Last Days of the Bus Club (2 page)

Of course it had a lot to do with growing up as a Spaniard. A century or so ago, George Borrow, in his book
The Bible in Spain
, made the rather pertinent observation of the Spanish: ‘that in their social intercourse no people in the world exhibit a juster feeling of what is due to the dignity of human nature, or better understand the behaviour which it behoves a man to adopt towards his fellow human beings. It is one of the few countries in Europe where poverty is not treated with contempt, and, I may add, where the wealthy are not blindly idolised.’

Well, that’s what our daughter got from the village school. And she had a point about the speech: this was an important gig and I had to get it right. So I thought about it for a bit and hit on the theme of laughter and school.

You laugh all your days – and it’s one of the very best things in life – but you don’t often laugh the way you laughed when you were at school, that gut-busting, aching,
joyous agony of laughter. The sort of laughter you have to contain at any cost, for fear that the humourless tyrant doing his level best to illuminate your darkness on subjects in which you had not the remotest interest – the use of the gerund, or the genetic codes of peas – might catch you at it and suggest that you might want to share the joke with the class. And to share the joke with the class was what you didn’t want because you knew full well that the joke was crass as crass can be and you were only so horribly convulsed with laughter because you weren’t supposed to be. That was laughter, and it left you sweating and limp like a used rag. It was so good that I devoted a considerable part of my school career to the pursuit of it. With hindsight it occurs to me that my lamentable academic performance might have had something to do with this.

Be that as it may, I thought I could advise my eager young audience to do the same, to make the most of that unrepeatable laughter. I would go on from there to
recommend
some more profitable activity, like reading, in order to give the impression that there was more to me than mere mindless frivolity.

In town a couple of days before the talk, I put this idea to one of the teachers, Dori, the mother of Chloé’s best friend María. It didn’t go down too well. She said that although she remembered that laughter from her youth, it was no longer the same; school was a much more serious business today. The world is different now, and its schoolchildren would not be able to make much of what I was blathering on about. Best perhaps to drop this theme.

So I dropped it, and wondered what to say instead. Nothing obvious presented itself and I wondered a little more, and then, as so often happens, I threw in my lot with
an eleventh-hour inspiration. I had been mulling over the way in which Chloé and her friends, both boys and girls, seemed to treat one another as if they belonged to the same species. Having been to a single-sex boarding school in England, I had for many years harboured a certain envy for boys who went to school with girls, and consequently knew how to deal with them on a more or less equal footing. I decided there and then to address the school on the great benefits of co-education.

Now, my method with talks, whatever the language, is to sketch in some basic themes and leave the actual
wording
of the thing to fend for itself. That way, I imagine, I can achieve an element of spontaneity, and may even, seeing as I don’t actually know what I’m about to say next, share a bit of interest in the matter with the audience.

So, as I drove along the narrow road to town, I cast my mind back to the momentous day when, after years at that boys’ boarding school, I entered Crawley New Town’s finest co-educational sixth-form college, and a giddy infatuated trance that was to last the best of two years. These were pleasing thoughts to mull upon, but before I knew it I was being led up the steps of the assembly hall and confronted with a great rabble of youth milling about in the passages and aisles. Chloé was in the senior building, safely (as far as she was concerned) out of the way, but I could pick out a few friendly faces from the younger siblings of her friends and the families we knew in town.

There was a not altogether fruitful call to silence as the last few miscreants scrambled noisily to their seats. The
teacher – it was Dori – introduced me and I was left alone. I looked out for a moment across the heaving sea of girls and boys, waiting for the muse. And then I was away like a clockwork monkey, relishing the Spanish idioms that sprang to my aid and using my foreignness to advantage. I managed to raise the odd snigger and giggle, but if the truth be told it was like getting blood out of a stone (to be fair, not much of what a fifty-something-year-old has to say is funny to a teenager). I talked about the advantages of small town life; I told a little moral tale; I recommended the road less travelled, and extolled, briefly – and cautiously – some of the virtues of the wild side; and then I launched into my great paean to co-educationalism.

I wasn’t far into it when a minor linguistic problem presented itself: I was suddenly seized by a doubt that such a word actually existed in Spanish. Why should it? Just about all education was co-educational, so why should there be a special word for it? This thought brought me almost to a standstill. But I soldiered on.

My preferred strategy for this sort of situation is to slide neatly into the circumlocution. Forget the grammar and the vocabulary, and, if things are getting really out of hand, even the meaning; I just launch myself confidently onto a tangential track. The muse carried me along as I talked in ever more discursive mode about the pleasures of the sexes mingling, the masculine conjoining with the feminine, both coming together to create a well-rounded person.

I’m not sure that even I had much of a sense of what this blather was adding up to, and the slightly bemused
expression
of my audience did little to reassure me. But I plunged heedlessly on with my peroration, ending with my certainty
that it was going to school with both girls and boys that had rescued me at the last minute from the warped confines of my earlier single-sex schooling and that I was sure it would be the making of all of them, too.

‘And that’, I said, by way of winding up, ‘is it.’

There was that dread pause while my local reputation as a speaker hung in the balance, and then, to my relief, a
spattering
of polite applause laced with a puzzling undertone of sniggering from the older kids, and Dori came up on stage, gave me a kiss and bundled me off.

‘Phew,’ I said, ‘tough gig.’ Or rather, I thought I said ‘tough gig’. Dori was looking at me uncertainly. ‘
Un bolo duro
’ is what I said, and that, as I subsequently discovered, does not mean ‘tough gig’ at all, but rather ‘a hard skittle’.

However, a hard skittle turned out to be about right, when on the following day reports of my speech reached my daughter. She climbed off the bus with an
uncharacteristically
sour, if not hurt, expression on her face.

‘Dad, don’t you think there are some things that you and Mum might want to discuss with me first before going off and announcing them to the whole of my school?’

‘Er … to what might you be referring?’ I hedged.

‘To the fact that you’re bisexual?’

This was news to me. ‘Bisexual?! I’m not bisexual … I mean, I’ve got nothing against bisexuals, but I’m not one, or at least not that I’m consciously aware of,’ I spluttered. ‘Whatever gave them that idea?’

‘You did. Apparently that’s what you told everyone in your speech yesterday before urging them to celebrate their
own bisexuality. Or at least that’s what they reckoned you were saying. Apparently you waffled a lot.’

‘Aah …’ I said as the penny began to drop, ‘I think these poor benighted young people might have got hold of the wrong end of the stick.’

To add to my mortification, she enlightened me as to the correct word for co-education. It was
coeducación
… Who would have thought it?

W
HAT YOU GET
when you live out in the sticks, as we do – the only inhabited farm on the east side of the river – is wild animals wandering about the place.

We enjoy and, in certain cases, encourage the presence of wild animals around us. We leave milk thistles to go to seed, for example, because this encourages goldfinches. Ibex, which we see almost every day, are welcome, too; they don’t do any damage at all and they are lovely to watch, with their delicate grace and their predilection for posing on the
sheerest
of pinnacles and crags. Foxes inhabit a grey area, because once a fox has got into your chicken run and massacred your poor hens it’s hard to love them. But at times when we do succeed in keeping the hen house foxproof, the fox, too, is a welcome member of the wild.

The sound of foxes barking in the night is a sound of savage yearning melancholy. Of course it drives the dogs,
who are not allowed to roam the hills at night, to utter distraction; foxes are what the dogs want to be, and much of their day is spent racing around fruitlessly following the trails of foxes and, occasionally, what they like best of all, finding a particularly ripe dollop of fox shit, and rolling in it. Thus respectably redolent of fox, a smell which is truly loathsome to us humans, they come home and flop down in the house. This is not something we particularly encourage.

I have a firm belief that foxes have a sense of humour, a rare enough thing in an animal. They particularly love to taunt the dogs, and one dark winter night, as Ana and I lolled before the fire flanked by the dozing dogs, a fox had the temerity to walk onto the flat roof and look down at us through the skylight. Bumble and Bao went berserk, rushing about the room, barking and snarling, and
fruitlessly
leaping at the skylight … which didn’t do much for our candlelit evening by the fire. The fox considered them for a moment, then turned, calmly shat on the glass, and wandered off.

It’s harder to be so sanguine about the wild boar –
jabali
in Spanish, which sounds pleasingly like ‘Jabber Lee’ – of which there are hundreds living along the river and up in the hills. They, too, are nocturnal creatures, who prefer to hole up in dense thickets during the hours of daylight, though occasionally they misjudge the hour and you come across them trotting home early in the morning. Once, taking Chloé to school in the morning, I saw a mother and no fewer than eight stripy babies. They trotted across the track in an orderly line and disappeared into the thick scrub of oleander and broom on the other side. We felt as if we were on safari.

The wild boars’ apparent timidity, however, belies a terrifying ferocity. You don’t want to corner a boar, nor find yourself between a female and her babies. They are equipped with terrible tusks and immensely powerful neck and shoulders for delivering the blows. Both males and females are built like battering rams and covered all over with bristles as thick as fencing-wire. And it’s no use running; they can run a lot faster than you. Sometimes, walking home late at night, along the track from the bridge to the farm, I hear them snuffling and snorting in the dense scrub beside me. I stop for a moment to listen, and then hasten quietly on.

The boar are multiplying fast in our part of Spain, for they have no predators except the hunters, and most of the hunters who hunt on Campuzano, the hill behind our house, are next to useless. From time to time they organise a Sunday-morning
montería
, where, bristling with guns and arrayed in the very last word in green-drab hunting clobber, dozens of men and scores of dogs bash their way through the scrub on the hills. Sunday morning, though, seems to be a time when the boars are never in. I sometimes come across the hunters on their way back, usually with a tiny dead bird or two swinging from their belts. Archly, I ask these manly men for the boar count, knowing full well that they hardly ever see a boar and almost, but not quite, never bag one.

There’s a curious theory linking the fortunes of the wild boar with that of the
butano
, the gas sold throughout Spain in orange steel canisters that almost everybody cooks with. Before the introduction of this gas, found beneath the desert in Algeria, cooking was done on wood fires with fuel bought from
leñeros
– firewood collectors – who would
scour the countryside for any combustible material, load it onto their mules and take it to be sold in the towns. The activity of the
leñeros
almost stripped the land bare, leaving very few thickets and wooded
barrancos
– the gullies or gulches where the boar likes to hole up during the day. This lack of cover, along with the scarcity of meat and perhaps the greater skill and courage of earlier, less
camouflage-costumed
hunters, resulted in a severe reduction in their numbers.

When the gas took over and the
leñeros
were out of a job, the countryside soon returned to its natural wild and overgrown state, a state that the Jabber finds congenial, and the boar population began to rise. At the end of the 1980s, when we arrived at our farm in the Alpujarra, there were hardly any at all, but now the place is seething with them.

The damage they do has to be seen to be believed. A family of boars visiting in the night can dig up a whole field of potatoes or maize. They like to make mudbaths in recently watered earth, too, in which they can roll to ease the terrible burden of fleas with which they are all afflicted. They destroy cultivations, dig up whole plots of vegetables, expose the roots of trees, and the churning of the earth that these activities entail ruins the course of the water across the land, making it impossible to irrigate.

I have a vivid memory of walking down to the river one evening and passing our flock of sheep, who, contented and with full bellies, were lying amongst the long grass and wild flowers in the field by the river. The low evening sun shone from behind, illuminating the outline of each of them in a halo-like blaze of wool; they looked to me like celestial sheep in a paradisaical meadow and I lingered for
long minutes, bewitched by the scene. When I returned the next morning the Arcadian idyll had been transformed into something closer to the aftermath of the Somme – the earth churned into formless craters and hills, the grass chomped, shat on and ground into the mud. A few sheep were gingerly picking their way between the ruts and craters. The boar had been in the night.

Wild boar are a menace, the agents of chaos, wrecking the order of things, and their only saving grace is that the younger, tenderer ones are delicious in the pot.

Some years ago, Ana, whose mind is much exercised by strategies to confound the Jabber and keep him out of her vegetable patch, decided to create a hedge of pomegranate, using the tiny plants that come up all over the farm in the autumn. The pomegranate has long thorns, and she figured that the tangled mass of a thorny hedge would be a match even for the bulldozer-like boar. We dug up hundreds of saplings and planted them in a trench along one side of the triangular vegetable patch at the bottom of the farm, then covered them with a line of chicken wire to protect them from the sheep, who would otherwise nibble the young leaves and kill the lot.

Manolo, who helps us labouring on the farm and was in charge of watering this garden, didn’t think much of the idea. Manolo is very conservative in a typical Alpujarran way and, if a thing is not traditionally done, it’s a hell of a job to get him to accept it and cooperate. He didn’t like the pomegranate hedge because such a thing had never been done in the Alpujarra, and he couldn’t see the
point of it … and didn’t water it. Pomegranates are pretty drought-resistant, though, so the hedge survived in spite of his constructive neglect; it just took a little longer to get established.

Besides keeping the boar out, the hedge is a delight to look at. In spring it suddenly bursts into life with a sheen of tiny red leaves; in early summer it blossoms into a constellation of dazzling red flowers. Later the fruit comes, perfectly formed but tiny, because of the density of the planting, and then finally in autumn the leaves go from green to yellow to red. I like to trim it with garden shears, as if it were a privet hedge.

Ana views this activity with amusement; she suspects that deep within me lies a conventional suburban man. Still, I’ve been doing this for a couple of years now, and the hedge is taking on the pleasing form of a green cloud. It’s the sort of job you do when you haven’t got anything else to do – and, of course, that doesn’t happen much. But there was one late summer day when I found myself with a little time to kill while I waited for some visitors, so I took the shears and headed down the hill. It’s a long job, because it’s a long hedge. I clipped away for the best part of an hour, stepping back from time to time to admire the work and check its progress. As I worked, I thought, among other things, about the boar. There were tracks in the mud beside where I was working, and I wondered how long it would be before they discovered, like a tenacious siege army, some weak chink in the defences and battered their way through.

I was still thinking of this when I heard the horn of a car from the road above the river – we need visitors to announce themselves, so that we can shuttle them up from the river.
I downed tools and headed for the bridge. A week earlier I had answered the phone to a man who wondered if we might want to appear on a TV series following the travels of a well-known British chef. I didn’t think that we did, really, and was a bit unenthusiastic. But the man on the other end was extremely persuasive and gave me to believe that this would be a very good thing for all parties involved, so I capitulated and suggested that he come and pay us a visit. When I mentioned this to my publishers in London, they positively burbled with excitement. ‘It’s Rick Stein, Chris. He’s brilliant and has a vast following. Look after these people; give them anything they want.’

There were two men getting out of a car by the bridge when I arrived, a big one and a small one. The bigger one sprang forward, announced himself as David Pritchard, and introduced me to the smaller one, Derek, who was
staggering
behind him. Poor Derek, who had been driving, was in a bit of a state; in fact, it would not be exaggerating to say that he was unable to speak for a full fifteen minutes. It transpired that he had been absolutely terrified of the road. I shook his limp, quivering hand.

‘Well, Chris,’ boomed David, who was florid and ebullient and not remotely bothered by the journey. ‘I’m dead pleased to meet you and it certainly is a lovely place you’ve got here. But I have to tell you right now and without further ado that there is no way – absolutely no way – that we can film here. It’s just too far, too wild, and the logistical problems of getting the team and all the gear out here would be a nightmare. And what with the budget and the limited time we’ve got … well, it’s out of the question … we’ll have to forget it.’

Derek feebly nodded his heart-felt acquiescence.

‘That’s OK,’ I said, thinking that I had not been the one who had raised the idea in the first place. ‘I guess I’ll just have to get over it.’

‘It’s nice here, though. I like it,’ David continued. ‘And I happen to have a couple of fish with me. Beautiful-looking
s
ea bass. I got them from the fish counter in the
hypermarket
in Motril – one of the best fishmongers I’ve ever come across. Why don’t we go and slap ’em on the grill? Be a shame to waste ’em.’

So we crossed the bridge, poor Derek still shaking, climbed into the farm car, and drove up to the house. David was a man who knew how to do business: as well as a whole heap of fine fish in a bag, he had brought with him a cool-box of Rías Baixas wine. He wormed his way straight to my wife’s heart by cunningly contrived commentary upon the plants and being nice to the dogs, and proceeded to prepare us all lunch.

The grilled fish was the star of the show, following a simple starter of hot flatbread and baba ghanoush that we had knocked up earlier, alluringly sprinkled with
pomegranate
seeds. David was a gifted cook – more of the
rumbustuous
than the delicate school – and, jollied along by the wine, we enjoyed a long, lingering and rather noisy lunch. Even Derek temporarily forgot the terrors of the morning. As the afternoon drew to a close, we all vowed eternal friendship and lamented long and bitterly the fact that the part we would have had to play in the cookery programme was not to be.

‘But I love this place, I always have done,’ insisted David, a little crapulously, ‘and I know my man would love it, too. He’s read all your books and he just loves ’em – crazy about ’em, in fact. He’ll be gutted that we can’t film here. It’s a
crying shame but it can’t be helped; there’s no way I can get the crew out here, no way at all.’ Derek, who was sinking into an anxious gloom at the thought of the journey home, roused himself briefly to nod at this.