Читать книгу The Dolce Vita Diaries - Cathy Rogers - Страница 30

We only just made it back to London before our baby, Rosie, arrived, bang on time, and suddenly we were three. As we left the hospital, our tiny little naked mole rat bundled up and looking teensy in the obligatory car seat, we expected a heavy hand on our shoulder at any moment. It just doesn’t seem possible, when you think of all the tiny petty things that the law doesn’t let you do, that the authorities really think it’s OK to hand over the care of a tiny vulnerable little human to terrified amateurs.

We happily lived in the bubble that is early parenthood for a few months, seeing lots of friends and family, being treated like royalty, and sauntering out with Rosie into the charmed London world around us. We did things like take her—at a few weeks of age—to an exhibition of magnified insects at the Natural History Museum, or, stashed under coats, to music recitals. And every Friday night—our sacrosanct ‘date night’—we’d walk round and round the block, swinging her in her car seat or singing banal songs until she fell asleep and we’d be able to go out for dinner together, banned from even mentioning the baby word.

Jason did his last stint of work for the Scrapheap Challenge juggernaut at the end of 2004 and then said goodbye to TV. We both underestimated the shock of his giving up work. The idea was that he would do part-time Rosie care (my maternity leave having come to an end) and part-time development and research for our life to be. In other words, a rather formless existence, with suddenly no colleagues, no structure, no clocking in and out and, crucially, no pay cheque at the end of the month. Lots of people say money isn’t important to them—us included. And what you mean when you say it is that, if you were forced to live on very little money, you feel sure that you could cope. And you’re probably right. But the main thing you lose when you give up a pay cheque isn’t the money. Instead, you are losing your independence (and I’d say, feminism intact, that for a man this is harder, because the social taboos are so much more potent) and your sense of being valued in the world; you’re losing your sense that you are contributing.

Rationally, you know most of this is nonsense—of course Jason was doing valuable work, both with Rosie and for our future. But such is the curse of unpaid work at home—it is unrecognized and unappreciated by society. But people still ask women who stay at home ‘But what do you actually do all day?’

In terms of the business we were going from a true standing start. And Jason was doing most of it single-handed as I was back at work three or four days a week, the other days looking after Rosie. Our ‘To do’ list for January read as follows:

TO DO LIST—JANUARY 2005

TO DO FOR BUSINESS	WHEN	BY
Write Business Plan
Find out about EU grants
Find out about small business loans
Investigate starting business in UK v. Italy (consulate)
Investigate importation rules (licences, food standards)
Organize pruning lessons
Capital investment research
Set up e-mail/website
Name for company
UK importer contacts
US importer contacts
Shop contacts USA
Talk to Madeleine re design
Get hold of Italian instructional video tapes on olive trees
Set up UK company—UK or Italian? Research

TO DO FOR HOUSE	WHEN	BY
Work out timetable for building work
Transfer money/get best rate (check rate daily)
Kitchen plan—send designs
Telephone line—talk to Roberto, architect
Electricity—Francesca says we need 5 or 6 KW
Franco—other carpentry e.g. bookshelves
Septic tank—check requirements
Book tickets for next trip out

TO DO GENERAL	WHEN	BY
Italian residency—talk to Furio about deadline
Find out about language schools in Italy
Do a proper budget
Place to get married
Import car
Check on stuff shipped from LA
Buy desktop computer?
Sell bike
Write Italian will
Write English will
Do at least an hour of Italian every day

Work was due to start ‘pretty soon’ on our Italian house. In Italian that seemed to mean anything from ‘this afternoon’ to ‘some time next year’. But we’d found a builder to do the work and an architect / project manager who was going to keep an eye on him as well as coordinate electricians, plumbers, carpenters, septic tank installers, all those folk. It all seemed to be very specialized—with particular experts, ‘skilled artisans’ we liked to think, to do one specific tiny thing, rather than a single gun-slinging cowboy who often typifies the Brit norm.

As for work, we still had very vague ideas about what we were going to do. We knew we’d make olive oil and we hoped we’d be able to sell it to shops in the UK. But neither of us had any background in marketing or retail or food production or really anything relevant at all. But we somehow hoped that because we were determined and accustomed to learning fast, because we had a hunger for new knowledge and a mortal fear of failure, that we’d somehow manage not only to get by but become successful and rich. Hoping to have our optimism corroborated, we decided to ask some people we knew for advice. An old family friend of Jason, who set up the chocolate company Green & Black’s, advised us that the olive oil industry is notorious for its deadly combination of low margins and high levels of competition—basically because any old Tom, Dick or Harry thinks they can chance their arm at it. He suggested we would need something earth-shatteringly unique in order to set ourselves apart from the myriad competition. And with that he wished us the best of luck.

One day I came home from work to discover that Jason had found us an olive tree pruning course. It always amazes me the things that he manages to find out—he would have made an excellent sleuth. On this occasion he’d unearthed a three-day course on ‘The Theory and Practice of Pruning Established Olive Trees’ in a church hall in a village less than an hour from our Le Marche future home. Hearing this information while drinking a cup of tea in a flat in central London, the murmur of traffic below, felt something like a miracle. We decided to sign up before the mirage vanished.

We didn’t yet have the full medical history of the olive grove but we knew that no real work had been done on it for a good decade. There’d been a bit of harvesting here and there—well, who wouldn’t take a few olives from orphan trees for a bit of free oil? But it would have taken more of an altruist to get out there with secateurs and saws and actually prune. So a pruning course was essential, both for the radical facelift that the grove needed, but also for us—to get our heads out of textbooks and into wellies and practical work. Encouragingly, we’d read that olive trees are generally very resilient and that despite the years of neglect, we should be able to get the grove back on track pretty quickly.

A week later we were in Le Marche. We’d decided to stay in a bed and breakfast near Loro Piceno as our house was still missing a few fundamentals like water and walls. The B&B was basic but functional. The ‘breakfast’ element consisted of a fruit tart presented on day one, and expected to do for the week. Hooray, we said, this place is definitely not Tuscany.

The drive from Loro Piceno to San Severino Marche where the course was to be held was one of those really sickly ones with too tight curves and pointy tufts of hills that make your stomach roll over, much to giggles from Rosie in the back. We were heading off to sign in, the day before the course proper. Italy still works by nature of this face-to-face exchange. It is normal to sign up for something like this, or even just to book tickets for a show and still have to physically show up. They haven’t (yet) developed our fixation for the ease of the telephone and e-mail and I suppose it is simply, admirably (?), because they aren’t in such a fret about constantly saving time. This sort of Italian habit is a good example of the sort of thing that is charming when one is on holiday and distinctly less so when one is not. For now we were still on holiday—sort of, a working one—so could swallow it, but rancour mightn’t be far off.

The concession they make to the need to communicate remotely is that fantastically archaic device the fax machine, which is still ubiquitous in Italy. I hate them, they are such rubbish and outdated I would rather have a pigeon appear. Even that word ‘fax’, ‘facsimile’, conjures images of the ’80s and of secretaries with big shiny shoulder pads and electric blue mascara.

For the pruning course, run by a local agricultural association, even the fax wasn’t an option, so here we were.

We found the place, at least we thought it was the place, quite easily. It was a completely empty church hall next to a completely empty, in fact locked, church. We were early, that is to say we were on time, so decided to keep the faith and wait a bit. Rosie was in one of those kangaroo pouch things on my front, constantly trying to put my finger in her mouth.

After about quarter of an hour, a very, very old man arrived. He was about 4 feet 10 and his trousers were on a battle against gravity, which might have explained his shuffle. It looked so improbable to us that he was there for the same reason we were, and to him it looked so improbable that we were there for the same reason that he was, that we exchanged nothing more than a sort of cocked neck acknowledgement of each other’s existence. A little while later, more tiny old people came in, followed by a few more. And then more still. Then there was a youngish—well, late-middle-aged—man in a suit who breezed in and then breezed as breezily straight back out again. After about another quarter of an hour, there had assembled probably about fifty people, and it dawned on us, belatedly, that some sort of ad-hoc queue had formed. Ad-hoc or not, we were definitely at the back of it. At the front of it, I was not sure how she had snuck in, was a young lady—like properly young, in her thirties, half the age of anyone else in the room.

A baby is like an access-all-areas pass in Italy and I walked boldly to the front, just to check that we weren’t in a queue for a wake or something. The young lady was writing things down in what looked like a register and I could see the word ‘potatura’ which means pruning, written on her sheet, so this really was it. The reason the queue was moving so paralysingly slowly was that these old people were taking an aeon—each—to write their names and phone numbers on it. The weight given to each signature was as slow and deliberate as a judge signing someone’s death warrant. Then it occurred to me that for some of these old geezers, their name was probably the only thing they could write, a theory borne out when the breezy man who’d been and gone, came again and, with scolding words, made a spelling correction to one of the old men’s scrawlings.

When we got to the front of the queue, we realized we were in more-or-less the same illiterate boat as the rest of them. First of all we got in a muddle trying to explain that we didn’t have a phone number—one of those situations where I always say too much. Where ‘non telefono’ would probably have got the message across, instead I decided to try to explain that we were redoing our house and still waiting for a phone line to be put in; what came out was something like ‘The house, yours, is being reseeded and we are late for the string.’

Then we got in a pickle about where to put our first names and where our surnames, and also whether we needed to put Rosie down (London habits making us think that this list might also serve as a checklist should the place be bombed). In the end I put Cathy where I should have put Rogers and Jason where I should have put Gibb—with everything leftover going in the column for first names. The result was that for that evening and for the duration of the course, Jason would be known as ‘oceantelfordgibb’ and I as ‘androsierogers’.

Having signed up, everyone headed into another room where there were several chairs and benches set out in rows. Italians don’t like rows and within minutes old men were rearranging them so they could sit next to their buddies in comfy huddles. We managed to squeeze into the end of a Johnny-no-mates row. By this time Rosie was pretty restless, my finger had been chewed to the bone, but Jason managed to unearth some prehistoric biscuit from some nether region of his jacket.

The young lady got up onto the platform/stage area and introduced herself as ‘Alfei, Barbara’. She would be taking the pruning course for the next three days. Relief! We were such strangers among these grizzled farmers with filthy fingernails and legs all bent the wrong way that it was great to have someone sort of the same shape as us at the helm. There was nothing more we needed to do today but she’d see us all bright and early in the morning.

The next morning we were all back in the hall again by 8 a.m. About three-quarters of the people from the night before were there and a few new people, mostly slightly younger ones who must have known to take this whole signing-in business with a pinch of salt.

As Alfei, Barbara set off on her guide to olive-tree pruning, it dawned on us just how far we had to go with our Italian. It didn’t help that there was a constant murmur of noise from the assembled farming crowd, who acted as if showing up alone was the point. As fast as our fingers could thumb through our dictionary, we couldn’t get a level of detail greater than ‘branches, cut, lymph, overall shape’, generic things like that. Alfei, Barbara had a charming habit of saying ‘OK’ which she pronounced ‘Ho-kayee’ at the end of each sentence, but that wasn’t going to get us very far with 1,000 trees to prune. When she came round after the first hour with handouts, with pictures in, we could have kissed her.

In the break—for coffee, of course—our course-colleagues turned out to be quite friendly. I think that last night they had assumed we were lost tourists looking for a remote Lotto painting, but now that they realized we were there for the same reason they were, things warmed up. Even if our Italian was dire (and it didn’t matter because they spoke in that constipated, cauterized language that is the Le Marche dialect), we managed to get by thanks to the ancient art of gesture talk. They would point at Rosie and make snipping movements as if she were pruning an olive tree and we’d laugh, and in return mime her carrying crates of olives up a steep hill, beating her to go faster.

The course carried on in similar vein for the rest of the day. The only difference was that the audience had an ever-growing confidence and would challenge Alfei, Barbara more and more at every stage. We couldn’t understand most of the words, but we could understand that there was a clash of cultures of sorts—between ancient farming tradition and modern scientific method. To me it seemed that the fact all these old guys were here at all listening (well, mostly listening) to a whippersnapper of a woman teaching them about ancient country ways was a victory for her in itself. And she clearly earned their respect—not least measured by the fact that they all stayed. She gently took the piss out of them—admonishing the critics of her methodology by insulting their trees as being ‘all wood’. This was something we’d read about—that a lot of people who kept olive trees mainly for their own use weren’t nearly radical enough in their pruning. They couldn’t cut one branch off in preference to another any more than they could choose to feed only one of their children. The result was that trees which should have at the most four main branches ended up with nine or ten—and the resulting tree was ‘all wood’. The effort it took the tree to keep all this wood alive meant that there wasn’t much left for the productive parts—and the trees would not only look ugly but be woeful olive producers. It’s a sort of ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’ warning shot for olive keepers.

That night, we sat on the cold tile floor of the B&B, our notes all laid in front of us, taking turns to use the Italian—English dictionary. Jason cross-referenced a lot of what Alfei, Barbara had said with a very technical manual published by the University of California, the only technical olive book he’d found that was written in English. It was a close contest whether the unintelligible academic text or the unintelligible Italian was harder to fathom.

By midnight we’d started to make some headway. The good thing about technical jargon is that it’s usually derived from Latin and the words are often very nearly the same in English and Italian. So we found out that the vaso policonico that Alfei, Barbara kept referring to was no more mysterious than a ‘polyconic vase’. Hang on, that’s pretty mysterious. But another pruning book showed us that this meant a tree pruned in such a way that it was like an open bowl in the middle, i.e. empty of growth inside, and that each of the (usually four) main branches was pruned into a sort of cone shape with one main growing tip then giving out to more productive shoots lower down. This was a shape we recognized from trees we’d seen and we liked the sound of it. Trees like that couldn’t be accused of being all wood and how clever we’d be to talk about pruning our trees like a polyconic vase. Even in English people would be perplexedly impressed.

The next day was more of the same, except for some reason freezing cold. I think the church heating bill can’t have been paid—though they’d really no excuse given the pile the Pope is sitting on. Now whenever Alfei, Barbara mentioned the vaso policonico we glanced at each other knowingly. Jason even did a ‘casual’ sketch of one in a place in his notepad which he knew was visible to the rows behind.

The afternoon brought excitement in the form of some young olive trees offered up to the Alfei altar. There was a gasp from the crowd—well, from my mouth—when she whipped out a pair of secateurs clearly with intent. As she demonstrated how to prune a very small olive tree, that messy bit where theory tries to become practice clouded our vision. And everyone else’s. Within seconds, half the audience were up on their feet poking and jabbing at this little tree, pulling a branch here and a twig there—saying cut that bit, leave that bit, everyone sure they knew the answer.

‘Domani,’ said Alfei, Barbara, ‘tocca a voi’ (‘you will have your turn’). The next day was a Saturday and some of the teensy farmers had brought along their burly wives. It had snowed the night before and everyone was thickly bundled. Rosie was almost rigid in layers, wedged into her papoose like a too fat hotdog in a too small roll. We congregated outside the church, ready to head up the hill to the olive grove which some unwitting volunteer had lent the course for our pruning experiments. Probably saw it as a cheap way of getting the trees pruned. But would you get a bunch of apprentice electricians round to have free run of your home’s wiring?

Alfei, Barbara bobbed up and down the ladder like a squirrel, showing why a snip here and a cut there were called for—and how, in some cases, there were branches big enough to justify the saw being brandished. She showed us what to do on perhaps four trees before offering up her secateurs to the first smart Alec who fancied his chances. A sprat of a man bounded up the ladder and was ready to start his ‘tac tac tac’ when Alfei, Barbara asked the assembled throng to suggest which branches should stay and which should go. A chorus of ‘Secondo me…’ (‘Well, I think…’) rang out through the valley.

The ‘secondo mes’ carried on the whole day, with arguments about what and where to cut becoming more impassioned as cold and hunger set in. A nice lady lent me a blanket she’d brought along so that I didn’t have to lay Rosie actually on the snow to change her nappy. The lady and her wrinkly husband laughed at us affectionately and called us the ‘mad English’.

In terms of learning, the experience was one of feeling like you’ve got it, then lost it, then regained it, then lost it, then regained it again. There were so many different bits of the theory that, when faced with an actual living tree, one often contradicted another. So the rule that said you should cut off anything blocking light to the centre ran into conflict with the one which said you shouldn’t sever a ‘principal branch’, when the tree you were faced with had one main branch that curled across the middle of the tree and exploded growth out down below. Or how to choose between retaining the end branch that was too vertical and the one which went through an awkward dogleg right at its end? This was life and one had to make compromises. We were sorry when Alfei, Barbara told us it was the end of experiment time and the course.

All that remained was for us all to assemble in a restaurant across the road and eat an enormous feast. I suspect all Italian courses end a similar way. At the end of the meal, a group of dignitaries at the high table got up to speak. The farmer next to me told us that one of them was the local mayor, one the president of the Le Marche olive oil society and various others things I didn’t understand. They talked keenly for quite a while and singsongishly enough to send Rosie thankfully to sleep. Then there was a reshuffling of chairs as it became clear that presentations were to be made. Everyone who had completed the course was to be given a certificate! In turn, each grizzled farmer was called up to walk in silence to the high table, shake hands with the mayor and collect his little paper slice of prize.

The mayor said the words ‘Oceantelfordgibb and androsierogers’ so strangely that it was only when we were jabbed in the back that we realized it was our turn. We felt terrified. Jason said he was more nervous getting this three-day pruning course certificate than he’d been getting his degree after three years of study!

Suddenly, out of the quiet, everyone burst into spontaneous and loud applause, which turned to cheers and whistles and shouts as we walked up, Rosie slumped in her sling. As we shook the mayor’s hand and looked out at these lovely grubby rosy smiling faces, it was all I could do to stop myself bursting into tears of gratitude. Gratitude that we had been allowed to fit in.

This was to be our life.