But where was Mr Q?
I waded through the flooded living room towards the bedroom. The door was closed. I knocked. I was praying he was not in there, that a displaced chunk of plaster or beam had not fallen on him while he was sleeping.
‘Larbi?’
Silence. I felt hot and cold at once, an appalling sense of dread. Slowly, I pushed open the door. The bed was a mess of soaked linen. The room, too. The wardrobe door was open, its interior empty, a few items of his clothing were sinking in the water on the ground. I looked for a body. There was none.
I rang Michel. ‘I hope he hasn’t just left us.’
‘Don’t be silly.’
I went looking for him at the settlement where his Algerian chums were and found him there, limping. He told me that he had packed up his bag with his personal belongings the afternoon before and begged a bed.
‘What happened to your foot?’
‘I broke it,’ he moaned. (Quashia was a child when he got sick. Even a cold and he moaned that he was dying.)
I drove us both back to the cottage where Michel was chucking buckets of water out into the garden, attempting to dry out the mess. The roof was a catastrophe.
‘I’m running Quashia to the hospital.’
‘I’ll call the Portuguese.’
Our desert man was surprisingly good-humoured as we sat in Emergency. It was a long wait.
‘Those olives were blighted,’ he said to me. ‘Not all, but the majority. You hadn’t noticed because they were changing colour. You lost them because you didn’t spray.’
‘There might have been sufficient healthy ones for a pressing.’
He shook his head, rubbing at his lower leg. ‘Two or three kilos, what’s the point? You’ll only get bumper crops if you spray.’
His foot was not broken, of course. He would not have been walking had it been. He had slipped and sprained his ankle, trying to escape the interior flooding. No serious damage.
Back at the farm, we found Michel, sleeves rolled up, collecting what few fruits he could, but there was precious little to salvage. We had missed our mill appointment and the drupes were too wet, too bruised to keep for any length of time and Quashia was correct. When we examined them closely, many had been attacked by Dacus, but somehow it mattered less.
‘When all these olives are sufficiently dry,’ said Michel, ‘they’ll have to be burned.’
I nodded. It was a sad conclusion to our first year of organic farming.
My profuse apologies to Quashia were waved away with smiles. ‘It’ll get sorted. I’ll stay where I am until the cottage is repaired. What matters is to get all this mess cleared up and get ready for next year.’
I loved him all over again for his consideration.
12
A quartet of wood pigeons were flapping their wings like sails in the descending light. Doves were cooing in the gloaming. The days were growing longer. Bumblebees, several species, were busy in the lavenders. A light mist sat on the heat. A few low cumulus clouds like a slick of creamy-white milk spilled into the valley beyond the farm. Others, into the distant vallons along the Estérel.
I was making my way carefully through the fields bursting with flowers, busy with insects, with Nature going about her business. In the words of Virginia Woolf, the garden was ‘full of lust and bees’ and it was spilling over with colour. The seasons, the months, were being reflected chromatically. In January, there had been a golden carpet of daffodils, narcissi. Fields, terraces buttered with lemon-yellow wild flowers. The fragile pink of the almonds in February. March had delivered linen-white blossoms on the fruit trees, including the junior cherries. Now it was May once more with its vibrant and varied tapestries, dominated by wild flowers, the rich red, pink and cream roses and the jasmine and orange blossom. The perfumes made my head reel. I wandered the terraces as though drugged – the grassy wilderness caressed my knees and I felt sure that any day now we would be receiving a letter from the council threatening us with a fine if we did not cut back the herbage. Already, there were risks, due to above-average April temperatures. The coast had suffered its first fires in the Var. No human casualties were reported but thousands of acres of forestland had been destroyed.
The stalks of grass had grown so tall now and so barley-green. On several of the terraces, they were brushing against my buttocks. ‘Hey, lady, look at us!’ I could no longer spot the dogs when we were out walking. It was the movement of grass, the tossing heads of the armies of purple thistles, the bristled and unexpectedly sharp stalks of the vivid viper’s bugloss, Echium vulgare, that alerted me to their whereabouts. The grasses, wild flowers swayed softly, dislodged by the animals’ bodies. Echium vulgare was a wasteland plant that had been found to contain significant levels of gamma linolenic acid and a rarer stearidonic acid. Like borage, which spreads profusely across our terraces, and evening primrose, it contained essential fatty acids. It was also a hearty contributor to the tree bumblebee’s diet.
For many years I had been teaching myself the identities of the plants. This had been for no purpose beyond my own curiosity. To acquaint myself with where I was living and what other forms of life inhabited the hill alongside me. Now the interest had another purpose: I hoped to understand the delicate balance of the species’ needs. All part of my new land management programme!
The tuberous comfrey had never reached flowering stage before this year. It had been felled. The terraces were scattered with wild Mediterranean orchids. In the tropics they are epiphytes – plants that grow on other plants. Not here. Here, several species of Orchidaceae grew directly from the earth, but we had never seen them before because they were levelled by the cutting machines before they could identify themselves. The red helleborine; broad-leaved helleborine that provided no nectar but offered a nectar-like wax for wasps. The pink butterfly orchid happily inhabited this maquis region and I had been completely unaware of it. All pollinated by wasps. And the bumblebee orchid, an inconspicuous treasure, whose existence I had been blithely ignorant of, was, like me, happiest when haunting olive groves.
In order to adhere to the regulations laid down by our organic status I was now obliged to resist, during my regular trips to the garden centre, purchasing half a dozen sacks of terreau universel, all-purpose earth. It was time to bring our own soil from this crusty limestone hill into play. With our pine forest high on the hill’s apex, quality natural soil existed. Comfrey in the compost heap offered us an organic nitrogen, which was a perfect way to keep the soil balanced. Comfrey was a natural fertiliser of the soil.
A detail, one of many, each remarkable.
Every morning I rose at daybreak and hurried impatiently outside to gaze upon the high, rising grasslands. I did not wait to percolate coffee. I needed to be there, out among it all. The birdsong was intensifying. The farm was abounding in songbirds, butterflies (dozens of Vanessa cardui, which thrilled Marley to know that a butterfly bore his mother’s name!) and bees. Among them was the European tree bumblebee, our own honeybees, of course (we now lodged over 200,000) and myriad species of other pollinators.
The reign of the fascist-like magpies was becoming a thing of the past.
I felt as though the ground was reawakening, unfolding, opening its eyes and grinning. When we first cut back this hillside, a monumental and very expensive task, hacking and sawing through years of jungled growth, I felt that the sods of earth, the dried-out soil buried so long beneath briared darkness, had lifted itself up, inhaled the rays of the sun, sighed, stretched its limbs, glad to experience its freedom once again. But today’s was a different reawakening, or so it seemed to me. The earth was regenerating, feeding itself, calling upon its own brotherhoods to return, to take command.
I had only to step out of the way.
These were the final days of late spring, and the Lavandula heterophylla, sweet lavender, planted the previous year, was becoming a favourite hangout of so many pollinators, particularly our honeybees, which seemed to be fixated by the vi
olet blossoms, swarming and circling the plants, working them for hours on end. On one plant alone, Marley and I counted twenty-five bees this morning, among them three tree bumblebees. They resembled the common bumble except these had white, furry backsides. I had only recently encountered these little darlings.
I had joined Apimondia, an international organisation representing the interests of apiculture, and learned that last year approximately 30 per cent of Europe’s 13.6 million honeybee hives had died, been killed off, disappeared. Even the very largest businesses in beekeeping – apiarists who owned up to and over a thousand hives – were facing bankruptcy. This tragic news had one positive side effect. People from cities with smallholdings were taking it upon themselves to Save the Bee and were becoming part-time apiarists.
After his holiday with us last summer, Marley had returned to Paris impassioned by some of the creatures he had encountered here and he began to drive his parents crazy with his requests for ‘beasties’ of his own. I encouraged Vanessa to plant window boxes on their matchbox patio. Even this did not satisfy his eager desire to become acquainted with the natural world around him. It was not until, quite by chance, I learned from Robert that he had colleagues in Paris who were installing hives on rooftops: one at the Opera House, another close to the Eiffel Tower, a third on top of the Grand Palais. Chic bees! All these urban hives (more than three hundred in total) were flourishing while those maintained by the same apiarists in rural areas, agricultural zones, were ailing, if not dying.
‘There has to be a message in it somewhere,’ Robert said to me. ‘People talk of mobile phones as the perpetrators of the problem, but there are hundreds of thousands of mobile phones in the cities and the masts for them.’ Robert said he was convinced that it was the pesticides used on crops in the rural areas.
Might he agree to contact one of his beekeeping associates? Might we arrange for Marley to pay those hives a visit? It was then that I learned of an extraordinary story. Close to the Boulevard Saint-Michel, there is an apiary with but a handful of hives whose beekeepers are dedicating time to working with children, children with hearing difficulties. Their goal is, through the social network and colony structure of bees, to assist in awakening worlds for those youth who are otherwise partially closed off. A fact I had never even considered before: honeybees have no ears but they have an auditory system of sorts, a Johnston’s organ at the base of their antennae, as well as a complex system of communication as evidenced by their famous dances. Michel and Vanessa took Marley along to visit the apiary, hooking the boy up with this remarkable world and its special forms of communication.
When I shopped, I shopped for an augmented family, the bees as well as the dogs, ourselves and our guests. I bought extra plants, always trying to think ahead, to be sure that when one species had completed its flowering, there would be others in blossom. The financial saving on insecticides was greater than I had expected. We had never sat down before and calculated what our old way of farming had been costing us. Not fortunes, but sufficient to splash out on the creation of gardens, transforming forgotten pockets of dust and stone, envelopes of land into extra herb beds, climbing corners, flowers creeping through and along the metres of balustraded terraces. Here was the purple bed. Elsewhere, the white corner. I had learned somewhere that the Bombus species, the bumblebees, were attracted to white flowers, and I observed that our honey girls frequented the lavenders and others with tall, spiky, purple-toned heads. And how I indulged them! I sought out flowers that I had never heard of before, returning with the back of our van loaded with myriad varieties. Quashia would shake his head and ask: ‘Where’s this to go then? What’s this for? Is it a vegetable, a herb, can we eat it?’
‘We cannot, but the bees will enjoy its offerings.’
He was happy. I would watch him through the window from my den, shadowed by the loyal dogs, taking cuttings, planting them into tiny pots and leaving them on handkerchiefs of soil where he felt there was insufficient growth. He had stopped nagging me about weed clearance. He was counting the months before his cottage cupboard (now renovated by the Portuguese, but at such an expense that we had been obliged to stay all architectural plans on our extension for a while longer) would be bursting with honeypots.
Robert, who was assisting Michel with the preparations for his soon-to-be realised vineyard, told me that Quashia had taken to phoning him. ‘Anything I can do for the bees? Are they comfortable, happy with us? If you have a spare pot of honey, bring it for me when you next drop by.’
Numerous species of bees in the garden. I stalk them, in a kindly way. I identified two Blue Carpenters on the passion flower though I found no traces of their nests, even though we had logs and dead wood aplenty. And one morning, up near the woodshed after feeding the dogs, I came across a mammoth flying insect. Similar to a hornet, but this I had never seen before. Close to two inches in length it was, with four clearly defined yellow squares on its back. It was hovering above the grass and then settled on the ground and darted forth into the tiniest of cracks, disappearing underground. It took me the best part of a day to discover its identity – a French Scoliid wasp. He was a solitary who lived off the larvae of scarab beetles. Across the planet, there were three hundred varying species of this fellow.
Oh yes, I could feel the shift taking place within me. Giving up control.
I am simply a worker here, just like the foragers and pollinators, just like Quashia. I had a part to play but I was not the orchestra leader. Neither was Michel. Nature guards that role for herself. She does not enforce her superiority but she maintains it and in the understanding of that, in the yielding to the act of creation, I felt more content than I ever had done before. It seemed that for the very first time in my life everything was in its natural place. I was no longer hell-bent on attaining, achieving, rearranging. This order might be chaotic but it had not been imposed and my job was to respect it, to be kind to the earth, to assist with its perpetuity, not its destruction.
After the loss of last winter’s olive crop, the three of us had worked hard. We had cleared the land, burned the damaged beauties, raked and tidied. Climbed within forests of branches hunting out the rogue fruits, those that had clung on, and we picked these too and relegated them to the bonfires.
I had no means of forecasting whether or not this ‘new way of farming’, this natural approach, as old as agriculture itself, was going to work. What I had learned was that I had little say in the matter. Nature did not need me, any more than the Olive Farm did. When I went away for a period of time or fell asleep, it did not stop living, breathing, working, creating. Nature was always busy, always weaving. I had a choice: hinder the process or leave it be. I also had the choice to be there with it, to create at its pace and not mine.
In the years since we have taken possession of this olive farm, I had seen a shift in attitudes towards farming, towards living. The world was spinning in confusion and little seemed to me to be real. Love is real, I think, and Nature is real. And we cannot own either; we can engage with them, play within their boundaries, draw immense energy from them but not much else.
There were steps to be achieved along this journey. No more urgent issue, it seemed to me, than to steer a new direction away from the pharmaceutical multi-nationals, the agrochemical giants who had the world within their grips. I received one more missive from the chemical company in the States. They sent me through pages of notes, experiments that were intended to prove that their product was not harmful to insects other than Dacus. I was not convinced. In any case, my return to them was: Thank you, but we are not looking for ‘bumper crops’. We are looking for a method that allows us to live with Nature not as its dominator.
There was no easy solution. We had lost the crop, were walking on thin ice with the olive bodies and I saw no assured direction ahead. Less oil had been my expectation, my calculation. None at all, for a second or even a third time around – this I had not been anticipating. We had not eked out what we had, we were
living and eating with our usual lust, gusto for food and the pleasures of the garden and yet there remained well over two hundred litres. That was more than sufficient for our needs for yet another two years. Either I had miscalculated the previous June or, like the parable of the loaves and fishes, the stockroom remained bountiful.
The earth would give us all that we required, I felt sure of it.
Marley had come to visit with Vanessa. We were out on the land, walking in the late afternoon light. Michel with his grandson took the lead – they were naming the trees, the fields and terraces – while Vanessa and I strolled slowly, bringing up the rear, chatting of inconsequentials.
‘Look! See that small olive tree there?’
The blond-haired boy nodded, his uncertain eyes as large as marguerite daisyheads. He was a city child with urban images in his head.
‘Many of these trees have names, Marley, and for those that are not so lucky, we can christen them. That one there is Bridget. She has a mournful soul. See how she bows her crown towards the elephantine fig towering above her?’ The boy stared at his grandfather and then back at the growth. Slowly, with a certain amazement, he nodded.
‘That tall one up there, way up high. He is Hans. He shoots skywards reaching towards the hill’s pinnacle and he pays no heed to the shadows cast by the pines. They can’t frighten him. He’s a warrior.’
‘I want to choose a tree,’ shouted Marley, breaking away from his grandfather’s grip, haring this way and that. ‘Maman, which tree shall I choose?’
I caught sight of a song thrush in the garden cracking open the shell of a snail on one of the steps of the Italian staircase.
‘Marley!’ An urgent, soft call. The boy crept back towards me, watching us watching the bird.
‘Snail,’ he screamed.
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