The Olive Harvest (The Olive Series Book 3) Read online

  Best known for her role as Helen Herriot in BBC Television’s All Creatures Great and Small (for which she was awarded The Variety Club Television Personality of the Year Award), Carol Drinkwater has enjoyed a long and distinguished career as both an actress and writer. During her acting career she has worked in film, television and theatre. Her credits include working with Laurence Olivier at the National Theatre, Stanley Kubrick on A Clockwork Orange, and Max Von Sydow, who she played opposite in the film Father for which she won the Critics Circle Award for Best Film Actress. Her bestselling children’s novel, The Haunted School, has sold over 150,000 copies and was made into a film and television series which won the Chicago Film Festival Gold Award for children’s films. Carol has written novels for both adults and children, including An Abundance of Rain, Akin to Love and Mapping the Heart as well as the two bestselling memoirs The Olive Farm and The Olive Season.

  The Olive Harvest

  A Memoir of Love, Old Trees and Olive Oil

  Carol Drinkwater

  Copyright © 2004, Carol Drinkwater

  Contents

  Copyright

  A Dry Welcome

  Out of the Firing Line

  A Late Homecoming

  Warning Skies

  Together, Separately

  Too Many Strays

  One Shot More or Less

  Counting Sheep

  The Fortunes of Saints

  280,000 Bees for Breakfast

  A Beast’s Love

  A Cocktail of Toxins

  A Harvest, at Last

  Blessed June

  You are gone. The river is high at my door.

  Cicadas are mute on dew-laden boughs.

  This is a moment when thoughts enter deep.

  I stand alone for a long while.

  … The North Star is nearer to me now than spring,

  And couriers from your southland never arrive –

  Yet I doubt my dream on the far horizon

  That you have found another friend.

  Li Shang-yin, Thoughts in the Cold

  Je ne puis pas regarder une feuille d’arbre

  sans être écrasé par l’univers.

  I cannot look at a leaf on a tree

  without being bowled over by the universe.

  Victor Hugo

  Acknowledgements

  Firstly, I would like to acknowledge all those who are involved in the distribution and sales of my books; without you I would be lost in the dark.

  Special thanks to Jonathan Lloyd at Curtis Brown for handling my affairs; to my copy editor, Caroline North; to friends in other houses who continue to look out for my books and to Denny Drinkwater for enormous support.

  My special thanks to everyone at Orion and Weidenfeld & Nicolson for welcoming me so warmly aboard, particularly Malcolm Edwards for opening the door and my editor, Alan Samson, for his poetry.

  For Michel

  I love the gypsy soul in you and the joys

  and sorrows of your changing face.

  A Dry Welcome

  A puzzling silence is the welcome that awaits us. Only the familiar screech of cicadas cracks through the early summer stillness on our Mediterranean hillside. In fact, so mute is the reception from our olive farm, so scruffy its terraces, that the place gives off a melancholy air. It appears abandoned, not tranquil.

  ‘Good heavens, I hope nothing awful has happened to Monsieur Quashia.’

  ‘He was in good spirits when I telephoned yesterday morning to say we were on our way. He talked of a surprise.’

  Michel and I are climbing the driveway on foot, looking from left to right, baffled by what we are discovering. We pause to inspect the veteran as well as the young olive trees, most of which are sadly lacking fruit, as we saunter up to the parking area, to the threshold of our romantic home. Arriving in front of the garage, our suitcases ditched at our feet, still clad in our city clothes, hot, sticky and bemused, we linger, taking stock. Everywhere is shuttered and locked up.

  ‘I hardly recognise it as Appassionata. It’s as though we’re strangers here.’ That quickening excitement of arrival, of expectation, of being back home, has been replaced by dismay.

  ‘Come on, Carol, it’s not that bad.’

  I spin around in a circle. The bougainvillaeas are in livid blossom and have snaked their way around the villa’s creamy, weathered balustrades and are now coiling in heavy magenta plaits up the electricity lines towards the roof; the swimming pool has turned slimy green, while browning rose petals and dead geranium heads lie scattered in puddles on the terracotta terrace.

  ‘It is bit of a mess, that’s true,’ murmurs Michel.

  ‘What’s all that up there?’ I am pointing midway up the grounds, to beneath the first stands of pine trees. There, alongside our woodshed and my modest fruit garden, are several substantial hummocks of rusty red earth, spires of stacked stones and three hefty boulders.

  ‘I can’t really tell from here. The vegetation is so dense,’ sighs Michel. ‘Have you got your keys handy?’

  ‘They’re in my case. And where have all these materials come from? Quashia wouldn’t have ordered them.’

  Surrounding us and our two cars, both unwashed and splotched with sticky patches of resin, is a veritable cargo of treated pine beams and what must amount to something in the region of five hundred locally baked, cambered Provençal roof tiles. ‘And where are the dogs? They are always here to greet us.’ I scan the slopes hopefully, eyes piercing our ten unkempt acres in search of three rough-and-tumble mutts bounding towards us, or one lone Arab busy at his chores, but I cannot see a soul, not a whisper of life. ‘And Monsieur Q. gave you no inkling?’

  ‘He said there was a surprise.’

  ‘Well, he can’t have been referring to the condition of the land. It hasn’t looked this grotty since we bought the place. It must be something to do with all this masonry equipment!’

  ‘Let’s take a look up the hill,’ says Michel, moving on ahead, leaving me to clip-clop an unsteady path after him. My low-heeled sandals are hardly suited to the loose stones and the sharp verticality.

  It is mid-June. The weather during our absence has been unseasonably hot and Quashia has been complaining about the lack of rainfall since late April. The fields of spring wild flowers are long over and what remains, what has grown up in their place, is bone-dry, scratchy and pallid. The greensward is made up of knee-high, dehydrated grasses. Within it, I spot a bristly purple-blue flower that I recognise as viper’s bugloss. I point it out to Michel who frowns, continuing his ascent. I believe it was once thought to be a remedy for snake-bite. This is the first time I have run into it because our grounds are usually kept neatly shorn to counter the risk of fires that accompany this climate’s long dry summers.

  ‘This is dangerous,’ I mutter.

  ‘Quashia and I will have to cut it back as soon as possible.’

  I am puffing, out of breath, out of the habit of scaling our steep, pebbled hill, particularly in open-toed shoes and a skirt, and I feel saddened and confused by the disorderliness we have returned to. Michel, long-legged and lean, is striding purposefully ahead. He says nothing more, but his silence tells me that he also is frustrated. We come to rest alongside the upper cherry tree whose fruits this year would have been devoured by the flocks of thieving magpies who nest here. We have both been away from the south on extended career assignments and have not been around to harvest the crop.

  ‘Strange there’s no sign of Quashia.’

  In the distance, from one of the neighbouring mediaeval villages perched high above the coast, I hear the keening of a works siren and I glance at my watch. It is m
idday. Time for lunch.

  ‘He’s probably gone off somewhere for a bite to eat.’

  And then suddenly, from beyond the curvature of the hillside, we hear a cry: ‘Monsieur ’dame!’ It is Monsieur Q., waving and smiling, wading through the hip-high grass to reach us. In spite of the heat he is wearing his black lambskin hat and dark ankle-length trousers. He never shows up in shorts or without a long-sleeved shirt, no matter what the weather. Behind him, through the thick undergrowth, I make out a pair of upright tails: Lucky, our Alsatian, and Bassett, the little black and white hunting dog, are following in his wake.

  ‘He must be boiling in that battered old hat. Where’s Ella?’ I mutter. Ella, our golden retriever, is past retirement age, fat and arthritic these days and I worry that while we are away there will be a message from Quashia or Gérard, our vet, informing us that she has been taken ill, or worse.

  ‘She’s probably dozing in the stables and didn’t hear us arrive.’

  Yes, on top of everything else, the poor old girl is going deaf. Lucky and Bassett have spotted us and are bounding on ahead of their companion, a chorus of howls and dribbling affability.

  Monsieur Quashia speeds up his pace as he draws near. He is laughing, delighted to find us here. Our loyal Arab gardener and the pivotal cog of this modest olive farm has obviously been doing his rounds, completing a reconnoitre of the land. It is essential that our fencing is inspected regularly for signs of illicit entry by the wild boars who gnaw through it, dig up the earth, buckle the walls and tear at the branches of all our newly planted trees, particularly the apples. The trunks of our two hundred young olives have been encased with wire netting to protect them against rabbits who chomp away at the bark; this needs occasional reparation. A further requirement is to visit our basin at the hill’s summit to gauge the water level and guard against stagnancy. The hundreds of metres of piping that transport water up the land’s gradient must also be kept under close observation in case a length perishes, springs a leak and dribbles away our most precious commodity. All these tasks take time and require attention on a twice-weekly basis.

  ‘Bonjour! Bonjour!’

  He pulls out a creased, purple checked handkerchief and mops his tattooed brow before kissing the two of us twice on both cheeks. Hearty handshakes and backslappings are exchanged with Michel, a twinkling, ageing, appreciative eye is turned on me, and then he begins to set forth about ‘the project in progress’. Profuse apologies that he has not found time to cut back the land as yet but he is digging foundations, he announces proudly.

  ‘But for what, Monsieur Quashia?’ I beg.

  To create a toolshed extension to our woodshed, which he built for us a few years back. ‘Just a few structural changes and improvements I have been attacking during your far-too-long absence.’ He winks and shrugs with theatrical modesty. ‘Oh, but it’s good to have you both home!’

  ‘What are the dimensions of the extension?’ enquires Michel uncertainly.

  ‘It will go as far as …’ our obliging Arab is goose-stepping in his dusty brogues along the terrace in question, ‘… cinq, six, sept,’ counting aloud – each of his strides is loosely, very loosely, measuring out a metre – until he arrives at the eastern extreme of our land, where he stops, turns and faces us again, beaming. ‘Here. Vingt! Plenty of space! It’s what you’ve been dreaming of, eh, Carol?’ he grins proudly, hollering back at me.

  ‘Well, I … but twenty metres plus the fourteen already in service, Monsieur Quashia, seems a little long for a shed.’

  ‘Pas du tout. Not at all.’

  I have been banging on for some time now about clearing out the garage, which has never housed the cars and currently serves as a desperately overcrowded and ill-organised work room. I have been hoping that, when we can afford it, we can transform the front half of it, plus the two horse stables adjoining it (where the dogs sleep and the dusty washing machine lives), into two light and airy guest bedrooms with en-suite shower rooms and, next door, a tiled, L-shaped laundry room.

  ‘I wanted to surprise you!’

  ‘Well, you certainly have,’ smiles Michel politely.

  Tired of listening to my idle speeches and grand schemes that rarely get off the ground, Quashia has, in our absence, taken matters into his own hands and ordered the requisite materials from the builders’ merchants where we keep an account. His reasoning is that the first stage of my project necessitates creating alternative storage space for our numerous gardening utensils and ever-escalating collection of farm gadgets and machines. This argument is perfectly logical, but it will involve us in unforeseen expenses. I glance at Michel, who does not return my look; he is surveying the scene with furrowed brow. Quashia has never taken such an initiative before, certainly not on decisions of structural or financial consequence.

  Michel and I are both stressed, edgy from a surfeit of time spent apart, living independent city lives, and are a little unsure of how best to handle the situation. At least that is my reaction and what I detect from my husband’s expression.

  Aside from all this, I had been lovingly planting up and tending this particular patch, which is located a couple of terraces up behind the house, below the pine forest and Michel’s amazingly fertile little palm grove, as a mixed-fruit orchard. Looking at it now, the plot resembles nothing more than a heavily tramped-over building site. Solid blocks of rock, recently quarried from the limestone mountainside on which our farm has been constructed – Quashia must have hired an electric drill from the builders’ yard for this stage of the proceedings – have been hewn into manageable slabs, piled into two triangular towers and left. Later, they will be used to construct what, when accurately measured, proves to be a 24-metre retaining wall to his shed extension. He has broken up half-a-dozen rough-wood pallets used by the builders’ merchants to deliver tiles (and which, contractually, are supposed to be returned) and nailed them back together, transforming them into crude but rather natty hand-made trestles. Unfortunately, he has left them stacked over several of my recently potted bougainvillaea cuttings. Freshly dug earth has been chucked everywhere – its final resting place to be decided by Michel and me later, he explains – leaving holes and shallow trenches. The upheaval is causing sections of the farm’s original, free-standing stone walls to be displaced. Two wheelbarrows, rusted and contorted with age, seamed with dried mortar, stand empty and idle; several tons of blond Biot sand have been shovelled into three hillocks alongside further hillocks of the coarser, grainier sand normal; all lined up on corrugated-iron sheets in readiness for mixing with the dozens of bags of cement currently stabled next to our chopped wood in the area of shed already in use. The sand must have been there for some time because there are native ground-pines (which though they smell like pine are in fact of the mint family), growing up through it.

  Michel walks the length of the site. I look about me and sigh. I dread to calculate the total cost of the bills Quashia has run up.

  Fortunately, my young fruit trees – two peach, one pear, a nectarine, three apricots, one stupendously robust, self-seeded almond, my beloved pomegranate (the Phoenicians transported these bushy trees from west Asia to Carthage. Mine has travelled a far shorter and, no doubt, less hazardous journey. Still, I was obliged to uproot it and rehouse it a respectable distance from our lower olive grove by order of one of the many agricultural inspectors who have visited us) – are all holding their own, thriving even, some with clusters of unripened fruit on offer, in the midst of this nightmare building scene.

  ‘I even found out the name of the wood merchants we used last time and organised the delivery of the beams,’ grins Quashia triumphantly. He lifts his arm and points an oil-stained finger towards the lengths of wood lying about in the parking, and my heart softens. I am saddened to observe a slight tremor in his hand. The wrinkles on his dark-skinned face have deepened and he has grown a gut. Several years back he stopped smoking during Ramadan, a moral obligation of his Islamic faith, and afterwards he announced to me: �
��If I can stop for Ramadan, then I can kick the filthy habit altogether.’ I was pleased and promised to support him in any way I could. He had been a sixty-a-day man and I knew it might prove challenging, but I misjudged him. He beat the addiction, just as Michel had several years earlier, and never said another word about it. Still, in spite of his rigorous physical activities, he has an indisputable belly on him now, and he is looking older.

  ‘Yes, we noticed the beams when we arrived.’ How could I be angry with this man? I love Monsieur Q. His life is dedicated to this farm. How could we fault him for his initiative? Nevertheless, there were plenty of other projects I would have preferred he had launched into ahead of this one. There’s no money for my dreamed-of additional bedrooms, not now or in the foreseeable future. Nor have we commissioned architectural drawings or submitted the endless forms and documents required for planning permission. We would have lived with the higgledy-piggledy clutter in the garage for the time being and concentrated on more pressing matters such as drilling for a subterranean spring-water source, which has been on our to-do-list for way too long. Single-handed, this shed development will take Quashia the entire summer to accomplish and employing extra manpower to assist him cannot be an option for us right now.

  ‘Why don’t you let me cope with this?’ says Michel to me in English.

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  Michel hands me his keys. I take my leave, descend to the house and circle to the main door while the men above are locked in a discussion about masonry matters, costings, the unkempt state of the land and Lord knows what else.

  As a rule, Michel and I would deal with these small problems together. It is unlike him to send me away.

  Inside, I am greeted by imprisoned heat. I slip off my sandals and splay my tired feet against the cool, un-giving tommette-tiled floors, and I pad from room to room, throwing open the slatted shutters and French windows, letting in sharp sunlight which instantly floods the tall-ceilinged spaces, and the lovely old house seems to sigh and expand like a woman discarding her corset. ‘Bienvenue,’ I hear it softly whisper. I breathe in trapped fragrances of dried lavender in bowls, eucalyptus leaves fallen from a vase on top of the television set, whiffs of lingering cologne and humidity, while I attempt to allay my uncertain mood by rediscovering home.