The Almond Blossom Appreciation Society

by Chris Stewart

  As we were talking, a couple of youths approached us. They were deep black and so shabbily dressed that they stood out. There was a haunted look in their eyes and they addressed me hesitantly in very shaky English. They had travelled, they told me, all the way from Liberia, where a civil war was raging. Their families had been slaughtered and they could not return for fear of their lives. They were utterly destitute. They believed that, if they could just get to Europe, they could find work and start to rebuild their lives, with enough to eat and freedom from terror. I was the only European in the crowd, so they had sought me out. Surely I could help them?

  I could do nothing. They walked off slowly, not knowing where to go or what to do. I can still recall the faces of those poor boys – neither of them would have been as much as twenty years old – wandering aimlessly among the lorries; the fear in those youthful eyes, the momentary light of hope, and the disappointment. I hate to think what became of them.

  Mourad and Aziz stopped with me at the pier. We bade each other a fond farewell, swore vows of undying friendship and swapped all manner of addresses. Then I shouldered my baggage and walked apprehensively towards customs.

  The bags of seed, gathered with such care and with present and future hopes riding upon them, suddenly made me profoundly nervous. Although I knew I was doing nothing illegal – as Carl had explained, there were no seed-exporting regulations in place between Morocco and Europe – there was guilt written all over me. I oozed paranoia and was already preparing for my arrest and trial. I was sure I wouldn’t get a fair hearing. The system in Morocco was such that officials in public employ – policemen, customs officials, administrative officers – were not paid well enough even to feed and clothe their families. Corruption was thus a necessary way of life. There seemed a strong likelihood that, carrying all the broom seeds, I might find myself thrown in jail, and would be obliged to buy my way out. I could probably afford the bribe, but even so it would be very disagreeable and inconvenient to find myself in the slammer, or indeed to risk the fruit of our recent labours.

  At the customs control, I trembled and blushed, stammered when spoken to, looked nervously to left and right and cast the odd distracted glance behind me in case I was being followed. The three uniformed customs officers stared at me knowingly as I approached the inspection… but did nothing; not even a poke in my bag. A short walk up the gangway and I was on my way back home to Spain.

  Carl was thrilled by our haul, and listened with interest to my plans of starting a seed-collecting partnership with Mourad. This was precisely the sort of operation he wanted to support and, although Ana had some reservations about covering the entire expanse of northwest Europe in Cytisus battandieri, she too thought it right to shift the project to a local enterprise.

  With the omens all in place, I entered into an erratic correspondence with Mourad. As neither of us had easy access to a phone, we wrote letters, which introduced a rather formal note to our relationship, Mourad using an elaborate literary English. It also showed us both up as appallingly inept entrepreneurs. One thing we agreed on, however, was that we would meet the following summer in Azrou and collect some seeds.

  In the event we didn’t, because the winter before that Mourad took it into his head to smuggle himself into Europe. As proof that the worst-laid plans just occasionally work, he had hunkered down under the seat of his cousin Naïma’s van, covered himself in rugs and the sprawling legs of her children, and sailed serenely through customs. He’d done it. He’d reached Europe, the promised land. And his first thought, touchingly, was to visit me at El Valero, and take up my offers of hospitality. But, by some mischievous twist of fate, he chose the one month that year that I was away, shearing in Sweden.

  Ana was at home and recounted the brief visit as soon as I got back. Apparently Mourad had persuaded his cousin, who was on her way back to her home in France, to make a detour to our farm. Finding it almost impossible to work out the right road to our valley, they accosted the first foreigner they met in the street for directions. Luckily this was Sam Graves, a kind and gracious British expat who knew us very well, being the father of the agent who had originally sold us the farm. He was also the son of Robert Graves, which, had Mourad known, might have led to much literary discussion.

  But the talk, it seems, was all about how to reach our farm: not an easy thing to explain. Poor Sam tried every means to get across the complicated directions, but to no avail, and in his typically generous manner ended up taxiing Mourad, his cousin and her husband, and their four children, along our rutted mountain track, even fording the river to the farm. At last they rounded our final bend and parked just below the stables. Mourad and his group emerged from the car and looked slowly round at the few traditional buildings and ramshackle outhouses that comprise our home. Nobody said a word, but each wore a slightly puzzled frown. The farm, as Mourad explained to me later, reminded them all of one thing: Morocco.

  Still, the party made their way up towards the house and were greeted by Ana on the way. She had never met Mourad before and he stepped quickly towards her through the dust, anxious to effect the introduction, and to discover where I was. The news was a blow. It hadn’t occurred to him that I might be away. Ana invited him to stay until I returned, but he wouldn’t hear of it. Not only would it have been a gross breach of etiquette to stay with Ana on her own, but I think he was also worried about incriminating her with the police.

  By the time I came back, Mourad had disappeared from his cousin’s home in Lyon and embarked on what sounded very much like a grand tour of Europe. It was typical of Mourad that he refused to limit himself to working behind the scenes in a restaurant kitchen or sweatshop, making discreet forays around the city under cover of night. Instead, as soon as he earned a bit of cash he embarked on the sort of travels that only the most avid literary tourist might contemplate: hopping trains and buses and popping into bookshops en route to read up on each new city’s attractions in a guidebook. Following up contacts he’d been given by friends in Azrou, and trusting that his outrageous luck would continue, he sallied over the border from France to Italy and on to Switzerland, where he had a hankering to see the Alps. Eventually it was in Switzerland, in the shadow of the mountains, that his luck faltered. He was caught dawdling near the border in broad daylight, thrown into jail for a fortnight and deported. ‘Ah, but Chris,’ he told me, his eyes dancing at the memory, ‘I would do it all again.’

  Later on, I had my own reason for delay. Chloë was born the following year, so I tried to pare down foreign trips to a minimum and find work closer to home. Carl came up trumps with a large order for the extravagantly blossomed Retama monospermum which thrives on the Costa de la Luz, and some euphorbias, which grow even closer to home, on the hillside high at the head of the Trevélez River. But, even with local shearing jobs thrown in, it was tough trying to make ends meet, and when autumn came I was left with no choice but to head for Sweden again for a month’s shearing. I remembered once asking a friend of Mourad – one of the lucky ones with a visa in his passport – how he could bring himself to leave his young family for a year at a time to work on construction sites in Germany. He shrugged: ‘But I’m Moroccan. For us there is not a choice.’ And yet my own short stints seemed hard enough to bear.

  It turned out that we never did repeat our seed-collecting enterprise. Back in Azrou, Mourad, with another timely piece of fortune, managed to land himself a job as a teacher. The money wasn’t much but it was enough to enable him to marry. His wife was a Berber whom he’d known since childhood, named Aïsha like his mother, and the couple moved to a rented house in the district of Sidi Assou. He was delighted – this was much closer to the life he’d hoped to lead – and when Aïsha became pregnant with their son Ilyas he wrote in glowing terms of the ‘new generation we are both producing that will forge in harmony a new culture’.

  I considered asking Ali to join me instead in the seedcollecting work, but I wasn’t sure we could establish the same rapport. A
nd then I, too, found other work. A publisher in London accepted my first book and with a few strokes of ink at the bottom of a contract turned me into a bona fide author. Mourad was tremendously pleased and impressed. He knew, he assured me, that I was destined for the literary life.

  We still write to each other and, on rare occasions when Mourad takes me up on offers of help, I cross to Tangier with a few necessary medicines or books for his growing family of two boys and a girl, the latter of whom suffers from asthma. While we sit together at a harbourfront café talking, as men of our age do, about our health and the sort of future we hope to steer our children towards, I sense how much the travel constraints still weigh on him. Of course he would like the extra consumer power that goes with working and living in Europe. But he insists that even more than this he would like to be free to dream: to plan trips, and adventures and opportunities for his children, without having them so categorically denied. It would be nice, for instance, to think of taking his children to Brighton and tasting that famous rock.

  CASA & CAMPO

  SOME YEARS LATER I FOUND MYSELF reflecting on Mourad’s reaction to our home, after a phonecall from one Eduardo Mencos. El Valero had looked depressingly like a Berber farm to Mourad yet here was the director of Casa & Campo – one of Spain’s glossiest home and garden magazines – asking to come and view our garden. It seemed a ludicrous notion, but Señor Mencos was not a man to be gainsaid. ‘Didn’t you tell him that we don’t actually have a garden?’ Ana asked incredulously. ‘And this is just your average mountain farm with a vegetable patch on one terrace?’ I assured her that I had, but that this had been dismissed by my interlocutor as typical British modesty.

  ‘And you mentioned the old wrecks of cars scattered about the place, and the bedsteads used as gates?’ she continued.

  ‘Well, yes, I think I might have. Anyway, all farms have old cars and bedsteads on them,’ I countered, neither of the two having featured prominently in the conversation.

  ‘And that the swimming pool’s a pond full of frogs?’

  ‘Yes, I said all those things, but he’s read some article about us and is convinced he should come and see the place for himself. He’s not bringing a photographer, though – this would just be to, well… to meet us and have a look around.’

  Ana groaned. Casa & Campo specialises in features and photos of salubrious dwellings with impeccable borders, topiary, gravel drives, zen follies and the like. ‘It’ll be a waste of everyone’s time,’ she insisted. ‘El Valero just isn’t a Casa & Campo sort of place. And I’m not sure I’d particularly want it to be.’

  She was right, of course, but it seemed ungracious to cancel the visit now. Perhaps we could make some improvements. Standing on the terrace, outside the kitchen, I cast a cool appraising eye around our farm. ‘We could get rid of Custard,’ I suggested.

  Ana came and stood beside me, and together we gazed down at the ancient yellow carcass of our old Renault 4 rusting away just beyond the steps to our house. Wasps were buzzing in and out of the jagged hole that had once been her sunroof; for some reason hot yellow tin is irresistible to wasps. ‘Well, at least it will keep the Guardia happy,’ she reluctantly agreed.

  It’s wrong to get sentimental about cars, especially their battered old husks, but the truth is that you can’t help remembering them fondly. They head my personal hierarchy of inanimate objects, along with guitars, walking sticks, the odd cooking pot and a beloved cherrywood corkscrew… Thinking about it, I seem to be consumed with sentiment for a whole array of objects, though cars are very much ahead of the pack.

  Custard was the very first car that we bought when we settled in Spain: a canary-yellow Renault 4L, or a Cuatro Latas (‘Four Tins’) as the locals call them. We were seduced utterly by her spotless bodywork and the sparkle of her windows, which we were assured was the work of one devoted lady owner, a pharmacist from Armilla. And in an automotive way Custard trod lightly upon the earth: she didn’t use a lot of fuel and she didn’t weigh much, and like the Deux-Chevaux she was a car designed to transport a basket of eggs the wrong way across a ploughed field with a peasant at the controls. That suited us fine, and also the price was right – the equivalent of £600 – which was as far as we could stretch at the time.

  We took Domingo along with us to buy it, because he knows everything about cars. He slithered about beneath the car on the showroom floor for half an hour, then pronounced himself satisfied that she was in good order. And so the three of us clambered aboard and clattered proudly back to the Alpujarras. ‘I’m glad we’ve got a car like this,’ said Ana as the engine strained up the steep mountain track, bouncing in and out of the ruts. ‘We don’t want our neighbours to think we’re grand.’ At that time not many of our neighbours owned cars at all, but the look on their faces as they stopped their mules to wave us past held not a glimmer of envy. We called the car ‘Custard’ because it was that sort of yellow – well, the yellow you find in packets, at any rate; personally, I make custard with brown sugar and cinnamon, so it comes out a sort of dull ochre.

  Coming to live with us was a big lifestyle change for the car, with daily runs to the pharmacy replaced by the merciless battering of our track, the fording of the river and heavy loads of animal feed and building materials. Little by little the pristine yellow coat faded, bits began to drop off, and Custard was transformed into a most singular vehicle. The exhaust pipe fell off altogether and the slightest incline made the engine roar like a battle tank; the wheel bearings, as a result of constant soakings in the river, went rusty, so that as the wheels went round they did so with a sound like the twittering of many small birds; and the doors had been damaged by repeated blows and opened with the sound of braying donkeys. Ana found it a little embarrassing when people stared as we roared and twittered through the town. But despite the fact that the car sounded like a mobile zoo, we developed a great affection for her. She would go anywhere, in the foulest of conditions and with huge loads.

  Domingo gave me a couple of lessons in how easy it is to maintain a Renault 4. You just buy the bits from town or from the dump, and bolt them on. To me it never seemed quite as easy as it looked when he did it, and the job was marred by my sloppy workmanship and complete mechanical incompetence. So, with the battering and bodging, Custard started to go downhill – metaphorically speaking.

  It was a state brought home to us, with some melodrama, the following New Year’s Day, when my sister treated us to a wildly generous Christmas present of a night in one of Spain’s fanciest five-star hotels. We arrived late and not a little frazzled, having rattled all the way from El Valero to Salinas near Loja, a journey of about three hours as it was then. Finally we pulled in through the hotel gates and clanked on along a drive that curled through groves of holm oaks heavily populated by rabbits. Turning a final corner, we came upon the gleaming white towers of the hotel, set amid sweeping lawns and pools with fountains that glittered in the evening sunlight. I pulled in amongst the rows of huge Mercedes and BMWs with blackened windows and gleaming paintwork. As if from nowhere, a flunky appeared, a superior-looking cove dressed in an archaic uniform and top hat. Grasping the passenger door, he opened it for Ana. It says a lot for the sort of place this was that, as the door slid off its hinges and clunked onto the ground, he batted not an eyelid. ‘Welcome to La Bobadilla, Madam, Sir,’ he said.

  The next day we fixed the door back on with a judiciously placed nail, and limped back to El Valero. It was, however, to be Custard’s last major journey and within weeks she had spluttered to a halt by the old threshing circle above the house, where she rusted away beneath her shroud of wasps’ nests and plants.

  Even Ana had to acknowledge that this current state was of no use to anyone, and we agreed to have the car cleared away. So a few days later, Pepe Pilili’s awesome JCB reduced Custard to a loveless lump of barely yellow metal, hoisted her up and dragged her across the river to the dump.

  The ground still bore the indents of Pepe’s machine when Eduardo Me
ncos roared into the valley in a low-slung BMW estate. I met him at the bridge, a great bear of a man, very blond for a Spaniard, and with a frank and genial manner. I could tell by the way he looked around him that he was a man with an eye for landscape. It was early summer and the heat of the sun was still melting the last of the snows in the high mountains, so the river was tumbling full and clear out of the narrow gorge. He had been gazing at the riverbanks lined with tamarisks in feathery flower, the yellow profusion of the gayomba and retama, and the poisonous pink blooms of the oleanders.

  ‘You’ve found yourself a Garden of Eden,’ he announced, striding forwards in a cloud of dust and enveloping one of my hands in his. ‘Even Spain, which is clearly the most beautiful country in the world, has little to offer as good as this. You live in Paradise. I am certainly looking forward to seeing your garden.’

  ‘Er, well, in a sense this is our garden,’ I said lamely.

  Eduardo laughed heartily and slapped me on the back. ‘No, this is your farm,’ he said. ‘Let’s go and look at your garden.’

  We crossed the lower acequia and walked between the thick bramble hedges that border the field of alfalfa, towards the eucalyptus grove. ‘Nice-looking crop,’ he commented, but was still casting about for telltale signs of our more decorative patch of earth. ‘Ah!’ he exclaimed, climbing the stone steps that led up to the pool. ‘This is better – definitely better.’ The pool stood before us, dark green with the excrement of frogs, its still surface dusted with fallen yellow petals of broom. The great iron waterwheel grumbled quietly on its axle as it revolved slowly, heaving great quantities of water, fish shit and algae up into the stone filter bottle.