more tiny old people came in, followed by a few more. And then more still. Then there was a youngish—well, late-middle-aged—man in a suit who breezed in and then breezed as breezily straight back out again. After about another quarter of an hour, there had assembled probably about fifty people, and it dawned on us, belatedly, that some sort of ad-hoc queue had formed. Ad-hoc or not, we were definitely at the back of it. At the front of it, I was not sure how she had snuck in, was a young lady—like properly young, in her thirties, half the age of anyone else in the room.
A baby is like an access-all-areas pass in Italy and I walked boldly to the front, just to check that we weren’t in a queue for a wake or something. The young lady was writing things down in what looked like a register and I could see the word ‘potatura’ which means pruning, written on her sheet, so this really was it. The reason the queue was moving so paralysingly slowly was that these old people were taking an aeon—each—to write their names and phone numbers on it. The weight given to each signature was as slow and deliberate as a judge signing someone’s death warrant. Then it occurred to me that for some of these old geezers, their name was probably the only thing they could write, a theory borne out when the breezy man who’d been and gone, came again and, with scolding words, made a spelling correction to one of the old men’s scrawlings.
When we got to the front of the queue, we realized we were in more-or-less the same illiterate boat as the rest of them. First of all we got in a muddle trying to explain that we didn’t have a phone number—one of those situations where I always say too much. Where ‘non telefono’ would probably have got the message across, instead I decided to try to explain that we were redoing our house and still waiting for a phone line to be put in; what came out was something like ‘The house, yours, is being reseeded and we are late for the string.’
Then we got in a pickle about where to put our first names and where our surnames, and also whether we needed to put Rosie down (London habits making us think that this list might also serve as a checklist should the place be bombed). In the end I put Cathy where I should have put Rogers and Jason where I should have put Gibb—with everything leftover going in the column for first names. The result was that for that evening and for the duration of the course, Jason would be known as ‘oceantelfordgibb’ and I as ‘androsierogers’.
Having signed up, everyone headed into another room where there were several chairs and benches set out in rows. Italians don’t like rows and within minutes old men were rearranging them so they could sit next to their buddies in comfy huddles. We managed to squeeze into the end of a Johnny-no-mates row. By this time Rosie was pretty restless, my finger had been chewed to the bone, but Jason managed to unearth some prehistoric biscuit from some nether region of his jacket.
The young lady got up onto the platform/stage area and introduced herself as ‘Alfei, Barbara’. She would be taking the pruning course for the next three days. Relief! We were such strangers among these grizzled farmers with filthy fingernails and legs all bent the wrong way that it was great to have someone sort of the same shape as us at the helm. There was nothing more we needed to do today but she’d see us all bright and early in the morning.
The next morning we were all back in the hall again by 8 a.m. About three-quarters of the people from the night before were there and a few new people, mostly slightly younger ones who must have known to take this whole signing-in business with a pinch of salt.
As Alfei, Barbara set off on her guide to olive-tree pruning, it dawned on us just how far we had to go with our Italian. It didn’t help that there was a constant murmur of noise from the assembled farming crowd, who acted as if showing up alone was the point. As fast as our fingers could thumb through our dictionary, we couldn’t get a level of detail greater than ‘branches, cut, lymph, overall shape’, generic things like that. Alfei, Barbara had a charming habit of saying ‘OK’ which she pronounced ‘Ho-kayee’ at the end of each sentence, but that wasn’t going to get us very far with 1,000 trees to prune. When she came round after the first hour with handouts, with pictures in, we could have kissed her.
In the break—for coffee, of course—our course-colleagues turned out to be quite friendly. I think that last night they had assumed we were lost tourists looking for a remote Lotto painting, but now that they realized we were there for the same reason they were, things warmed up. Even if our Italian was dire (and it didn’t matter because they spoke in that constipated, cauterized language that is the Le Marche dialect), we managed to get by thanks to the ancient art of gesture talk. They would point at Rosie and make snipping movements as if she were pruning an olive tree and we’d laugh, and in return mime her carrying crates of olives up a steep hill, beating her to go faster.
The course carried on in similar vein for the rest of the day. The only difference was that the audience had an ever-growing confidence and would challenge Alfei, Barbara more and more at every stage. We couldn’t understand most of the words, but we could understand that there was a clash of cultures of sorts—between ancient farming tradition and modern scientific method. To me it seemed that the fact all these old guys were here at all listening (well, mostly listening) to a whippersnapper of a woman teaching them about ancient country ways was a victory for her in itself. And she clearly earned their respect—not least measured by the fact that they all stayed. She gently took the piss out of them—admonishing the critics of her methodology by insulting their trees as being ‘all wood’. This was something we’d read about—that a lot of people who kept olive trees mainly for their own use weren’t nearly radical enough in their pruning. They couldn’t cut one branch off in preference to another any more than they could choose to feed only one of their children. The result was that trees which should have at the most four main branches ended up with nine or ten—and the resulting tree was ‘all wood’. The effort it took the tree to keep all this wood alive meant that there wasn’t much left for the productive parts—and the trees would not only look ugly but be woeful olive producers. It’s a sort of ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’ warning shot for olive keepers.
That night, we sat on the cold tile floor of the B&B, our notes all laid in front of us, taking turns to use the Italian—English dictionary. Jason cross-referenced a lot of what Alfei, Barbara had said with a very technical manual published by the University of California, the only technical olive book he’d found that was written in English. It was a close contest whether the unintelligible academic text or the unintelligible Italian was harder to fathom.
By midnight we’d started to make some headway. The good thing about technical jargon is that it’s usually derived from Latin and the words are often very nearly the same in English and Italian. So we found out that the vaso policonico that Alfei, Barbara kept referring to was no more mysterious than a ‘polyconic vase’. Hang on, that’s pretty mysterious. But another pruning book showed us that this meant a tree pruned in such a way that it was like an open bowl in the middle, i.e. empty of growth inside, and that each of the (usually four) main branches was pruned into a sort of cone shape with one main growing tip then giving out to more productive shoots lower down. This was a shape we recognized from trees we’d seen and we liked the sound of it. Trees like that couldn’t be accused of being all wood and how clever we’d be to talk about pruning our trees like a polyconic vase. Even in English people would be perplexedly impressed.
The next day was more of the same, except for some reason freezing cold. I think the church heating bill can’t have been paid—though they’d really no excuse given the pile the Pope is sitting on. Now whenever Alfei, Barbara mentioned the vaso policonico we glanced at each other knowingly. Jason even did a ‘casual’ sketch of one in a place in his notepad which he knew was visible to the rows behind.
The afternoon brought excitement in the form of some young olive trees offered up to the Alfei altar. There was a gasp from the crowd—well, from my mouth—when she whipped out a pair of secateurs clearly with intent. As she demonstrated how to prune a very small olive tree, that messy bit where theory tries to become practice clouded our vision. And everyone
