approval of a man like Captain W. E. Johns, in any case. –
*
Mercifully we break here for a long-overdue fix of caffeine. For a while we sit in comparative silence, his presumably reflective and mine more convalescent after his unbroken onslaught of memories. The bonfires of olive branches mark the progress of pruners moving about the hillside with billhooks and chainsaws, carving surplus wood from the trees. I have already heard Jayjay on the subject of Tuscan rural life, couched in terms of a Horatian eheu fugaces (how contagious his style is!). Not that he isn’t accurate and even evocative in his descriptions of harvesting olives in late October and November, about how days are lost when rain clouds droop low over the hillsides like mist and the beaded nets waiting beneath the trees become like the cobwebs of Eltham made visible by fog. He is good, too, on olive-picking as a neighbourly activity when friends come to do their stint, balancing on home-made ladders among the swaying branches, their gossip interwoven with cheery obscenities and inventive blasphemy. He notes that these days the friends are mostly middle-aged or olderand behind this festive ritual, as behind so many others in the agricultural calendar, there is the undisguised apprehension that what has gone on for a thousand years is not guaranteed to last indefinitely.
It is here that Jayjay and I part company in that I lack his strong nostalgia and his sense that change necessarily means irreparable loss and degeneration. He is rueful that the sons and daughters of Tuscan hill farmers have increasingly little interest in such laborious ways of spending their lives. They prefer driving delivery vans or working in a supermarket. Boys with little formal education are happier to work on a garage forecourt and to feel part of the glittery stream of life that daily washes through. Not for them the uncanny quiet of the hills, tapping ancient knowledge for a hard living, labouring alone in the woods and the groves … Jesus Christ, Jayjay (I say), are you surprised ?The Eltham of your childhood was no Eden, either. Why would people today bother growing their own runner beans when they can buy deep-frozen bags of them at the supermarket for a fraction of what they would have spent in cash, time and effort to grow the damn things themselves? The same goes for olive oil. I, too, have heard these local Tuscans grousing in their kitchens. Is it not a kind of treason, they say, the way the certainties of millennia are being overturned in a single generation? One worked in order to leave carefully tended fields of vines and olives for one’s children, even in the days when one didn’t own the land, to be passed on in turn to theirs; and so the generations went by. But now, Ddio boia, on the edge of the twenty-first century, we own the land and the bad old feudal days of mezzadria are safely dead and it’s no longer clear what it means to be a small farmer, a coltivatore diretto. It’s not even clear, my friends, what it means to be a father these days, with disobedient children who have too much money and who do exactly what they want … Golly, how they do go on, and so does Jayjay in similar vein until I tell him this is a boring and hackneyed threnody. It’s just that people don’t like change unless it’s obviously going to make them rich. End ofstory. (I admit I take issue with him at least partly to conceal my own unease about the same thing. It’s bleakly comforting to demolish one’s own position when someone else is too fervently holding it.)
Jayjay and I drink our coffee without speaking. I am conscious that the sounds of ploughing fill the silence left by his passionate reminiscences. As a fellow resident of these parts he is as susceptible as I to having certain trains of thought started by seasonal activities. At length the grandson of a goose-farmer who made a living beside the vanished Effra says:
– My father. My father. I became
*
Mercifully we break here for a long-overdue fix of caffeine. For a while we sit in comparative silence, his presumably reflective and mine more convalescent after his unbroken onslaught of memories. The bonfires of olive branches mark the progress of pruners moving about the hillside with billhooks and chainsaws, carving surplus wood from the trees. I have already heard Jayjay on the subject of Tuscan rural life, couched in terms of a Horatian eheu fugaces (how contagious his style is!). Not that he isn’t accurate and even evocative in his descriptions of harvesting olives in late October and November, about how days are lost when rain clouds droop low over the hillsides like mist and the beaded nets waiting beneath the trees become like the cobwebs of Eltham made visible by fog. He is good, too, on olive-picking as a neighbourly activity when friends come to do their stint, balancing on home-made ladders among the swaying branches, their gossip interwoven with cheery obscenities and inventive blasphemy. He notes that these days the friends are mostly middle-aged or olderand behind this festive ritual, as behind so many others in the agricultural calendar, there is the undisguised apprehension that what has gone on for a thousand years is not guaranteed to last indefinitely.
It is here that Jayjay and I part company in that I lack his strong nostalgia and his sense that change necessarily means irreparable loss and degeneration. He is rueful that the sons and daughters of Tuscan hill farmers have increasingly little interest in such laborious ways of spending their lives. They prefer driving delivery vans or working in a supermarket. Boys with little formal education are happier to work on a garage forecourt and to feel part of the glittery stream of life that daily washes through. Not for them the uncanny quiet of the hills, tapping ancient knowledge for a hard living, labouring alone in the woods and the groves … Jesus Christ, Jayjay (I say), are you surprised ?The Eltham of your childhood was no Eden, either. Why would people today bother growing their own runner beans when they can buy deep-frozen bags of them at the supermarket for a fraction of what they would have spent in cash, time and effort to grow the damn things themselves? The same goes for olive oil. I, too, have heard these local Tuscans grousing in their kitchens. Is it not a kind of treason, they say, the way the certainties of millennia are being overturned in a single generation? One worked in order to leave carefully tended fields of vines and olives for one’s children, even in the days when one didn’t own the land, to be passed on in turn to theirs; and so the generations went by. But now, Ddio boia, on the edge of the twenty-first century, we own the land and the bad old feudal days of mezzadria are safely dead and it’s no longer clear what it means to be a small farmer, a coltivatore diretto. It’s not even clear, my friends, what it means to be a father these days, with disobedient children who have too much money and who do exactly what they want … Golly, how they do go on, and so does Jayjay in similar vein until I tell him this is a boring and hackneyed threnody. It’s just that people don’t like change unless it’s obviously going to make them rich. End ofstory. (I admit I take issue with him at least partly to conceal my own unease about the same thing. It’s bleakly comforting to demolish one’s own position when someone else is too fervently holding it.)
Jayjay and I drink our coffee without speaking. I am conscious that the sounds of ploughing fill the silence left by his passionate reminiscences. As a fellow resident of these parts he is as susceptible as I to having certain trains of thought started by seasonal activities. At length the grandson of a goose-farmer who made a living beside the vanished Effra says:
– My father. My father. I became
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