Last Days of the Bus Club

by Stewart, Chris

  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?

  CHAPTER TWO

  RICK STEIN AND THE WILD BOARS

  WHAT 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 mud
baths 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 sea 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.

  It was about three days later when the phone rang again. ‘Chris, it’s David. I been thinking about your place ever since that lunch, and I’ve come to the conclusion that we’ve got to do it. My man would never forgive me if we don’t. It’ll be the best part of the show. I know I said it couldn’t be done, but I reckon it can. Can you give us a couple of options for next month?’

  And thus it was that I embarked upon yet another career, mercifully short this time, as a guest television cook.

  What, I wondered, ought one to make for the delectation of Rick, not to mention the foodies who would be watching? Some ecological dish perhaps, composed of our own home-grown ingredients and cooked in a sustainable
way, using almond shells and dried rosemary. Fish was the thing of David’s man, but fish is one of the things that don’t grow on the farm. I crossed fish off the list.

  Over the coming weeks I tried various things out on Ana and Chloé, many of them heavily loaded in favour of the cucumber, for we were suffering from a glut of cucumbers that year. But you can only eat so many cucumber dishes, and we were pushing the limits: cucumber soup, cucumber sorbet, cucumbers fried, curried, baked and stuffed, even a detestable cucumber lemonade. But, as Ana pointed out, the viewers were hardly going to make a big effort to tune in to find out how to cook a cucumber.

  I abandoned the cucumber and cast about for something a bit sexier and more televisual. The pomegranate is of course about as televisual as a thing can be, but there’s only so much you can do with one, beyond eating its seeds. Pomegranate syrup is good, but the preparation of it makes for rather tedious viewing.

  Then, a week before we were due to receive David and his man, the hunters rang me to say that there was to be a montería that Sunday morning, and that we ought to keep the sheep shut in the stable because of the risk from the hunting dogs that they always, without fail, seem to leave behind them. Just a few hours later, they rang again, bubbling with manly pride, to say that, through some bizarre circumstances, they had actually managed to find a boar and shoot it, and that if I wanted some I could go up and collect it.