The Olive Harvest (The Olive Series Book 3)

by Carol Drinkwater

  Soon it will be March. The pale almond blossoms have fallen; the branches are shooting lime-green leaves. Rooks caw loudly above the hillside, wagtails hop to and fro across the driveway, the cedars are heavy with a rusty pollen, which, when the winds come, spreads a canopy of yellow dust everywhere. Borage is a carpet of blue in the grass, the sun shines silver on the sea and I can work with all the doors open. Myriad songbirds are settling in, intent on nest-building after their long flights. New research suggests that as well as being guided by solar and star navigation and visual clues or landmarks such as we humans use, migratory birds also possess an ability to use the earth’s magnetic field as a compass for their arduous journeys. Now safely landed, they greet the mornings with their crystalline tunes, their bell notes. The temperature is 24 degrees. Spring is truly on its way and I cannot say how glad I am that this winter with its hauntings, its death and decomposition and loss is at an end.

  Michel and I remain in regular contact. Our relationship is amicable and I am determined to rebuild from there. From this southland I send him samples of all that flowers or grows. These are my couriers, my love letters, my optimism.

  The young olive trees are shooting up at an astonishing rate; tender new foliage is in evidence all over the estate. As I turn their newly thrust sprigs in my fingers and marvel at their life-force, I fancy they are displaying such tenacity to encourage me, to spur me on to dizzy heights of faith.

  Their eminent stature, though, on such slender trunks, makes them vulnerable to the harsh winds that surely lie ahead at the tail end of February and beyond the ides of March. I must protect them. I motor to the co-opérative, choosing a Monday, knowing that it’s Alexandre’s day off, and buy 200 2-metre wooden pickets. Days it takes me to carry them up the hill on my shoulder, or drag them like a carcass when they grow too cumbersome. If I am to remain here alone, I tell myself, I will invest in a donkey. I am a woodpecker at work – tock, tock, tock, tock – driving the thick sticks into the stony hillside with Quashia’s mallet or, when I cannot negotiate it, with a rock that fits into the palm of my hand. Once they are secured, I fetter them with a cushioned thread that cannot cut into the trees. And when the work is done and the day is at an end, I fall like a log into bed.

  With such growth comes the need for pruning; indeed, the season for olive-pruning is drawing to a close – soon their lacy forked flowers will begin to bud again. But alone I cannot lop the trees. I cannot even shift my splendid wooden ladder from its resting place by the stables. Our apple orchard badly needs attention as well, and then there are the mixed fruit trees I planted up by Quashia’s neglected shed.

  I telephone René but he has had an accident: he fell out of an olivier and sprained his wrist when his mobile phone rang and frightened the life out of him. He and Claude have only recently completed their harvest. The olives never really ripened. ‘In the end we pressed them all green. I’ve never known it in all my years,’ he groans. ‘Just goes to show, there’s always something you don’t expect.’

  Laurent from the co-operative is still convalescing after his own arboreal mishap and Jacques does not prune trees, he informs me.

  ‘But I thought you were a gardener?’

  ‘My specialities are grass and swimming pools. Why not call in Alexandre?’

  And that is what I am obliged to do. Together, in the young year’s sun, we trim the small fruit trees and then the apples. ‘I’ll take you fishing, if you like. In the mountains, close to where we shot the chamois. It’s beautiful up there in the spring. I spend days camping at the lakes, watching the fauna and fishing.’

  ‘Doesn’t it frustrate you not being able to shoot them?’

  He shakes his head. ‘I’m just as passionate about studying animals as I am about shooting them.’

  I shake my head. I don’t get it.

  ‘Where’s your husband? He hasn’t been here for a while.’

  ‘He’s working.’

  ‘I’ll stay around and help you prune your olives.’

  Although I believe his offer is well-intended, I thank him but refuse.

  ‘As you like, but you had better get the dead wood out soon or it’ll hinder the growth of the new crop.’

  I urgently need his assistance, so my refusal is born of what? Caution, hurt. I haven’t recovered from his derision over the wild boar. If the worst comes to the worst, the farm will suffer a second consecutive harvestless year. There has been nothing but silence from the AOC bodies so our rating appears to have gone nowhere. I am almost past caring. In any case, how can I hope to manage the upcoming olive seasons single-handed? Nothing of these concerns, nor my swing to despair, do I disclose to Michel.

  And then, when I least expect it, Quashia returns. Strolling up the driveway in his old black lambswool hat, swinging one solitary carrier bag crammed to bursting with freshly picked Algerian palm dates: his annual gift for us. I have never confided to him that I don’t like them too much. Michel, on the other hand, loves them, so I post them all to him. Quashia cuts a less ebullient figure than the smiling Monsieur Q. I have worked alongside for so many years but he is glad to be back, he owns, and I am desperately grateful to have him here.

  ‘Work,’ he says, ‘is what heals. Let’s get to it.’

  After everything, even though he has returned, I make the decision to forgo drastic pruning of the groves this year. ‘We’ll clean out the trees, fillet them and see what happens. It might, just might, produce a bumper crop.’ So we snip away the rogue suckers from the base of each trunk – these will sap the growth force – and set about cleaning out the dead twigs within the trees’ silvery crowns, letting in the light, making a passage for the swallows to fly through, while the outer branches we leave alone.

  The farm chores are endless. We work as a team. I lack the strength and skills of a man but I participate with commitment and reasonable good humour. I decide to modernise our ancient kitchen and, in preparation, I strip and paint and clean. Then I attack the bathroom, choosing an ice blue for its walls, cracking the sink while climbing a ladder. Late into the evenings, when the sun has set and outdoor chores are impossible, Monsieur Q. and I replace the tiled skirting board throughout the entire house. In daylight hours we restore the corrugated cover to the water basin and till the land. I am his assistant, running errands to the builders’ merchants, shunting, carrying, ordering materials. I call in the plumber, the fellow who shouts and takes five sugars in his coffee, to repair leaks we have lived with since time immemorial. I book the electrician to lay cables for garden lighting. I plant bulbs, I sow veggie seeds. I scour bric-a-brac markets for old chairs, metal tables, stone water basins, broken amphorae, anything I can cheaply lay my hands on to put to inventive use on the land. We toil in rain, in driving winds, in spring sunshine, into the night. I develop a rash from weeding the flowerbeds. On free evenings I burn the midnight oil, studying the local language and lores and writing. The plant I am allergic to, I discover, the one that creates the rash on my arms, is bizarrely named pellitory-of-the-wall. It is part of the sandalwood family and grows out of the stone walls.

  Exactly like my Arab companion, I work to assuage my sadness. He reports that he refused the suitor his granddaughter’s hand and took the girl out of school, believing that she would be better off segregated from boys, learning cooking at her mother’s side. I beg him to reconsider this decision. ‘Every young woman is entitled to education,’ I plead, but he shakes his balding head adamantly.

  He never makes reference to his deceased son though from time to time he talks of the orphaned grandchildren and how he worries about them. And I, in turn, speak of Michel only when Quashia asks after him. But I never let go of my love for him. All that I am doing is for his return; holding faith with our dream, our olive farm. Whatever our land produces, no matter how modest, I box up a share and send it to him. Herbs, bay leaves, pressed flowers, oranges. I take snapshots, fairly amateurish ones, of sunsets over water, of changing colours and seasons on the land. Ev
en after all these years, I regularly find shards of old earthenware pots or hand-painted tiles buried in the rocks and when I do, if they please me and I think they will inspire him, I parcel them up and send those to Paris too. I hold fast to the picture of his crazily painted studio. The colours he chose were our colours, and so I offer him whatever the land throws up. Lest he forget.

  The bees must leave. Off to work, says Monsieur Le Beekeeper, to mountain escarpments in the Var, the pollen-rich rosemary fields. The spring transhumance is underway and the little girls are being packed up like so many boxes in a shoe shop. Each hive is weighed again before they depart to establish the kilos it has gained, how honey-rich it has become. And the joy and relief of opening up les ruches to find bees buzzing noisily and a healthy queen laying nigh on a thousand eggs a day. Perhaps the most memorable moment is the sighting of one bee, returning home in the nick of time before the circus hits the road. Somewhere she must have found a late-flowering mimosa. She lands with a cache of mimosa pollen, like two miniature gold bullion bars, strapped to her hind legs. Miraculous.

  Their departure saddens me. I lend a hand, as Mr and Mrs stack the hives into the trailer behind their four-wheel-drive. ‘I look forward to seeing them back next year.’

  ‘Next year it will be so much better for them if they could be housed higher up. You must create a realistic approach to your hill’s extremity. You’ll need one yourselves when all those olive trees start bearing fruit. Those splendid future harvests will require transportation.’

  I reconsider the idea of a donkey. If that is how these terraces were farmed in earlier days then why not now? But who keeps mules these days? I could visit Thierry, the shepherd in Castellane, seek his advice. Who knows, perhaps Zamzong has produced a youngster? But Quashia shakes his head. ‘A donkey?’ He roars with laughter. ‘I had two in Algeria but when we moved closer to the city I sold them. No point bringing them here, of course, they only spoke Arabic. No, we don’t want donkeys. They will bring other burdens upon us. Buy me a tractor. One with caterpillar feet that is designed to scale these rocky surfaces.’

  ‘But we have no tractor access and you don’t drive.’

  As spring advances, and to our delight the olive trees are showing every sign of a decent fruiting season ahead, a letter arrives from the olive institute in Nice. I have heard nothing since the Marsellaise letter I ignored. I open it, steeling myself for further difficulties, but this is a very different missive. After everything Michel and I have struggled through, after the countless inspectors who have visited us, the forms we have filled out, the expense and work we have let ourselves in for – can it be true that the paper I am holding is informing me: ‘Your farm has been given its ticket, its identification by the Institut National des Appellations d’Origine’? I read it and reread it, telling myself it’s my French. I’ve misunderstood. I’ve got it wrong. I sit down and read it again, but there is no mistake. Your farm has been given its ticket, its identification by the Institut National des Appellations d’Origine. The identification number is right there on the page in front of me: 06040000001. I read on. ‘Please contact us with your pressed oil in order that we can make an analysis of its chemical content. No AOC will be authorised without confirmation of the analysis.’ We are asked to deliver to the institute three examples of this winter’s newly pressed oil. But we have none! Does this mean we are back to square one, must begin again from zero? I telephone Michel, wishing that he were here to share this long overdue moment with me. ‘I’ll write to them,’ he promises me flatly. ‘All farms have poor years. I am sure they will agree to hold our status until the next season’s fruit is delivered.’

  He does not tarry on the phone to discuss his own affairs and I do not press him. He sounds tired, strained. Whenever we speak these days I find myself examining his words, listening for nuances, clues, sounding out the depths of his warmth, his distance or proximity and his state of mind. I replace the receiver promising myself abundance for us. The very next morning, our first newsletter arrives from the AOC bureau in Nice. It is addressed to all colleague farmers. Chers confrères. I relish every word, hellishly proud that Appassionata is now amongst their esteemed oliveraies. I learn that it has been a bumper year for local producers. Three hundred and fifty farms have requested AOC recognition for the season’s olive confections. Alas, not us, but so long as we can keep the trees healthy, free of insects and disease and we can invent an efficient method of servicing the upper hillside, we will reap ourselves scads of olives next autumn. I scout the hills to reaffirm my faith. The dogs accompany me as warm sunlight breaks through the groves where I gaze upon silvery bearers in doughty health. With hard work and good fortune, my hopes for our autumn harvest will be realised.

  Spring delivers nothing but good news. My spirits are lifting. Blossoms abound. Quashia finally completes his shed, though without Michel to oversee its structural fine-tuning I have to admit that, in places, it looks decidedly tipsy. Monsieur Q. argues hotly against this conclusion. He takes up his spirit level and presses it against walls and pillars, crying, ‘There, you see, dead straight.’ So we let the matter rest. In any case, I quite like its helter-skelter appearance. The wild boars have not returned. It would seem that two deaths here were ample sacrifice and I am deeply grateful for that. Alexandre, aided by his father-in-law, removes his cage. I harvest the oranges – their yield is pretty spectacular – and store them to give to René to metamorphose into delicious marmalades and orange wine.

  I walk the land with the dogs in the golden spring evenings, alone but optimistic, always on the look-out for gifts for Michel. The finely forked flowers on the olive trees are plentiful. Fruit nodes are peeping out from beneath perishing petals everywhere. Only the orange trees seem in decline. Their leaves are losing their verdancy and on their undersides I discover encrustations of what resembles white shingle. When René comes by, arm strapped up, to collect the oranges I show him the foliage. He shakes his head. ‘Well, you didn’t treat the olives last year, and this is the result.’

  I feel frustrated with him. ‘What has this got to do with the olive trees?’

  ‘You’ll see, but my advice to you is budget for three, even four, treatments this year or you’ll have infestations of trouble.’

  I don’t believe him.

  ‘Gauging it by the flowers, you’re going to have a spectacular crop, but you must safeguard it,’ he reiterates, before tottering off with our crates, promising to return soon with wine and jams. ‘If you want me to come and spray, let me know.’

  I nod, waving him off without the slightest intention of calling upon his offer.

  Summer arrives and the oliviers are straining beneath the weight of their early fruit. As long as no natural disaster intervenes to destroy them, we are set for a whopping harvest. The zenith of the year, and this one promises to be as sweltering as the last. So far, no major fires. And no promise of a visit from Michel for the holidays, but he has begun to send gifts too. Jazz CDs he has copied, articles from newspapers. I treasure them as missives of love in response to mine.

  While I am lingering over breakfast and a book on the upper terrace, my attention is drawn to a squad of purple-grey insects on the bougainvillaea blossoms. I rise to investigate and recognise them as those I spotted late last year on some of the upper-grove striplings. I leave my coffee and set off on a quick recce. My search reveals the young olive trees to be covered in these small helmet-shaped flies. They have a metallic, space-age appearance and some have a few darker markings. Might they be a variety of moth with opaque wings? When I raise my hand they flit from the trees and settle on me, stinging my legs and arms. They are nesting in the crooks and angles of the young branches. I press my fingertips against the clustered larvae; they are white and powdery and sticky. And they are everywhere. On the roses, vines, tomatoes, but most worrying of all, on the olive trees, young and old. How have we not noticed them? I spend the stiflingly hot midday hours in the house, leafing through my various re
ference books in futile, drowsy attempts to pinpoint the precise identity of these bugs. I narrow the possibilities down to five insect families but cannot be more specific. I read that ‘insects are the most successful animals on earth. They account for more species than any other class: over a million have so far been identified, but it is thought that the true number may be between 5 and 10 million.’

  I close the book in despair. I need unbiased advice, and fast. If I could catch a few of these silver-grey, gossamer-winged beauties and bottle them, I could drive over to the co-operative with them and ask Alexandre or Jacques, but the critters are elusive. Finally, after patient hours, I manage to trap three in a washed yoghurt jar set aside by Quashia for such emergencies.