Mallorca Arrival April 1986_(3)
Friday 25 April: Cana Cavea 222, Son Barcelo. We were still missing a back door, windows and a door to our only shower-room and toilet. We had cold running water, an electric box, but no electric sockets or lighting. The house was running on candle power, a small primus-stove and a gas bottle.
With no extra beds at Can Floquet, and our friends Mac and Mel arriving, we relocated to farmhouse Cana Cavea. We phoned the shipping agent and discovered our things would not be delivered until the next week. Ronnie and Carolyn, Sandy’s brother and sister-in-law, had helped us clear Cana Cavea on a number of previous expeditions, but we had all stayed at Can Floquet. Mac and Mel would be the first to stay in our luxurious home. With no furniture, we would all sleep on the floor on mattresses loaned from John and Daphne. It was a miserable wet morning when we left for the airport, leaving the house open in the hope the carpenter would come and finish his work.
Mac and Mel landed on time, and we set off to the Polígono Industrial de Son Castelló to pick up our new red Ford Fiesta. We then returned to the airport, dropped off the hire car and headed to the Continente to stock up with provisions. Back at Cana Cavea, we unloaded the Fiesta then drove to Can Floquet for our things. By the time we had loaded the car with our suitcases and bags, there was no room for the mattresses. At Cana Cavea, Mac and I began cutting up firewood, and Sandy and Mel returned to Can Floquet for the mattresses. While the girls were gone, Mac and I swept up, laid some towels on the floor and set out cold meats, cheese, bread, olives, fruit and wine for a surprise evening meal. On the girls’ return, Tayrne, bless her, was so excited she couldn’t contain herself and told them about the surprise before they got out of the car. Like Bedouin nomads in a stone tent, we ate our meal on desert sands. We put the children to bed, and moved to the tiny snug, the only room with a chimney. Drinking wine in front of a smoky wood fire, far to hot in the confined space, we chatted by candlelight until midnight.
Thus ended our first night in Cana Cavea. With a new family, the dying embers of a fire and everyone asleep on the floor, after years of abandonment the old house was once again returning to life.
The next morning was overcast and misty but soon brightened into a beautiful sunny day. I spent my time cleaning the house for the arrival of our furniture and possessions. Mac set about making the kitchen units with materials left by the builders, and Rohan straightened out his finger with a hammer instead of the nails I’d given him to keep him amused.
Washing was a problem, so Sandy and Mel took the children off to the beach so they could all bathe in the sea. There, the new Fiesta received its first dent by being backed into a stone wall. No matter, it would soon enough blend in with the other old bangers that occupied the Mallorca roads in those days.
In 1986 there was no internet, online shopping, emails, mobile phones, skype or WhatsApp. In the wilds of Mallorca, with an installation cost of 300,000 Pesetas (£1,500), there were few land-line phones. In any case, our Spanish was so bad a phone wasn’t much use to us, all transactions were done face to face with hand signals and a sketch pad.
In those days, if we had to use a telephone, it was in a local bar against the background din of the TV, farmers and other locals; Mallorcans are not the quietest conversationalists. Or, we had to use a public phone box. I only tell you this to explain our struggles to achieve the simplest of tasks. For example, the following day, Mac and I went into bars and shops in Felanitx buying small beers and chewing gum with large notes. This was done just to get enough small change for the telephone box, so Mac could phone his brother in the UK for the dimensions of a Zanussi dishwasher. When we did get enough coins, we lost them all by pressing the wrong button in the phone box, defeated, we went home. Then, Sandy and Mel drove 60 Km to Palma. This was just to place an advert in the English language paper, to sell three return air tickets to the UK on black-market (I was keeping mine to fly back to work). The only saving grace was the Cas Concos telephone box behind the church. Every month or so it went wrong, meaning, once you dropped your first coin into the box, the line stayed open. You could always tell when the Cas Concos phone was malfunctioning, there was a line of ex-pats cueing to make international calls. Calls could last as long as you wanted, however, most callers were pressured by the ever-expanding crowd to limit their nefarious communications to 10 to 20 minutes. Oddly, no one contacted Telefonica España to report the fault.
Monday 29 April: Mac and I drove out of Cana Cavea’s drive en route to Felanitx to buy materials so Mac could finish fitting out the kitchen. Two men, obviously not locals were wandering down the lane looking lost. They turned out to be from White & Co, delivering our things in a 40-foot articulated lorry that couldn’t get down our lane. The lorry was causing an obstruction, so I directed the driver to a distant lay-by.
We tried to find a small truck and driver in Felanitx to transport our things to the house, but without success we had to unpack all our possessions from their crates onto the road. Helped by John and Daphne and their two Fiestas with roof racks, we ferried our things from the lay-by to the house. The last thing standing in the road was our metal framed upright piano that we could no way fit into or on top of a Fiesta. Jaime, the local tractor driver, volunteered to deliver the piano in his Seat van. By driving slowly with two of us walking behind to support the instrument hanging out the back of the vehicle, we eventually got it home in one piece. I asked Jaime how much I owed him, but he wouldn’t take any money, saying, he only charged for tractor work, he didn’t have a price for delivering pianos. The builder Rafael, on his way home for lunch, delivered the empty pine packing crates that we’d purchased from a UK importer of Russian machine tools. Amidst this disorder, Rohan found his bicycle and disappeared, the next thing he came flying down the lane, skidded on the gravel on the bend at the bottom and hit the stone wall. We thought he’d broken his arm, but he was crying more in shock than pain. Very quickly, in the excitement of finding more of his own things, apart from bent bicycle forks the accident was forgotten. After giving the delivery men a lunch of beans on toast and red wine, I drove them to the lay-by, and they went on their way. After they’d gone, we found we had acquired a television stand, a carpet and a bottle-cooler belonging to Seargent Brown of the British Army in Gibraltar.
The day was not yet done, and we picked up materials from the builders’ merchants plus the wood we’d ordered from Matias the carpenter in Cas Concos to finish the kitchen units.
Strangely, by late evening, although I tried not to show it, I felt deflated and depressed. After the chaos of the day, I was hit by the realisation of the monumental task we had undertaken. I asked myself if I really did know what we were doing, and the answer was, no!
The next day Mac pressed on with the kitchen units, and we began sorting out the mass of boxes that were now cluttering up the house. Not only did the carpenter come to finish his work, but the plumber materialised like the ‘Genie from the lamp’ to fit the Junkers instantaneous gas water boiler. By the end of the day, we had a back door, windows (no glass) and a shower room with a door and hot running water.
The following morning, with Sandy and Mel still treating the woodwork, the glazier arrived and fitted the glass in the back door and windows. Mac finished the kitchen, and I installed some electric sockets and rigged up temporary lighting.
Surrounded by our own familiar things, my mood began to lift.