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  Maria gives me an old-fashioned look. Worth nothing if you tried to sell it, she says, but it would still cost money to buy, wouldn’t it? A year’s worth of olive oil doesn’t come cheap, does it?

  No, we agree, doubtfully, we suppose it doesn’t. A year’s worth of olive oil… not a familiar concept. It certainly wouldn’t amount to a truckload in our case. Early eighties orthodoxy in our own land still has it that the oil of the sunflower, polyunsaturated, is the thing for health and longevity. Olive oil is something that lurks exotically on the shelves of delicatessens and Cypriot corner shops, nice but probably as bad for you as butter, and anyway only used in the occasional Fancy Foreign Dish. Or lives in tiny bottles on the skin-care counters of chemists’ shops: Olive Oil BP, stuff you rub into babies’ scalps. Or something.

  Anyway, here is the explanation. Every household is pressing its own year’s supply, enough for a litre or two a week till next harvest. They’ll be tucking the demijohns away in their storerooms, decanting them bottle by bottle for their own kitchens.

  Money saved, maybe, contributes Luigi from behind his bar, but nothing earned. That’s the tragedy. The good wholesome oil pressed in San Pietro this year will never so much as see the market. He doesn’t know what it’s like in England, he says, but here in Italy the so-called olive oil they sell in shops is rubbish – no one in their right mind would let the stuff anywhere near them. Processed in a factory, filtered till it has no taste left, years old likely as not. And made out of cheap nasty olives full of acidity in the first place. Then people wonder why city folk are turning to that seed-oil stuff. (The sister gives me a quick prod under the table – yes, that’s us.) It’s not just to save a few lire – it’s because they’ve forgotten what real olive oil tastes like, that’s why.

  Euh! says the old man, moved (it seems) to despair at this vision of a world deprived of the flavour of fresh-milled olive oil. Luigi abandons his enquiries into the Olive Oil of England, and launches instead into an impassioned speech on the topic of Poisonous Olive Oil and the Evils of Capitalism, which, though his aged friend seems to appreciate it a lot – he’s nodding away like mad, at any rate – we can’t follow at all. We try for a quiet précis from Maria, who just rolls her eyeballs skywards and sighs. Apparently she’s heard it all before.

  She gathers up her colanders in protest and sets off for her kitchens, pausing to promise us a treat of raw broad beans and salami among tonight’s antipasti; and is shocked to discover that in England we don’t ever, so far as either of us knows, eat our broad beans raw with salami. Madonna! Did you hear that, Luigi?

  No, he didn’t. He’s much too busy, thank God.

  Maria off in the kitchens; Luigi deep in passionate debate. Good moment to try for a third coffee. I quickly order one, hoping Luigi is on automatic and won’t notice. He turns to the espresso machine and puts the cups ready under it like a lamb, going right on talking; it looks like we’re going to get away with it. No. Something about the slow-motion way our cups are going down on the bar, the worried look in the big Saint Bernard eyes, warns us that our host is about to remind us yet again of the danger of drinking any more coffees before lunch. I dash to the bar, grab the cups with a quick Grazie, and beetle off back to our table in the corner before he can get up to speed.

  We already know, of course, that an extra coffee might easily close our stomachs, preventing us from ingesting enough of our lunch to survive the afternoon. We have been warned of this possibility several times, by several people. Even the most monosyllabic of card-players is moved to speech when it comes to matters imperilling the stomach. The trouble is, though, that the coffees here are so small. They may be ferociously strong, but you only get a couple of sips to a cup. Most people don’t even bother to sit down to drink one – just stand at the bar and knock it back as if it were medicine. Which I suppose, at this strength, it is. Then they have a glass of water to quench their thirst. Hard on us English used to having the water and the coffee in the same cup, a nice long hot drink. In theory, the solution is simple: just ask for extra water in your cup. Chance would be a fine thing. Or magari as they say round here, reducing that cumbersome phrase to one elegant word. Not only is the cup no bigger than a generous eggcup anyway, but a proper coffee only comes a third of the way up it. Luigi and Maria are constitutionally unable to fill it to the top. Every fibre of their being tells them to turn that Gaggia tap to ‘Off’ at the third-of-the-way-up mark. They can’t ruin a good espresso like this. Screwing their courage to the sticking point, they get it to halfway, and that’s their limit. Unless, that is, you’re prepared to stand right over them, exhorting and cajoling. Don’t turn it off, really, yes really, just a bit more… Rather than keep going through this major drama, we accept the half-full version and then have another one. Or another two, when we can swing it. I am pleased to relate that so far, probably thanks to years of rigorous training in our own less delicate land, our stomachs have successfully resisted closure.

  The World of the Rose, by contrast to that of the Olive, turns out to be quite startlingly cheerful. Introducing us to our workplace, Signor Patrucco, a fearlessly fluent Italian speaker, takes us round to inspect the premises, beaming and bouncing. To judge by his happy air of smug prosperity and bulging embonpoint, he is doing very nicely. Even better, he seems to have no intention of demanding an on-the-spot display of our grafting skills. Lucy has shown me once in England on a real rosebush, and a couple of times on various old twigs since, but I am not confident that I would come across as much of an expert as yet; not under the critical eye of an employer.

  We visit the office first – more of a recycled greenhouse floating in a sea of mud, it has to be said – to be introduced to Caterina who works in there. Amazing! Not only female, but definitely youthful: about our own age. Not a hanky or bit of string about her person; just ordinary jeans and a T-shirt. A recognizable type of person at last. Caterina is, she says, from Diano Marina. That explains it. She kisses us on both cheeks, smiles and chats happily, makes faces about her boss behind his back. Not only a town girl, but evidently a kindred spirit.

  Now, off to our zone of operations. Signor Patrucco’s huge flat tract of alluvial plain sits alongside the riverbed just down past the olive mill, covered with acre upon acre of ramshackle wood-framed greenhouses the size of tennis courts, their glass whitewashed against the sun. Between the greenhouses sit equally large rosebeds, open ploughed-up areas stubbly with rows and rows of ferociously pruned-back rose-stumps. This dusty, clod-filled and seriously unromantic plot of land turns out to be the unlikely source of those individually wrapped red roses that are touted around London’s West End every night. These are what we will, in a sense, be creating for the next couple of months, mating the new stem buds with the innocent species rootstock where they will breed like some collection of outlandish parasites until, in a month or two, they will be setting off weekly in great refrigerated lorries to harass the diners and dancers of Europe’s great metropolises. I find it hard to believe that fate is not playing some ironic trick on me. Is there not, I ask my sister, a faint yet horrible resonance in this rose business of the more repellent aspects of London that we have travelled so far to escape? No there isn’t, says Lucy. Stop being morbid.

  As it turns out, luckily for me, Signor Patrucco is off the site most of the time, busy bulging about in his office. He has taken out a patent on one of his roses, which he has called – sign of the times – ‘Dallas’; a business move that has turned out to be most lucrative, but which is creating a lot of paperwork. So with my sister to cover for me I am able to muddle my way through the wax and string of my new career as slowly and incompetently as I like, with little fear of detection. At last, after a fortnight of fudging, fumbling, and occasionally slicing my thumb to the bone, I really do know how to graft a rose.

  Mr Patrucco may be proud of us, but the same cannot be said, alas, for the denizens of Luigi and Maria’s bar. Back at base, of an evening, the older men, the village Godfath
ers, do their best to set the tone. They are not pleased with our presence. We have burst in on them, sponsored by the evil Patrucco, from another world; one that, as far as they can see, will be satisfied with nothing less than the destruction of their own.

  Patrucco has offended them by importing his absurd Roses into the sensible world of the Olive. Think of good nutritious olive oil going to the wall, while foolish nosegays can earn you a fortune! People going hungry in the world, too. Worse still is Patrucco’s lack of community spirit. Patrucco’s pockets are filling while everyone else’s are emptying, but does he give some local lad a chance? No. He parrot-talks about profit margins and suchlike, employs a girl in the office – a girl, mark you, from Diano Marina – and takes on seasonal, casual labour. Then foreign casual labour: last year, we hear, it was two long-haired Dutch youths. Now, adding insult to injury, not just foreigners, but females. Sternly rustling the bar’s much-thumbed copies of l’Unità, these powers in the land concede us the obligatory politenesses of ‘Buon giorno’ and ‘Buona sera’ as we come or go, and not a jot more.

  They silently watch our toings and froings, our immodestly bare upper arms, our nocturnal visits to Diano Marina, cradle of shiftlessness, drugs and degeneracy, a place where people shamelessly dance without partners. No doubt they have their suspicions about our seed-oil eating past as well. The younger men, the under-fifties, avoid our eyes even more than usual when these brooding presences are enthroned in their corner of the bar. Which they are most evenings till nine-thirty or so.

  On Saturday nights, party nights, the company stays late in the echoing vaulted bar. The old men, when they’ve drunk enough black wine, start to sing terrible sad songs. They stand in a tight circle, heads uncovered for once, arms round one another’s shoulders, backs turned to the company, and close-harmonize with their eyes closed, voices thick with emotion: songs of dark satanic mills sucking the lifeblood from the countryside, of deserted villages and abandoned olive groves, of tradition dying out and family ties withering away, of the city-hardened hearts of ungrateful offspring, of a lifetime’s heroic struggle to wrench a living from this hard stony land all shrunk to nothing, to pain and pointlessness…

  We, of course, won’t understand the lyrics of these old favourites for some time yet; they are in deepest dialect, and we’d be hard put to understand them in plain Italian. How could we guess that we are the incarnation of the bleak future they’re so depressed about? We love the singing, so sad it gives you gooseflesh: no mistaking the tragedy and despair. How has our own country come to be so culturally deprived? we ask one another. Why have we ended up with morris dancing instead of this? And, although the assembled company shows no sign of being especially keen for our approval – rather the contrary, if anything – we always, in our mad foreign way, call enthusiastically for an encore.

  2

  Diano Marina is the obvious refuge from the brain-wrenching complexities of village life. Here, refreshingly, we are objects of interest to no one, no longer weirdly foreign but generic strangers in a town used to stranieri. Or is it Diano Marina that’s less foreign, more like Italy’s public image? At any rate down there by the sea we have less of that feeling of living in one of those crossword puzzles where you have to work out the grid as well as the answers. Today we decide to take advantage of our three-and-a-half-hour Italian lunchbreak, and rest our brains from the mysteries of peasant social relations, by going swimming in Diano’s wide sandy bay.

  Although it is only March the sun is shining, the sky is a cloudless blue, the temperature baking hot. In England, this would be a scarcely to be dreamed of summer’s day. We set off on foot along the flat river road from San Pietro in high spirits, with costumes, lilos, bottles of a strange local lemonade called gasosa – or, in dialect, gazüa – and a bag of fresh rolls from Ulisse the baker. Arriving in Diano Marina twenty minutes later, we detour to the town’s rostic-ceria to buy a mouth-watering spit-roasted chicken filled with herbs which (such is the power of horticulture in this part of the world) is cut up neatly for us with a pair of secateurs, and sprayed from a plant spray with aromatic white wine, before being wrapped in silver foil.

  We have the beach all to ourselves: nodding palm trees, gently lapping waves, warm sun, soft sand, mouthwatering picnic. Idyllic. But the people of Diano Marina, models of moderation though they may be compared to their neighbours in San Pietro, turn out to have one fatal flaw: their conviction that to immerse yourself in the Mediterranean outside the months of July and August is to court certain death. Seawater at the wrong time of year is even worse for your health than coffee at the wrong time of day, and the beach is only deserted because, as far as the citizens of Diano are concerned, if you put so much as a toe into the water before June you are certain to die within the week from exposure or pneumonia or both. Since almost the entire length of the bay is bordered by the wide paved walkway with its strip of palms, and is a favourite spot for the after-lunch digestive stroll, our suicide bid is highly visible. The people of Diano Marina may not actually know us personally; but, of course, you don’t need to know someone personally to feel morally obliged to stop them killing themselves.

  What we had in mind was stress-free sensuous relaxation: instead we find that we are putting on a cabaret show. Not content with inducing bad self-consciousness about plumpness, pallidness, finger-licking chicken-eating manners, swimming style and suchlike, our public-spirited spectators are waiting agog to leap on us, as soon as we leave the relative privacy of the water, with dire health warnings and their own personal recipes for survival after unseasonable immersion, mostly involving grappa. One kindly middle-aged lady in startling green eyeshadow and a seasonable fur jacket even braves the damp and life-threatening sands, coming right down to the water’s edge, heedless of her own safety, to call us back from our watery grave. She listens to our foreign ravings about swimming habits in our own land, the freezing North Sea, the lukewarm weather, the windswept beaches, with the patient indulgence usually reserved for the mentally ill. Once we have done, she gently explains to us all over again the perils we face in the Mediterranean on a sunny March day.

  We boldly put on another couple of these two-woman shows, hoping that people will get bored and leave us alone once they’ve noticed that, thanks to our stout Northern constitutions, we are still hale and hearty in spite of repeated immersion. But we are given no quarter, and after various ever-more-agitated encounters with our well-wisher in the fur jacket and her fellows, we give up flying in the face of this central tenet of the local faith. It is impossible to go on stoically sunbathing when all around you are wrapped in layer upon layer of winter wear and fussing about draughts. We too will have to wait for official summertime. We will abandon the sea and take to the hills for our recreation.

  Henceforth we energetically and sweatily follow the steep, pester-free cobbled muletracks leading uphill and inland from San Pietro, where we potter about the olive groves nosily inspecting local agriculture, marvelling over the enormous numbers of lovely old farm buildings lying abandoned and semi-derelict around the hillsides, over the ancient igloo-shaped stone roundhouses which are dotted about the place in various states of decay, and whose design, we’re told, hasn’t changed since prehistory: strange to look at one and not know if it’s BC or AD, maybe only fifty years old.

  Hardly have we adopted this new inland exploration plan when, much to our surprise, we make a friend. And, incidentally, meet our home to be.

  We have finally made it to the top of the village, following the heroically steep and straight-as-a-die cobbled alley that climbs onwards and upwards, tunnelling through the various neighbourhoods of San Pietro – the frazioni Gionetti, Ughi, Colla – and crossing the toings and froings of the long-winded, hairpin-bending road half a dozen times as it does so. We are high enough to see the sea again, up where the village ends and the serious olive groves start, when Domenico appears bearing down on us, hanky on head, in a huge rusty tip-up truck. We stop and wait for the lorry
to cross our path. But, grinding and squealing, it comes to a halt before us, blocking our way.

  Patrucco’s girls! Mount! cries its tiny driver cheerily. We recognize one of the smallest and quietest of the bar’s leathery habitués, one whose fellow card-players enjoy tormenting him of an evening with humorous sallies concerning – as far as we can tell through the linguistic haze – his rampant sexuality.

  We clamber in. What else can we do? This is the first friendly gesture we’ve been offered. Moreover we’ve grasped, thanks to our own acuity and the hints and tips section of our Blue Guide to Northern Italy, that the concept of the recreational walk hardly exists in these parts: its nearest equivalent, the passeggiata, implies something much more like a promenade to and fro in the village square after dinner. Of course our guide is an heirloom, thirty-odd years out of date, but it seems things haven’t changed overmuch here since the 1950s. Maria has already exhibited signs of perplexity over our aimless walking behaviour. Do we need something? Can’t she get it for us? Where are we going?

  Caught red-handed roaming so far afield, right on the very boundaries of the village, we feel that turning down a lift might seem either mad or rude. Keen to avoid creating either impression, well aware that we are already borderline cases, we swiftly change our plans.

  Our small and bristling-moustached benefactor luckily shows no curiosity about our intended destination. He is giving us a ride, he announces, to the top of the ridge. Silence falls. Having so boldly got us onboard, he seems to have been overcome with shyness. Unless it’s the language problem? A bit of gentle prodding elicits that he speaks perfectly good Italian – better than ours, at any rate – and that the load we are carrying is the amalgamated garbage of all the villages and hamlets on this side of the Diano valley. As well as owning (naturally) a respectable number of olive trees, Domenico is in charge of the valley’s rubbish disposal. We’re off to dispose of it now.