The Almond Blossom Appreciation Society

by Chris Stewart

The bigger of the two Guardia grabbed the runner, heaved himself into the cockpit, and sat on top of Paco. I could hear the poor man’s shrieks above the sound of the roaring engine. I grasped the runner with my good arm and tried to pull myself into the cabin, but I hadn’t the strength. The other Guardia, meanwhile, got his shoulder under my butt and, with a great heave and grunt, boosted me over the rim of the cockpit door, where I tumbled helplessly into the cabin, landing with an agonising thump. I screamed at the impact… but found that my arm had suddenly, magically, re-attached itself to my shoulder. The pain had disappeared, too. I wiggled the arm this way and that. It was a little stiff, but it worked. The Guardia had, entirely by accident, relocated it.

  I grinned like a lunatic as my rescuer squeezed in behind me. And then, with a lot of grunting and wriggling, so that everyone was sitting on at least one other person, we set off across the mountains towards Granada. I watched, euphoric at the sudden absence of pain, and thrilled as the snowy peaks slid beneath the machine and the world fell away in folds of blue to the gorges and valleys of the Sierra. Poor Paco, squashed beneath the enormous policeman, was in too much agony to take in anything at all, but for me, well, these vistas and the miraculous release from pain seemed almost worth the trauma.

  In a very short time we found ourselves in the hospital in Granada. The doctor took one look at Paco, grabbed his arm, twisted it and pushed. Paco’s eyes nearly burst from his face. ‘God, it’s gone! The pain’s gone!’ he cried.

  They trussed us up like a pair of oven-ready chickens and told us to take it easy for a bit, which we felt inclined to do anyway. Then we signed a form and showed our Social Security cards. ‘How much are we going to owe for the helicopter?’ I asked a little nervously.

  ‘Nada,’ said the nurse. ‘It’s free. All mountain rescue is paid for by the Junta de Andalucía.’ I was deeply impressed.

  Early in the New Year I drove to Granada for a hospital check-up. My shoulder had felt extremely sore in the run-up to Christmas, and was made worse by the need to chop olive and almond logs for the fire. Olive is wonderful and burns like oak, with a slight cedar-like scent, but almond is the best of all and burns with the heat of coal. We were thankful for both as the temperature continued to drop. By the end of December we had lost almost all our young orange trees, the new Valencia Lates that we’d painstakingly planted and nurtured simply drooped and turned black amongst the glittering fields of frozen alfalfa.

  Arriving in the city I parked the car by the river and, cuddling my arm, walked up the main thoroughfare towards the centre. A dense throng of people, many clad in the furs and Loden coats which are the preferred winter attire of the Granada bourgeoisie, was surging along beneath the great plane trees of the Paseo del Salón. The nearer I got to the centre, the thicker the crowd grew, and I shrank back instinctively to the side of the pavement to protect my bad arm from the jostling. Something was going on, but what?

  As I was swept round the corner of Reyes Católicos into the Plaza del Carmén, I realised: it was the Día de la Toma, an annual celebration that recalls the handing over of the keys of the city to Isabela and Ferdinand in 1492 by Boabdil, the last Moorish king of Granada. This commemoration also provides a convenient excuse for Granada’s ultra-Right to get onto the streets and try and drum up a bit of support for their repellent ideas. Dotted amongst the well-heeled and tightly packed Granadinos were groups of young men and women in black outfits waving Spanish flags and jabbing the air with placards scrawled with racist slogans. Stalls erected round the edges of the square were decked with anti-immigrant posters and leaflets, while a few steps away from where I was standing a pale, clammy-faced young man thrust his arm out in a Nazi salute and stood interminably to attention.

  I have to admit that the atmosphere was not particularly threatening; rather than any incipient violence, there was a sense of anticipation, as if something really exciting was about to happen. And then there was a ripple in the crowd, and the event was upon us: the military band had arrived. I peered around the leather jacket in front of me to catch a glimpse, and to my surprise – as the Right are supposed to be good at this sort of thing – found one of the sloppiest, most inept marching bands imaginable slouching dully past.

  No sooner had they raised their tubas and euphoniums for the first inharmonious blasts than the upper doors of the town hall burst open like a cuckoo clock and a host of dignitaries staggered from their cocktails out into the freezing cold on the balconies. A howl of approbation rose from the eager crowd as a small, dark, top-hatted man on the centre balcony began to wave a huge Spanish flag emblazoned with the heraldic arms of Granada.

  ‘Y GRANADA?’ shouted the top hat.

  ‘QUÉ?’ howled the horrible host.

  ‘Y GRANADA?’ he repeated.

  ‘QUÉ?’ came the rejoinder.

  ‘Y GRANADA?’ one last time.

  ‘QUÉ-É-É?’ they roared back.

  It was all very baffling – ‘And Granada?’ ‘What?’ was the limit of the exchange – but this was the climax all right, and, as the band strolled off out of the square, the ranks of the Right headed for the bars. Puzzled and rather dispirited, I continued on my way to the hospital.

  SUMMONED BY BELLS

  WE HAD ALREADY EXPERIENCED a severe drought during our time at El Valero, but the dry spring and summer that followed the ola de frío seemed harder and more disoncerting. People talked of little else: of how reservoirs throughout Andalucía had sunk to desperate levels, and mountain springs that had never run dry in living memory were reduced to the feeblest of drips. In the vega between our valley and Órgiva, farmers had ceased to irrigate as the river dried up and the acequias with it, and in Granada province there were towns that had been rationed to a few hours of water a week. Yet still the sprinklers played all night long on the golf courses of the coastal strip.

  Summer, and a drought-stricken summer in particular, brings with it the prospect of bush fires. Many of the aromatic plants that cover the hills of Andalucía (the lavenders, thymes, artemisia, rosemary and cistus) are rich in combustible oils, and at the slightest spark will burst into flames… and for centuries past they have been allowed to do so, as the shepherds who graze the wilder terrain fire the scrub in order to rejuvenate their grazing grounds. There are those who would have it that fire is a part of the natural cycle; it enriches the poor earth with potash from its ashes and allows the countless seeds that lie dormant beneath the soil some light and space to germinate.

  But these days bush fires – even bonfires – are tightly controlled throughout Andalucía, and prohibited in the summer months, for the damage they have caused in recent years has been immense. It doesn’t matter a hoot about the loss of fast-growing scrub, but when forest is burnt, it is an altogether different matter. For a tree to survive in the harsh conditions of the mountains of Andalucía is little short of a miracle – and, given the susceptibility of the land to erosion, and the dearth of forestry, every single tree needs to be protected.

  It’s a rare year when we don’t see a fire from the farm. First you smell the smoke on the hot air, then cast around until eventually you catch a blue-brown haze shimmering above a distant hill or at night the sky glowing red above black mountains. Then the helicopters arrive. A faint chopping becomes a roaring that echoes across the mountains and fills the valleys, as the machine races overhead dangling a great orange bottle containing a thousand kilos of water. Right into the heart of the fire the pilot flies, seeking to drop his load at the very root, then back to the reservoir to refill. For a big fire a further helicopter will turn up, and there’s a powerful biplane, too, that comes to help out. Then, if things start to get really out of hand, they send in a couple of twin-engined flying boats and a huge fourengined aircraft.

  The noise of all this echoing amongst the mountains sounds almost apocalyptic, and there is an undeniable drama to this spectacle of men and their amazing machines pitted against the fire, to say nothing of the poor bloody infantry – thos
e who fight on the ground amongst the flames, with brooms and buckets. The risk to these men is appalling: that summer, eleven of them were killed in a fire to the north, near Guadalajara, when the wind turned and drove the flames amongst them. So the sight of a fire, which at night has a kind of terrible beauty as it illuminates the mountains, fills everyone with despair, and with anger against the perpetrators. For it has to be said that the majority of bush fires are started intentionally, for insurance payouts, politics, even in vengeance upon neighbours, as well as to improve grazing.

  And there is also the constant threat that a barbecue or bonfire will throw out a stray spark. This happened to me some years back, and nearly frightened me out of my wits.

  It was in April, a month that is sufficiently close to winter not to have to worry too much about fires – and, in my defence, it was a year or two before the controls were imposed. I was tidying up a corner of the farm down by the Cádiar River; sometimes the chaos that is the natural order of things in the countryside gets to me and I feel compelled to try and impose some sort of order. I made a heap of dry canes and bits of old fig – you can’t use fig as firewood as it gives off no heat; just a pungent, headache-inducing smoke – and set light to it. It was only a small heap and I reckoned that I had been pretty careful about siting my bonfire, but even so, as it caught, the faintest zephyr began to ruffle the leaves of the canes. Almost before I knew it the flames moved into the long grass, spread, set light to a bush and licked at the stems of the canebrake. The zephyr became a breeze and the flames became a fire.

  Panic seized me: I could see things would be out of control within seconds. I searched wildly about for something to carry water with, and spotted a bucket dangling from a branch. Thanking Providence, I grabbed it and leapt down the bank to the river, scooped some water, raced back and hurled it at the fire. Then, without even stopping to see if it had done any good, dived back down to the river. Like a madman, I leapt to and fro with my bucket, stumbling and panting, in a frenzy of terror lest the fire consume my farm.

  I was fortunate, for within a few minutes a lucky bucket of water doused the root of the fire and the flames were reduced to wisps of smoke and a sodden sludge of ashes. But the memory – the panic, the smoke – remains sharp and clear.

  One of the more distressing manifestations of drought is the hardship that livestock suffer. It’s a popular belief that sheep and goats will eat anything, which holds true when they’re desperately hungry, but like any other organism they have their preferred foods, and will only move on to the less agreeable stuff when these are used up.

  Last year, as the dry summer advanced, grazing grew desperately scarce, to the extent that I started thinking about feeding my flock with alfalfa, in spite of the fact that it was all we had to see them through the coming winter. It’s an almost fundamental folly, though, to feed your reserves before it’s absolutely necessary, and I hung on, pushing the flock to forage high up the mountain in search of every last edible scrap.

  Domingo, with a flock several times the size of mine, didn’t have the option of feeding them; it would have been far too expensive. So I was surprised, and impressed, to see them maintaining their good condition. This Domingo achieved by devoting himself singlemindedly to his flock, drawing on a deep fund of skill and knowledge. He would be up at first light every day, leading the sheep off to ever more distant pastures where he knew some scant reserve of moisture might provide a little grazing, where the tortuous orientation of a hillside protected its slope from the sun’s harsh rays, or where he had noticed a stand of plants that would nourish his poor charges for an hour or so.

  On through the long, hot days of summer, Domingo sweltered and toiled at the head of his great tripping mass of sheep, making his way over the hillside on his nameless bay horse and accompanied by the stalwart Chica. It was amazing to see how well the young collie, born and bred in the misty bogs of the Low Countries, coped with the fierce heat, and I began to suspect Domingo of taking special care to find her water and shade. For the flock he cut branches of eucalyptus and poplar, or felled whole canebrakes in the river so they could browse on the unappetising fibrous leaves. He took them to places no shepherd had ever been, high on the horrible southern flanks of Campuzano, among the crags and the pines, where they gorged upon unfamiliar high-growing plants: juniper, cotton lavender and the pink rock rose Cistus albidus – plants they would never normally see in their usual grazing grounds, let alone eat.

  If they ranged too far to get home, Domingo would sleep on the hard ground beneath the stars, surrounded by his woolly companions. He carried a mobile phone with him so he could let Antonia know where he was, in case she should worry. The sheep, as I said, looked as good and fat as I had ever seen them, but it was the most exhausting regime.

  The old men shook their heads bleakly as one dry week followed another and prophesied worse times on the way. That’s what a drought does: it brings on uncertainty, fear and depression, even in these fortunate lands where we are sheltered from the reality of crop failure and subsequent hunger or starvation.

  And still it didn’t rain. I took a party of walkers up into the high mountain meadows only to find that none of the flowers were blooming, and where a thick cover of grass and grazing plants should have been forming there was only dust and stones, populated by thousands of the little Sierra Nevada beetles.

  I thought of my shepherd friend, Antonio Rodríguez, who grazes his flock on these high pastures. For him things would be even harder than for Domingo, whose flock inhabited a world far beneath the high mountain grazing. For up here the intensity of the sun and the icy winds had withered all but the toughest and spikiest plants – grazing that the most famished sheep would find hard to stomach. It was a depressing thought, especially as Antonio had only recently managed to rebuild his flock after the results of a blood test for brucellosis had forced him to slaughter nearly two-thirds of his animals. But that’s the way it is with shepherding: occasionally there’s a windfall of one sort or another, but mostly the shepherd lives at the whim of cruel and heedless Nature.

  Down at El Valero, by some amazing mechanism of nature, rosemary and anthyllis flowered, but there was almost nothing else for the sheep to eat, and little by little they started to get restless. We hoped desperately that they wouldn’t remember just how good the grazing was on the other side of the river, though I had a nagging fear that once the water level was low enough they’d be off, following some embedded memory, to lay waste our neighbours’ vegetable gardens and fruit trees. Sheep, as I’ve often said, are obtuse creatures, but when times are hard they can turn into raiders of audacity and cunning.

  I shouldn’t have been worried about the welfare of our neighbours’ vegetables, however, for our sheep’s designs turned out to be targeted much closer to home. It was four in the morning, on yet another hot, hot night and I was fast asleep. I was so deeply asleep, in fact, that when the sound of bells dimly percolated into the murk of my consciousness, I assumed it was a dream and rolled over. Later, as the edge of light sliding down the shutters became sharper, the sound came again and this time the dogs began to bark.

  I leapt from the bed and rushed outside. There were sheep everywhere, frenetically devouring the plants that grow round the house. The dogs shot through the door barking; the sheep panicked, and rocketed as one down the steps. With Big and Bumble at my heel, I hurtled buck naked – no time to bother with clothes – in pursuit. The flock thundered through the vegetable patch, out by the pool and hurled themselves over the stone wall, down to that part of the farm that belongs to them.

  I turned and looked at what had previously been the lovingly tended fruits of Ana’s labours. It was hardly a catastrophe on the scale of earthquakes and hurricanes, almost farcical in fact (‘SHEEP RAVAGE VEGETABLE PATCH’). But it put me in shock, this orgy of herbivorous gluttony that had just taken place. The sheep had been eating Ana’s organic fruit and vegetables, and the flowers that were planted around them, all night lon
g. The only things that had survived were the courgettes, which, it would seem, are abhorrent to sheep. The rest was just a miserable mess of trampled and half-masticated plants, spattered here and there with glistening cagarrutas, sheep turds.

  I stood there in the first light of day, still wearing nothing but my boots, slack-jawed and appalled by the damage, and wondering how the hell I was going to break the news to Ana. But Ana was already there, stooping amongst the remains of her raspberries. She had followed me down, and as she looked about her I could hear that she was sobbing. I put my arms around her. I couldn’t think of anything to say. What would you say?

  There was little she could say, either, though I worried at once as the words trickled out: ‘I can’t put this right… I can’t do it all over again… All that work and… and there’s nothing left…’ This was so unlike Ana – the stoic among us who always kept going, who always saw the funny side.

  What was exercising me immediately, though, was to establish where the wretched sheep had got in, and to fix things so that it wouldn’t happen again. The whole lamentable episode had, I was bitterly aware, been my fault: I was the one who had delayed feeding the alfalfa to the sheep, and I was the one responsible for the fencing. I examined the boundary minutely, looking for tracks in the dust, or wool on the thorns, but the fencing was all intact. I couldn’t make it out. There was one possibility though. We had built a high stone wall to support the terraced garden that surrounds the pool. The entrance to this terrace was contrived according to a drawing I had seen of the fortified entrance to the crusader castle of Crac des Chevaliers in Syria, which was conceived to discourage attacking armies, who would find themselves hemmed in amongst stone walls with defenders pouring boiling oil and other substances inimical to their well-being upon their heads. I figured this ought to scotch any incursions planned by mere sheep into that part of the farm we had designated as our garden.