Working Holiday 1985 Part 2
Saturday 10 August 1985
It was difficult working around the builders going in and out of Cana Cavea, so I decided to get on with things that needed to be done outside. Between the northeast side of the house and the entrance to the top field was an area surrounded by a metre high thick stone wall that supported the remains of a wire fence. This area would make a great car park as it gave access to the front and back doors of the house. It used to be a chicken run but was now completely overgrown with prickly-pear and brambles. To those not familiar with prickly-pear, it’s a cactus that grows all around the Mediterranean coastal region from Spain across Southern Europe to the Middle East and on around the North African coast. It’s so prolific that many assume it’s indigenous to these places. However, it’s not. Prickly-pear was originally brought into Spain from Mexico following the discovery of the New World.
That’s the history, now to the problem. The prickly-pear in our chicken run amounted to a two-metre high impenetrable thicket. These cactus can survive in arid conditions and are a good source of water and nutrition that consequently attract animals and humans. The succulent green leaves, over 50cm long, are flat and elliptical in shape and are protected by spikes as long and sharp as sewing needles. The fruit that are red when ripe are the size and shape of avocados and grow on the spiky leaves. They are also armed with fine, brittle hair-like spines that break off in the skin when touched. Trying to eat the fruit with these hairs on is like trying to eat a hedgehog and results in painful, swollen, moustachioed lips. Clearing these triffids would be a difficult task. We could have hired Jaime with his tractor and bucket to clear the place. However, John suggested we’d much impress the locals if we removed the patch before the builders returned after the weekend. Naively, I set that as our goal.
On the morning of Saturday 10 August, armed with heavy garden gloves, machetes, axes and saws Ronnie and I attacked the wall of spine. Carolyn and Sandy, suitably dressed in bikinis, cleared and piled up the spiky leaves. It was slow, hard, dirty and painful work in the hot sun with temperatures over 30ºC. Soon, we were stained with red blotches of mercromina antiseptic solution. Our skin had been punctured by vicious cactus spikes and lacerated by brambles. I got a break from my work when an old Mallorcan neighbour called Miguel, from two fields away, asked if I could repair his electrical fuse. He’d lost his spectacles and couldn’t see the wire. By two, not having made much headway in our clearance operation, we returned to Can Floquet for lunch.
After lunch, the others went to the Continente Supermarket outside Palma to stock up with provisions for our stay. I returned to Cana Cavea and continued hacking down prickly-pear. Sweating under the hot August sun in the Mediterranean away from a telephone was a far cry from fiddling with electronics or being stuck in a factory dealing with clients and their technical problems. It was hard to realise that this old place, a long way from home on a distant island, was ours, and I had a strange feeling of belonging. Our intent was to work on the house when we had the time. When it was finished, we’d have a place in the sun for our retirement. Little did we know we’d become so emotionally attached to this old abandoned farmhouse that it would change the course of our lives forever.
Just before nine, I stood on a pile of boulders. I watched the sun sink in a red and orange blaze behind the distant, mauve coloured, misty Serra de Tramuntana mountain range far to the west.
In evening twilight I made my way back along the empty lanes to Can Floquet. I saw a solitary figure leaning on a wall silhouetted against the fading evening sky. Smoking a black tobacco cigarette, Antonio the shepherd was watching over his flock. With gaunt, wrinkled brown skin from years of working in the fields, it was difficult to tell his age, he looked eighty but was probably much younger. I stood in silence with him for a moment, watching the grazing sheep, then I wished him “Buenas Noches”, and found my way back to Can Floquet in the dark. Shortly after the others returned from Palma. Carolyn went to bed suffering from a cold, probably acquired from the aeroplane’s air conditioning. We barbecued a chicken that Michaela, gave us, it was a tough old bird, but she was such a kind lady no one complained. Sandy and I sat up in the warm night until two talking with John and Daphne.
At 07:30 the next morning, I left the others to sleep. While it was still cool, I returned to prickly-pear cutting at Cana Cavea. About 11:00, I was joined by Sandy and Ronnie, Carolyn’s cold had gotten worse. John had suggested we offer our neighbour Mateo the young cactus leaves for his animals. I walked to his house, but Mateo wasn’t there, so I reeled off my carefully prepared speech in Spanish to his wife, Maria. Impressed, thinking I could speak the language, she embarked on an extended dialogue. I didn’t comprehend a word but nodded in response according to her expressions. I returned to Cana Cavea with an understanding Maria would talk to her husband. Later, Mateo and Maria arrived with a bottle of San Miguel each for Ronnie and me, and tonic water for Sandy. Ronnie didn’t like alcohol much, but to be polite, he drank the beer. After showing them the work on the house, Mateo and Maria left, and we continued clearing cactus.
At 14:00, it was too hot to work so we went swimming at Cala Mondrago. In those days the place wasn’t so crowded, you could drive down the hill and park by the beach. After cooling off in the clear waters of the Mediterranean with the tourists, we had a quick beer at the beach bar and returned to Cana Cavea. By 21:00 in the fading light, we had cleared ourselves a car park. Back at Can Floquet we had Pizza and salad on the terrace and got to bed just after midnight.
12 August was Ronnie’s birthday. The morning was cloudy with a cool breeze, a good day for working. When we got to the house, the pile of young cactus leaves had been taken. Mateo, his son Bernardino, and a wizened old man were piling the older leaves onto a horse and cart. Ronnie and I raked the remaining scrub and brambles into heaps that Sandy dragged to a bonfire in the top field, not to be lit until the rainy season in November. The builders and a couple of locals came to admire our labour. Were they impressed as John had suggested? They probably thought ‘What are these foreign idiots up to in this heat. Jaime could have cleared this with his tractor in an hour’.
But I didn’t care, it was the most satisfying thing I’d done in a long time. Tired, scared, with aching muscles, I felt better for the physical exertion.
The ladies went shopping to buy Mallorcan cakes and pastries for Ronnie’s birthday dinner in the evening. Later, Sandy began preparing the roast dinner she’d decided to cook, and John put two bottles of cava in the freezer to chill. The sun was up, so we set the table in the shade of a tree on the terrace. As Sandy was ready to serve dinner, the builder, Rafael, arrived with bills to settle equivalent to ₤2,300. I couldn’t pay him because our new cheque book was still with the bank. After a chat and a few brandies, Rafael left. Sandy’s Yorkshire puddings were a little burned from the delay. Never the less, Daphne said she’d not had a dinner like it in years.
The new figures from Rafael meant the total price to finish the current work on the house would now be about ₤5,000. This was considerably more than we’d intended to spend, but we were determined to go ahead. Once the work was complete, we’d have a basic habitation to camp in, then we could proceed in our own time. The extra bills would stretch us financially, but we were still getting modest payments from our venture in America. However, that was another cloud looming on our horizon.