Annie Hawes - Ripe for the Picking

PENGUIN BOOKS

RIPE FOR THE PICKING

Annie Hawes, originally from Shepherd's Bush, is based in Liguria. Her previous book, Extra Virgin, was a worldwide bestseller.

ANNIE HAWES

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL , England

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First published 2003

Copyright Annie Hawes, 2003

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-193311-5

For Patrizia, Greta and Miki

A rickety three-legged stepladder, the home-made kind you use for pruning olive trees, stands in the middle of my kitchen. From out here under the grapevines, all I can see of the ongoing operation is a pair of stout boots perched high on its creaking rungs; above the boots, a pair of wrinkled corduroy trousers fading off into the shadow of the beams above. The sound effects are pretty impressive, though. A series of knowledgeable huffings, puffings, proddings and scrapings; a sudden outbreak of loud buzzing; a heartfelt call upon the Madonna from somewhere in the region of the grizzled moustache on high. A great shower of powdery sawdust falls to the worn terracotta tiles below. Can there be a whole nest of bees up there? The suspense is too much to bear. I nip across the terrace and stick my head through the door. How's it looking?

Euh! mutters Franco the expert in tones of deepest pessimism.

Porca miseria! he adds dramatically, as a hail of splintery fragments rains down upon my head, accompanied by another burst of wild buzzing.

I wipe the sawdust from my eyes and return chastened to the pleasant shade of the vines, where my neighbour Anna is waiting with me to hear Franco's verdict. She is wrapped in her usual voluminous apron, and naturally she is not just sitting about doing nothing as she waits. No native of the village of Diano San Pietro would sink so low. She has already made a quick tour of the olive trees nearest the house, checking for any sucker shoots I may have missed; and alas for my reputation, she has found several, which she has whisked off the trunks with an expert snap of the fingers. Now she is busy picking surplus leaves off my vine pergola, wherever she feels that a touch more sunshine needs to get on to the bunches of grapes gently ripening below. The shade from the vines, as far as I'm concerned, is a lot more important than the grape harvest they will provide, but I don't bother arguing. I have, as it happens, become relatively competent at looking after my own crops and garden after so many years; I've been living in this house ever since my sister and I came across it while on a holiday job in the plant nursery down at the bottom of the valley and discovered to our amazement that the building, along with its surrounding terraces of olive trees, was on sale for no more than our joint two months' wages. An irresistible bargain; and one that set us up for a decade-long steep learning curve in the matter of the customs and lifestyle of an olive-farming community in this north-western corner of Italy, right up against the border with the South of France. But public opinion in San Pietro will not move with the times, and I've given up being offended when neighbours mollycoddle me like this. Why bother, when everyone gets so much enjoyment out of your idiot foreigner persona?

Anna has turned her back pointedly on the house as she plucks. She has no time for Franco, who once got her husband Tonino embroiled in an unseemly bit of sharp practice over the purchase of a well, and she wants to make sure he remembers the fact. She is positively bristling as she crumples her handful of vine leaves and hurls them on to the mulch pile around the roots of the lemon tree on the next terrace down; glowering off down the valley to where the sea and the sky mingle in misty blue at the bottom of our steep hill. The well in question was, as it happens, the source of our home's only water supplies, yet my sister and I managed to get over the outrage and re-open diplomatic relations with Franco years ago. You'd think Anna might have forgiven and forgotten too. But not a bit of it. As I arrive at her side she nudges me rudely in the ribs and rolls her eyes skywards.

Surely, she says, you don't seriously believe Franco knows what he's about here? On horseflesh and cattle, fine, you can't fault him. He maybe knows a thing or two about olive-farming and basil-growing. Not to mention water supplies and their intricacies, she adds darkly. But bees? Don't make me laugh! What a pity your own man's not up here to take care of the situation, she adds, with a conspiratorial smile and a naughty lift of the eyebrow.

Yes, Anna knows I have a man of my own these days. She was the first to find it out; caught us together all alone up here in the middle of the night. And she's very much enjoying the knowledge. She's been doing the conspiratorial smile at every opportunity ever since, just to let me know that it doesn't bother her, whatever anyone else might think

She's certainly right that Franco did not look his most confident and devil-may-care when I informed him breathlessly, as I dragged him away from his olive-pruning a few terraces downhill, that I urgently needed his help with an invasion of giant black bees in my kitchen. Still, I got the impression that this was more to do with his inability to name the creatures in proper Italian than with actual ignorance of them and their habits. He announced, doing his best to brazen the thing out, that they were called boumburumboum.

That doesn't sound like Italian, I said severely, having already had several bad experiences with vocabulary taught me by Franco. There was the time, for example to name but one when, thanks to his help, I made the entire staff of a sophisticated Riviera builders' merchants collapse in hysterical laughter by asking for a set of door hinges in what turned out to be deepest downhome Ligurian hillbilly dialect. After this embarrassing event I requested Franco in the strongest possible terms to own up like an honest man when he didn't know the name of something in Italian. This time my suspicions were confirmed when Franco, avoiding my eye and any more inconvenient linguistic debate, stepped down from the tree he was working on without more ado, picked up his ladder, hung it over his shoulder, and headed off up through his olive grove towards my house and lands.

I may have been exaggerating slightly when I called it an invasion, but we're talking monstrous bees as big as scarab beetles here, creatures with fat black shiny bodies and great stumpy iridescent blue-black wings. Even a mere handful of these things tumbling drunkenly out of the ceiling and on to the table unprovoked as you are taking a peaceful mid-morning coffee with a passing neighbour are a lot more than required. The outbreak began with just two of them, accompanied by a small shower of fine sawdust and backed up by a series of loud buzzings from somewhere on high, deep inside a roof beam; suggesting strongly that more of the creatures were lining up to join in the party. There being no fly spray to hand, I took Anna's advice one kind of spray being, in her opinion, much like another when all's said and done and nipped into the bathroom to grab a can of anti-perspirant deodorant; climbed nervously up on to the table and sprayed a powerful burst of the stuff right down into the suspicious hole in the beam.