by Caro Feely
The Bristow family went home, leaving feelings of joy and gratitude in their wake. I had learned the Five Tibetans and with their help our farm work was so advanced we could look forward to our long-awaited trip to South Africa.
I had a dawn call with potential house-sitters Margherita, an Italian writer who preferred writing in English, and Nick, an Aussie photographer, who ran The Crowded Planet, a travel blog about their non-stop travel lives. They were looking forward to touching down in France for a few weeks to catch up on months of material from travelling. As I flicked through their blog I felt envious of their footloose lifestyle. Despite the bad reception of the call from their hotel in Indonesia, the tone of their blog and the brief conversation were enough to know we had found a match. I ticked 'confirm house-sitters' off my list. It would be a first for us to leave our precious farm for longer than a week but with Cécile on-site most workdays and this responsible pair we were feeling as sure about it as we could be.
CHAPTER 16
BACK TO OUR ROOTS
Our flight from Bordeaux to Paris was smooth but the lineup at Charles de Gaulle customs was a 200-metre snake seething with worried or plain impatient people. There was one booth open and three international flights to process. A 'jump the queue' feeder for first- and business-class passengers ensured that the rest of us moved at a wounded snail's pace. French citizens had a special automated queue that worked intermittently.
An Asian lady raced past us, saying politely, 'I am sorry but I am very late. I am going to miss my connection.'
We happily let her through – we had been there before. The airport official controlling the entrance clicked over, heels tapping officiously.
'Do the queue,' she said, her arm blocking the lady's way.
'But I will miss my flight.'
'I don't care. Do the line. I will call you.'
The woman went to the back, cowed, anxiety written all over her face and in her movements.
I felt like smacking the control freak. She clearly hadn't been notified that an angry perimenopausal monster woman was passing through. Violence seemed to come naturally to me as opposed to the expected sagesse of ageing.
Two minutes later, the official shouted, 'Anyone for Seoul, Korea?'
The anxious lady stepped forward, relief flooding her features. I felt myself relax.
After 12 hours in the air, our Cape Town airport experience could not have been more different. All the booths were working and the queue flew through. Perhaps they had got the notification.
The customs official welcomed us warmly, took our passports and noticed we were born in South Africa.
'Do you have South African passports?' he asked.
'No,' we replied. We had let them lapse when we lived in Dublin and never had the need to renew.
'Do you still have family here?' he asked.
'Yes, we're going to Durban to see family and friends and then back to Cape Town to do the same.'
I felt tears as I said it. A sense of homesickness and a deep sadness that I hadn't been back in time to see Mum Feely swelled up.
'Welcome back,' he said, giving me an empathetic look.
I swallowed the tears. I had been holding back the longing and deep memories of Africa for more than 20 years. I felt homesickness like physical pain along with a note of sadness that our daughters had not experienced growing up here.
'This will be the first passport stamp for Sophia and Ellie,' said Seán.
'Oh, the stamps aren't for children's passports; only for adults',' said the customs official. He gave them a wink, lightening the moment. 'But for this special case I will make an exception.' He stamped the passports with a flourish.
'Thank you,' I said, smile wide despite swimming eyes.
This generous spirit made Sophia and Ellie's first experience of Africa great, a place of kind heart and good humour.
We collected our bags and rolled on. We had to find the mobilephone shop, food, our next flight and deodorant – pronto, as the effects of almost 24 hours of transit were becoming obvious. At the phone shop the counter staff were inundated with clients, some super agitated. The staff kept their cool, their good humour eventually getting the better of grumpy travellers and their impatience. It was time to get on to African time and chill.
Phone in hand, we found a pharmacy for Mission Critical Deodorant. I waited with the bags while Seán went in with Sophia and Ellie.
A sixty-something white man walked into the pharmacy behind them.
'Have you got any ticks here?' he asked the lady on the counter.
'Huh?' said the young lady, looking uncertain of what he was on about.
'Have you got any ticks here?' he asked a little louder.
I could see her mind wondering if he was asking to buy ticks from the pharmacy. Or was he asking for some product she didn't know about? Or perhaps he was asking if there were ticks in the airport.
She shook her head. Her face said that she couldn't fathom how he could ask such a question. Of course there were no ticks here. If he was asking about South Africa in general then he was crazy too since, of course, in the veld (the bush) there were ticks all over Africa.
I imagined he was asking if he should buy a tick repellent but, given his manner, I could also see why the teller couldn't understand. I felt like helping translate but my attention was taken by Seán approaching the counter with sinister-looking canisters.
'No antiperspirant!' I shouted. 'Breast cancer in a can.'
Seán lifted his eyebrows and went back to the shelf. A few minutes later he exited the pharmacy.
'You had better go and look. I can't find any that aren't antiperspirant.'
I left Seán with the bags. Inside were rows and rows of deodorant that were all antiperspirant. I asked one of the advisers and she looked perplexed. We toothcombed the shelves and eventually found a roll-on that didn't contain antiperspirant for women but none for men. Seán risked a canister of antiperspirant deodorant for men. For someone who wouldn't let us use any cosmetics in the house and absolutely no perfume, it was a strange but necessary about-turn.
He sprayed himself liberally then sneezed.
Sophia approached and took a deep sniff.
'Hmmm,' she said. 'The true scent of a man.'
We all laughed.
It felt so good to be on holiday; I could feel the stress and responsibility of our everyday reality falling away like weights being taken off my shoulders. As we passed out of the international section of the airport a human-size sign announced, Welcome to the Mother City. A tsunami of missing this place – my original homeland, its familiar words and people – engulfed me, and tears flooded down my cheeks.
A few hours later we were in KwaZulu-Natal. We visited friends at their beach shack for a couple of days then went to Dad Feely in Howick. It was my first visit to the small house that he and Mum had built after selling the family house where I got to know the Feelys almost three decades before.
We revelled in being together. We visited Mum Feely's place, where her ashes were spread, a small river near Howick surrounded by fields and nature. Dad and Seán cleared the protea planted in her memory and Sophia and Ellie combed the river and surrounds for litter. We sat on a rock listening to the murmur of the river. It felt peaceful and good to be there.
We planted herbs – parsley, rosemary, thyme – and celery in Dad Feely's garden. We felt wonder at herds of impala, red hides against green scrub, at the twisted horns of kudu reaching to the sky. Our brief escape to a game farm was more than the riot of buck (gemsbok, blesbok, waterbuck, hartebeesbok, duiker, steenbok, blue wildebeest, black wildebeest, eland) and four of the big five (lion, rhino, elephant and buffalo); it was a precious shared moment. Sophia and Ellie seemed more outgoing here, more willing to take risks. We canoed a river and flew down zip lines strung across the largest indigenous forest in KwaZulu-Natal.
We left for Cape Town resolved to get back to see Dad Feely more often.
'Your South A
frican accent is much stronger here,' said Sophia.
'That's funny. Everyone keeps asking "so where are you guys from?" as if we're foreigners,' I said.
We were on our way to visit two biodynamic vineyards. A trip to a winegrowing area was an opportunity to research ideas for where to take our wine estate.
The Waterkloof wine estate's glass-fronted restaurant was suspended over their winery and vine-covered hillsides, looking on to a panorama of mountains and sea. It was worth the visit for the views but with their food and wine it was an unmissable sublime experience. I took notes and photos feeling inspired by everything they were doing, from their horses in the vineyard to their winemaking facilities and restaurant. It was a large operation powered by a significant workforce and massive investment, in many ways a world away from our small vineyard in France, but their Circumstance Sauvignon Blanc, despite the different soil (granite and sandstone; very different to our limestone and flint stone), was the closest we had ever tasted to our pure Sauvignon Blanc Sincérité.
Our next visit was a little more our scale. Johan Reyneke was a wiry, tanned surfer and wine farmer based between Somerset West and Stellenbosch. Seán's grandparents' wine farm, sold decades before, was minutes away. After introductions in the tasting room, chat came easily.
'You know, when I was studying philosophy at Stellenbosch I couldn't get a job at a local restaurant because of my dreadlocks, so I got a job as a vineyard labourer instead,' Johan said. 'That was how I started. But let's go for a walk and look at the cows rather than just talking. I almost love them more than the vines now.'
We stepped outside.
'Look at that,' said Johan, pointing to a window lying on the grass in front of the building. 'I had a group of visitors this morning. One lady asked if she could let some air in and pow! She pushed the whole window out. I've never seen anything like it.' He laughed.
A monster dog came loping up and Johan took the cue.
'A word of warning,' he said. 'He has big chops and he's a farm dog. He slobbers, and it's not just the saliva – it's saliva and chicken shit and cowpat and a bit of hay thrown in. So watch out. Also, girls,' he said to Sophia and Ellie, who were stroking him, missing their animals at home. 'Just be careful with him. We've never had a problem but last week we had a lady that said she was a dog whisperer and she tried that on him and he went nuts.'
He laughed again – an easy, relaxed laugh – then led us down a dusty red track towards the cattle kraal (enclosure).
'There they come. You see the dust cloud? That's the cows coming in for their sweets. They've had a day of eating tough boring grass; now they'll come and eat some of the post-pressing leftover grapes. They love it. It's like candy after dinner.'
The view across the vineyards to the mountains of Stellenbosch changed colour as we walked, the sky progressing from bright blue to cornflower as the sun dropped lower in the sky.
'When I started farming we farmed with chemicals like everyone said you should. But using weedkiller and pesticides on your back in a backpack is not pleasant. So I decided we would stop using them. But it was bad. We had all the bugs and disease that you can imagine in our vines.'
'That was our experience too,' I said. 'The first two years of organic conversion were hell – I call it "the valley of despair".'
'Just so. Jislaaik. Anyway luckily I got talking to a lady in Wellington that was doing biodynamics. I tried the solutions she proposed and they worked.'
'That is exactly how we started biodynamics,' I said. 'We needed to solve our downy mildew. The organic wasn't working and biodynamics helped us solve a practical problem. Then we found it brought so much more. It impacts every part of our life, not just our farming.'
'Yes, it's about the balance. You see the vineyard over there?' Johan pointed to the opposite hillside. 'The one that's red? It's a vineyard attacked by the leaf-roll virus. It's a sickness that is spread by the mielie bug.'
'Aphid?' I said.
'Yes, exactly,' he said.
'That sounds like it's transmitted in a similar way to the flavescence dorée virus we have in France,' said Seán. 'We saw a lot of the leaf-roll virus in Franschhoek a few days ago.'
'Yes, it's a real problem in the Cape. But you know it's all about the balance. So, like I said, we used to weedkill all the stuff on the ground but in fact this aphid prefers dandelions to vines so if we leave the weeds there's no more leaf-roll virus. Of course, we have to control the weeds or our vineyard would be a wilderness. Those sick vineyards aren't ours by the way.' Johan laughed. He sounded like me when I disowned the chemically farmed vineyards below us.
'Anyway,' continued Johan, 'for me vine-growing is about fertilising the soil, controlling the weeds, managing the insects and pests, and preventing disease.'
I felt a smile breaking out on my face at how similar our discourses on the vineyard were.
'So when it comes to the fertiliser part, we used to spend about ten thousand euro a year on fertiliser; now we don't spend a cent. We have our cows instead and they generate income for us too. In the low period of the year the sale of an ox or two fills the gap. We use their dung, our wine waste and grass from old thatched roofs to make our compost – you can see the heaps over there,' he said, pointing across the cattle pasture. 'We feed the soil in autumn with the compost, spreading it by hand. Then in late spring we bring the ducks into the vineyard to eat the pests, and to attract the ducks we place a small dose of compost next to each vine. The ducks don't eat vines but they do eat grapes so we have to watch out. To break down heavy kitchen waste we use Australian red wrigglers in old vine barrels. We have researchers coming to study us now. The life in our soil isn't twenty per cent better than the chemical farmers'; it's nine hundred per cent. That's not my estimate by the way – that's what a recent group of academics found.'
He was passionate about his farm and proud that his tenacity had paid off.
'How many cows?' I asked.
'About forty at the moment for thirty-seven hectares.'
As I noted Johan's numbers on a scrap of paper from my purse, I felt a drop on my foot. I looked down. The chop monster was standing over me, gobs of sticky saliva drooling off his massive lips. I stepped back.
'For me it's about good farming. I try to get the balance. It's a tussle between building the soil and getting yield. One year I might farm for yield because I need it but then the following year I need to give back to the soil to bring back the balance,' said Johan. 'We'll check in on the winery on our way to the tasting room.'
The track to the winery hugged a vineyard full of bright-green happiness and verve, very different to some of the conventional vines we had seen. Johan waved to a crew member, sporting a Vine Hugger T-shirt, displaying the same easy manner he had with us.
'There used to be pressure between the picking team and the processing team. For the pickers it's all about speed and for the processors it's about precision. So we bought two refrigerated containers. Now when the fruit is picked we stack it in there and it waits. No problem. The guys can take as long as they need. Let's go and taste some wine.'
Back in the whitewashed room Johan poured us a sample of his Sauvignon Blanc.
'Johan, may I have a wine list so I can track the wines we taste?' I said.
'Sure,' he said. 'If I can find one. I don't often do the tastings these days.'
As he turned the back of his neck was like leather; it was clear he spent his days out there and not in here.
'Our wines are cheap,' he said.
'Never say "cheap"!' I said. 'They're great value.'
'Cheap. Too cheap. Jislaaik! Lekker!' he said, laughing and looking at the wine list before handing it over to me. 'The prices have changed again! They've gone up since yesterday. Soon they won't be cheap any more. Yeeeow. The Cabernet is eight hundred rand. I've never seen that wine or tasted it!' He was laughing hard.
'Good marketing,' said Seán. 'Sounds like something Caro would do.'
We all laughed; he
was joking and so was Seán.
'What's this logo that I've seen on all the wine bottles in SA?' I asked, pointing to a sticker of a sugarbird on a protea that was placed over the screw cap.
'That's the biodiversity and wine initiative. It's a voluntary programme to promote conservation-minded farming practices that will protect nature. The seal above it is Sustainable Wine South Africa – it's the guarantee of IPW, Integrated Production of Wine. IPW is a "sustainability" label, a small step. You can still use herbicide but you have to think about it and lower your dose. It's not ideal but it's a start. It gets people who aren't organic thinking about their chemical usage. Each year they tighten the rules. Slowly, slowly, catchy monkey.'
'It sounds like lutte raisonnée, the reasoned fight, and the Haute Valeur Environnementale ('High Environmental Value') we have in France,' I said. 'I don't like it because it's confusing for the consumer. The lovely HVE label makes them think it's organic when it's not; it can still be packed with pesticide residues. But I see what you mean – it's making the bulk of the pack, those that might not have made any effort on ecology otherwise, move forward.'
