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  THE DRIVING OVER LEMONS TRILOGY

  A wonderful book – funny, affectionate and reaching deep beneath the skin. Tuck it into your holiday luggage and dream.

  Elisabeth Luard, Daily Mail

  Exquisite: the anecdote flourishes once more.

  Penelope Lively, Daily Telegraph

  A funny, observant and personal account of what a man can learn, and what there is to appreciate in life. Marvellous.

  John S. Doyle, The Sunday Tribune

  Everything that made the first book so successful – endearing, heart warming, self-deprecating, sometimes surreal… charming stuff.

  William Leith, The Standard

  You just can’t fail to like him and the world he spreads out for you: wayward sheep, eccentric ex-pats, hospitable (and slightly barmy) neighbours. Stewart is that rare thing, the real McCoy.

  Rosie Boycott, The Guardian

  DRIVING OVER LEMONS

  A PARROT IN THE PEPPER TREE

  THE ALMOND BLOSSOM APPRECIATION SOCIETY

  LAST DAYS OF THE BUS CLUB

  The fourth book in the Driving Over Lemons trilogy

  Chris Stewart

  For Michael Jacobs

  my favourite travelling companion

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1. Last Days of the Bus Club

  2. Rick Stein and the Wild Boars

  3. The Green, Green Rooves of Home

  4. How El Valero Got Its Name

  5. Deer Leap

  6. A 4B Pencil

  7. Virtual Chickens

  8. Breakfast in Medina Sidonia

  9. Cures for Serpents

  10. Manualidades

  11. The Rain in Spain

  12. Crimes and Punishments

  13. An Author Tour (with Sheep)

  14. How Not to Start a Tractor

  15. Santa Ana

  16. Oranges and Lemons

  17. All the Fun of the Feria

  About the Author

  Also by Chris Stewart

  Copyright

  LAST DAYS OF THE BUS CLUB

  CHAPTER ONE

  LAST DAYS OF THE BUS CLUB

  THROUGH ALL THE YEARS of my daughter Chloé’s schooling it fell to me to get the family ship under way in the morning. I function better in the early hours; Ana, my wife, lasts longer into the night than I do. And so it was that on a cool September morning, the first day of Chloé’s last year at school, I rose in the dark. At six forty-five it’s still dark where we live, in the mountains of Granada, as, even at summer’s end, the sun takes its time rising above the cliffs behind our home. Leaving my wife and the dogs fast asleep in the bedroom, I padded across the cold stone floor to the bathroom, splashed my eyes with cold water, dressed, and went into the kitchen. I put the kettle on, lit the candles for the breakfast table and at seven o’clock I woke Chloé. In all the fourteen years of the school run I did not have to wake her again more than on one or two occasions. She loved school, and would appear without fail ten minutes later blinking in the candlelight and clutching her heavily stacked backpack.

  Chloé’s breakfast, a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice and a bowl of some absurd industrially modified cereal product – Choco Kreks, ideally – was already on the table, while I busied myself with the first task of the day: the preparation of her mid-morning sandwich. In the creation of these little masterpieces I employed all the imagination and artistry I possess. I couldn’t bring myself to inflict upon my daughter the standard Spanish bocadillo – a dry and artless roll, unaccountably afforded the status of cultural icon in spite of its curious quality of emerging from the oven almost completely stale. No, for Chloé’s delectation I would first select a better class of bun – and these are to be had, if you know where to look. (Supermercado Mercadona, top left corner of the bakery section, labelled ‘Mini Ciabattas’.)

  These I would slit open with a razor-sharp knife, leaving an infinitesimal hinge of crust. Then I would oil them up a bit with a little extra-double-virgin, cold-pressed, unfiltered, single-variety, single-estate olive oil from our own Picual trees, add a layer of thinly sliced tomatoes (ready salted to enhance the flavour), a dab of sugar to counteract the acidity, a couple of transparently thin slivers of fresh garlic, some Genoese basil, and finally a dollop of mayonnaise to help the whole concoction slip down … oh, and a few chives sticking out of the end like whiskers on a prawn.

  This was the vegetarian option. There was a meat one, too, with exquisite embutidos – the preserved meats that the Spanish do rather well – enlivened by a scattering of sliced gherkins, some chilli sauce perhaps, and a handful of herbs. Or the oriental bocadillo with ginger, chutney, a prawn or two and some beansprouts.

  I would then slip a couple of these into one of those silver bags that vacuum-packed coffee comes in; they fit perfectly and it made them smell of fresh coffee, which Chloé, especially when little, didn’t like, but I thought would set her up for the future.

  In truth these snacks were not always greatly to Chloé’s taste. When young, she disliked being marked out as different from her peers, and would mournfully report that she had shared her bocadillos with her friends, and the friends, who were no doubt busy trying to get their teeth through their own stale dry buns, had not thought much of them. But gradually things changed, and Chloé, charged with the nostalgia teenagers develop for their infancy, increasingly accepted my creations for what they were – simple manifestations of love.

  That morning, with an atmosphere of newness that comes with the first day back at school, the bocadillos crammed in amongst the books in Chloé’s backpack, and the backpack on my back, we left the house to walk down the hill and across the valley, with Bumble and Bao, the dogs, sniffing the fresh morning scents behind us.

  The first rays of sunshine were already warming the far side of the valley, as we walked past the stable, pausing to catch the cacophony of farting and coughing with which the sheep habitually start the day, and hastened upriver amongst the oleanders and tamarisk to the bridge. Our bridge, being a ramshackle contrivance of worm-eaten eucalyptus beams thrown across the river, has no railings, and tends to sag and creak if you creep gingerly across it. So we don’t; casting caution to the side we leap down the bank and race across as fast as we can go. For late summer there was a good flow of red-tinged, iron-rich water rushing down the river. With only minutes to go now we scrambled into the aged Land Rover – no doors – and accelerated off along the sandy tracks in the riverbed, and up the hill towards the final stop on the school bus route, just above La Cenicera, the farm where our Dutch neighbour Bernardo lives.

  Jesús, who keeps a flock of goats and sheep high up on Carrasco, the hill farm opposite us, was already there in his little white van, and Bernardo was leaning on its roof, chatting to him through the open window.

  In a cloud of dust we hurtled past the little gathering and raced to get the car turned round before the bus came. The dust had hardly settled before the bus nosed cautiously round the corner. There was a rush and tumble of frantic kissing as Bernardo kissed his son Sebastian, Jesús kissed his boys José and Javier, and I kissed Chloé, and they climbed onto the bus, leaving us three fathers waving until it disappeared round the corner.

  And so began the morning’s meeting of the three fathers of the valley – Bernardo, Jesús and me – or the Bus Club, as I liked to call it. I think we all rather cherished being able once again to have these few minutes together at the start of a weekday; we had missed it over the long summer months. It gave us a chance to discuss what was going on in the valley, exchange what scant news there was from the town, and reminisce a little.

  Inspired perhap
s by the presence of a horrible-looking cur of a dog that was sniffing the wheel of Jesús’s van, perhaps with a view to urinating in a small way against it, Bernardo was telling a scurrilous tale that featured dogs. We learned that he had a bitch on heat, and he had locked her in the bathroom in order to protect her from the lascivious attentions of the hordes of male curs who had travelled from the four corners of the province of Granada to press their suits.

  ‘I locked ’er in de barfroom,’ he said, ‘because it’s de only place wid a lock on de deur, an’ dere wass orl dese doggs howlin’ an’ barkin’ an’ slobberin’ about der place orl nite long an’ I don’t want ’em to get at ’er.’

  ‘Very sensible,’ Jesús and I concurred.

  ‘Only when I come out in de mornin’ de whole lot of ’em was down in de barfroom wid der bitch, dey gone an’ dug a ’ole through de roof.’

  ‘Ah,’ I observed sagely. ‘You can’t lock the door on love, Bernardo.’ Jesús grinned in agreement.

  ‘Dat’s not lurv,’ exclaimed Bernardo, looking at us in amazement, ‘Dat’s jus’ doggs fockin’.’

  Of course we spoke in Spanish, because Jesús was limited to his native tongue, but I have written this little exchange in a sort of cod Dutch-English, in an attempt to give the flavour of Bernardo’s Spanish, which is extremely good, but at least as idiosyncratic as my own.

  Turning to Jesús, I asked after Ana and María-José, his two daughters. Not so long ago they too had waited for this same bus, like two baby birds they seemed, with backpacks on. But a couple of years ago they’d left to go to university in Granada. It’s always a pleasure to ask Jesús about his daughters just to see the honest pride it stirs in him. When they were schoolgirls, Jesús would answer with a fond, if slightly mystified, expression, ‘Oh, they’re doing fine.’ He wasn’t even really sure what they were studying; it was so far removed from the experience of this hard-working man who had lived and raised his family by the strength of his arm and the milk of his goats. But the day that Ana and Maria-José took their seats in the lecture halls of Granada University – one to study Business Administration, the other Economics – was a giant step for their family and the valley, and it was felt by all of us. A generation earlier it would have been almost impossible for country girls like these to attend university; they would have been needed to help on the farm, and a farm’s meagre returns would certainly not have stretched to tuition fees and accommodation in the city.

  ‘Ay, Cristóbal,’ he said. ‘Enjoy this year with Chloé while you can; it’ll be gone in a flash and she’ll be off.’

  Bernardo nodded knowingly; his two eldest were also living in Granada, while Rosa his younger daughter, who used to be Chloé’s playmate, was about to leave to work for an NGO in Colombia. It seemed that the children of the valley were disappearing fast. Though Jesús still had the two boys, and Bernardo his Sebastian, my days in the Bus Club were numbered. I changed the subject a little abruptly.

  ‘I’ve got a lamb for you, Jesús, if you want it,’ I said.

  ‘Seems an odd time to be lambing.’

  ‘I know, but we have a few out-of-season lambers, covered by a rogue ram. Anyway, one of them has twins and I don’t think she’s got enough milk for both of them. Have you got goats milking at the moment?’

  ‘There’s always goats to milk,’ said Jesús with resignation. ‘I’ll be happy to take it.’

  ‘Then I’ll bring it to Bus Club tomorrow.’

  And so saying, we all set off home to our respective breakfasts.

  It was not many weeks after the beginning of the term that I got a call from Chloé’s school. It was from the assistant head, no less, and she wondered if, as a local author accustomed to regaling the public on the subject of my books, I might like to give a talk to the Instituto classes?

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘What do you want me to talk about?’

  ‘Oh, whatever takes your fancy, really. We’ll leave the subject up to you.’

  Well, addressing the school would be pan comido, I thought (the Spanish say ‘bread eaten’ rather than ‘a piece of cake’). You don’t have to prepare a thing like this; you just turn up and do it.

  Or perhaps not. For, when I told Chloé, she expressed some concern.

  ‘You’ve got to prepare this speech, Dad,’ she insisted. ‘The Instituto class is only a year below me. They’re my friends, or at any rate the younger brothers and sisters of my friends.’

  This gave me pause for thought, for apart from not wishing to shame my daughter I was a great admirer of Órgiva’s school and its staff. It had done what Ana and I considered an excellent job, despite the fact that when we enrolled Chloé, Spain had one of the worst education records in Western Europe, and Andalucía the worst in Spain. But due to some fortunate glitch round about the turn of the new century – a good headmaster and some inspirational teachers – San José de Calasanz was different.

  Chloé was emerging from school with an easy sociability, a confidence in her own judgement and a laudable streak of anti-materialism bordering on contempt for fashion brands and accessories. These qualities might have had something to do with our own attitudes, but the ideas were consolidated by her pandilla at school. And the pandilla, the gang of girls and boys with whom she hung out, taught her to deal easily and naturally with her fellow beings, and to be comfortable in her own skin in a peculiarly Mediterranean way. This counts for a lot, and I was proud of Chloé and deeply grateful to all those who had helped to bring her up.

  Of course it had a lot to do with growing up as a Spaniard. A century or so ago, George Borrow, in his book The Bible in Spain, made the rather pertinent observation of the Spanish: ‘that in their social intercourse no people in the world exhibit a juster feeling of what is due to the dignity of human nature, or better understand the behaviour which it behoves a man to adopt towards his fellow human beings. It is one of the few countries in Europe where poverty is not treated with contempt, and, I may add, where the wealthy are not blindly idolised.’

  Well, that’s what our daughter got from the village school. And she had a point about the speech: this was an important gig and I had to get it right. So I thought about it for a bit and hit on the theme of laughter and school.

  You laugh all your days – and it’s one of the very best things in life – but you don’t often laugh the way you laughed when you were at school, that gut-busting, aching, joyous agony of laughter. The sort of laughter you have to contain at any cost, for fear that the humourless tyrant doing his level best to illuminate your darkness on subjects in which you had not the remotest interest – the use of the gerund, or the genetic codes of peas – might catch you at it and suggest that you might want to share the joke with the class. And to share the joke with the class was what you didn’t want because you knew full well that the joke was crass as crass can be and you were only so horribly convulsed with laughter because you weren’t supposed to be. That was laughter, and it left you sweating and limp like a used rag. It was so good that I devoted a considerable part of my school career to the pursuit of it. With hindsight it occurs to me that my lamentable academic performance might have had something to do with this.

  Be that as it may, I thought I could advise my eager young audience to do the same, to make the most of that unrepeatable laughter. I would go on from there to recommend some more profitable activity, like reading, in order to give the impression that there was more to me than mere mindless frivolity.

  In town a couple of days before the talk, I put this idea to one of the teachers, Dori, the mother of Chloé’s best friend María. It didn’t go down too well. She said that although she remembered that laughter from her youth, it was no longer the same; school was a much more serious business today. The world is different now, and its schoolchildren would not be able to make much of what I was blathering on about. Best perhaps to drop this theme.

  So I dropped it, and wondered what to say instead. Nothing obvious presented itself and I wondered a little
more, and then, as so often happens, I threw in my lot with an eleventh-hour inspiration. I had been mulling over the way in which Chloé and her friends, both boys and girls, seemed to treat one another as if they belonged to the same species. Having been to a single-sex boarding school in England, I had for many years harboured a certain envy for boys who went to school with girls, and consequently knew how to deal with them on a more or less equal footing. I decided there and then to address the school on the great benefits of co-education.

  Now, my method with talks, whatever the language, is to sketch in some basic themes and leave the actual wording of the thing to fend for itself. That way, I imagine, I can achieve an element of spontaneity, and may even, seeing as I don’t actually know what I’m about to say next, share a bit of interest in the matter with the audience.

  So, as I drove along the narrow road to town, I cast my mind back to the momentous day when, after years at that boys’ boarding school, I entered Crawley New Town’s finest co-educational sixth-form college, and a giddy infatuated trance that was to last the best of two years. These were pleasing thoughts to mull upon, but before I knew it I was being led up the steps of the assembly hall and confronted with a great rabble of youth milling about in the passages and aisles. Chloé was in the senior building, safely (as far as she was concerned) out of the way, but I could pick out a few friendly faces from the younger siblings of her friends and the families we knew in town.

  There was a not altogether fruitful call to silence as the last few miscreants scrambled noisily to their seats. The teacher – it was Dori – introduced me and I was left alone. I looked out for a moment across the heaving sea of girls and boys, waiting for the muse. And then I was away like a clockwork monkey, relishing the Spanish idioms that sprang to my aid and using my foreignness to advantage. I managed to raise the odd snigger and giggle, but if the truth be told it was like getting blood out of a stone (to be fair, not much of what a fifty-something-year-old has to say is funny to a teenager). I talked about the advantages of small town life; I told a little moral tale; I recommended the road less travelled, and extolled, briefly – and cautiously – some of the virtues of the wild side; and then I launched into my great paean to co-educationalism.