SUNDAY IN MEMORY LANE (Episode 37)

Escape from the Empire!

In March of 2002 I passed my fiftieth birthday and, thankfully, saw an end to the hot flushes and mood swings of menopause. I was still very fit, thanks to my job and my dogs. Financially, I was paying off my mortgage very quickly and noted that my little terraced house in Clacton on Sea was now worth over £100,000.

I had been watching a television series about purchasing property in Europe and it had triggered a desire to travel again. I began to look for a suitable van which could be converted to a living vehicle and I drew layout designs for the interior. I wanted a plain white, hi-top diesel ‘builder’s van’ which would not appear to be occupied or lived in, if it was seen parked on the side of the road. Eventually I was lucky enough to find the perfect Leyland Daf with a Peugeot engine that had only 24,000 miles on the clock. I had a neighbour who was a mechanic and he serviced the van’s engine while I fitted a bed, a portaloo, a propane cooker and various storage cupboards in the back.

For our first trial runs we used up my holidays and went on short excursions around Britain. I wanted to acclimatise Rasta, Ben and Pearlie to living in the van. They took this new lifestyle entirely in their stride and appeared to be loving it. Everyone warned me that cats are territorial and don’t travel well, but Pearlie proved them all wrong. She stayed quite close to the dogs when they jumped out for their toilet needs and she returned to the van with them when called. She liked to sit on the dashboard watching the road ahead or just dozing in the warmth of the sun or heater.

We toured the Lake District in the pouring rain, the West country, Wales and anywhere that was far from the cities. Each journey helped me to fine tune our living arrangements, overcome difficulties and minimise the van’s contents.

When I was confident that we could live in the van permanently, I put my house up for sale and was amazed that it was quickly snapped up by a couple who were planning to rent it out. On the 31st of January 2004 I put the last of my furniture into storage, took the last load of rubbish to the tip and we began the adventure of a lifetime.

The first thing I wanted to do was to visit my son, Dan, who had moved to Totnes in Devon and was between jobs and girlfriends. When I found him I explained my plans and he was keen to come along. We had a slight delay while he applied for his passport, but finally we got on the ferry from Dover to Calais on the 6th of March 2004.

I don’t think I have ever been more excited in all my life as I was on that journey. The new EU Pet Passports had cost me close on £1,000 but nobody asked to see them! When we drove off the ferry nobody stopped us to ask for paperwork and I drove on the ‘wrong side of the road’ for the first time (with my heart in my mouth) terrified! It took me days to get used to it!

We bought an Atlas of Europe and found a rural route through France towards the Pyrenees. From there we crossed them and headed into Spain.

Our journey turned into an epic odyssey of mountains, lakes and rivers, some of the most treacherous daring driving I have ever done and long periods of relaxing in the back of the van while the dogs and cat explored the land. We had it so beautifully organised with great ventilation that we lived and slept very well.

Dan was keen to return to the UK after a few months because he didn’t speak Spanish and felt awkward living at my expense. I drove him to an airport in Portugal where I got him a cheap flight and he made his way to his father’s home.

In this escape I had limited my interaction with civilisation down to fuel and food but I soon realised that if I ran out of money things would become sticky. Also I did not have indefinite time to spare. Once the paperwork on the van, MOT, insurance and Road Tax expired that would be the end of the journey and time to settle down.

So I searched all of the Spanish sierras for an off grid home. I called in to Inmobiliaras (Estate Agents) and everywhere I went I had a vague idea of what I wanted but I was not seeing it.

Eventually I made friends with a rancher who owned a beautiful lakeside place with gorgeous snow-topped mountain views where I parked up for many days. He appreciated me because I cleaned up his land from litter. He recommended to go up to the nearby Vera of the central mountain range, Sierra de Gredos in Extremadura. He got me an appointment with his friend, the local estate agent, and I was shown a number of properties around a string of tiny medieval villages. The soil was black and there were so many rivers and streams that the whole ledge of foothills around the south side of the mountain, Almanzor, was lush and verdant.

The Garganta Alardos is a river which goes from cool blue flat calm to a raging torrent depending on the season and weather. I loved this spot above all others. It is the Roman Bridge of Madrigal de la Vera:

This is where I found my dream home.

It was a three bedroomed bungalow with a wrap around veranda, car port under grape vines, swimming pool, exterior dining room, solar panels on the roof and a brick barbeque, all nestled under two mature cherry trees, in the corner of a wildly overgrown fruit farm right on the riverbank. Rasta, Ben, Pearlie and I were in seventh heaven as we explored the place and all the wildness around it. We had two copses of various trees running north and south of us, we had copious fresh mountain water and endless goat paths enticing us to go higher and higher into the ancient terraced mountains.
The three months of waiting for the purchasing paperwork to be done was a fun filled time. At first I asked a restaurant proprietor if I could park in her car park, but I soon got bored of being a tourist.
I put a notice in the van window that I was looking for work and a lovely man offered me a job helping him to restore an old barn with a view to turning it into a home.
This gave me somewhere quiet to park overnight, a loving donkey to wake me up at dawn, physically demanding bricklaying work from 7am until 1pm and then, in the afternoons I went swimming in the rivers and lazing on the river banks of several villages on La Vera.
I began to meet the locals and found that the children had already named me Pocahontas due to being seen, followed everywhere by my two off-lead dogs and Pearlie darting along between us!

When we did eventually occupy the finca (small farm) I had opened the house and was tidying stuff away. I looked around and could not see the dogs.
They had gone to bed in the van!
It took them a while to get the message that our wandering days were over and this would be our new home. Pearlie absolutely loved it from the very start. Her favourite food was lizards which she had hunted on every mountain range in Spain by then. My new property was loaded with them and moles, voles and mice. She also cleared all the scorpions for me, bless her!

Having spent the bulk of my money buying the fruit farm outright, I had to be careful to make what was left of my money last until I had got the place organised. Madrigal de la Vera was a very welcoming place and soon, thanks to some local friends, we got a well paid job working as night watch at a vast gravel extraction pit for the winter of 2004/5.

That was the easy life. I would arrive on site at the gravel pits just before 7pm, park the van, lock the gates after the workers had left and let the dogs patrol the place! People were afraid of big black and soppy wolf-like Rasta, but Ben was the real danger. He would not think twice about attacking anyone who looked like they might break in and threaten us. He even chased lightning during cracking storms, barking at it in fury! He was so brave!
Until midnight, I would stay in the van while the dogs worked patrolling the acres of wild land around the gravel pit. I had plenty of Spanish books to read by candlelight, a blazing gas cooker keeping me toasty and time to text my friends back in the UK about my adventures. I fitted a spotlight above the rear doors so that I could scan the area from time to time. There was a considerable fortune in excavation equipment, tools and fuels in the vast crater below and enormous mounds of graded gravel all around. The dogs especially loved to race to the top of these mounds and survey the entire acreage. Occasionally they would lay chase to wildlife but I couldn’t usually see what they were chasing because the land was mostly covered with tall drying grasses.

The nights were amazing and frosty in the plains below our home on the mountain range. The silence there was profound. I would sleep, cosy and warm. Then, at 7am, I would unlock the gates for the workforce, drive home and continue the work on clearing my land of its tangle of overgrowth. My boss was delighted. Nothing was stolen when we were looking after his business.

The dogs and I dug a natural irrigation system that diverted water from the river alongside our property and fed it though a network of narrow channels ending at a large pond which drained back to the river. From this I was able to pump fresh water into the swimming pool, up to the water tank on the roof and to hose down my baking land at sundown.
I learned how to use a strimmer and a chain saw. I created a wigwam wood store which defied the wind valiantly but eventually succumbed!

The following spring I was offered a job teaching English in a private school in Madrid. This was only part time work but the pay was brilliant with shared luxury accommodation nearby. I also gave private lessons in the evenings which added to my income. Spanish school holiday periods were so frequent and long that I was always able to drive home to my fruit farm and continue improving it.

One very hot night in May 2007, I was asleep in my room in Madrid around 4am, when I heard Ben barking madly. I jumped out of bed and found him standing by the main door of the flat, very agitated and inconsolable. I presumed that he wanted to go out to relieve himself urgently, so I quickly dressed. Rasta, Ben and I went down in the lift. As soon as the lift door slid back, Ben shot out and raced to the gate, he was almost hysterical. ‘Maybe he has diarrhoea!’ I thought, as I chased after him.

However, Ben did not head to the grassy park in front of our building. He ran along the parked cars searching underneath them! Then he lay down and whined. Rasta and I ran over to him and there, between his paws, was Pearlie. She was barely conscious, mewing faintly. A piece of twig was stuck through her leg and she couldn’t seem to move. She had fallen off our 5th floor balcony, through the tree below and crashed onto the pavement. She was lying in the gutter beside a parked car. Carefully I carried her back up to the flat and waited for the veterinary surgery to open at 8am.
Rasta and Ben were bereft and whining. We were all sleepless with worry.

The local vet was a brilliant young man. He said she had broken her pelvis in several places; there were broken ribs and he removed the twig. He wanted to keep her under observation because she was completely incontinent and he wasn’t sure that she would recover. I persuaded him to let her come home because, if she were separated from Rasta and Ben and in a strange place, I was certain that she would give up and die. I had to really work on him to convey how attached my animals were to each other. My Spanish was good, but in times of emotional stress the vocabulary of a second language feels inadequate.

I bought some incontinence pads to lay her on and he gave me pain medication for her. I had been right to bring her home. Rasta and Ben kept a constant vigil, cleaning and kissing her, for weeks. They would only go out for long enough to do their necessities and then they would run back to the gate, to return to the flat and be with Pearlie. She began to drag herself around the flat by her front legs and, for a time, it looked as if she would not regain control over her back legs at all.

But she did.

The Vet was amazed when I took her to him for a check up x-ray, her broken bones were perfectly knitted and she was purring. Pearlie eventually returned to her full jumping, hunting and feisty self. I don’t know how many of her nine lives she traded in over that fall, but there was no sign of it by the end of school term when we returned to our farm in Madrigal de la Vera.

After two years teaching in Madrid I felt I had enough experience to start my own evening school in the village near to my fruit farm. I had saved enough money to decline another contract at the private school and so, I moved back to my fruit farm full time.

I proposed my idea at the local council offices and got a lot of help from the local Alcalde (mayor) who was keen to see local youngsters take advantage of learning English in their spare time. He informed me that everyone was being encouraged by Spain’s government to learn English at that time, so I was given the use of a classroom above the village police station. All I had to buy was chalk for the black board, everything else I needed for the school was provided by the village council, even advertising! My students ranged from 6 to 66 and I held four hourly classes from 5pm until 9pm every weekday. I soon became known to, and very fond of, everyone and took part in village fiesta life.

Rasta and Ben would howl down the mountain if I was more than an hour late returning from teaching in the village. It was hilarious. Villagers would see me at the local bar, sharing a nightcap with some students and say, “The wolves are howling for Francheska!” The sound was so mournful, that other dogs would join the chorus and it echoed throughout the village. I would have to run home before they woke up the entire valley!

Rasta and Ben were truly special and highly adaptable, willing workaholics. They wore their claws down to the quick by helping me to dig miles of irrigation trenches between the trees and they patiently guarded our precious chickens and fruit. Ben was especially adept at finding eggs hidden in our haystacks and he would chase the chickens out of the kitchen, growling and pretending to bite them all the way! It wasn’t long before the chickens knew that the interior of the house was not their territory.

It was heavenly living there. I was not wealthy materialistically, but in terms of communion with nature and that tiny village community, my life was full to the brim.

It is possible to extract yourself from the Empire and live off-grid, but only to a certain extent. You still have to pay local taxes, buy certain essentials like phone credit, solar panels, batteries and fuel but you can get it down really low if you find the right hermitage, like I did.

I had all sorts of deals going on. I cared for sick and abandoned pets for the local vet in exchange for her services to my precious animal friends, which now included a small flock of assorted free range chickens, a feisty multicoloured cockerel and later, an elderly horse named Soldato (Soldier).

Image from Soldato’s story: https://hive.blog/adventure/@francesleader/soldato-the-suicidal-horse

He was a retired goat-herding horse who taught me to ride him bareback. I received a fabulous pair of handmade riding boots for caring for him after his owner died. Soldato was old, but still very strong. He saved me a lot of hard work by chomping up all the grass between the trees and helping me drag huge boulders out of the newly dug pond.
The village people gave me a lot of support. The local butcher gave me bags of offal and bones to cook for my dogs every time I visited her shop. She loved to see Rasta and Ben sitting on her doorstep, waiting patiently for me. She chastised me for not eating enough myself. “You are getting thin, Francheska!” she would tut loudly. The grain merchant would deliver broken rice for the dogs, grain for Soldato and corn for the chickens at knock down prices. Feeding my team was not too expensive.
Pearlie, now fatter but still fleet of foot, was feeding herself entirely! She would leave the headless and legless torsos of lizards in the dogs’ bowls, which they would stare at in amazement before gobbling them down raw.
I swapped my fruit produce for credit at the local grocery and gave fruit and eggs as presents when calling on village friends. One of my students paid for her classes with jars of honey! Another adult student paid with small bags of dried home grown cannabis! Bartering is a wonderful system!

Madrigal de la Vera is a community that keeps its wealth within itself as far as possible and yet was always friendly and warm to me, a foreigner. In August every year the village would be over-run with holiday makers from Madrid, France and Italy. Brits had not realised that the natural fresh mineral water of the inland mountain ranges is much better than any of the coastlines full of hotels, lager louts and mayhem.

Shh, don’t tell ‘em! 🤣😂