• St Isidor of Seville, who was Archbishop there in 601 AD and found time to write a dictionary, an encyclopedia, a history of Goths, a history of the world from creation, the Mozarabic Liturgy and introduced the works of Aristotle to Spain. He was designated in 1999 as the patron saint of the internet, which we all love and can’t function without.
• St Cecilia, the patron saint of music, although she did little to earn it except sing a song of devotion to God in her heart during her forced marriage. Devout she definitely was. She told the unfortunate man to whom she was engaged that she had pledged her virginity to God and that he would have to convert to Christianity if he were to marry her. This he did. But still not getting his leg over, he then had to promise that his brother would also convert, which he did. But then the Roman authorities caught up with the two men doing Christian works and condemned them to death. Cecilia herself was put to death by suffocation, but that didn’t kill her, so she was beheaded. You might say she was headstrong to the last.
• St Barbara was another favourite. A very beautiful young woman, imprisoned in a high tower by her jealous father. While there she converted to Christianity, her father denounced her to the authorities and was ordered to kill her. She escaped from the tower but he caught her, dragged her back by her hair, tortured and killed her, whereupon he was struck by lightning and perished. She is the patron saint of fire-fighters and architects. A statue of her in your porch is said to protect you from explosions, spontaneous combustion and lightning strikes.
• Saints Cyriacus and Paula would be contenders too, as both are the patrons of the town of Málaga, where they were stoned to death.
• The local Virgen de la Candelaria who looks after Colmenar might be useful interceding with the neighbours.
• St Nicholas, as the patron saint of Christmas, our favourite time of year, brought the total so far to nine.
Over time, Stan has assembled this mighty army of plastic and wooden saints from purveyors of religious memorabilia all over the world. I’m not sure how many he has accumulated, but there are certainly more than the original nine, their ranks swelled by four Buddhas and a donkey. He keeps them on a shelf next to the fireplace in London, waiting for the time when we feel that the path marking the Saints’ Walk down to the oak tree is stable enough to withstand landslides and consecration. We wouldn’t want to see our saints dumped into a holy mess over the southern edge.
Stasis at the town hall
Another St Patrick’s Day dawned and the closest we’d come to finishing the house was to add St Patrick to our growing list of saints. The delay was still with the mayor at the town hall, who seemed to avoid signing any permission, as if to do so would give him herpes. I wished the pox upon him, to be frank.
So we planned another trip the following Easter this time with the children. Stan was fed up. This was going to be crunch time. The hopelessness of hearing Marcel’s side made Stan believe that we were being fobbed off at the town hall, so he had pushed Marcel into agreeing that we should all meet with the planners; him, us and Eleanor to interpret the nuances. Meeting with the mayor himself was not possible, apparently. He was far too busy to deal with trivial matters like ours.
We turned up at the town hall on the day specified at 12pm. In the midday heat the square in front of the town hall was deserted except for Old Rodrigues, our neighbour to the north, who was still trying to sell us his narrow piece of land for €40,000 - or put a dog kennel on it. He sat patiently on a bench under an orange tree with his two gnarled hands on top of his stick, like some biddy at an Irish wake. He waved at us. I waved back.
‘What’s he doing here?’ I asked Stan.
‘He’s come to see how our visit turns out.’
‘That’s very nice of him.’
‘Oh yes, he has our interests at heart,’ said Stan keeping a serious face. ‘They all do.’
The planner was a young man, much younger than I had imagined. He had metal-rimmed glasses that he probably thought made him look important. His desk was tidy; always a bad sign, in my view. Anyway, we got straight down to it. The main topic of discussion, he informed us, was that we wanted to know why permission for the Certificate of First Occupation had not been forthcoming. Within thirty seconds of the meeting’s start we were given the reason.
‘We cannot grant a Certificate of First Occupation because you had no licence granted for the earth moving,’ he said bluntly.
‘The earth moving?’ Stan asked.
‘Yes, the earth moving.’
‘We were unaware we needed a licence for earth moving. No one has mentioned this before.’ Stan looked over to Marcel.
‘You need an earth moving permit to move any earth, either the earth moving done by the previous owner before you bought the land, or any you have done since,’ said the officer.
He looked up at us from his documents.
‘So. Because you have no licence for any of the earth moving, all your planning permissions are invalid, which means you should not have moved any earth or built on this land any structures.’
He fiddled with a bent paperclip.
‘But you gave us planning permission to build,’ said Stan incredulously. ‘You approved our drawings. We sent you the plans, our proof of ownership. You never asked for certificates of earth moving. If you had, we would have obtained them from the previous owner. Our lawyer would have sought them in the searches. This is the first we’ve heard of an earth moving permit.’
‘Anyway, we cannot deal with this here. The matter needs to be referred to the Environmental Agency, not us. They deal with earth moving in protected areas. The problem is very serious because they will go to inspect your earth moving and they will see you have also built an almacén without a licence. The least they will do is fine you before granting a licence retrospectively; the worst they will do is instruct you to pull down the building and plant trees across the top of the mountain. Then they will ensure that you can never build there.’
Stan and I sat stunned, as if we had been slapped around the face. As Eleanor interpreted for us as best she could, I could see my dreams slipping away as this young man fiddled with his paperclip.
With remarkable fortitude, Stan lifted his head and asked calmly, ‘So what can we do?’
‘You need to approach the Environmental Agency for a licence. If they grant you one, we will be satisfied that your building is legal. If they do not, there is nothing we can do.’
‘What I don’t understand is why the Environmental Agency is now handling this.’
‘They are a higher authority. They deal with the whole province of Andalusia, not just the jurisdiction of Colmenar.’
‘But why can’t you handle the earth moving permit?’
‘Normally we do grant earth moving permits, but your property is on ‘protected land.’
‘What do you mean, ‘protected land?’
The young man sighed with impatience.
‘It means just that. The land is protected.’
He got up and walked over to a large map of Colmenar on his wall.
‘See, your house is here. The Natural Park of the Montes de Málaga is here, three kilometres away. All around a natural park is a three kilometre border which has special protection.’
‘We never knew that,’ I said. ‘No one told us.’
‘What does that mean? That we can’t build at all?’ asked Stan.
‘You can’t build at all in the natural park, but you can build in a limited way in this border where you are.’
‘What do you mean, in a limited way?’
‘You can only have an almacén, not a house.’
So that was it. We were back where we started four years earlier. Our lawyer who did the conveyancing said that we would first build an almacén, and then, after a certain number of years, we would apply for a Certificate of First Occupation to turn it into a house. Had the rules changed? Were they making them up as they went along?
‘No,’ said the plan
ner, as if reading my thoughts, ‘this was always the case. But earth moving permits were always required.’ He was surprised we hadn’t heard of them. So were we.
It is tempting to think, when confronted with an opaque system, that those who hide behind it enjoy hauling dormant regulations back into service when needed. This may have been what happened here. For a period of years in the 1990s, corrupt town planners and local government officials had taken backhanders from developers to approve applications. The scandal went right to the top of the town hall in Marbella – and chaos ensued. Disgraced locals were arrested and found guilty. Homeowners were unclear about the legality of their properties. Developers disappeared from the Costa del Sol to exploit greedy politicians in some undeveloped part of the Mediterranean.
For our planners in Colmenar, the repercussions were felt deeply, and they fell into paralysis. They were scared of granting anyone permission to sneeze, let alone build, for fear of being imprisoned like their fellow planners on the Costa del Sol. They needed to stall us, so they called up the overlooked, under-applied permit required for earth moving.
My theory was less wholesome. Someone had found a yellowed copy of Kafka’s The Trial in the biblioteca. Someone young and idealistic, like this man possibly, who thought he’d try building a new Soviet state in Colmenar. This fanciful experiment would allow him the pleasure of toying with us, wielding unlimited power over us, spinning us dizzy into a mad whirl of regulations and bureaucracy until we could be stabbed like a butterfly with a pin.
The only thing to do, declared the young planning officer, was to refer the matter to the Environmental Agency. They could deal with it. He would send them a letter asking them to decide if we had broken the law by moving earth without a permit.
We staggered out into the bright light of the town square, blinking like hostages released from a grubby basement. Old Rodrigues rose from his bench when he saw us.
‘How did it go? Are you now willing to buy my plot for a bargain €40,000 or shall I put a dog camp on the site?’
‘No,’ Stan yelled and walked straight past him. I swear if Stan hadn’t been in such a hurry to get to the bar, he might have kicked Old Rodrigues’s stick from under him as he left. George was sitting outside the bar when Stan approached.
‘Well?’ said George, putting down his beer.
‘No,’ said Stan again and broke the bad news to George. All work would have to stop on the house and the only work on the garden was to make good all landslips, to ensure it was safe and to await further instruction when we knew about this earth moving licence. Breaking the news to the children was harder. Back at the hotel, Matthew and Lottie took it badly and we all slumped into a depression for the rest of the afternoon. It hadn’t lifted by the time we took off for London.
Several weeks later, in an attempt to get things moving, Stan and I went to Spain again to stir things up a bit. We weren’t sure if the threat of our presence would galvanise anyone into action but it was worth a try. Something, anything was better than doing nothing. We were slowly going mad with frustration staying in London with a half-built house in Spain. It had been four years and completion of our project was nowhere in sight. Besides, turning up would remind them that we existed, that we were clients and had money we wanted to spend with them.
But perhaps I was being naive again and our custom was irrelevant, as was the fact that we’d done everything up to that point that we’d been told to: not broken any laws, not offered any bribes, not exposed the sex lives of the entire planning department to the Costa del Sol tabloids or poisoned their childrens’ rabbits.
There was quite a party up on the hillside that morning. Muscle Manuel turned up looking for his cheque to cover his maintenance of the water system, Old Rodrigues turned up again without lowering his price of €40K or relenting on the blackmail of building a dogs’ home. Dear George turned up just to say hello. Eleanor, newly married and lovely as ever, turned up to translate for us. In fact, all of them turned up at 10 a.m, as we had agreed. All of them except Marcel, the main attraction, the man who could tell us how we could break out of this ghastly paralysis, this planning inertia, the architect who hadn’t known about earth moving permits, the man with the inside knowledge about permit negotiations with the Environmental Agency. Marcel, the person we had taken two days off work to see, traveled a thousand miles to meet, paying hundreds of pounds for the privilege, failed to show.
‘What must be happening inside his tiny mind is beyond me,’ Stan said, kicking the dirt with his shoe as we waited.
I wandered across the platform. Well, the house building may have been grinding to a halt, but the garden was thriving. OK – not all of it: the lavenders were struggling with so little top-soil in the Persian garden, but everything else looked really happy. Muscle Manuel had saved the life of the almonds dying from whatever disease he said they had. He’d painted their trunks white with something that I’m sure was illegal in Britain and they were topped with fresh, healthy green leaves. The oranges, which had looked so weak in the face of the constant west wind, had perked up a bit, and even the Strelitzia had flowered. We may not have had a house, but we had a garden.
A great disappointment was that four of the olive trees that had fallen off the terrace when the soil slipped downwards in the heavy storms had not been replanted by George and had died. Muscle Manuel took great pains to explain to me that it wasn’t his fault, that he had pointed out to George that the dying olive trees needed to be put into the earth quickly or they’d perish. But George had just ignored him and carried on scooting round in his little earth moving machine. As I pointed out to Stan when relating this story, we have to remember that Muscle Manuel is basically a gardener and George is basically a builder. We shouldn’t ask the farmer to build or the builder to garden.
Finally when we had waited long enough in the heat, Stan phoned Marcel and got an update (and a casual apology). The latest from the town hall was that Marcel would make an application to the Environmental Agency and they would inspect and, depending on their reaction, we would be either (1) granted permission to continue, (2) fined for moving earth without an earth moving permit, (3) instructed to stop all further building, (4) instructed to destroy the house, (5) all of the above.
It wasn’t just the house I was worried about, but Stan. He took it so well on the surface but I knew he was bottling it all up. That’s why I was relieved when he admitted to me, as we dined alone at home for the first time in ages, that the only way he coped was to put it out of his mind altogether. In La Manga, I remember, where we had been with the cricket team on tour that spring, he became totally absorbed in other people’s conversations, he let the banter and the chat wash him away, and he floated downstream on a mixture of bonhomie and laughter, soothed by the comfort of old friends and the pacifying game of cricket. And as we neared the end of the football season and Manchester United soared to the top of the Premier League and defeated European foes in the Champions’ League, he got carried away, gripped in a battle that is of no consequence to me, harmless, unimportant compared to the creation of our dream home. Yet to him it was a life-saving distraction. As Bill Shankley said, ‘more important than life or death.’
But Manchester United winning or losing silverware that season wasn’t going to affect our lives to the same degree as the Environmental Agency’s consideration of our petition. It was enough to warrant a prayer of intervention, even from atheists like us. Who, I wondered, was the patron saint of planning applications, and where could we buy his or her statue?
Laying the hard stuff
To overcome our sense of powerlessness, we decided to lay the granite in the Persian garden. We needed no planning permission for this, so it was something we could crack on with. After all, eight container loads of it had been sitting in a warehouse at Málaga port, costing us money. When Stan last asked Muscle Manuel to move it up to the site, Manuel replied that he couldn’t because the roads were too bad and transporting heavy granite up
that hillside would be reckless, even by making several trips in a small lorry. It just wouldn’t be safe. But he agreed that now would be a good time. Summer had come, the roads had hardened, and he was looking for work.
It was essential that each slab was laid precisely butted up against its neighbour, tight against the curbstones and leveled on firm foundations. Only an earthquake should shift these slabs. I didn’t want anyone to trip on an edge, or for any water to gather in a sunken corner and stain the surface. In fact, if a two year old scooted a Dinky car from the beginning to the end of the path, it should move swiftly and silently, without impedance.
Stan had calculated precisely how many slabs and how many curbstones were needed for the Persian garden. This precise number was what he had ordered to be cut by the supplier in China, and as far as we knew, this number were what had been delivered to the port in Málaga and transported up to site. But when George began the task of laying the curbs, he found there were ninety missing. He counted again. No, that’s right. There were ninety missing. He thought it unlikely that Stan had miscalculated, so phoned him to confirm. Absolutely, Stan told him. There should be ninety more somewhere.
When Muscle Manuel next appeared on site, George asked him about the ninety missing curbstones. According to George, the look that appeared on Muscle Manuel’s face was ‘sheepish’. He said he didn’t know where they were and scurried off to his watering duties. But the next evening, as George and Andy, his colleague, were finishing their work, Manuel appeared unexpectedly and asked if they would like to have a drink with him. Now, George and Manuel had a history of hostility, jealously guarded boundaries and periods of one sending the other to Coventry. At one point, Manuel accused George of stealing Spanish jobs. So a cordial invitation to enjoy some hospitality in Muscle Manuel’s own home was a surprise. After unsuccessfully claiming to be too tired, they finally succumbed to Manuel’s insistence and found themselves down in his house ten minutes’ drive away, vowing they would have a quick drink, then head home.
The Gardens That Mended a Marriage Page 19