Two Old Fools in Spain Again (10 page)

Every now and then she left the nest, jumped down and produced an enormous, smelly poop. She snatched a beakful of food, took a few sips of water, then hurried back to her nest. According to the Internet, this is all normal behaviour for a broody hen.

Poor Three began to look a little ragged. She must have been hungry and uncomfortable, but still she remained immobile on that nest. We were at a complete loss how to help her.

“Pah!” said Paco, slamming his fist onto our kitchen table, “I will show you what I do with such a hen!”

“You won’t hurt her?”

“No, of course not! Now, watch me.”

Paco filled a bucket with cold water and carried it to the coop. We watched, round-eyed. He grabbed poor Three and carried her, flapping and protesting, to the bucket of water.

“Oh no!” I gasped as he held her upside down and dunked her, headfirst, into the cold water.

“Uno, dos, tres,”
counted Paco, then set a soaking wet and shocked Three on the ground. “Now she will forget all about the eggs.”

The chicken shook her feathers in a blur and water droplets flew off. She stood still for a moment, having a deep think, clearly disoriented. Then she realised she was ravenously hungry and pecked enthusiastically at the grain. After a good drink of water, she settled down to preen her feathers and take a dustbath. All thoughts of egg incubation and starting a family were forgotten.

That November, strong winds ripped through the valley, snatching the last crisp leaves from our grapevine. Over-ripened grapes still hung from the vine’s branches, attracting wasps and fruit flies. Frequently the grapes dropped with a splat on the patio below, leaving black sticky stains. Now that the leaves were stripped away, we could see the grapes and cut them down. It took several hours, an unpleasant job, dodging wasps and smearing ourselves with decomposing fruit that already smelled alcoholic.

Chickens eat everything, it doesn’t matter how unpleasant it may seem to us. I’ve seen a video of a chicken catching and swallowing an entire live mouse. They’ll eat dead or live cockroaches, potato peelings and their own eggshells, which are supposed to be good for them. So when we threw the rotting grapes into the coop, the chickens dived on them. Perhaps it was my imagination, but I’m sure the fermenting grapes caused the girls to stagger to bed that night.

By November, the wind had lost its hair-dryer warmth and had a chilling edge to it. The sun was still warm but nights were long and cold. We stockpiled our logs and lit the woodburner a little earlier each day.

But now Christmas approached and as with every year, Carmen and Paco came round bearing gifts of home-grown tomatoes, a bottle of red wine and a poinsettia. The tomatoes were useful for homemade tomato soup and the wine was most welcome too. However, as always, the poinsettia filled me with dread.

When I was a child, I thought a poinsettia was a breed of dog, but now I know it’s a magnificent red and green plant. Every poinsettia I’ve ever owned begins to die as soon as I accept it. This one was no different and I could hear the leaves dropping off as I typed.

But that Christmas I was given another gift. The most unexpected, welcome Christmas present I could ever wish for. A gift that would probably change our lives for ever.

11. News

“M
um?”

“Karly, what a nice surprise! Are you okay? Is Cam okay? What time is it in Australia?”

“Um, ten o’clock at night.”

“Oh. Early morning here.”

“Mum...”

“Yes? Karly, what’s the matter?”

Hushed voice, full of wonder. “Mum... Mum, I’m
pregnant,
we’re going to have a baby!”

“What? That’s FANTASTIC news!” I dance round the room, squealing. “Joe! JOE! Karly and Cam are going to have a baby! Karly’s pregnant! They’re going to have a
baby!
” Then, more soberly, “Karly, are you sure?”

“Yep! I did the home test and it came up positive. We kept staring at it and didn’t believe it so I did another test and it still came up positive. So then I made Cam do a test.”

“You made Cam pee on the little stick?”

“Yes, just to make sure it looked different. And it did.”

“Wow! That’s just the
best
news ever!”

“I know...”

“Gosh! I’m going to be granny...”

“I know...”

“So, when is it due?”

“I’m not sure, August I think. It’s about the size of a poppyseed at the moment.”

“Oh my! I can’t believe you’re going to have a baby!”

“I know! Neither can we! I wish you didn’t live so far away.”

“Don’t worry. I’m definitely coming over. Even if we can’t both come, I’ll be there.”

“Are you sure? It’s such a long flight and so expensive.”

“I’m sure.” Wild horses wouldn’t stop me.

“When I’ve had my doctor’s appointment and had my first scan we’ll have a better idea of dates.”

“Okay, I’ll wait to hear from you, then I’m booking that flight to Australia.”

12. Deaths

‘At five weeks, your baby is the size of an apple seed. It is starting to form tiny organs...’

I
n January, while we were warm and snug inside at night, our chickens still insisted on sleeping outside in the elements. Creatures of habit, they ignored the cosy perch inside their coop, and insisted on flying up to the exposed outside perch. Whatever the weather, neither harsh winds nor freezing rain would induce them to sleep on their rail under shelter.

“Daft birds,” said Joe one morning as the chickens flapped down from their perch, soaking wet and shivering after a stormy night. “How can they be so stupid? Our last batch of chickens always slept inside under cover, why won’t these?”

We tried to break the silly habit. We spoke to them severely, explaining it was for their own good and that they’d catch pneumonia if they stayed outside. Poor Sick-Note’s cough grew worse and we were convinced the cold nights outside were the cause.

One night we watched a documentary on TV about brains. It seems a chicken’s brain is about the size of a wine-gum so perhaps our expectations were too high. It was very likely our hens were incapable of reasoning that roosting under shelter was a much better idea. Through the window, I watched the clouds thickening as night fell. The temperature was already down to freezing; it would probably snow.

“Let’s manually put them on the inside perch for a few nights,” I suggested. “Perhaps they’ll get the idea then.”

That night, as it began to grow dark, we caught them one by one and put them on the perch. There they sat, locked on, until we turned our backs to catch the next one. Then down they jumped, ran outside and up to their accustomed outside perch.

“This is getting ridiculous,” said Joe, lifting Venus down for the third time and carrying her protesting inside. “We need to wait until it’s dark.”

Chickens can’t see in the dark at all, so it was a good plan. When night fell, Joe’s routine was to ‘put the girls to bed’. He plucked each girl from the perch and took her inside. Seven times a night he repeated this action until every chicken was safe and sound inside. Our thinking was that the girls would wake up in the morning, realise that they’d had a pleasant night and choose to sleep inside in future.

Not so. Our chickens weren’t the brightest bulbs on the Christmas tree. For weeks Joe continued the nightly ritual. He trudged down to the bottom of the garden, lifted each chicken off the perch and put her inside. But they never learnt.

“That’s it!” said Joe one day, toolbox in hand. “I’m going to remove the outside perch, then they’ll
have
to use the inside one.”

I heard the sounds of drills and hammers and demolition work coming from the chicken coop. Joe came back in, pleased with his work.

“I’ve removed the perch completely,” he announced. “I think we’ve finally solved the problem.”

That night we waited until the garden was in darkness, then visited the chicken coop. Were our girls sleeping inside, snug and warm?

They were not.

The inside perch was empty, but outside, huddled on the ground in an untidy heap of feathers under the place where the perch used to be, were the chickens. Exasperated, we took them inside the henhouse and placed them on the perch.

Sleeping outside proved to be too much for Sick-Note. Sadly she died that week and we buried her on waste ground near the cemetery. The evening ritual of putting the girls to bed continued all winter, ferrying the chickens inside.

But, months later, when the weather had turned warmer and the ferrying wasn’t really necessary, our girls surprised us one night.

“Well, cut off my legs and call me Shorty!” said Joe. “You won’t believe where the girls are perched now!”

With no warning, the girls decided that their indoor quarters were preferable after all and we never had to move them again.

When I finish reading a good book, I always experience a sense of loss. It’s exactly the same when I’m writing. When the final chapter is completed, I’m left with a void, a gap that needs filling. That’s how I felt when
‘Ole!’
was finished that winter, but I felt reluctant to start the next book. I had all my notes, photos and material poised for
Camel
, but I just didn’t want to start it. I think that year in Bahrain shocked us more than we realised and I wasn’t ready to relive it all.

So, at the beginning of 2012, I was looking for any excuse not to write, but I needed a project. And it appeared, as if by magic and it had been buried in our house all the time.

In 1993 my parents both died within three months of each other. Neither of them talked much about their childhoods or family, but I knew that my father was the youngest of several siblings and that my mother was an only child estranged from her mother.

What I
didn’t
know was that my father’s eldest brother had been an adventurer and explorer and was proclaimed by the newspapers of the 1930s as ‘the World’s most travelled motorist’. (My mother hid a huge, much darker, more shocking secret too, but I wouldn’t uncover that for another twelve months.)

I’m ashamed to confess that we still had boxes stored from our move to Spain in 2004. They remained unpacked and unexplored until the day I decided I really should sort through them and throw away useless stuff. The first box I tackled was filled with odds and ends that had belonged to my parents. Some china ashtrays, a few pictures, kitchenware and odds and ends. But at the very bottom was a bound manuscript, brown with age.

I read the old-fashioned copperplate writing on the cover.
‘Horizon Fever’ by Archibald Edmund Filby.
I guessed this was the work of my uncle Archie, who had died long before I was born. I opened the manuscript and found newspaper cuttings pasted in. Dated 1938, the headlines shouted,
A Marvellous Motor Trip!
and
London to Cape Town and Back
. It seemed that my uncle had been quite a celebrity in his day.

I read reports of his broadcasts and saw grainy photos of a small, bespectacled man smoking a pipe, dressed in a suit and sitting on the running board of an ancient car.

AE Filby and the Austin 12 he drove to explore Africa in 1934.

I turned the flimsy, typewritten pages. I had stumbled upon Archie’s memoir, written 80 years ago. Here were his own words describing his 37,000 mile journey from London to the bottom of Africa and back again in a series of dilapidated motor cars, including a Model T Ford. It was the project I had been searching for and, as if by magic, it emerged genie-like from the bottom of a box.

“Look what I found,” I said excitedly to Joe. “This has been buried here all this time!”

Together we pored over it and were mesmerised by Archie’s tales of his journey through Africa. How things had changed since he bashed out these words on a typewriter! He wrote about big game hunting, the natives, swimming in the Nile with crocodiles, mining for gold and crossing the Sahara. For a while, one of his companions was a monkey, another a stray dog, until it was killed and dragged up a tree by a leopard.

Joe and I looked at one another. This was it. We had our next project.

“I’ll transcribe it all,” said Joe. “It’s not going to be easy with all those crossed-out words and the ‘e’ not working on Archie’s typewriter.”

I emailed my brother in the UK, who told me that he had scrapbooks belonging to Uncle Archie with photos he’d taken on that African trip. He scanned them and sent them over.

Gradually, we pieced the jigsaw together. It seemed that Uncle Archie intended to have
Horizon Fever
published, because an address label of a publishing company in London, now defunct, was still pasted on the back cover. Archie died of malaria at the age of 43, less than three years after he had written the book, so we were pleased that we could put the book together ourselves and finally share Archie’s stories with the world. His exploits were fascinating, but it was even more interesting getting to know this uncle I had never met through his own words.

As Joe worked away on
Horizon Fever
, I reluctantly began
Camel
. However, soon the words began to flow and I was happy in my own little writing world again.

Some mornings, ice skinned the puddles and the mountains were dusted with icing-sugar snow. As the sun rose higher in the sky, the snow melted away, except on distant high peaks where it clung on with grim determination. Joe and I kept the woodburner stoked and abandoned the hob, preferring to cook on the woodburner instead. We were warm and the chickens didn’t seem to mind the low temperatures outside. With fluffed-up feathers, they appeared twice the size that they were in the hot summer months.

All the village cats now had thick winter coats. Gravy never reappeared, but we saw a great deal of her sister, Sylvia and Sylvia’s two kittens, Snitch and Felicity. We didn’t feed them regularly, but sometimes left scraps outside. Then the time arrived when we heard caterwauling coming from the garden, even with our doors tightly shut. The cycle of nature had swept round once again. Every village tomcat had crowded into our garden and was sidling up to Sylvia, following her every move.

Sylvia appeared indifferent, even annoyed by their presence. She growled at them in warning, but it was an elaborate act. If she felt they weren’t paying her enough attention, she’d drop the ‘playing hard to get’ pretence to roll on her back, tail sweeping the ground, paws waving in the air. If that didn’t entice them, she’d slink up and turn her hindquarters to them, coyly watching the reaction over her shoulder as she offered herself wantonly. But she held all the cards. She permitted a tomcat to mount her only when
she
was ready and not a moment before.

Snitch and Felicity watched their mother with huge eyes from under the shelter of our garden table. They needn’t have been nervous; the tomcats were far too preoccupied to be bothered with the youngsters.

That year, the biggest, most powerful, well-endowed tom in the village was a jet-black cat Joe insisted on calling Black Balls, for obvious reasons. I hurriedly shortened the name to Blackie. We guessed that many of the village kittens born that spring would be black and as the weeks rolled by, Sylvia’s waistline expanded and we knew she was pregnant again. We would have to wait a few months to see if Blackie was the father.

February is probably Spain’s wettest month, as well as the coldest. El Hoyo is snuggled at the bottom of a valley and grey clouds often hid the mountains surrounding us, making us feel as though we were in an isolated world, smothered under a silver blanket.

However, even in deepest winter, the valley never looked lifeless. The wild fig and almond trees lost their leaves, but the orange and olive trees retained theirs. Not to be outdone, the almond trees burst forth, their waxy, pinky-white blossom like edible decorations crafted from sugar. But the orange trees dashed off with the prize, now hung with bright fruit that weighed down the branches and begged to be picked. As distant snow-covered peaks jabbed at the sky, it seemed strange that oranges could ripen and be picked in midwinter.