The Almond Blossom Appreciation Society

by Chris Stewart

  As I drove through Órgiva a couple of days later, the school was disgorging its mob of fledgling citizens, the future and hope of mankind, onto the street. Gangs of sloppily dressed, slack-jawed youths with fags hanging out of their mouths, slouched nihilistically around the gates.

  ‘God,’ I thought, as I slowed down to avoid mowing down those who, for a dare, dashed in front of the car. ‘To think that these people not only know the value of X but have mastered the secret of the heptagon.’

  I saluted them with respect as I crawled past.

  Despite this gloomy vision of parental redundancy, there remains one area of expertise and experience that we keep in our armoury, and – having a flattish piece of farm track leading from the bridge – can dispense at whim. I offered to teach Chloë to drive.

  This was a new scheme of mine designed to make good use of the journey back from the school bus. Chloë may have only just turned thirteen but she was long enough to reach the pedals, and dead keen to embark on this next step towards independence. If she were a little drained from the long school morning, then so much the better: the driving would clear her mind.

  I embarked on our first lesson in deliberately casual manner. Having strolled down from the bridge I climbed into the passenger seat of the old Land-Rover we keep on the near side of the river and tossed her the keys. ‘Right, Chloë,’ I said, pretending to be more relaxed than I really felt. ‘Foot on the clutch, turn the ignition halfway…’

  ‘What’s ignition?’

  ‘The key. Turn it until the lights come on the dashboard, then wait for the yellow light to go out. Now, clutch in…’

  ‘What’s clutch?’

  ‘Embrague, the pedal on the left. Press it down and turn the key all the way.’

  Chloë jumped as the engine started. The starter motor graunched and screamed…

  ‘What do I do now?’

  ‘Let the key slip back on the spring… Good. Now, foot hard on the clutch and slip it into first.’

  Chloë fumbled with the gearstick and finally pushed it in. Big and Bumble, sitting in the back, looked disapproving; it didn’t normally take as long as this to get the car on the move.

  ‘Now what?’ She turned to me uneasily, gripping the steering wheel hard.

  ‘Well, now it’s time to get home for lunch. Give it a touch of throttle, let the clutch out and steer it along the track. Okay?’ I turned to quell the early signs of mutiny among the worried dogs in the back.

  ‘Give it a little more throttle and away you go…’

  Chloë jumped the clutch, a burst of throttle. The car bucked hard and stalled. The dogs fell off the back seat.

  ‘What did I do wrong?’ she said with a slight quake in her voice.

  ‘Too brutish, too impetuous. A little more throttle and a little gentler with the clutch. Feel the contact…’

  When you teach somebody to drive, you realise what an incredibly complicated business it is. And yet it has become so much second nature that you perform each action quite automatically… Ah, what a piece of work is man.

  Finally, to the relief of the poor baffled dogs, Chloë succeeded in getting the dilapidated old Land-Rover in motion.

  ‘STEER IT! Look out, you’ve got to keep in the middle of the track… There, there you go…’ And we headed off along the rough track for home, Chloë gripping the wheel tightly with a look of grim determination while I, feigning nonchalance, put my feet on the dusty dashboard and looked out of the window.

  The idea is that one’s apparent nonchalance infects and relaxes the pupil: a trick I picked up while learning to fly, many years ago in Texas, under the instruction of Gary, a deranged and unpredictable Hawaiian. Now, in general terms there’s nothing dangerous about aeroplanes so long as they’re up in the air. There’s an awful lot of air up there, and the likelihood of hitting any of the few objects that are capable of getting up there in it, is extremely thin. No, your problems only really start when you decide to return to earth. It’s when your aeroplane actually regains contact with the ground that the – well – that the shit really can hit the fan.

  Anyway, there I was, sitting in the pilot’s seat, next to Gary, who was looking out of the window, thinking impure thoughts, as we were coming in to land at Red Bird Airport, Dallas. It was the very first time I had ever attempted to land a plane and I was scared. My knuckles were white on the wheel and my attention darted desperately between the altimeter, air-speed indicator, turn and bank indicator, and the windscreen – through which I could see the planet’s surface hurtling perilously towards us. My whole body was tensed and quivering in an anguish of anxiety to get this right. Gary, however, continued picking his teeth and looking out of the side window. Then suddenly he looked up, assessed the situation, opened the door and made to leap out. ‘Shit, man!’ he yelled, over his shoulder. ‘You’re too nervous. You going to fuck it all up! I’m getting out!’

  ‘Hey, Gary! What d’you mean?’ I screamed in blind panic. ‘You can’t leave me all alone in here… I don’t even know how to drive this thing!’

  He shut the door and howled with laughter. ‘Just testin’ you, man… Just testin’ you. Loosen up for fuck’s sake, loosen up!’

  I loosened up. I hooted with laughter, more from relief than anything. Then suddenly the bastard had his hands around my throat – he’d turned into a homicidal maniac seconds before our plane hit the ground. ‘Hey, man… Never laugh when you landin’ a plane. You’ll fuck it up for all of us!’

  We both rocked with mad laughter. I was laughing so much I couldn’t grip the wheel at all, let alone with white knuckles. I looked out of the window. In less than a second we’d be plastered like a cowpat on the runway. I eased back, tears of laughter in my eyes, and cut the throttle. The plane flared and, eased by the cushion of wind, touched the ground with a gentle thump and a rumble of wheels. Gary’s unorthodox technique had worked well; the mad distraction had killed my nervousness, and without the nervousness I had performed smoothly and well.

  ‘I don’t pull that stunt with just anybody, boy,’ he said. ‘I figure you got to be least as crazy as me to use that treatment.’

  That was more than twenty years ago, when I had blown my life savings on an incredibly cheap and unethically short three-week flying course in Dallas, Texas. As it happened, I was the only one of the over-stressed pupils who actually earned my wings at the end of the stint – not because of any prowess on my part, but because my flying examiner couldn’t seem to get over the fact that he had a sheep shearer at the controls.

  ‘That’s a mighty hard job,’ he commented after I had ballsed up the figure-of-eight manoeuvre and overshot the airport, then looked at me thoughtfully, and added, ‘I think I’m gonna pass you, boy.’

  In fact I was as hopeless as the rest – and far too poor to keep up the flying hours necessary to take it further as either a hobby or career, so it wasn’t the handiest qualification I’ve ever earned. But to return to our farm track…

  Chloë by now had burst out from a tunnel of pomegranate and brambles, through which she’d managed to steer us and was suddenly faced with a sheep on the track, hysterical and mad-eyed, watching the inexorable approach of the car and wondering which way to go.

  ‘Dad! Dad! What shall I do? There’s a sheep in the way!’

  ‘Well, stop of course…’

  ‘HOW DO I STOP?!!’ By now the whole of Domingo’s three-hundred-and-fifty-strong flock had been apprised of the danger and were leaping in dim-witted terror from the terrace above the track right into the path of the car.

  ‘Left foot on the clutch, right foot on the brake.’ Chloë did as I said, and the car, bogged in a cloud of dust and an amorphous mob of panicking sheep, obediently stopped.

  ‘Dad, I don’t think I can do this. It’s too dangerous…’

  ‘Just stick with it, kid, and you’ll be alright. Don’t worry about it. And besides, how are we going to get home? I’m leaving the driving to you now.’

  Behind this
bravado there was a note of seriousness. Within a very few years I knew Chloë would be spending a lot of time being transported by young machos keen to show her just how fast you can go on a 49cc moto (at age sixteen in Spain you’re allowed to ride a motorcycle with a capacity less than 50cc), and likely as not nobody would be wearing crash helmets. We live a long way from town, out along a rough and precipitous mountain track and I reckoned that if Chloë knew better how to drive a car and ride a motorbike than all the beastly testosterone-charged hoodlums, whom I could already see muscling in on the periphery of her hitherto exclusively female coterie of friends, then she would stand a better chance of coming through these dangerous years unscathed.

  As the sheep dissipated toward the river, leaving a cloud of sweet-smelling dust behind, Chloë seemed to regain her spirit.

  ‘Okay, they’ve gone,’ she allowed. ‘What do I do now?’

  ‘Bit of throttle, clutch out and don’t forget to steer.’

  This time she got it better, and in a dignified fashion, in first gear, we continued towards home. More by luck than judgement she negotiated the narrow gap between the gateposts, smacked across the lower acequia with a great graunch of the sump, and ground on up the hill past the stable. With some foresight I had left open the gate that normally bars the track up to the house and acts as a fence for the horse.

  ‘Now, once you hit the hill I want you to put your foot down on the accelerator and keep going until you get to the house. You should lift your foot slightly just before speeding up round the bend, but on no account stop. Have you got that?’

  ‘Yes, but why?’ she asked, not unreasonably.

  ‘It’s steep. You’ll need a good steady pace to get to the top.’

  What I didn’t tell her was that the car had no handbrake to speak of and if she let her speed drop the car would inexorably grind to a halt and start rolling backwards – not quite what you want to happen on your very first lesson. Ana and I have developed an incredibly complicated way of stopping midway, to close the gate or the doors to the sheep shed, say, or pick up a bag of oranges left beneath a tree, but it involves backing the car into the shed wall with just the right circular motion so that it comes naturally to rest. It was a manoeuvre best left till later.

  Finally we came to a halt outside the house, Chloë having skilfully contrived to butt the front wheel up against a stone cunningly placed to catch the back wheel.

  ‘Okay, how do I stop it now?’

  ‘Turn the key the other way.’

  This she did, but the engine kept on grumbling away. This was another of the more eccentric deficiencies of the farm car: it starts like a dream, but it’s often reluctant to stop.

  ‘Well, put it into neutral and get out and I’ll stop it.’

  With some relief, Chloë clambered out. She’d done pretty well, I thought, and I told her so.

  A couple of days later I was cutting some sheaves of alfalfa for the sheep and collecting together some bundles that had been drying in the field. The dogs, having heard a car arrive on the other side of the valley, came hurtling down the hill barking. It was our old friend Cathy and her teenage son Juanito, who were giving Chloë a lift back from school. I bent to the work again with my sickle and cut a few big bundles, gathered them together and tied them with a rope. Then, turning to hoist them onto my shoulder, I found Manolo standing at the gate looking rather pleased about something. He had been walking up to the house for a beer after clearing the lower acequia.

  ‘You’ll never lift that, Cristóbal. Here, let me help you,’ he said, as he took the great bundle of leaves and stalks from me, shouldered them effortlessly and turned towards the stable. That was the great thing about Manolo: he was always popping up just when you could do with a hand. I wondered, though, what was amusing him so much. Manolo is one of the most good-humoured people I know, but even he needs a reason to grin.

  ‘Chloë’s full of surprises, isn’t she,’ he commented, nodding down the track from where I could hear the sound of an engine gunning along in first gear. ‘Better watch out or she’ll be wanting that car for herself.’

  I stopped and squinted in the direction of the sound. The Land-Rover burst into view, with Chloë peering anxiously over the top of the wheel. Cathy, I later discovered, had been a bit surprised when my daughter hopped onto the front seat and announced she was going to drive them up to the house, but thought she probably knew what she was up to. Cathy is one of those old-school feminists who would rather bite her tongue in two and swallow the other half than discourage a girl from showing a bit of initiative. Her son Juanito was simply impressed.

  I panicked. The gate halfway up the hill was shut and Chloë wouldn’t have the slightest clue about the complicated parking manoeuvre required, and would either slam into the horizontal pole or slide off the terraces. I dropped the alfalfa and raced to get there first. Chloë hardly noticed me holding the fence open as she gunned past, eyes glued to the track ahead, teeth set in grim determination. At the house Cathy and Juanito were climbing out of the car looking slightly aquiver. Chloë was still sitting in the driving seat, the engine running, her foot hard down on the brake pedal. I think she was just getting to grips with the enormity of what she had done.

  ‘Dad, the engine’s playing up again, and every time I take my foot off the pedal the car rolls backwards… what shall I do?’

  I helped her sort out the problems and she clambered unsteadily out. ‘I think I might have had enough driving for now,’ she whispered, handing me the keys.

  GUESTS WITHOUT PAPERS

  UNLIKE MY SHEEP-SHEARING PARTNER, José Guerrero, who makes his living travelling from flock to flock throughout the Alpujarras, my becoming a writer means that I can, these days, afford to be choosy about the work I take on. I’d hate to give up shearing entirely, and if a flock or its farmer or its patch of mountain appeals I’ll be off like a shot, but it must be said there is some pleasure in saying no to jobs you know will be nothing but drudgery. Which made it all the odder that there I was hauling myself out of the connubial bed at the crack of dawn to help José shear Paco López’s sheep.

  Paco López is a notorious drunk who lives on a ramshackle farm high up in the Ilex forest above the Trevélez river valley. Frequently he would disappear for days, abandoning his sheep to whatever grazing they could find beneath the holm-oaks, and leaving them prey to the packs of wild dogs that are such a disagreeable feature of the Spanish countryside. It had been almost two years since José and I had last sheared his flock and I remembered that we had made a solemn pact never, ever, to accept another job from him again.

  ‘Remind me just once more why we’re doing this,’ I bleated as we hurtled round the mountain bends in José’s little tin van, deafened by the Led Zeppelin tape that he insisted on playing at full volume through his tinny radio speakers.

  ‘Parné, pasta, dinero!’ José shouted with a bristly grin. ‘I need the money and I can’t do it on my own! Also, it’ll help you shake off those disgraceful rolls of flab! All that sitting on your arse with a pen in your mouth is doing you no good, Cristóbal.’

  I supposed he had a point, and it is always hard to turn down work with José, who in spite of – or, perhaps, because of – his recent battle with cancer, remains one of the most cheerful and energetic people I have ever met. In the event, however, the job was worse than either of us could have anticipated. The past months had weighed heavily on poor Paco, who, ground down by the loneliness and the harshness of a mountain shepherd’s life, had been hitting the bottle hard. He had that pinched and distracted look of the serious imbiber, coupled with an evident querulousness about money. His sheep were no bundles of fun, either. They were bonier and thinner-skinned than ever and each one hosted a thriving colony of parasitical arachnids (ticks have eight legs so don’t qualify as insects).

  We pitched in to the job with all the good humour we could muster, but it was a stretch even for José’s natural cheer. The air in Paco’s asbestos-roofed shed was bakin
g, and stagnant with the putrid stench of dung, and the ticks were making it almost impossible to get the wool off. Each stroke of the clippers left a livid trail of blood as it hacked through thirty or forty engorged bodies, and the cutters kept sticking, so we had to push and pull and tug and jab, while taking as much care as we could of the sheep’s protruding bones and thin skin. Time and again we nearly gave up, took down the machinery and went home. But something kept us going – perhaps the money, perhaps some imbued work ethic, or maybe just sympathy for a shepherd and his sheep. So we stuck it out and at last our constancy was rewarded. The end of the job was in sight.

  Paco didn’t seem to share our relief, though, and was moving morosely around the flock, counting anxiously under his breath, as he appeared from the pen with another creature for me to shear. I grabbed hold of it, flexed my shearing arm ready to make the first blow and then stopped. ‘Bloody hell! Paco,’ I called above the buzzing of my partner’s shears, ‘I can’t shear this one. Take it away!’

  ‘Why, what’s the matter with it?’ he muttered,

  ‘It’s a goat, man. I’m not going to shear your goat!’

  Paco looked – and there is no other word here – sheepish, then rallied. ‘No, Cristóbal, that’s no goat,’ he insisted, fixing me with a bloodshot look. ‘That’s a sheep.’

  It wasn’t, of course. Goats can look a bit like sheep and some even have a certain ovine demeanour, a sheepish gait that at a distance – say, peering from one mountainside across to another – can lead to confusion. But there was no confusion at all about the particular specimen that was standing right before me. This wasn’t just your run-of-the-mill, undistinguished goat; it was a goat’s goat, with horns and a beard and all.