Driving Over Lemons: An Optimist in Spain (19 page)

As I went I made the noises favoured by local people who want sheep to follow them. The sheep listened courteously but decided against it. And fifty metres down the hill I came across the path I had been looking for on the way up.

The next day Domingo and Antonio offered to come up with me to get the sheep off the hill. ‘That’s very good of you,’ I said. ‘But I really can’t see how we’re going to get them down.’

We headed up the hill armed with Domingo’s pack of five nondescript curs, and after about an hour’s scramble managed to locate the sheep, more or less where I had left them, at the top of the steep cliffs.

‘We’ll push them down the north side,’ said Domingo. ‘They’ll always go down best the way they came up.’

‘You’re joking, Domingo. That side is about ninety percent vertical cliff.’

Antonio rolled a cigarette and kept his own counsel.

‘Bah!’ said Domingo and whistled the bird whistle he uses to get his flock moving. The sheep raised their heads, startled. Then they bolted as one, straight over the edge of the cliff.

I rushed panic-stricken to the edge, expecting to see their little woolly bodies plummeting hundreds of feet through the air to shatter on the rocks of the river far below. But no, there they were, skittering from ledge to ledge, bum up, ears down, hurtling headlong down that impossible hill. It took them seven and a half minutes to reach the river, and then they shot up to the farm and in minutes were lost to view on the orange terraces.

‘Well, that wasn’t very difficult!’ said Domingo brightly, as we all sat down on a rock to look at the view and enjoy the smoke curling away from Antonio.

No sooner had the news reached Janet about the Serreta incident than she came striding across the valley to see us. ‘Out of my way! There’s a dog’s life at stake!’ she shouted at some hikers who coincided with her at the bridge.

‘I’ve found an excellent position for Barkis,’ she announced when she reached the house. ‘Good European family,’ she added, meaning they weren’t Spanish. ‘Now, how much does the dog weigh? The people I’ve found are very concerned that he should not weigh more than twenty kilos. They don’t want to be pulled over by him. How much? Thirty kilos? Well, that should be alright. He’s a beautiful boy, just right for them. I’ll ring them tonight. They’ll be down to collect him tomorrow.’

The dogs happened to be suffering from fleas at the time; there was an outbreak in the stable by the workshop where Bodger and Barkis had their quarters. We covered them all with flea-powder that night, in the hope that they might look more presentable the following day.

As Janet had promised, Barkis’s prospective owners turned up next morning, equipped with a pair of bathroom scales. The flea-powder had done its work and brought all the fleas biting furiously to the surface of the dogs’ coats. So the dogs were twisting and turning and scratching and gnawing at themselves in a frenzy of itching. You could actually see the wretched fleas hopping. Nevertheless, Barkis could turn on the charm when he thought it might be in his interest to do so. George and Alison were so delighted by him that they took him home with them that very night.

Barkis fell on his feet with his new owners. They have a rabbit farm and they supplemented his diet with dead rabbits. They also took him for walks on their mountain every day and to church with them on Sundays. He thrived under this tender regime and gave up chasing sheep altogether. Then he was poisoned by the hunters.

Hunters in the Alpujarras routinely put poisoned bait down to kill any beast that might disturb their birds. It’s a highly illegal as well as cruel practice and a lot of dogs die horrible deaths as a result. But few of the victims’ owners bother to make any sort of fuss. Not so George and Alison. They were wretched with misery when Mariano the shepherd brought them their dog, dead in his arms, and immediately launched a campaign to publicise the outrage. The mayor was petitioned, legal advice was sought regarding criminal proceedings, and together with the village pharmacist they produced an emetic to distribute free of charge to anyone whose dog was in danger. It was a shame that Barkis couldn’t have witnessed his ascension to cause célèbre.

If the truth be told, Barkis was not the only one of our dogs liable to kill sheep. All dogs will have a go at chasing sheep given the opportunity, but some more so than others. One summer morning the sheep strayed onto a terrace uncomfortably close to Ana’s vegetable patch. I ran down to move them off, and the dogs followed. Bonka stood eagerly by as I pushed the flock through the gate. Bodger, however, was not to be found. Fearing the worst I raced up to the far end of the terrace – and there came upon a grisly scene. A sheep was stuck in the mesh fence, and was struggling helplessly while Bodger was methodically tearing it to pieces.

I yelled at the dog, heaved a huge rock, and missed. Then I disentangled what was left of the poor creature from the fence. She stood, swayed a little and collapsed in a pool of blood. I rolled her over to have a look at her wounds, averting my eyes and sucking a long breath through my teeth until the spasm of horror passed. I didn’t know just what fearful wounds those teeth could inflict. The sheep’s legs, back and front, were torn apart, like cut meat on a butcher’s slab. Her belly was ripped deep and there were bloody toothmarks all over her.

I had never seen such a horrible savaging and ran up to the house to get a knife to finish her off. But when I got back she had heaved herself to her feet and was staggering towards the stable. ‘If she has that much will to live,’ said Ana, ‘then it would be wrong to put her down. We must try and treat her.’

‘Have you seen the wounds, Ana? They are appalling, she can’t possibly survive.’

‘We can try, anyway. I’ll consult Juliette.’ And so saying, she retreated to the house to pore over
The Complete Herbal
Handbook for Farm and Stable
by Juliette de Baïracli-Levy, which lay permanently to hand on the corner of our kitchen table.

I helped the sheep to the stable, made her a pen bedded with fresh straw, and put her lamb in with her. Though she must have been suffering unimaginable pain, the first thing she did was to haul herself to her feet to let the lamb drink. This was definitely a sheep worth saving. I gave her an injection of antibiotics and a feed. Ana came down with some sort of natural cleansing solution, as recommended by Juliette, and bathed the wounds carefully as I held the sheep. She washed away every speck of dirt from every wound on the body, pulling away the wool where it had stuck to the meat.

I couldn’t bear to look at the wounds – the sight of that torn flesh made my blood crawl – but Ana set to work with patience and skill. It took two hours just to clean the wounds. Then we fitted loose bandages wherever possible to keep off the thousands of flies intent on debauching themselves on her blood. The next morning, as prescribed by Juliette, I had to urinate first thing in a bucket, the resultant liquid to be used for the bathing of wounds. Ana and I walked down to the stable (me rather self-consciously swinging the bucket) and tipped the sheep over to remove its bandages. The wounds were now covered in scabs and clots and bits of straw but the sheep munched contentedly while Ana doused them with my morning pee. And so we proceeded, for a week or so, administering one or other ghastly herbal drench from Juliette’s natural animal husbandry regime, as the ewe visibly recovered. It kept milking throughout, and its lamb thrived.

Apart from one tendon – whose tear would have needed microsurgery beyond Juliette’s primer and which left a bent forefoot – the sheep recovered completely. She has reared two sets of twins since and the long period of treatment made her quite tame.

It was a result that went beyond the benefits of a single sheep. Knowing that we had rescued the animal, and treated her with natural medicines, left me feeling quite different about my flock and indeed the whole style of farming we were able to practise. In a big efficient flock, sheep with a far better chance of survival than this one would have been knocked straight on the head.

As for Bodger, well – we kept a careful eye on him after that.

Over the years, Juliette de Baïracli-Levy has attained such an influence over our household that it’s hard not to think of her as a resident in-law, one of a triad of women who dictate the course of my life. She stayed down the road in Lanjarón during the 1950s, and was, or still is (for rumour has it that she lives today among a clump of pine trees on Mount Hermon, a somewhat contentious spot on the borders of Israel, Syria and Lebanon), a woman obsessed with herbs and natural ways of healing. One of her claims to fame is that, during her time in Spain, she nursed herself and her four-year-old son through typhus, pitting herself against the Lanjarón doctors by insisting on following her own prescriptions of herbs and fresh water.

A battered, second-hand copy of
Spanish Mountain Life
, Juliette’s wonderfully quirky and triumphant account of that year in Lanjarón, formed our introduction to her works. Then some friends sent us a copy of
The Complete Herbal Handbook
for Farm and Stable
. On the back were all sorts of testimonials from no-nonsense bodies like the British Horse Society and
Farmers’ Weekly
. Juliette was thus stamped with the mark of respectability.

On many an evening when I came home tired and dusty from the field or the hill, I would find Ana engrossed in the more worryingly entitled
Illustrated Herbal Handbook for Everyone
, soon to be dubbed ‘Towards a Healthier and More Wholesome Husband through Herbs’. Ana would regard me pensively as she looked up from the pages. Then, to her undisguised delight, I whacked the sharp point of a sickle into the side of my knee as I was clearing an
acequia
channel. This is a typical Alpujarran wound, by all accounts, all men having been born with a sickle in their hand and most of them subsequently going on one way or another to get it in their knee. Mine went in deep, and the knee swelled up like a football.

Ana consulted Juliette, then made a poultice of herbs and a vile potion that I was to drink. Comfrey was an ingredient of both poultice and potion, and the drink also featured coarse wormwood and garlic, just in case I should not find it sufficiently detestable. I’m more or less convinced that it worked, for the wound healed unusually fast. Meanwhile, Ana’s confidence in her powers as a herbal healer soared. She could hardly wait for another opportunity to test her new skill.

Not long after the business with the knee, I obliged her by being very sick indeed. Ana found me vomiting violently into the rosebushes one afternoon, wishing to die. She sat down on a stone beside me and leafed through the wretched book. ‘Juliette says here that it’s a wonder that man is so concerned to stop vomiting which is a natural and wholesome purge for all the ills of the body. What do you think of that, eh?’

‘BAAUUUGGHHH!’

‘But if you really do feel as bad as you look, then you can have some grated raw quince, some cloves, ginger and lemon juice. That’ll fix you up.’

It did, given time, and a reluctance to repeat the cure.

Juliette’s record with us remains good so far, and at El Valero her dictums are applied equally to humans, sheep, horses, dogs and cats – the last being surprisingly accommodating. I am always amused to watch them eagerly queuing up for their weekly dose of garlic, honey and wormwood balls, while at full moon Bonka and Bodger get pomegranate juice and garlic for their worms. Even Ana, however, stops short at embracing all Juliette’s ideas, for it must be said that there is a puritanical streak in the books. Juliette disapproves strongly, for example, of what she calls ‘fired food’ – that is to say cooked food – which she claims destroys the ingredients’ natural goodness and healthful properties. Nor, she says, should you wear rubber-soled shoes, as they deny you the benefits of the wholesome natural emanations of the earth. Still, Juliette is always worth consulting on the less obvious problems that might beset one – how to deal, for example, with the rotting carcasses that are apt to appear in one’s garden.

At El Valero, when a sheep dies of mysterious causes and so cannot be consigned to the pot, it gets bundled into a wheelbarrow and heaved over the
barranco
. The dogs watch this performance with ill-feigned indifference. They string the thing out for a couple of days, until the sheep starts to develop an interesting flavour, then they start work on it. Over the next ten days or so, the sheep returns to haunt us in the form of foul-smelling meaty limbs torn from the carcass and great wodges of rotting flesh with wool on it. The dogs bring these up to the house and spread them around the garden. It’s not a practice to everybody’s taste. When things get really bad, these offerings start to make their presence felt in the house itself. One night I stepped out of bed in the dark and found myself treading on something large, sharp and slimy. With a squeal I lunged for the torch and discovered the skull of a wild boar, with some interesting bits of flesh still clinging to it. The dogs, who had found it in the river, stood proudly by wagging their tails.

Ana consulted Juliette, who was of course very much in favour of unfired flesh for the dogs, and somewhat dismissive of our objections to the smell of the stuff lying around the house and garden. Why, it might even have the beneficial effect of bringing on a healthy bout of vomiting. She did, however, have a solution that would not only keep the dead animals out of harm’s way but would provide a cheap store of dog food. It involved boning the meat and then burying it beneath a mat of selected herbs which were to preserve it.

As the man of the house, I was delegated to dig the hole. It was a hot summer day and the earth was like concrete. I cursed Juliette roundly as I picked and scrabbled about under Ana’s supervision. ‘That’s quite deep enough now,’ I grumbled.

‘It’s not. Juliette says it should be a good metre deep.’