The Olive Tree (The Olive Series Book 2) Read online

  ‘Exactly. There has to be something less noxious.’

  ‘If there was, don’t you think we’d know about it?’

  My Algerian visa arrived, but, in the light of what had come to pass, I postponed my travel plans and stayed home to help with the harvest. I found a mill high in the hills, operating the ancient granite-stone system. It had begun pressing. I booked us an appointment. All hands to the land, to gather for this first oil of the season.

  The following day I received a letter from the AOC office. ‘Chers adhérents’, it began before issuing an official warning to all AOC-registered farms. NO FRUIT was to be picked or harvested during the twenty-one days that followed a spraying. It was an illegal act to do so (due to toxin residue left in the fruits, which they omitted to mention). I totted up the dates, realised that we would be within the infringement period and called to cancel the recently booked mill rendezvous. I was seething. Fruits were falling, fruits were rotting.

  Gérard eventually switched on the centrifuge machines two weeks ahead of schedule. Now came the next challenge: les étourneaux, the starlings. The hungry creatures were congregating, Hitchcockian swarms blackening the skies, plunging down upon the branches and picking them clean within a matter of hours.

  ‘Next year, the chemical companies will be marketing a vastly expensive spray aimed at the destruction of the starlings!’ I bellowed to anyone within the farm’s parameters who was still willing to listen to me.

  With a trio of friends who descended from various points north, we swooped upon the trees ourselves, gathering the fruits at top speed and I hastened them to the mill. The ratio of oil to fruit was 7 per cent down on our previous year. We were not alone. Every farmer I spoke to told the same sorry tale, but few acknowledged that what we were looking at was a climate shift, a problem partially caused by ourselves, by the tons of pesticides and products rained down upon our agricultural lands.

  I bumped into René, our silver-haired friend and erstwhile olive guru, at the weighing machines. He was in the company of the local water sorcerer. René was running Raymond’s farm. Seven hundred trees, a little more than double our count and producing a ten times greater yield. They were pressing their first harvest of one and a half ton of fruits.

  ‘It’s just a freak season,’ was René’s explanation. ‘You’ll be fine next year. You should water the trees more frequently. You’ll get more oil.’

  ‘We’ve got four wells now and the pump is turning day and night. The fields are always irrigated. We’re expecting twelve tons of fruit this year,’ glowed the sorcerer.

  Christmas came. We bottled our new oil and celebrated its arrival with friends, as was our tradition, though I genuinely believed its quality and taste had been compromised. Still, it was fine, I had to admit it.

  It was January, unseasonably warm. From the farm’s upper terraces looking west, a dense custard-yellow cloud had broken across the Fréjus promontory and Esterel. The mimosa trees were bursting into blossom, flecking and fleshing out the lower slopelands. They were three weeks ahead of season. I was finally ready to hit the road. Fortuitously, Michel was due to attend a documentary film festival in Barcelona. I set my disembarkation date to coincide with his stay there. Circumnavigating the western Mediterranean in an anti-clockwise direction, I intended to slip south from upper Spain, cross to North Africa, traverse the sea again to Sicily and, skirting the western coast of Italy via dreamed-of destinations, meander back home, returning to Appassionata.

  My quest for ancient stories of the olive tree, of those who transported it to remote, watery inlets within the Mediterranean, still held true. I hoped to discover a gnarled, buckled old oleaster or two, a western Mediterranean long-termer, and some fascinating folklore, but to that had now been added another dimension: the twenty-first-century olive. I was still eager to track the myths and legends of peoples residing around this sea, whose ancestors grew up with the medicinal powers and mysteries of the olive, but I was concerned now for its future. I wanted to grasp the newer picture. I wanted to comprehend the scenario unfolding before us, and how we, on our little farm, might fight the dreaded pests without chemicals, without distressing our small patch of earth and its ecosystem.

  NORTHERN SPAIN

  In the hills surrounding Nice, for those farming cailletier olives the harvests had been stored. Now came pruning, and Appassionata’s centuries-old groves required challenging hours of labour. We had not cut back for three years and within the trees’ canopies hung clusters of dead, briared branches, but we were leaving Quashia alone so he could only handle the essentials. We could have attacked the work before Christmas, given that our vintage had been early, but I had entreated the others to hold off, anxious to lessen the disruption of the plants’ cycles. I was unsure whether adhering to regularity could soften the impact of climate changes. Still, I argued for the rhythms of time-honoured seasons until we knew better.

  I was booked on the Ventimiglia to Montpelier TGV train, en route for Barcelona, leaving early the following morning. A batch of forms had arrived from the oil bureaucrats, officials whose task it was to oversee the quality of oil produced by farmers, requesting details of the damage our farm had suffered at the beaks of the thieving starlings. I stuffed them into my luggage. I had months of travelling before me and was scribbling last-minute, almost-forgotten instructions for Quashia, a personal detail or two into my own notebook, before I shut down my laptop, slid it into my already straining backpack and turned out the light. This time tomorrow I would be in Spain.

  I could not claim to know Spain, having visited the country on four previous occasions only, skimming its rim, dipping into its cities, but I had never infiltrated its dark and mysterious heart, never penetrated its multi-layered substance. Reflecting on those earlier excursions, recalling images, I realised that my impressions were barely more than clichés: a nation of bullfighters, flamenco dancers, overcrowded tourist resorts, Virgin Marys, tapas: nothing but a fistful of Spanish iconography churned out regularly for postcards.

  I had embarked on my first trip when I was thirteen. Of the silver-grey olive and the sweetly scented citrus groves I had been ignorant. Totting up dates, I realised our holiday had taken place during the latter part of Franco’s dictatorship, he who wrested Spain from the Republicans in 1939 after a grotesque three-year civil war and remained in power until his death in 1975. Along with my parents and younger sister, I had set out for the Costa Daurada, Spain’s Golden Coast, driving from rural Kent with its gentle oasthouse scenery in my parents’ Austin A60 Cambridge. Today, it would be a trip of no consequence but back then it was, not brave, but reasonably ambitious. Continental holidays were not a common event in the market-town world of my childhood. So here we were, descending France on course for the northern Spanish fishing village of Sitges. The journey itself took us the better part of three days. I sat in the front with my father, a series of maps on my lap, proudly navigating while my mother and sister dozed in the back.

  Recollections of that two-week sojourn are patchy. What remained was the incident of my father’s food poisoning. Our three-star establishment served the demi-pension meals in a vine-bowered garden. So exotic, so sweetly scented it seemed to me until my father began to interrogate the waiter, attempting to identify the meat on our plates. The fellow appeared not to understand. This caused Daddy to yell at the underling, and the more vocal my father grew the less willing was the waiter to furnish the information; the less willing, in fact, to attend to us at all.

  ‘Please leave it, Peter,’ pleaded my mother on the second or third balmy evening, but Daddy refused to.

  I have a clear memory of the embarrassment I felt as he stabbed at the tablecloth with a thick finger and over-enunciated his perpetual question.

  ‘What meat is this you’re serving us? I am paying for it; I want to know what I’m eating.’

  The thin-boned Spaniard, who had given up on verbal responses, stood alongside the check-clothed table, his arms hanging loose
ly at his side as though held together by string, and shrugged.

  Eventually, patience at an end, my father lifted his plate and waved it beneath the nose of the feckless server. ‘This,’ he bellowed red-faced, pointing at a threadbare cut of steak. ‘What is it?’

  The waiter, probably in his late teens, certainly no more than early twenties, and no doubt grateful for this summer employment, even if, in my father’s opinion, he showed little aptitude for his role, sighed, raised two fingers to each side of his black-haired head and emitted the sounds ‘Ee-aw, ee-aw’.

  ‘Donkey! Jesus Christ!’

  Directly after dinner, my father retired upstairs to a room that reeked of Ambre Solaire, Yardley’s lavender water and Brylcreem. Mummy drew the curtains while my father, supine on the bed in the crepuscular light, groaned dramatically. During the succeeding days, he refused to budge while beyond the windows the sun beat down on to melting tarmac and glimmering sea and we were obliged to entertain ourselves without him. Each morning after breakfast, when we tiptoed into the sacred darkness to give him a kiss, he rasped instructions about digging into the pockets of his shorts to extract a fistful of pesetas for ice creams.

  ‘I told you it was better not to ask,’ sighed my pretty mother, shaking her head at the condition of him.

  She took us to a seaside church – Sant Bartolomeu, it must have been – to light candles for his swift recovery, but he was little changed when we returned from the beach later, arms full of soggy towels. There, a service with high mass was under way with a dozen or more newborns in neatly pressed white gowns cradled in the arms of doting parents. I had never before been present at a communal baptism and it was the closest we came to brushing shoulders with the life of the local inhabitants. I would not have understood that it was financially less taxing to employ the priest for several christenings all at once and I had certainly not been aware of the crippling poverty and oppression the Catalans were enduring. I knew nothing of the dictatorship and how would I have understood that the tourism we represented must have been a godsend to those people?

  Reflecting now from the rolling train, I found myself curious about the life of that beleaguered, melancholy waiter. Where was he today? Had he dreaded the sight of us? Was the opportunity to eat donkey a blessing that he and his family with lowlier rations would have thanked God for? When we were not on the beach sunbathing, we traipsed narrow streets in search of somewhere for a cup of tea. Phyllis, my mother, was tea mad: ‘I could kill for a nice cup of tea.’ Back on his feet, back to his old self, my father took great delight in dragging us from beachside café to beachside café, comparing prices. It drove me crazy with boredom. Then an outing to the nearby city of Barcelona, thirty-five minutes north of Sitges, where catastrophe struck us once more when my father found himself driving the tramlines, and in the wrong direction. Due to onslaughts of hooting traffic, he was unable to shift. Such panic when an oncoming tram approached, blasting its horn, flashing its lights, my mother yelling, ‘Peter!’ …

  I was seated at a café on the terraced pavement outside the gare, the Montpelier railway station, recalling these paper-thin memories. Since that first, somewhat troubled adolescent visit, I had only managed whistle-stop trips to the cities of Madrid and Barcelona and what delighted me about such lack of familiarity was the realisation that I was uninitiated. It felt as though I was entering Spain for the first time.

  The third week of January; sun shining; weather winter-perfect. All about me, sporting black anti-reflect sunglasses, inhaling, slow exhale, cigarette smoke rising, were Arabs, business folk, students. I had departed that morning, winding and wheeling from Cannes along the speckled coast. Now, I had two hours to kill before I picked up a Spanish express due to deliver me late into the Catalonian capital where Michel awaited me. His commitments honoured, we would weekend there. Afterwards, his itinerary led him to Paris while mine was to be local buses, coach- and island-hopping, pleasing myself, tracking olive clues, until I had descended the peninsula. Cádiz for Mardi Gras. Cádiz hosts one of the most popular of Spain’s many carnivals and contains a wealth of olive history. Onwards from a neighbouring port, Algeciras or Tarifa, south to Morocco. Most of this was undiscovered territory for me. I had settled upon this loose, snake-like peregrination principally to avoid the over-constructed coast roads. Also, I had a rendezvous with an Englishman who had bought an olive and fig farm in Extremadura, a lesser known region deep in the heart of Spain, west of Madrid. Aside from a few exchanged emails, I knew very little about him. His details reached me by a very circuitous route. I had approached Friends of the Earth and from there was led to European Funding. They, in turn, suggested I contact Simon.

  This Spanish train offered far fewer comforts than its French counterpart. There was nowhere to purchase coffee or sandwiches; it lacked both bar and refreshment trolley. So I settled to gazing at the passing view of rose-mirrored wetlands reflecting the setting sun. It was Friday. Dusk was rolling into evening. The world of Europe was commuting home for the weekend while I was off on a brand new adventure into forgotten epochs, southern elsewheres.

  In May past, I had returned to the farm after an eight-month expedition encircling the eastern basin of the Mediterranean. Commencing in Beirut, I had ascended into the Christian hills of Mount Lebanon. There was a village, Bechealeh, where the survivors from two olive groves were thriving, fruiting even, in among terraces of trees planted dozens of centuries later. What was remarkable about these ancient colossi was that they had been scientifically dated at between six and seven thousand years old. On a journey that had carried me across seas, cultures, history, war zones, time and space, I had come face to face with what might well have been the naissance of olive farming and had spent a moment of time in the presence of, possibly, the oldest living examples of life on earth. The sequoia forests in California, often cited, are the tallest but not the most aged. Some have reached 1500 years, but they are mere babies alongside those Lebanese masters.

  Who planted those olive trees? Whose was the unidentified hand that had first reached up into an olive branch and picked off one small berry, firm and single-seeded? Where had that happened? Which peoples or person had first come up with the idea of taking a drupe and grinding its stoned fruit to a pulp, thus releasing its powerful, essential golden oil? Who was the man or woman – from which clan or tribe – who had first cultivated the wild ancestor of Olea europaea?

  The answers remained mysteries.

  If two small groves of olives can survive for the entire span of man’s civilised history, what might we learn from their staying power? What opportunities might they offer for our future?

  During those earlier travels, I had been bowled over by the ingenuity of nature, become fascinated by the wealth of history and civilisations residing at the Mediterranean’s rim, bobbing about its shores, where the first alphabets were born, where the seeds of agriculture had been sown. And always, everywhere, the olive tree had played a significant role. Since Michel and I set up home on our olive farm, I had developed a profound affinity with these trees. Their longevity, mystery, medicinal powers, not to mention their gnarled and tortured beauty, set them apart. Olives are a cornerstone of the Mediterranean’s traditions and cultures, but the ancestry of both the wild and cultivated varieties remain an unsolved mystery.

  The answers mattered to me now more than ever, because I felt our own farm, its direction, was at risk.

  Spain. Its history leads us to a remote, almost ungraspable past, even before the existence of olea, the wild olive tree, as far as I was aware. Some millennia before Spain and Portugal had come into existence, this peninsula had been populated by Iberians, a people, or peoples, who had crossed over from Africa by the shortest route possible. Setting sail on rafts from what today is the northern coast of Morocco, passing by Gibraltar – almost certainly some disembarked and settled there – and then continuing onwards to the foot of the mainland. I was moving in the opposite direction, towards that Iberian influx
, and would, undoubtedly, encounter clues both botanical and otherwise, to their history. This African exodus is thought to have taken place somewhere around 3000 BC – a thousand and so years after the Bechealeh groves of Lebanon had been planted – and these Iberian peoples were destined to become the roots of ‘Spain’. They brought the great African continent and its earliest traditions to this more northerly, river-veined, mountain-divided promontory. Did they bring with them rudimentary agricultural expertise? Did they plant olive trees? I did not know, yet.

  But they were not the beginning of the story. Further north, travelling Spain’s other sea borders, its blustery Atlantic coasts and elevations, Stone Age settlers or nomads had already left significant traces. Beyond Barcelona, I intended to begin there, to pay a visit to those cave dwellers, those prehistoric hunters …

  The train slowed, wheezed and ground to a halt. I peered into the darkness. We were at Portbou station, held up at the border by frontier police. A voice from a whistling loudspeaker informed us, in Spanish and French, that disembarkation was forbidden, interdit, prohibido. Twenty or more officers, police and customs, boarded, snaking the carriages’ central aisles, checking identity cards. Sniffer dogs accompanied them. I was obliged to show my passport three times. Visible within shadows and shafts of light beyond my windowpane were the black hands on the broad-faced station clock. They marked the hour between half-past eight to after nine. I began to feel agitated. This is Europe, I was thinking, Portbou, whose rail tracks were laid in 1929 to create easier access into Spain when the World Exposition was held for the second time in Barcelona. What was causing such a lengthy delay? Surely not routine checks? Since the Madrid bombings of 2004, when the central station of Atocha and several commuter trains, las Cercanías, travelling at rush hour towards the Spanish capital were blasted by a series of strategically targeted bombs leaving close to two hundred dead and almost 2000 injured, security at every port of entry must have been permanently tightened. I could only assume that nothing imminently threatening was holding us up.