newspaper cuttings pasted in. Dated 1938, the headlines shouted, A Marvellous
Motor Trip! and London to Cape Town and Back. It seemed that my uncle had been quite a celebrity in his day.
I read reports of his broadcasts and saw grainy photos of a small, bespectacled man smoking a pipe, dressed in a suit and sitting on the running board of an ancient car.
AE Filby and the Austin 12 he drove to explore Africa in 1934.
I turned the flimsy, typewritten pages. I had stumbled upon Archie’s memoir, written 80 years ago. Here were his own words describing his 37,000 mile journey from London to the bottom of Africa and back again in a series of dilapidated motor cars, including a Model T Ford. It was the project I had been searching for and, as if by magic, it emerged genie-like from the bottom of a box.
“Look what I found,” I said excitedly to Joe. “This has been buried here all this time!”
Together we pored over it and were mesmerised by Archie’s tales of his journey through Africa. How things had changed since he bashed out these words on a typewriter! He wrote about big game hunting, the natives, swimming in the Nile with crocodiles, mining for gold and crossing the Sahara. For a while, one of his companions was a monkey, another a stray dog, until it was killed and dragged up a tree by a leopard.
Joe and I looked at one another. This was it. We had our next project.
“I’ll transcribe it all,” said Joe. “It’s not going to be easy with all those crossed-out words and the ‘e’ not working on Archie’s typewriter.”
I emailed my brother in the UK, who told me that he had scrapbooks belonging to Uncle Archie with photos he’d taken on that African trip. He scanned them and sent them over.
Gradually, we pieced the jigsaw together. It seemed that Uncle Archie intended to have Horizon Fever published, because an address label of a publishing company in London, now defunct, was still pasted on the back cover. Archie died of malaria at the age of 43, less than three years after he had written the book, so we were pleased that we could put the book together ourselves and finally share Archie’s stories with the world. His exploits were fascinating, but it was even more interesting getting to know this uncle I had never met through his own words.
As Joe worked away on Horizon Fever, I reluctantly began Camel. However, soon the words began to flow and I was happy in my own little writing world again.
Some mornings, ice skinned the puddles and the mountains were dusted with icing-sugar snow. As the sun rose higher in the sky, the snow melted away, except on distant high peaks where it clung on with grim determination. Joe and I kept the woodburner stoked and abandoned the hob, preferring to cook on the woodburner instead. We were warm and the chickens didn’t seem to mind the low temperatures outside. With fluffed-up feathers, they appeared twice the size that they were in the hot summer months.
All the village cats now had thick winter coats. Gravy never reappeared, but we saw a great deal of her sister, Sylvia and Sylvia’s two kittens, Snitch and Felicity. We didn’t feed them regularly, but sometimes left scraps outside. Then the time arrived when we heard caterwauling coming from the garden, even with our doors tightly shut. The cycle of nature had swept round once again. Every village tomcat had crowded into our garden and was sidling up to Sylvia, following her every move.
Sylvia appeared indifferent, even annoyed by their presence. She growled at them in warning, but it was an elaborate act. If she felt they weren’t paying her enough attention, she’d drop the ‘playing hard to get’ pretence to roll on her back, tail sweeping the ground, paws waving in the air. If that didn’t entice them, she’d slink up and turn her hindquarters to them, coyly watching the reaction over her shoulder as she offered herself wantonly. But she held all the cards. She permitted a tomcat to mount her only when she was ready and not a moment before.
Snitch and Felicity watched their mother with huge eyes from under the shelter of our garden table. They needn’t have been nervous; the tomcats were far too preoccupied to be bothered with the youngsters.
That year, the biggest, most powerful, well-endowed tom in the village was a jet-black cat Joe insisted on calling Black Balls, for obvious reasons. I hurriedly shortened the name to Blackie. We guessed that many of the village kittens born that spring would be black and as the weeks rolled by, Sylvia’s waistline expanded and we knew she was pregnant again. We would have to wait a few months to see if Blackie was the father.
February is probably Spain’s wettest month, as well as the coldest. El Hoyo is snuggled at the bottom of a valley and grey clouds often hid the mountains surrounding us, making us feel as though we were in an isolated world, smothered under a silver blanket.
However, even in deepest winter, the valley never looked lifeless. The wild fig and almond trees lost their leaves, but the orange and olive trees retained theirs. Not to be outdone, the almond trees burst forth, their waxy, pinky-white blossom like edible decorations crafted from sugar. But the orange trees dashed off with the prize, now hung with bright fruit that weighed down the branches and begged to be picked. As distant snow-covered peaks jabbed at the sky, it seemed strange that oranges could ripen and be picked in midwinter.
Outside our kitchen door, our grapevine was a tangle of dead-looking branches over our heads. For the first time, neither Uncle Felix nor Paco arrived to prune it for us, so I decided to take matters into my own hands.
“How hard can it be to prune a grapevine?” I asked Joe.
Joe looked at me blankly and shrugged.
“You just chop it, I guess.”
I shouldn’t have asked him. Had I wanted to know something about the molecular structure of hydrogen sulphide or (heaven forbid) something about the Fourier analysis of waves, he might have helped. If I’d asked him to list all the American Civil War battles and their commanders, or the dates of every significant writer from Samuel Pepys onwards, he might have been useful.
But gardening is not one of Joe’s strengths. Joe calls every flower, regardless of size or colour, a pansy.
Having been away for a year, the shrubs had become rather unruly and I’d asked him to help me in the garden. We had a beautiful jasmine and a plumbago that grew together, intertwined. The blue plumbago flowers lasted for months and when the snowy jasmine flowers peeped through, it was my favourite part of the garden.
“Could you just tidy it up a tiny bit?” I asked him, handing him the secateurs. “Just neaten it up, nothing more.”
Then I turned my back to get on with other jobs. Big mistake.
“I’ve finished,” he called some time later and I came to view his labours.
Joe stood there, beaming, obviously well pleased with his efforts, the garden shears hanging loosely from one hand. Piles of green foliage, blue and white blossoms and branches were piled on the ground, already wilting. The plumbago had been reduced to a foot-high stump and the jasmine was nearly as bad. I stared with horror.
“It would have taken too long with the secateurs,” he said, “so I used the big shears.”
I couldn’t speak. To be honest, I felt quite tearful.
The plumbago, unsurprisingly, gave up and died. The jasmine eventually recovered and took over the space. I loved the blossoms and the fragrance of the jasmine, especially during summer evenings, but I sorely missed the cheerful splash of blue that the plumbago had provided.
Yes, the grapevine needed pruning, but this was not a job Joe could be trusted with.
“If Uncle Felix and Paco don’t turn up by the end of the month,” I announced, “I’m going to have a go at doing it myself.”
13. Pruning
Mackerel Paté
‘Your baby is now the size of a raspberry. Those little arms and legs are wriggling around like crazy...’
By the middle of March, Paco and Uncle Felix still hadn’t appeared to prune our grapevine. I spent a lot of time under its twisted, naked branches, gazing up, considering how best to tackle the job.
I turned to the Internet for assistance.
‘Prune the 12 renewal buds so that there is always one more bud growing from the ti
p. Allow the renewal buds to extend and grow one bud length. The fruit develops on the new growth that springs from the renewal bud. Keep it short during the dormant season and the plant under control.’
I’ve always liked gardening, but this was a little baffling. Twelve renewal buds? I stared up at the vine and did a little counting. This wasn’t going to be quite as simple as I’d thought.
“I’ve sharpened the clippers,” said Joe. “Are you sure you don’t want me to help?”
“Quite sure, thanks,” I said, recalling the ugly slaughter of the plumbago. No, I was not going to allow the same thing to happen to our beloved grapevine.
I took a deep breath, trying to remember the rules I’d just read about new growth and old growth, renewal buds and fruiting spurs. Then I positioned the cutters and snipped. The first branch tumbled to the ground.
An hour later, my feet were surrounded by fallen branches. I had a stiff neck from looking up, sore eyes from squinting against the bright sky and blisters on my hands from the clippers. I was exhausted, but satisfied that I’d done a fairly good job. In fact, I was feeling rather pleased with myself.
Vine branches and twigs make perfect kindling, so Joe and I chopped them into short lengths and stored them away to dry, ready for next winter.
A week or so later, we heard the clattering of hooves up our street and voices. Then a fist pounded on our door.
“English! English!”
“Hello Paco,” said Joe, opening the door to admit our neighbour and Uncle Felix.
As always, Paco burst in and his presence dominated the room, in sharp contrast to Uncle Felix who shrank a little every year. Uncle Felix’s flat cap was pulled down over his eyes and he shuffled behind Paco, his fourscore years evident. Uncle Felix’s mule tried to follow her master inside, but she’d been tethered to the window bars so only succeeded in pushing her head into our living room.
Two Old Fools in Spain Again Page 9