A Parrot in the Pepper Tree

by Chris Stewart

  Gradually my eyes adapted to the gloom — what little light there was entered through cracks in the planking and dusty windows — and to a truly disheartening sight. There were sheep everywhere, grubby black creatures with steam rising from their backs. The steam hung in a great smelly cloud and within the cloud, seemingly drifting in the air, were even more sheep. They were wandering along plankways that led into the cavernous vault of the barn. Everywhere were huge malodorous bales of hay and silage, with sheep on them and in them, like weevils in a biscuit.

  ‘Bit of a balls-up, eh Björn?’ I muttered in a feeble understatement. I was looking at one of the grimmest jobs I’d had to do in ten years of work in Sweden.

  Björn looked crestfallen. His eyelashes brushed his cheeks as he looked down and wrung his hands a little.

  ‘You see, it’s been a terrible year,’ he said quietly.

  ‘It certainly has, Björn — these sheep look like shit! Still, don’t you worry about it, we’ll get at them this afternoon and in a couple of days they’ll look like new!’

  ‘Well then, shall we go and have something to eat?’ he said, with the beginnings of a grin. I decided that I liked Björn.

  Björn’s parents, Tord and Mia, were waiting for us in the kitchen. Unlike the barn this had a scrubbed, colourful look — it was clearly Mia’s domain — and a warm smell of cinnamon buns and coffee wafted towards us from a tray on the broad wooden table.

  ‘Come and eat,’ intoned Mia, clumping back to the oven and then bending at the hip in a stiff bow to lift out another tray of buns. She winced a little before straightening up.

  ‘We hope you’ll stay,’ she added and glanced at her husband as if calling on him to flesh out the invite. Tord, a larger, rounder, pinker version of Björn, smiled broadly at me but seemed unwilling to commit himself to words. Instead he helped himself to another bun, and gestured that I should do the same.

  ‘Thank you, these are nice buns,’ I enthused. It was true they were nice buns, with lots of cinnamon and sugar, but they were also the same as every other bun I’d tasted from the north to the south of rural Sweden on any given day.

  ‘Aah det är de — that they are…’ Tord agreed, and gestured towards the coffee pot.

  ‘Nice coffee,’ I commented, a mite less sincerely as I hate coffee that’s been boiled twice. This didn’t, however, seem the moment for experimental chit-chat.

  I looked meaningfully at Björn. He nodded and we rose from the table to go back to the sheep shed. Back in the barn I changed into icy, grease-caked shearing clothes and hung my machine in a corner while Björn set up a mercury lamp. It was only half past two but the sun was dropping fast. The shabby black sheep surrounded us, munching insolently, and as the mercury lamp built up to full power I was illuminated in a pool of bluish white light like an actor in a very fringe theatre. Björn disappeared into the darkness and came back with a sheep. The first customer of the day. I pulled the starter cord.

  The first stroke when you shear a sheep goes down across the brisket and out over the belly — or it should do. But the machine stuck almost immediately on a matted snag of belly-wool. I pushed a little harder, took the comb out and tried another angle. Same thing. I pushed and pulled and tugged and strained but still that first bit of wool of the day refused to come off. Either Björn had selected the worst sheep in the flock for me or else I was in for a time of utmost misery.

  The sheep was bad all over but eventually I managed to get most of its wool off, by dint of merciless pushing and jabbing and pulling the more reluctant bits off with my hand. She looked awful as she tripped back into the darkness.

  ‘I’m sorry about that, Björn,’ I gasped. ‘She looks a fright, but it’s taken nearly fifteen minutes to do one bloody sheep. If there are as many as you say there are then we’re going to be here all week, and it’s going to be a god-awful week!’

  Björn looked miserable. ‘Maybe this one is a little better,’ he offered hopefully, dragging the next sheep from the shadows.

  But it wasn’t. Nor was the next one. Then came one that you could describe only with expletives. I straightened up and groaned with the pain in my back. I had been at it for an hour and I had done four sheep. There were supposed to be three hundred-odd sheep in the flock.., that would be seventy-five hours of this misery.

  With a groan I looked ahead through the long tunnel of the week — the cold, the smelly barn — and most of all the loneliness, for much as I liked Björn, neither he nor his parents were the sort of folks you’d want to spend a whole week with. I started thinking about doing a bunk there and then.

  ‘Who normally shears these sheep, Björn?’

  ‘I usually do it myself, only I’ve hurt my back — chainsawing in the woods.’ The old Swedish complaint.

  Björn seemed to be reading my thoughts — and he looked desperate. With good reason. If I didn’t shear these sheep, then I couldn’t see anybody else coming all the way to do it. I thought about the long drive up here, the money that I needed, the worsening task I’d be leaving behind, and relented. I signalled to Björn to pull out another sheep.

  Now I don’t want to go on too much about sheep-shearing, but four sheep an hour is hell. With average clean good sheep I could normally manage twenty to twenty-five sheep an hour. Going at that rate the body is in constant fluid movement, all the muscles well exercised and freely moving in what amounts to almost a choreographed dance. But when you’re bent over the same sheep, poking, jabbing and heaving in the same horrible posture, then the pain in the lower back, the middle back and the legs is almost unbearable — and it’s no ball for the sheep, either.

  Björn stood miserably beside me, his breath steaming in the dank air of the barn, while I heaved and struggled with the sheep. As the day progressed, my thoughts turned black and I silently cursed everybody and everything: Björn and his wretched sheep and his disgusting barn and his parents. I was nothing but bitterness and back-pain. What a way to earn a living! What a waste of life!

  ‘Let’s finish now,’ urged Björn, seeing the demons take hold.

  ‘No, let’s do two more. That way there’ll be two less at the end of the job.’

  Björn brought two more sheep and as if I were being rewarded for steadfastness of character they were both fliers. Young and firm-fleshed and well rounded they sat meek and compliant on the board as the wool peeled away like grey silk.

  I staggered and stretched and thought about beer. Then I remembered that I was in rural Sweden. A light beer, brewed by some vile industrial chemical process, would be the best I could hope for. It might even be lättöl — alcohol ‘free’ and lacking also any flavour, aroma or pleasure. It always makes me think of George Orwell’s ‘Victory Beer’ in 1984.

  I hung up the shears and together Björn and I trudged across the frozen yard, the snow squeaking beneath our boots — which means, if I’ve got it right, that it’s ten degrees or more below zero. Björn wrenched open the farmhouse door and we crowded in among ranks of evil-smelling boots and farm-wear. We peeled off our outer layers and padded in flopping woollen socks into the bright kitchen. Tord was there, smiling broadly as usual. He passed me a bottle of lättöl and a pink-tinged plastic beaker.

  ‘Thanks shall you have,’ I said in that curious Swedish way.

  Tord watched as I worked my way without enthusiasm through the beer. Tonight, he said, we would be going to the Norrskog Farmers’ Study Circle weekly meeting. It would be most interesting for me, he thought, to come along and take part in the proceedings. I thought about declining. It certainly wouldn’t be a wild evening out, but then I pictured us all sitting through that first night staring at a diminishing pile of cinnamon buns and sipping lättöl round the kitchen table. I went to get my coat.

  We whizzed along icy roads in Tord’s car towards a village hall in a clearing in the woods, stopping on the way to pick up Ernst, the chairman of the study circle, who lived in a little red house by the roadside. Ernst was small and wiry with a thin, slig
htly lop-sided mouth, and Tord seemed very much in awe of him. At the hall, Tord ushered me through the decompression chamber, a set of heavy double doors, and into the warm, brightly-lit wooden room. Motley groups of tall thick-set men in woollen shirts and baseball caps milled uncertainly about, sipping fruit squash from paper cups. These men worked alone deep in the woods with their chainsaws, or communed with their pigs in dark barns with the snow stacked up high against the windows. Small talk was not what they were good at and a grateful silence fell on the spasmodic and constipated attempts at conversation as Tord and Ernst entered.

  ‘Hejsan!’ (hello there) called Ernst as we passed through the hall. Everyone looked down at their boots and shuffled in acute embarrassment. ‘Hej, Ernst!’ muttered some brave soul. ‘Hej, hej, hej…’ came the quiet chorus. It was clear that Ernst ran the show, such as it was, and when he spoke people listened, and whatever he said was greeted with relief because it meant that nobody else would be obliged to say anything. Thus the assembled company hung upon his lips.

  ‘Tonight we have an Englishman with us,’ announced Ernst. ‘He is going to tell us about farming in England?

  ‘Bloody hell, Ernst, I can’t..? I spluttered, before my words were stifled in a bout of muted clapping. I looked down at the sea of upturned baseball caps — well, there were twenty of them at least — and began.

  ‘Er, good evening..? I said.

  ‘Go’afton,’ replied one or two.

  There was a pause.

  ‘I am really no expert,’ I hazarded, playing for time. ‘I don’t know much about the technical side of farming or even the ordinary stuff like dry matter conversion rates and subsidy clawback … perhaps I could, er, just answer a few of your questions about animals and crops?’

  The baseball caps were trained expectantly upon me but nobody chose to break the silence, until at last Ernst set the ball rolling. ‘Kris,’ he began (kris — pronounced krees — means crisis in Swedish). ‘Tell us, how big do you sell a cow in England?’

  I saw from a concerted nodding of the hats that this was a subject that excited universal interest. But I hadn’t the first idea how big we sold a cow in England. I tried to visualise a cow — the sort of fat cow that might be for sale. They’re huge, cows are, with great pendulous bellies and massive heads. I did a quick mental calculation.

  ‘Well, I suppose about a couple of tons?

  A gasp came from the hats, followed by animated mumbling. I had clearly erred on the high side here.

  ‘Of course,’ I added. ‘That would be a good big one — really, a hell of a big one. A more normal one would be around the one-and-a-half ton mark, I suppose.’

  More incredulous gasping. I was in deep.

  ‘And of course a lot of them are quite a bit smaller.., some of them would probably go as low as a ton — the runts, that is?

  It got worse as the session wore on. By the end of the evening I seemed to have recreated England as a land populated by creatures of mythical proportions and bursting with the most improbable crops and astonishing yields.

  In the car, afterwards, Björn broke the thick silence. ‘Don’t worry, Kris,’ he said. ‘People put too much emphasis on facts.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘What you said was… well, unusual. It woke people up.’

  ‘Björn,’ I groaned. ‘How could I have said that a cow weighed two tons? That’s nearly three times the normal size! They must think I’m an absolute and utter dickhead.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Tord, from the back. His voice was on the verge of hysteria. ‘It’s not as if you offered to muck them out!’

  I grew quite fond of Björn during the week at Norbo. Our glum days together in the sheep shed had become almost companionable, and on a couple of nights we went skiing in the moonlight across the sea, and on another to a local dance where we leaned against a wall in the shadows watching the girls and swigging whisky from a Coca-Cola bottle hidden in a brown paper bag.

  When Björn announced, ‘There’s only four left, I think,’ I felt a surge of affection for my melancholy friend, which endured even as the four sheep turned into fifteen or more hidden in the shadows. As we made for the door of the barn, the sun came out and shone in needle-fine shafts through the holes in the rotten cladding of the walls, illuminating bits of shorn sheep, flanks heaving, breath steaming. Björn surveyed his flock with evident relief and, removing his mitten, shook my hand formally. ‘Thanks shall you have, he said.

  The next morning, I slung my kit in the car and headed back across the sea, moving around to another half dozen farms separated by wearying drives through elk-infested forest.

  As usual, the trip lasted about a month — a long time away from home, and a lot of time to spend in the dark, on the road or with sheep. The high point was when a letter from home caught up with me at one of the farms. Chloe had written me a little poem, in Spanish and accompanied by a picture of a princess, and Ana had written a wonderful and witty letter, which carried momentous news.

  Apparently my publishing friends in London reckoned they might be able to make something of my stories about the farm, and they had sent an advance so that I could get my head down and finish it. ‘Prepare yourself for being a bestselling author,’ noted Ana wryly. ‘All you have to do is sell a few lorryloads of books and you need never go shearing in Sweden again?

  I grinned bovinely at this remote prospect, much as a giant cow might grin in the meadows of England.

  LEMONS GALORE

  I CLIMBED OFF THE BUS IN ORGIVA, THE SMALL PROVINCIAL TOWN and hub of urban life in the Western Alpujarras, and squinted into the bright April sunshine. After a month away, even the dump of a bus stop seemed gay and lively, flanked as it was by the pastel-green optician’s and the red and white supermarket, with some colourful plastic bags blowing in the wind round the wheelie-bins. I breathed in deep the inimitable Spanish town smell of coffee, garlic and black tobacco, and, shouldering my pack, set off for home. I always prefer to do the last bit of the journey home on foot; it adds a frisson of romance and gives me an opportunity to enjoy the sights and sounds of the countryside on the way. It takes about an hour and a half, in the unlikely event that you don’t find someone to stop and talk to.

  Crossing the dribble of the Rio Seco, I strode down into the vega — the fields of olives, oranges and vegetables that surround the town — and out along the road towards Tíjolas (sounds like ‘tickle us’). The roadside, which wound in and out of the river gullies and up and down the hills, was cushioned with tender new grass and clumps of dazzling yellow oxalis. The dark foliage of the orange and lemon trees was hung with bright fruit — a few here and there rolling across the road. As the first of the houses appeared, the village dogs that lay slumped on the warm road, roused themselves to bark at me.

  ‘Adiós,’ called the village women peering from behind the clouds of geraniums and margaritas that burst from old paint tins on their patios. ‘Adiós,’ I replied, raising my arm in greeting. ‘Goodbye, Goodbye.’ This is the standard greeting to someone passing by. It may seem a little odd to call ‘adiós’ to someone approaching, but if you don’t stop there is a certain logic in it.

  Leaving Tijolas behind me, I struck up the track that climbs through rocks and scrub to the ridge at the edge of our valley. At the top I unslung my pack and sat down on a warm rock to gaze back over the vega. A patchwork of neat fields, of all different colours and textures, stretched away below me. A blue plume of smoke rose into the still air and silver ribbons of water weaved among the fields, glittering in the sunlight. I thought of the dark pine forests of Sweden labouring beneath their burden of ice, and allowed myself a broad, self-satisfied grin. Then I hoisted my pack again and set off up the last part of the hill.

  The roaring of the river, tumbling out through the gorge far below the road, was the only sound apart from the trudging of my feet in the dust. A few more minutes tramping, and I reached the gap in the rock which is the first point from which you can see El V
alero, our home — tiny and distant on the far side of the river. A huge eucalyptus tree hides the house from the road but I could see the river fields with their crop of alfalfa, and the brighter greens of the watered terraces below the acequia (one of the Moorish irrigation channels that carries water along the hillside from the river to the farm). Higher up, I picked out the sheep moving through the scrub, while nearby, Lola, my horse, stood tethered in the riverbed, flicking away at the flies.

  ‘Nearly home,’ I thought to myself as I walked on round the bend in the track to the dead almond tree — the spot where visitors announce their arrival, either by sounding the horn or by whooping. Cupping my hands together, I whooped. It’s not a loud noise but over the years Ana and I have perfected just the right pitch so that either of us can hear the other from even the most distant corners of the valley. Even if we don’t hear the whoop, it never fails to set the dogs barking, and sure enough, I heard the yapping of Big, our terrier, the deep bass woofing of our sheepdog, Bumble, and a sonorous quack from Bonka, her mother. It’s hard to say why a dog should quack like a duck, but she always has done and I’d be sorry if she were ever to change.

  I caught sight of a slim figure waving down by the mandarin terrace. It was Ana. Screwing up my eyes I tried to fix the details — she’d had a haircut, no it was a hat — but I was too far off to make it out. Then there was a frantic rustling of a tree and all of a sudden a little figure with a mop of curly blonde hair appeared from under a branch, waving excitedly: Chloë, my five-year-old daughter. I whooped some more, and hollered, and jumped up and down waving frantically, and then strode on into the valley. It’s odd, being able to look down on your home some time before you get there — a sort of sneak preview. I still had a good twenty minutes to go.