Which produces uproar. Chrissie is looking puzzled, either struggling, like me, with the concept of a wealthy fruit-bearing plant, or at my stupidity because she knows from her Spanish O-Levels that mee-lon-arry-o means something entirely different, but everyone else is doubled up. ‘Jonneee no!’ cries Juan, wiping tears from his cheeks, ‘no millionaire, thees tree have one towsand jeer!’
Rafi is not having it, however, wagging her finger severely at her compatriot. ‘Juan, you no correct. Cristina and Jonneee tell we that in Eengliss you no have jeer, you are jeer.’ And she glances in our direction, seeking confirmation. Don’t look at me missus. My wife cottons on, thankfully. ‘That is correct, Rafi, in English we say ‘I am twenty, you are twenty, she is twenty.’ In Spanish you say ‘I have twenty.’’
Alonzo meanwhile is flapping his arms, calling for silence. He takes a deep breath. ‘Thees. Tree. Of. Olive. Ees. One. Towsand. Jeer. Oldth.’ And he exhales, grinning widely. Incredible! And he told us he didn’t speak any English. I’d buy some olive oil from the bloke, if only my wife had remembered my money.
Anyway, so where is this venerable plant? I mean, it’s knocking on towards lunch-time, not that I need anything to eat having polished off a square foot of breadth, and all that back-allow, but it’s the principle, isn’t it? We knock-off at one. The Spanish however, being officially in the wrong time-zone, which the Gobby-Enry are supposed to be doing something about, in the next fifty years, possibly, sit down around half-two, so there is plenty of time. We follow a dusty track out into the olive groves, the Spaniards all chatting away excitedly, whereas we are looking out for a signpost indicating the location of this mee-lon-arry-o, a ridiculous notion actually, in this country where directions are the exception, rather than the rule. Still, the others must know where they are going, but best of luck finding the thing, in this endless ocean of olives, which to my untrained eye all look the same. Obviously, there are minute differences in each tree, but they say that about snowflakes, don’t they? Low, squat, no more than fifteen feet high, (the olive trees I mean, not the snowflakes) they say olive wood is extremely slow-growing, which is not that surprising, quite honestly, in this country.
Historian-Anna is leading the expedition, and suddenly she arrives at the stump of a broken fence-post, indicating we need to turn off the main track. ‘Thees was sign for olly-bow mee-lon-arry-o, when I was cheeld,’ Jose confirms, ‘but Gobby-Enry no fixy yet.’ Well what’s the rush? Probably sat under a parasol somewhere, aren’t they. Get round to it in the next fifty years, no doubt. Do the time-zone, and the signpost, all in one go.
We head up a short rise, then the ground drops away, and there it is! Unmistakable, towering over its neighbours, dominating the landscape. And I am transfixed. We stroll reverently up to it, and I notice that even the Spanish have fallen silent. A thousand years, imagine that. I reach out my hand and caress the gnarly bark of the oldest living thing I have ever encountered. The trunk has divided into what appears to be five separate trees, all emanating from one massive root, spreading more than ten feet across the ground in every direction. The canopy is easily thirty feet, maybe more. Humbling, the history this tree has witnessed. It was a mere sapling at the end of the Dark Ages. The Norman Conquest, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Dissolution, the Spanish Armada, the Civil War, the Restoration, the Industrial Revolution and more recently, the world wars of the last century. All have come, and gone, and still this beast stands. My head is spinning. What a remarkable morning this has been.
Strolling homewards, Chrissie squeezes my arm. ‘I was really proud of you, this morning’ she smiles.
I feel a warm glow spreading through my person. ‘What, my Spanish, you mean?’ I whisper, modestly. ‘I am getting better, aren’t I? And we are so lucky, having such wonderful friends to teach us, and to share it with.’
She guffaws unkindly, breaking the spell. ‘Your Spanish? Do me a favour! You sounded like some Westcountry yokel! No, it was the olive-pickers hole, I mean. All that olive oil, and you didn’t manage to get a drop down your shirt, and trousers!’
Always the butt of the jokes round these parts, aren’t I?
CHAPTER 11. WHERE DID ME FLOOR GO?
‘Wow, what a difference! I can’t believe it’s the same room! You have been busy!’ Sunday evening, and I am admiring Del-Boy’s freshly scraped, filled and painted walls in his sitting room. The exposed beams have been stained, the floor tiles re-grouted, and his ‘coffee-table’, which previously consisted of three sacks of white mortar piled on top of each other, has been replaced by the real thing. Harvested from the street, no doubt, as it bears the scars of wear and tear, but a complete transformation from his previous living arrangements, which were, and he would be the first to agree, medieval. He has even stocked the fridge with a pleasing selection of beers, one of which is nestling comfortably in the pit of my stomach, a second cradled in the palm of my hand. Tomorrow morning we will begin the replacement of the damaged section of Ros and Jake’s roof, Dirty Diego the Dumper Driver is scheduled to appear at the stroke of the crack of dawn, or about half-nine, the weather forecast is good, and we hope to have the whole place at least water-tight by Friday.
And seriously, I am so pleased that Del is finally getting himself together, from his previous existence of chaotic, abject poverty. Rocking-up in Santa Marta around seven years ago, in a battered Ford Transit with twenty-five grand in used tenners stitched into the passenger seat, according to local folklore, a fugitive from a messy divorce in London, he proceeded to sink the whole of his funds into two dilapidated cottages near the top of the mountain, ‘one to live in, one to do up an’ sell, nah wot I mean?’, subsisting meanwhile on a Navy pension which would barely keep a mouse alive in the UK, but which here should have provided the basic necessities of life, were it not for his unruly pack of canines, who consume huge sacks of dog food, and his meagre budget, at a rapid rate of knots. Speaking of which, I cannot detect the cacophony of barking which usually provides the soundtrack to my visits here. ‘Where are the dogs, Del? I didn’t hear their usual greeting!’
He rubs his hands across his face. ‘Dead, mate. Well three of ‘em is, Harley, Suzy an’ Piddle. Happened when you was in England, they musta caught summat, in three days they was goners. I only got the three puppies of Suzy, now.’
Me and my big mouth. And he dearly loved his pets, despite them almost wrecking his house, stealing his food, raiding his fridge, attacking the local wildfowl, escaping at regular intervals and being confounded nuisances generally. But hang on a minute. Three dead, three puppies left, but didn’t he have seven bow-wows, previously? Mental arithmetic has never been my strong point, despite spending my entire career in the accountancy profession, but surely one is missing? ‘So what happened to Squirt, Harley’s son?’
He roars with laughter. ‘Oh my Gawd, that was so funny! Phil the chicken got him. You know when he booted that dim Jackie out for having it off with the neighbour? Well I think he regretted it after, he used to turn up here, pissed, going on about how lonely he was, so I suggested he got a dog, only joking really, but you ain’t gonna believe this, Squirt musta read me mind as he came bursting out of the kitchen an’ leaped on Phil, I fought he was gonna get him round the froat, but he started licking his ‘ead, Phil was laughing like ‘ell, an’ they just bonded. Two bloody lunatics togevver, if you ask me! An’ you ain’t heard the best bit yet! You know Phil reckons he’s an artist? Got all them pictures wot he says he painted? Well Squirt et ‘em! Some of the paintings is up on easels, like, but there was about half a dozen on the ground, all laid out like it was that bloody Louver-place in Paris, so Phil comes home one day an’ there’s bits of wood, canvas, you know he painted all them topless women? Well they all had teef-marks over their ‘eads, bits of chewed-up women all over the floor, he went bloody spare, I think he was gonna kick Squirt out an’ all, but he musta learned his lesson about Jackie. Anyway, Squirt is prettier than her!’
‘More intelligent, ce
rtainly!’ I confirm, and the pair of us are rocking with laughter.
‘Fing is though’ he continues, ‘ee musta got a few bob from somewhere, as he said he wanted to buy me Transit!’
I am astounded. ‘Surely it isn’t running? I thought you said it was clapped-out, falling apart, rusting away on that waste-ground on the edge of town?
It is, it was! It never had a MOT when I drove it ‘ere! But it still starts, just about, I used to go there once a month and turn it over, completely illegal of course, and utterly useless here, don’t go down the narrow streets, too wide, and his street is even narrower than this ‘un. But he reckoned he could get it changed to Spanish plates, get the ITV done on the cheap, so he gave me two-fifty for it, the silly sod! An’ it gets better, he said he was gonna start a chainsaw business, cutting up olive-wood he thought he would find, at the side of the road, an’ selling it to dopey Brits for their wood-burners. So ‘ee goes down that DIY place in Granada and buys a petrol chain-saw, an’ first time ‘ee goes out in the van, ‘ee gets caught red-handed by the old-Bill nicking wood, well you know how lazy the coppers are here, so they says provided the van disappears, completely, they will turn a blind-eye, say no more about it! So he had to pay these Moroccans to come with acetylene torches an’ chop the van up! Oh my Gawd, they done it on the waste land in the middle of the night, all you can see now are scorch-marks on the ground, an’ a few bits of rubber trim! Phil was going crazy, comes round ‘ere demanding ‘is money back, says it all my fault, my bloody dog eating his pictures, my bloody van getting ‘im in bovver with the law, my bloody fault Jackie left!’
I have tears streaming down my face. ‘How could Jackie leaving possibly be your fault? That is completely ridiculous.’
‘’Cause I introduced her to the chicken man!’
Tears are streaming down my tears, and it is several seconds before I recover the power of speech. ‘Well at least you got the van off your hands, and two-fifty will get you a couple of beers!’
My friend is consumed by a paroxysm of coughing. ‘Not two-pound-fifty, ya numpty!’ he splutters, ‘two ‘UNDRED an’ fifty!’
‘TWO HUNDRED?’ I choke. ‘Are you serious? He must have lost his mind! Anyway, I know where the money came from. You heard the story about how Chrissie found those paintings in the street? How Phil took them home, then sold the one of the giant retriever to the Irishman, Ronan, for two hundred and fifty? I cannot wait to tell Janie and Nigel, when they come over next month. That is total serendipity!’
A puzzled look crosses Del’s face. ‘Sarah Dippy? Do I know her? Is she Jackie’s sister? Jackie Dippy, and Sarah Dippy!’ He rises unsteadily to his feet. ‘Anyway mate, let me get you another one, then we gotta sort out what we’re doin’ termorra.’
At that precise second there is an ominous cracking sound from the ceiling. Several eddies of white dust drift nonchalantly past my head, and we both instinctively glance upwards. Suddenly there is an enormous, hideous crashing sound, I jump to my feet but am hit squarely on the bridge of my nose by a huge chunk of cement maybe two feet square, which stuns and knocks me clean off my feet, and I tumble in an ungainly heap into oblivion. I must have only been out cold a few seconds, if that, as I am aware of lumps of masonry raining down all around me, choking dust in my eyes and throat, red and green lights swirling around in my head and a shattering, searing pain behind my eyes. Writhing and groping amid the devastation, a disembodied voice is calling ‘quick, get up, the effing house is falling down’ and I feel a hand dragging the belt of my jeans, a vain attempt by the diminutive Cockney to haul fifteen stones of Westcountry muscle, OK, blubber, to safely. Somehow I manage to scrabble onto all-fours, and my first coherent thought is of Chrissie, who last year begged and pleaded with me not to get involved with this dilapidated structure, and who was proved right, yet again. And ironically, after all the work we have done making the place watertight, poor Del is back to square one.
Groping for the doorway, I somehow manage to haul myself upright, and the pair of us stumble gratefully into the sweet evening air, and crash down onto the cobbles. I pull up my tee-shirt to wipe the blood from my shattered forehead and nose, which seem to have ballooned in size, although miraculously, nothing seems to be broken. ‘What the hell has happened, Del?’ I croak, coughing up lung-fulls of dust.
My business partner has his head in his hands, presumably either mentally checking his third-party insurance cover, or crying. ‘Well, while you were rolling round on the floor like a bladdy girl’ he sniffs, ‘it looked like part of the back wall had fallen away, and two of the bedroom floor beams above had dropped, a couple of foot. So what we gotta do, mate, is get me scaffold tower out of the other ‘ouse, right now, an’ prop up those beams, somehow, stop the whole bladdy lot falling in.’
So not checking his third-party insurance policy, then. ‘Oh, and how are you feeling, John?’ I cry, as sarcastically as possible, given my circumstances. ‘How is your head? Is there anything I can get you? Do you need to go to the emergency department to get checked-over? Sorry you were almost killed in my shitty hovel. Sorry to ruin your clothes, and your Sunday evening, and sorry I am asking you to give up even more of your precious time saving me from being completely HOMELESS!’ He leans across and places his hand on my knee, which I hastily knock away. ‘And you can pack that in, you pervert, taking advantage of me, at death’s door. I read about people like you, on the internet!’
He buries his head in his hands. ‘Mate, mate, I am so, so sorry. You must be heartily sick of me. You must rue the day we ever met. I am nothing but a total nightmare, for you.’
I nod in agreement. ‘All of that is true, of course. But it gets worse, actually.’
He replaces his hand, and once again I brush him off. ‘Worse? How could I possibly be any worse, for you?’
I pause for dramatic effect. ‘Because Chrissie is gonna kill me, when I get home!’ He roars with laughter. ‘But it gets even worse than that, actually.’
‘Even worse than that? How could it possibly get any worse than being killed by your missus?’
I place my hand on his knee, and give it a playful squeeze. ‘Because, my little Cockney buddy, my bottle of beer is buried under all your bloody rubble! So give me a hand up, then go and get me another, RIGHT NOW!’
One curiosity of Del’s ‘main’ residence is that it was originally two cottages, now knocked into one, so effectively he obtained three dwellings for his twenty-five grand in used tenners. Sounds a bargain, doesn’t it? But then you haven’t seen these structures, have you? Trust me on this one. You don’t really want to. I would strongly advise anyone thinking of retiring to Spain not to go down this route. Buy one which has already been restored, unless you are a builder. Or an optimist. Anyway, Del is as certain as he can be that the collapsed section, effectively the middle cottage of the three, is structurally sound, and that all we, and note he implies ‘we’, have to do is crank the fallen beams back into place, support them temporarily with something called an Acro, rebuild the back wall, remove the Acro and hey presto, all will be ‘cushtie’, as they say in the building trade, apparently. But then, he is an optimist, after all. Me? I am keeping ‘schtum’, as they also say in the building trade.
Del has his thinking-cap on. ‘Wot we better do mate, is go out into the garden and check the back wall of the ‘ouse, it should be all right as it’s about a yard thick, I fink it’s just the inside bit of the wall wot has collapsed, where the rain was getting in last year, but we better check, right? So come on, don’t just stand there like a bleedin' dummy!’ Oh a bleedin’ dummy am I? And there was me, minding my own business, when half his house fell on my head, which now feels as if I have been clubbed senseless by about fifty cavemen. And garden? Describing the area to the rear of Del’s house as a garden, is a laughable statement of wild optimism, quite honestly. No self-respecting Moroccan would be seen dead sawing up a Ford Transit out there, that’s for damn sure. A fly-infested, faeces-encrusted, Third-World hell-
hole would be talking it up, frankly, and that would be a gross insult to the Third-World. And hell-holes everywhere. Keeping schtum though, aren’t I?
Head thumping, I groggily follow the annoying Londoner through the undamaged section of his property, out into the medieval plague-pit, sorry, garden, site of the dead goat and the flapping turkey incidents last year, and immediately, despite my fragile condition, I notice something has changed since my last visit. Takes me a few seconds to figure out what is different, but yes, the concrete floor has been dug up in several places, and replaced by tamped-down hardcore. ‘Trouble with the drains, or something, out here, Del?’
He regards me without warmth. ‘Yeah, thanks for reminding me, mate. You’re standing on Harley’s grave. There’s Suzy, look, and Piddle is in the corner.’
I stifle the urge to burst out laughing, but only just. I’d forgotten he had no actual earth in this so-called garden. Concrete, and piles of rubble only. He spots the corners of my mouth turning up. ‘Yeah, you can laugh’ he grins, ‘you know how big Harley and Suzy were, like bloody mountain lions. Took me a solid day to dig three holes. Nearly killed me.’
‘So how far did you go down?’
‘About a foot!’ he chuckles. ‘Nah, about a yard, actually. Dynamite wouldn’t get me down any further, would it?’ And he gestures at the granite mountain, towering above us.
My befuddled brain meanwhile has one major concern. Don’t want Del and his three puppies turning up at our house tonight, begging accommodation, do we? I’m in enough trouble as it is. ‘So where will you sleep tonight, mate?’
‘Oh, no problem, I can use the other part of the ‘ouse. The spare room, got a bed in there, ain’t I? That’s the good fing about ‘avin’ two ‘ouses knocked into one, innit?’
Sunsets and Olives 2: Back to Spain...... the madness continues! Page 20