Signs and symbols

Setbacks… and recovery

We have been here for the best part of two months. In some ways, it feels as if the hardest part is over: the cardboard boxes have gone, we have cars, and a Spanish calendar on the wall shows the various feast days as well as school start date – September 17 running right through to December 21 as there is no half term. Sandy has found a way of living with the travel and while we don’t – and apparently can’t – have broadband, we are managing with the dial-up connection. In other ways, though, I know the hard part – making proper friends, fitting in to the community – not the English one, but the Spanish - is yet to come. We are in limbo: we have left the UK but not yet arrived in Spain. I have tried to explain this to the children, when they had their homesick moments: you know what you have left, but you don't yet know what you are going to find.

Autumn on its way

The weather has begun to change for autumn, although it is only September. The over-40 degree-days have gone – days when the air coming in through the windows was like a hairdryer on full power. I can leave the shutters open most of the day; the air is cooler in the morning and evening, and we have had a night storm, with tremendous thunder and lightning. It only ever seems to rain here at night, and then in the morning the scent of the jasmine is more powerful, and a different, fresh air hangs over the courtyard – just until the sun burns it away an hour or so later. The back of the house is cooler: this is the "levante" side of the house, while the front is the "poinente," side, where the sun sets and the wind is stronger. Sitting out on the terrace every evening, we observe the sky for clues about the morning, but it seems unpredictable. Mysteriously, cloudless, starry nights turn into cloudy, heavy days and cloudy nights into completely blue mornings. Probably Antonio, who drives his hundred-odd goats back and forth every day and night, could decode the signs but I can't. We have already acclimatized to the heat enough to feel cold in the morning, even though it is probably still warmer than noon on an English summer day. I have bought various books on the trees, plants and birds here, but am still not sure what most things are: I know the agroroba, the carob tree, which sheds long, sweet-tasting brown pods all over the slope at the back of the house, but can’t name the desert trees Lara likes, like bare monkey puzzles or giant, half-naked cow parsley stalks. Swallows and martins fly low over the pool and live in the garage, having been exiled from the roof, and there are doves, or something like doves, all over the village. Having looked up its call, I was ecstatic to see, at last, a dramatically coloured and crested hoopoe at the side of the road, walking about casually the way the book says it does. It seemed quite miraculous, seeing the bird from the book, just where it should have been, after many days getting out of bed and peering out of the window to try and spot the owner of the distinctive cry.

Thoughts of Marcel Pagnol

Meanwhile, we have tried to get to grips with the land. Juana has helpfully instructed me in the right times to pick higas chumbos - prickly pears (in the morning, when the spines are softer) and figs for bottling (when the white streaks appear) She told me about the prickly pears after Sandy had already been seized with enthusiasm for harvesting the produce and had, despite gloves, covered his whole body with prickles. Sensibly, he was not wearing a T shirt, but sweating away on the hot track that runs past the house, using a stick and a ladder. Afterwards, Lara sat beside him and pulled all the prickles out, patiently, like a devoted servant. Meanwhile, I was toiling away, moving stones for about half a kilometre of path down the side of the land, dragging out the coarse and very persistent grass and weeds and cutting back the trees that haven’t been pruned for a couple of years. It took about a week, much longer than I expected, to do one side of the path, heaving stuff down into the rambla and coercing the children to help move stones on Alexander’s quad. They entered into the spirit of it when offered a percentage of the going hourly rate for the work and managed to lift quite enormous stones, arguing constantly about who should do what and buzzing around the field int their little helmets like wasps. By the end of the first part of the work, I had no nails to speak of, and my arms were grazed all the way from wrist to shoulder. Then Alexander and Sandy took on the almond tree nearest the house. It took them two days of bashing it with a cane pole to get most of the almonds (four large bags) down and out of the green outer shell. It was quite funny seeing them sitting there under the tree like a couple of peasants, only less efficient. Alexander had his usual financial fantasies about selling them almonds at a vast profit to the Zurgena factory. Later on, Pablo came over and remarked that he had noticed it had taken them two days to do one tree, and did I want him to do the rest? I asked him to leave Alexander a few, as we thought it was good for him to get the idea of working on the land into his head. At least it’s a change from the computer screen. Pablo turned up with the local hired machine, an amazing Chitty Chitty Bang Bang type tractor which backs up to the tree, opens a circular wing all round the tree and then bashes the tree till all the nuts fall off before unloading a huge pile into the trailer. Pablo and I had a beer while watching the man do the field: he told me he gets 15,000 kilos of almonds from his trees. Some years the price is higher, if there are less nuts, but one way or the other the price to the farmer is always low, and the profit is made somewhere down the chain, when Tesco or whoever flogs the little plastic envelopes of ground almonds for making cakes. Pablo appeared to have no real interest in where the almonds go: I told him how much the packets cost and he just shrugged: nothing is likely to change how much he gets paid for the rather gruelling task of cultivating and harvesting the nuts.

Scratching away at the hard surface of the land, or somehow capture the over-abundant fruit that spills off the trees daily, I have had very vivid memory of the beginning of Jean de Florette, when the naïve city hunchback toils up to the old family house, laden with furniture and Marie-Antoinette optimism about country life, only to fail consistently in all his attempts to breed rabbits or grow cabbages. I can only hope my neighbours are nicer than Ugelin and aren’t going to block up my well- or, more likely, inflate the price of water. We have already had one attempt to sell us an hour’s extra water at 9,000 Euros when the real price should be 1,500 max- but in this case my neighbours act as the good guys, warning us about the opportunist who owns the water rights and needs to make some money to offset the losses he has made on his own finca. However, there have been some successes: I have made several bottles of figs in rum from the many black fig trees, using Nigella Lawson’s recipe. The trouble is that there are so many. It’s sad to think how much they would cost on a plate in London, when I can’t even manage to pick up the windfalls.

Under the bonnet

The Landrover is ready, after three tries at the paperwork. The very charming young man from the concession in Almeria kept meeting us for coffee, but then slapping his head and saying he hadn’t got the right papers, or needed something else. The last attempt was the most tortuous: he turned up at the bar in Lubrin, as arranged, to take Sandy to Almeria to pick the car up – apparently now ready and registered. When he turned up, miraculously only half an hour late, he admitted that the tracker, which insurance requires, had not been fitted. I pointed out that we couldn’t drive it without the tracker, as I had explained to him on the phone, because the insurance was not valid. He made a “really? You don’t say?” face, although we had had a long conversation about it, and suggested he call the insurance company. We could take the car now and have the tracker fitted later, maybe? No, I explained, BECAUSE THE INSURANCE IS NOT VALID WITHOUT IT. You don’t say! Think of that! In the end, when I got to what I think of as the “¡es inadmissible!” moment, he started to take it seriously and call round to locate the tracker, which he had previously told me had arrived and was being fitted. It turned out it hadn’t even been delivered, but miraculously, when I started the process of hitting the roof, he found it and organized the fitting – after lunch at 3pm as the mechanics couldn’t work before then, of course. This is one of the lessons I am learning: it is necessary to be extremely assertive if you want anything done. Saying it in a normal voice or in passing will mean you are ignored. Unfortunately, this means engaging in constant bollockings – but weirdly, nobody seems to hold it against you. On the contrary, they seem to expect it, and to behave a lot better after you’ve shouted than before. The same thing happened with my Ford. After 6 weeks, I still don’t have a second key. On various occasions, I turned up at the garage, asking vaguely and politely for it. The son, a languid, gangling twenty-something, would wave a hand at me from behind the desk. “Hola, Julieta!” No, no key! Why not? Well, these things take time. And by the way, he said, could I drop him some more paperwork? He asked, for the third time, for Sandy’s NIE number and the padronimiento, the certificate that shows we live here. I pointed out I had already given it to his father, and he shrugged, saying his father forgot stuff all the time.

Eventually, I went down and asked for the father, or alternatively, the boss. Suddenly, father plus another, bigger boss, were there, and with every sign of energy and enthusiasm, were talking on the phone to the key people .It turned out the key hadn’t actually been ordered at all, but now they would order me two, and register them with the police, a process they were supposed to have completed anyway. Father wrote me his mobile on a card and said if I brought the car in he would also check it over for me, no worries. I played my pathetic woman card, and said I was worried about being up in the country with only one key, if something went wrong. Don’t you worry, mujer, they said, if anything goes wrong you call us and we’ll come and get you in a car. Don’t worry, it will all be sorted out this week! Well, we’ll see. I just know I’ll have to call them on Friday, and they’ll have forgotten about it. Then I’ll have to go and give them another rocket, and finally they’ll order the key.
Bad car week

All in all, we had an unbelievably bad car week. We went to Vera beach with the Adkins, who were staying, and, about 50 yards away, the same, one-key Ford car got broken into – apparently by passing hippies/gypsies who forced the lock and nicked the navigator. Vera was invaded with them, apparently – a change from the usual retired English people and pleasant Spanish hairdressers and supermarket workers. A few days later, when we went to Almeria to pick up the Landrover, tracker and all, the Ford started to smell weirdly of burning rubber. Lara, ever the drama queen, stalked out and said she couldn’t stand to sit in that smell. We ended up under its bonnet at 9pm in a garage by the roadside, having left the closing Ford/Landrover concession some half an hour earlier. It was dark, and we had to try to read the Spanish manual, then rush into the massive supermarket which fortunately sells everything, including brake fluid, and buy something (in the end, a kind of kitchen funnel with a hose, the actual purpose of which remained opaque) that would work to decant water into the radiator, which is stuck in an inaccessible position. The manual said nothing about how to reach it.

The same day, earlier on, Sandy had brought the new quad back, and it had broken down in the middle of the campo, leaving him and Alexander to walk back. Profusely apologetic, the very nice family at the quad shop came and shook their heads in disbelief, took it apart, and said it must be a “tonteria” (something stupid) like dirt in the fuel. At 9pm yesterday, they came up and took it away, shaking their heads again, and said it would be sorted out by the end of the week. In this case, I believe them: how complicated can a quad engine be? Also, they really are buena gente: a father, son and daughter who spent ages teaching Alexander to ride his small quad and gave him a free helmet into the bargain.

At home, meanwhile, the fancy new coffee machine broke down. I took it back to the Electrodomesticos in Vera – which involved driving round the narrow one-way streets on a Saturday, leaping out and dropping it off while trying to avoid more damage to the car. The girl in the shop and her colleagues spent some time poring over the manual and attempting to make coffee in the shop. Then she said she would replace it with another on Monday, which she duly did. I pulled up in the one-way system, leapt out and took it home. The next day, it broke down again, in a different way. Of course, I had to shout a bit on the phone. She said to bring it in and they would solve the problem. Another one-hour round trip to Vera, in which a van nicked my parking space and I ended up parked in a dusty alleyway on a pile of stones which was the only place I could find. The girl said that actually, this Taurus wasn’t a very good machine and perhaps I could change it for another, better quality one? A la tercera vez, va la vencida, third time lucky, she said, and laughed. I have to hope so. I have brought it back and so far, it works, but I am looking at it out of the corner of my eye, wondering how long it will last.

It is not that nothing broke down at home – on the contrary, things always did. However, here, I am not working, so I am not just going to go and buy a new one, which was my usual easy way out of things. Also, I had a Mercedes at home, and there was no point looking under the bonnet, because there was a big sign that told you not to touch it, but to take it back to the dealer. I haven’t looked under the bonnet of a car for a long time in fact, probably not since before I had my Toyota Carina, which was the best car I ever had – cheap, and never went wrong. Life is less automated here, and there is a good and a bad side to that. You don’t need a dryer: the washing is dry within five minutes of pegging it out. But there are times when you don’t want to learn to fix it yourself.

Children's worries

We had another terrible day, too, the day after the Adkins family left. The children had two weeks of fun with their friends, and then felt grim and desolate. They were both in tears: Lara because she will miss her best friend Natasha (“I will NEVER have another best friend like Natasha, why did you split us up?”) and Alexander for more complex, nearly-13 reasons. He spent a day looking miserable, then finally erupted in tears and protests of “you don’t understand.” It emerged he was worried about a number of things:

1) He wouldn’t make any friends here, it was too remote and there were no people. Yes, there are English people, but they aren’t my type, they don’t think like me. This is true: most of the Brits here are, not to put too fine a point upon it, a bit basic. Alexander, his social sense already finely honed by his massively snobby UK school, has picked up on the fact that he is now among the sons and daughters of failed plumbers and pool engineers, not bankers and lawyers. Hmm.
2) He would fall behind with school work. The school is not a proper big secondary, it’s like a primary, there isn’t anything to do. Yes again. It is a rural school: there will not be a massive IT facility and a music studio. The school work will be different: primary is behind the UK, though it all evens out in the end.
3) There is no big town here, he is cut off, there isn’t even broadband. True again.

After he’d said all this, I felt terrible and assailed by doubts. I wondered if I had been really selfish bringing him here, and depriving him of the benefits of a more sophisticated, expensive school. Would he become a village idiot, zooming around on a quad and forgetting how to do quadratic equations? At the same time, I knew perfectly well that a lot of the doubts had been put in his mind by the friend who had just left, who is still at the snobby school, and doesn’t have the quad, either. He probably wanted to even the ground out, by telling Alexander it was all very well having a quad and riding around the rambla, but he wouldn’t get a good job later, and would have to have a squat local barmaid as a girlfriend, instead of a glossy Sevenoaks model.

Night doubts

It was a bad night, though. My doubts extended themselves to myself: will I be cut off? Have I done the right thing stopping work? What was the point of all those years invested in my good career and earning potential, now I have thrown them away? And, more subtly, isn’t it naïve to think of escape to the country when the people here spend all their time trying to improve their lot, and their children’s, so that they can aspire to being lawyers and bankers and escape the tyranny of bashing almonds off trees for a few euros? I felt as if I had a succubus sitting on me all night, and woke up exhausted, not least because of the hours toiling away with the rake.
Books, signs and symbols

But the morning is always different from the night before. I took my coffee out to the back, where you look over the threshing circle to the mountains and see the sun rise. Since I have been watering the garden every day, all the flowers have begun to bloom: the jasmine, the mimosa tree, and a pale purple tree something like a bougainvillea, but with trumpet-shaped, paler flowers. The tree next to the garage has orange, trumpet like blooms; the roses are coming out in the flowerbeds near the house. A small amount of water has an astonishing effect. Alexander, engaged on the almond tree, appeared to have forgotten the day before. Later, we went down to the school, and confided Alexander’s concerns to Doña Isabel. Yes, she said, a lot of the English children were “fatal.” They had no support at home, and they struggled. But the Spanish children were good students, and plenty go to university. The state system here is standardized, so what they learn is a required curriculum: the children just need to work on their Spanish. We took away books: I promised them I will make sure they know the content in English, while they catch up with the Spanish. But by this time, Alexander had already lost interest in his future and education, and was lost in fantasises of a safe he wants to buy from Amazon to keep his earnings in. He spent most of the day bargaining with me: how many Euros if I move those stones? How many Euros if I get the figs? Well, maybe he will be successful in business, in which case, he won’t need education at all. As I have often reminded him, many of the most successful entrepreneurs were thrown out of school, anyway – (it was a mistake telling him this though, as of course he went and repeated it to his teachers, along with the fact, also imparted by his mother, that Einstein’s school report allegedly said “this boy will never amount to anything”.)

That night, we continued reading My Family and Other Animals, a routine that stopped when we had visitors. I pointed out that Gerry in the book, who turned out to be a top naturalist, had no real “formal” education, and apparently only mixed with local peasants and his family on Corfu. The children were not convinced the book was actually “true” – and wanted to know why the other children in it didn’t appear to either go to school/university, or work. I had no answer for that, but in any case, I found it reassuring, even if they didn’t. Books are a great comfort, serving this useful purpose of shoring up my decisions. There is always a book that makes your own mad, irrational choices seem likely to turn out well, so all I need to do is read plenty of books about people who have left riches for rags and turned out fine. Kind of the opposite of Cinderella, I suppose.

While waiting for these to turn up, I have continued my way through Don Quixote, but have added some other titles to my list. Sitting in the Bar Plaza, I was approached by an old man who looked rather like a sailor, or at least, wearing a cap. I was reading a day-old newspaper: they are kept on the freezer in the bar, and he cracked a joke about how they were not actually fresh, despite living there. He noticed Lara, reading a Puffin book of jokes (very easy, and she had read it about six times) and said she should be reading Don Quixote. I said maybe it was a bit hard, but I was reading it: he said, she should have the children’s edition, which I could get in Almeria. He then instructed me to note down various other things I should read, including specific poems by Lorca, which I duly did. I must read them in Spanish, he insisted. He had been married to a Frenchwoman he said, and things were not the same in other languages. Of course: I look forward to seeing him again; he is one of those characters that haunt the Bar Plaza, so no doubt I shall.

Meanwhile, the conversation with Doña Isabel was reassuring, and, what is more, the books she lent us belonged to someone I have not yet met, called Julieta, perhaps a teacher in the school. I thought maybe this was a sign: I have always been inclined to feel warmly to other Juliets, as there are so few. I am bound to make a few friends, but in any case, it doesn’t bother me that much, as I am really quite happy on my own. The trouble with so many people, as the children found, is that they can easily make you doubt your own mind. Books, on the other hand, make you surer of it.
As does religion: well, I have to think I am being guided, or I wouldn’t have done this in the first place. When I had my conversion experience, about twelve years ago now, Martin Waller told me over lunch in that French restaurant in Charterhouse Square that he likes, that my synapses were misfiring, probably. I recall it clearly: he is an atheist, of course, and we talked about Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, which we had both just read. The synapses might have misfired; I wouldn’t be surprised, but then love might just be a chemical reaction. Or, it could be both a chemical reaction, and a transforming experience. I’m not with Martin. Materialism doesn’t tally with my experience and it’s too depressing. The fact is, the conversion experience, all of five minutes, has lasted with me for the twelve years since, and being religious, I see symbolism in everything. If I pick up a book, it often has a message, and this helps to stop me doubting the path I’ve chosen. And living out here, surrounded by mountains, and plants that burst into life after a few days’ water, the post may not come for days, and the broadband may not work, ever, but you are never going to run short of messages