A Working Holiday 1985. Part 1
We landed at Son Sant Joan airport with Sandy’s brother Ronnie and sister-in-law Carolyn, at 03:15 in the morning of 9 August 1985. In air scented by high octane aviation fuel, I walked to arrivals with a feeling of elation tempered by uncertainty. Eleven weeks earlier, we’d been on a package holiday to Mallorca. There a chain of events before and during that holiday ended in us blowing all the money we’d earned, from a recent venture in America. We returned home the owners of an old abandoned farmhouse that we found and purchased in the last three days of the holiday. When Sandy’s dad saw the photos of our prize, he thought we’d lost the plot.
At 05:30 on the morning we were due to leave on this trip, my Uncle Steve died of cancer in Bedford hospital. Auntie Mary insisted we didn’t cancel. Uncle Steve’s death dispelled my doubts about what we were doing. We had a dream, life was short, and I didn’t want any ‘what ifs’ when it was coming to an end.
Palma airport wasn’t the international hub it is now. Then it only had the old terminals A and B, built in the late 1950s. Clearing passport control and customs, the passengers from our flight filed onto coaches and disappeared. We found our rented car with its key on the rear wheel. The roof rack we’d ordered had not been fitted. Dismayed, we stood wondering how we’d get four large suitcases, four overhead bags, and four adults into a Ford Fiesta. With the back seats folded down, Ronnie and Carolyn crammed between the front seats and luggage piled to the ceiling, like candidates for a Guinness Book of Records achievement, we set off into the night. With the windows down, and a warm summer breeze carrying the intense buzz of cicadas into the car, we sped along the narrow, undulating S’Aranjassa road to Llucmajor. From Llucmajor, with the windows close against swirling dust, we rattled along the unpaved road to Campos. Skirting the town of Felanitx, we parked in the top field of our farmhouse Cana Cavea around five in the morning.
In the car’s headlights, we could see the blockwork of the unfinished, two-story, extension that had sprung up at the back of the house since we bought it in May. Finished, the extension would add a kitchen, toilet and washing facilities. The plan was to fly over and work on the place whenever the opportunity arose. A working holiday in a stone tent with a toilet, what more could you ask for?
Sandy and I got out of the car, the air smelled of turned earth and dust. The two contortionists extracted themselves from the Fiesta, stretched and massaged their cramped muscles. Ronnie made to go to the back of the house, but I said it was a bad idea. There was insufficient moonlight to wander a building site. Somewhere in the night was a gaping cavity, hammered out of the solid rock by a mechanical digger. The excavation, laying in wait for the unwary, was for a ‘poso negro’, a cesspit.
Beneath a black star-filled canopy, we saw two meteorites in a golden blaze streak across the night sky and burn out, then we got back in the car and made our way through the dark lanes. Turning into a narrower lane, we drove on until we came to the back yard of the house of the shepherd Antonio and his wife, Michaela. At the back, between the house and its outbuildings, we manoeuvred around a tight 90º right turn into a rough track just wide enough for the car. Bounded on each side by stone walls, with shrubs scraping the paintwork, we negotiated two more doglegs on the last 300-metre bumpy ride to the driveway to Can Floquet. Our home for the next two weeks. An upstairs light came on as we parked. Here, the air was filled with the fragrance from a flower-filled garden. As if in welcome, a ‘lady of the night’ popped open, releasing its intense perfume. John and Daphne Hadland, the retired English couple in their 60s, the final catalysts to the chain of events that set this adventure in motion, came out to greet us. With our luggage, like a line of explorer’s porters, we passed through a colourful plant tangled arch into a house that had stood since the Arab occupation of the island.
Among introductions and fragmented conversation, like Christmas morning we unpacked presents and things English that were difficult to get in Mallorca. A large jar of Bovril, eight packs of Red Label tea, four tins of corned beef, rashers of bacon, and birthday cards and Erinmore pipe tobacco for John.
Tired, Ronnie and Carolyn went to bed. Sandy and I, buzzing with excitement, returned to Cana Cavea with John and Daphne. In the morning twilight, the roofless, grey cinder block extension, with large rectangular window and door openings, stood in contrast to the irregular features of the original structure. I experienced a twinge of guilt as if we’d abused the place with modernity. However, the old house had grown in a series of expansions over four hundred years, this was just another stage in its evolution, a new page in its history. In the field, a massive pyramid of shattered rock stood next to the cavernous, unfenced hole for the ‘poso negro’ connected to the extension by a deep trench for a waste pipe. In the extension, we enter into the old house through its original back door. Downstairs, nothing had changed. Upstairs, the thin sandstone floor panels were now strengthened throughout by a metal mesh and concrete slab. This reduced the distance to the low roof that would later be raised and re-tiled on new beams. The whole place required channelling out for electric cables and re-plastering. That was a job for me.
At 07:00 the builders arrived. After a brief site meeting, we returned to Can Floquet for a breakfast of fried eggs and English bacon in sunshine on the terrace. Following this, we drove to the tile factory in Manacor. There was such a big selection, we couldn’t decide what we wanted, so we left the decision for another day as tiling was not the most pressing job.
The rest of the day we spent relaxing. First, we had lunch outside with wine, corned beef, cheese, olives, homemade bread, and tomatoes and onions fresh from the garden. After lunch, leaving John to his horticulture, the four of us plus Daphne set out for Cas Concos, S’Alqueria Blanca and on to Cala Trencada to swim in the warm Mediterranean. In our early days in Mallorca, Trencada was a secluded inlet with turquoise waters and a small golden beach. Hidden away and concealed by pine trees it was a magical place. I’m sure many more people enjoy it today, but not in the special exclusive way we experienced it, before the big holiday complex was built there.
As Joni Mitchell put it in Big Yellow Taxi: “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. They paved paradise, and put up a parking lot”.
You might call it progress, I call it profit. But, maybe I’m being nostalgic or possibly just plain selfish!
We took the route home via Porto Petro, still relatively unchanged today. We went on to show Ronnie and Carolyn, the pretty village of Cala d’Or. A place now expanded into a featureless landscape of unremarkable whitewashed villas. Looking back, I realised how fortunate and privileged we were to have had that special time in Mallorca before the onset of modernity.
Back at Can Floquet, we had a barbecue of bratwurst, lamb chops, jacket potatoes and beans, cooked over the smouldering embers of an apricot wood fire.
In the quiet of the Mallorca countryside with only the distant clanking from the bells of grazing sheep, we finished our day. John, Ronnie and I went stargazing on the roof terrace. With no light pollution, using only a pair of field glasses, I saw three of Jupiter’s moons strung out on a tilted line on either side of the bright planet. At a distance of 2.5 million light-years from Earth, the Andromeda Nebula Galaxy was clearly visible as a dim oval blur, like a single tiny cloud in an otherwise star-filled sky.
After being on the go for 42 hours, I got to bed at 00:30 wondering if this was all real.