Last Days of the Bus Club (6 page)

Parking on the edge of the track up on Cerro Negro, I set out on foot for the final stretch to Rogelio’s farm. Save
the distant drone of a brush-cutter and the sound of goat bells coming up from the valley, it was quiet up there, far from the constant rushing of the rivers. A few flies kept me company. I pulled the brim of my hat down to keep off the glare of the midday sun.

I called out loudly as I approached the house, this being the accepted etiquette for approaching an isolated
cortijo
. Shortly Rogelio emerged from round the corner of the house, holding an armful of laundry and a bag of clothes pegs. His wife was having trouble with her legs, apparently, and was bedridden, so Rogelio was now her full-time carer, and did all the housework as well as tending the farm. All this at eighty-two, and at harvest time he was still
climbing
high into the big old olive trees to beat down those last reluctant olives. He told me that he had picked over three tons by himself the previous winter. With a big smile he showed me the peg bag, which had a rather pretty doll’s dress sewn up at the bottom and a coathanger fixed to the top, so you could hang it on the line while you worked. It was an unexpected little masterpiece of intermediate
technology
, and typical of the witty and ingenious shifts of the rural poor of the Alpujarras and no doubt the rest of the country, too.

‘Cristóbal,’ he said, turning to me with a weather-beaten smile. ‘It’s good to see you, but what brings you all the way up here. It can’t be to waste your time talking to an old man like me, surely?’

‘But it is, Rogelio. It is. You remember that story you told me when I was last here, the one about your mother’s last days and the great debt you had to repay?’

‘I do,’ he said, with a peg in his mouth, as he skilfully smoothed the creases from the crumpled dress.

‘Well, I think it’s such a wonderful story that I would like to write it down and perhaps include it in a book with other stories like it, and I wanted to ask you if you would have any objections?’

‘Why would I object, Cristóbal? So long as I don’t come out of it too badly, as a villain for example, or a snake …’

‘Oh, no, no, of course not, Rogelio; in fact you come out of it rather as a hero. I’ve already written it down and I think I’ve painted a rather nice portrait of you … and a true one. But I’d like to clarify a few details. Would it be OK if I ask you some questions and write down the answers?’

‘Why, of course, Cristóbal. I have nothing in particular to do and nowhere to be going, so why don’t we do it right now? You’re very welcome.’

This is what I love about people like Rogelio: they’re
positive
, agreeable and easy; nothing’s a problem. He beckoned me over to a couple of low, rush-seated chairs in the deep green shade of a carob tree. We talked for a time of cooking – Rogelio, unfashionably, likes his food very well done, more or less carbonised – then of washing machines and their various merits and defects, then of the electricity that powers them, then we moved on to a critical appraisal of a vintage bulldozer that his neighbour had just been cornered into buying. I was itching to get down to the nub of the business, but it doesn’t do to be too hasty: one must deal with the social niceties first. Well, the social niceties kept us at it for the best part of forty-five minutes until finally I reached into my bag and drew out the printed pages.

‘Let me read you what I already wrote. You’ll see that you come out of it pretty well.’

Rogelio turned in his chair and leaned forward on his stick to listen. I unfolded the paper and started to translate.
He nodded his head with a smile at the mention of the five thousand pesetas that his farm had cost him.

I read on: ‘We lived in a very remote spot, just the three of us, my mother my brother and me …’

‘That’s wrong,’ he interjected. ‘We were five children; my eldest sister was seventeen when our mother died.’

‘Er … oh, er, that rather changes things. I thought you said you only had one brother.’ I was a bit shaken by this revelation that I had got one of the most fundamental aspects of the story completely wrong. Could my Spanish really have been so bad when I first heard this tale? Still, it was a terrific story, and perhaps it could still be retrieved.

I continued reading: ‘We didn’t even have any neighbours; it was that far out …’

‘No, it wasn’t,’ interrupted Rogelio. ‘We lived on the edge of the village; there were lots of neighbours.’

I stopped and looked up at him. The carpet was being pulled out from under my feet. The wonderful story that I had cherished for so long was slowly falling to pieces. If there were neighbours, then the drama and pathos of the story would be considerably diminished. I started to feel a little dejected. How could I have got these things wrong?

A little less confidently now, I read on: ‘The doctors told my mother that she would not leave the hospital but would die there very soon. Her last wish was to see her sons before she died …’

‘No,’ said Rogelio. ‘We never went to Granada. We never saw our mother alive again after she went to the city.’

I lowered the printed pages, and stared at him. ‘And the business with the taxi driver … and the eight thousand pesetas that you spent your whole childhood repaying? What about that?’

‘What taxi driver?’

I was clutching at straws now: ‘The taxi driver who took you to Granada to visit your mother in hospital …’

‘I just told you: we never went to Granada. As for the eight thousand pesetas, well, yes, after my mother’s death we owed eight thousand pesetas, to people who had lent us money or helped us out … and we vowed to pay every last
duro
of it. In fact, we paid it all off within the year. It was a hell of a good year and we had a terrific harvest of figs.’

Well, I’ll tell you now that I was mighty pleased that things had turned out so well for Rogelio and his siblings in the end, but there was a disconsolate feeling welling up in me too, at the utter rubbishing of my cherished tale. I think I must have let the disappointment show in my face.

‘During the war the soldiers shot our dog,’ said Rogelio, as if in recompense for my lost tale. ‘And it was a really good dog, too. But they shot everybody’s dogs so they wouldn’t give them away by barking.’

This was scant comfort, to say the least. How could I have made such a hash of the story? But as I continued along the Cerro Negro track to fetch our dogs, I mused over how my version of Rogelio’s story was pretty typical of the way things were in rural Spain in the long, bad years after the Civil War. So I feel it may be worth sharing both versions with you, patient reader; and I hope it allows you some sense of the difficulties we anthropological ethnographers face.

A
S
J
ESÚS
AND
B
ERNARDO HAD PREDICTED
, Chloé’s last school year passed in a flash and, as she was often stopping over with friends in town, even my last attendance of the Bus Club came and went unheralded. But life was moving forward. Chloé had put her name down to study at Granada University, partly because this was where most of her
pandilla
were heading, but also, to our delight, because it was one of the few places in Spain where you can study both French and Chinese.

As Confucius himself might have reflected, there’s no knowing how things will pan out. Ana and I had both
travelled
in China before Chloé was born and we were thrilled by the possibility of going back there to visit a daughter studying Mandarin. And given the virtual demise of the Spanish job market, we figured that this skill might give her some kind of leg-up. But before embarking on this, Chloé had another rite of passage to negotiate – her first proper job. This was to be a summer of working back in Britain with some friends of ours who make and sell ice cream.  

And so it was, in the Welsh drizzle of early summer, that I pulled into Martin and Juliet’s farm drive, near Abergavenny. For the next three months Chloé was going to travel with these friends around the music festivals of Britain, camping in fields and selling their indescribably delicious sheep’s milk ice cream to overheated
festival-goers
. When they had suggested the job she had jumped at the chance – what teenager would pass up a summer of endless days of ice cream and live music and dance tents? I could tell, though, from her quietness on the journey down, that she was a little apprehensive: there was something just a touch subdued in her manner, or perhaps it was simply her English persona rising to surface above her Spanish, which tends more to the noisy and gregarious.

Nonetheless, Chloé was also clearly impatient for me to be on my way. This was her first job, her first move away from home, and she didn’t need me crowding her pitch, arming her with advice and catching up with old friends. It was strange to reflect that my daughter had been edging along the branch for the last year or so and that now, with a minimum of flurry and flap, she was flying off into the wide world outside El Valero. As I drove back to London, I stared at the windscreen wipers as they first swept aside the massing droplets and then, with the inevitable downpour, shelved water from one side to the other, and a feeling of utter desolation settled over me. What on earth was going on? I had just been joking with friends and hugging my daughter goodbye, and all of a sudden I wanted to weep.

I tried to focus instead on Chloé’s excitement at setting out into the world and beginning work, and as I did so the memories started to drift to the surface of a time over forty
years ago when I too was making my first shaky start in the adult world of gainful employment.

It was not yet five, and still pitch-dark outside, as I sat in the brightly lit kitchen of my parents’ house, waiting, mouth open and staring at the clock. The house was silent apart from the humming and gurgling of household
appliances
. The rest of the family were, very sensibly, still asleep. My mother’s poodles lay in their respective baskets looking at me and wondering what was going on. I wondered what was going on, too. It was a new day dawning for me, my first day of work – if you don’t count newspaper delivery.

My parents had beggared themselves sending me to an expensive school, with high hopes of some glittering future. Things were not looking good, though, from an academic point of view; I had never been that studious, and had scraped by without taking things too seriously. The best school report I had ever received, said: ‘He has endeared himself to me by the subtlety with which he makes himself a nuisance.’ Life was different back then: there didn’t seem to be the urgency that there is now … and teachers had the time to be thoughtful and witty when writing disparaging reports.

A man called Denny Scott had landed me this first summer job. He lived in a bachelor flat around the corner from us, near Horsham, and devoted his leisure time to the tending of orchids. He was a most peculiar man, and drove an open-topped sports car in shirt sleeves all through the icy days of winter, only deigning to put the roof up as the heat of summer approached. At a cocktail party he had
insinuated to my parents that he could get me a job as a builder’s labourer for A.E. Farr of Westbury, Wilts, for whom he – rather unaccountably, as he seemed to have pots of money – worked as an occasional quantity surveyor.

This was a far cry from what my parents had intended for me, but from the effusiveness of their gratitude you’d have thought he had offered me a fast track through the Foreign Office. They were anxious at the time that I was about to fritter away the summer and blight my future with dreams of rock stardom, as a result of being the drummer of a school band. A few weeks of five and a half days of
gut-busting
labour for sixteen pounds cash in hand ought to drive such foolish notions from my adolescent brain. For my own part I was delighted: it was sixteen pounds more than anyone else was willing to give me, and, who could say, it might even cover the cost of buying my own drum kit. The band was called The Garden Wall, later Genesis.

‘Brunt will pick you up at the bottom of the drive at half past five,’ Mr Scott had informed me in his clipped patrician tones. ‘Don’t be late. I’m giving you a big chance here.’

As the hands of the clock moved towards five-fifteen, I slid off the kitchen stool, gathered my lunchbag and slipped quietly out of the house into the greying dark. An owl hooted, the gravel of the drive crunched loudly beneath my feet. I pulled my coat around me against the fresh damp air – it can be like that at the beginning of July – and savoured the silence of the morning. Not a light shone from the windows; a few dwindling stars and the first grey of the coming dawn lit my way. I felt a delicious and entirely novel sense of superiority over all those idle slobs who lingered still in the warmth of their respective beds, wrapped in unproductive slumber.

I stepped out onto the road wondering a little
apprehensively
what work would be like, conscious that this was a rite of passage, that I was moving at last from childhood into adulthood. I was excited, too, at the prospect of new experiences and people, new knowledge and skills. I was sixteen years old and bursting with dreams and hope.

At the end of the drive I could make out a car parked, its engine bubbling quietly. Inside, softly illuminated by the glow of a pipe, sat a short man with a hard hat on. I opened the passenger door and leaned in. ‘Would you be Mister Brunt?’

The occupant slowly turned his head, considered me for a moment, drew deep from his pipe, and in a rich Somerset burr said: ‘I would. Jim Brunt’s the name. Call me Jim. In you get; we don’t want to be late now.’

‘I’m Chris,’ I said offering my hand to shake.

Jim looked for some time at the hand before shaking it, slowly and firmly. I climbed into the smoke-filled interior, and slowly, ever so slowly, Jim urged the old car out onto the empty road.

After a few minutes of painfully slow progress I felt the need to say something, to break the silence. I know it was only five thirty in the morning, but I had just walked briskly in the cold for fifteen minutes and was wide awake.

‘Pleased to meet you, Jim,’ I said breezily.

He seemed unaware that I had said anything. But after a considerable lapse of time, he removed one hand from the wheel, extracted the pipe from his mouth, and rather like a turtle, from beneath the carapace of the hard yellow hat, turned slowly towards me, considered my fatuous
conversational
gambit for a moment, and returned in silence to his earlier position.

For a while I contented myself with looking through the side windows, where the first light of the day was bringing a little colour to the fields and trees. Then I eased back in my seat and tried to doze. But no, it was all too exciting. I tried again: ‘How far is it to the job … you know, the site?’ I wasn’t quite sure what to call it.

I looked over at Jim as he commenced the process of replying. Out came the pipe, the head swivelled towards me, a moment’s reflection.

‘About forty-five minutes.’

I thought about this for a bit. ‘So what time do we start work, then?’

A pained expression passed across his features. ‘Eight.’

I considered this information and looked at my watch. It didn’t seem to square up: in forty-five minutes it would be only half-past six. Why would a person want to get to work an hour and a half before it started? Obviously I didn’t know much about the nature of work, but this didn’t make any sense at all.

I decided to venture another question. ‘Um, Jim?‘

A withering look.

‘Why are we getting there so early, then?’

Jim frowned and changed gear to negotiate a hill. He sucked deep on his pipe and shifted from one buttock to the other. It appeared that he hadn’t heard. We kept silent for a while as we passed through Ockley and Beare Green, then turned off towards Abinger Hammer and Friday Street. The early morning light began to flood across the fields and woods, and the North Downs loomed before us.

Finally Jim had an answer, and he put in motion the mechanism to deliver it. ‘I tell you what, Chris … I likes to get up an’ breathe the fresh air ’fore any other bugger’s
’ad a chance to fart in it.’ And he permitted himself a little chuckle. I chuckled too, to show that I was not above
enjoying
such indelicacy, and for a few miles we chuckled on, both getting the most out of this sagacious little conceit.

At half-past six, give or take a minute or two, we pulled up in the middle of a beech wood. There was a brick bridge over a single-track railway and, in a small clearing by the road, a big green wooden hut. Jim fumbled with the keys of the hut and disappeared inside. I stood outside for a bit, breathing in that morning beechwood air as yet untainted by human flatulence, and then walked out on to the bridge and leaned on the low brick parapet. As I stood there the first rays of morning sunlight came shimmering and gleaming along the rails from Effingham Junction and Dorking.

During the journey I had managed, with some difficulty, to elicit from Jim the facts about the bridge. It was called Deer Leap Bridge and was a Victorian construction of dark brick and a certain architectural distinction. Unfortunately the weight limit was three and a half tons, and some lunatic lorry driver had seen fit to drive his fifteen-ton articulated lorry over it. This had cracked the bridge so badly that it was no longer deemed safe for traffic, and our job was to build a hideous and utterly undistinguished new concrete bridge beside the old one. The road, which was a little back lane winding through the woods, had been closed to traffic for months, so we had this idyllic spot entirely to ourselves.

Shivering a little and bored, I followed Jim into the hut. He had made himself a cup of tea, which he was
drinking
from an enamel mug as he pored over yesterday’s
Sun
.
I sensed that he had no desire to chat, lost as he was in the paper. I sat down on the wooden bench and, in the absence of anything more edifying to read, leafed through an older copy of
The Sun
that lay to hand. Jim was engrossed in the sports pages. I have never been interested in sport, of any hue, and I didn’t want Jim to catch me studying the topless models, which seemed to be just about the only other content of the paper, so I devoted my attention to what tiny sensational nuggets of news there were. After five minutes I could have repeated the lot by heart. I fidgeted for a bit and looked around the inside of the hut. In one corner were stacked the shovels, pickaxes and sledgehammers that I supposed would be the tools of my new trade. A gas ring provided the heat for the tea, and a big bucket on a box would have been intended, I supposed, for washing up. But it was still not even seven o’clock, so, to kill some time, I decided to go for a walk. I was sixteen years old, you will remember; there was time enough and more for killing, then.