FRUIT TREES

It is early April in England as I write. The two apple trees are beginning to flower in our modest garden near the Devil’s Highway. They have been pruned this year to keep them from over growing and shedding apples onto our neighbour’s property. I like to watch them go through their seasonal changes from flowering to fruiting. I watch the apples grow and ripen and pick them one at a time for cooking purposes. Blackbirds and Thrushes feed on the windfalls. When the cold weather grinds us down a squadron of Fieldfares appears under the tree and feeds voraciously and briefly on the remains. One tree is of the Bramley variety and the other a Golden Delicious. They are rooted together in a perpetual cross-pollinating partnership.

When my sister and I were very young there were two fruit trees on our family farm, cannily planted together as cross pollinators. One of the variety known as Victoria, bore rich purple fruit and the other, a Greengage tree, bore green fruit touched with gold. Their summer ripened fruits were picked by our father and preserved by our mother in sealed jars which she stored in the cool pantry. Throughout the winter, the jars were opened one by one and we ate the preserved plums made more palatable by glutinous blobs of sweet custard. We would place the plums stones around the rim of our dish and try to foretell our future by counting them to the familiar chant; ‘tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor – rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief’.

Years later I had an office near the docks in Benghazi. One of the city’s date palm trees stood outside the window. Once a year a man parked his bicycle against the office wall, climbed the palm tree and dabbed about in its fronds with what appeared to be a piece of vegetation. Out of politeness he did not stare at me as I worked nor I at him. He was Benghazi’s official palm tree pollinator.

Like willow and cannabis, date palms are dioecious; that is there are separate male and female trees. The male trees produce copious pollen in male flowers. The female trees grow flowers which need pollinating before they develop into edible fruit. Left to their own devices date palms would make do with the chancy process of wind pollination. This is clearly unproductive in Libya which is dry and sandy and where dates are a dietary staple. It would mean growing many male trees whose brief and explosive moment of importance would not justify their long use of precious water. Therefore, humans intervene and grow one male tree for every fifty or so female trees. That is why the man parked his ancient bicycle outside my office window, detached a cluster of male flowers from the handlebars, discarded his sandals, clambered up the palm tree and brushed fertilising pollen onto its female flowers. I was too young and impatient to watch the fruit clusters grow.

Long ago, before the Toyota motor car company put camels out of the desert travel and warfare business, a human could survive for a very long time on strong tea, camel’s milk and dried dates.

For a while June and I and our daughter, Nikki, lived in a second-floor apartment near Port Moresby in Papua. The crown of a mango tree grew outside our bedroom windows. There were two reasons to regret this. The first was a vocal and insomniac tree frog which was only interrupted by the arrival of the flying foxes. That would have been a welcome relief were it not for the noises flying foxes make.

Flying foxes are very large bats and their wings are made of black skin stretched over bones. When the flap them, and they do so often to keep cool, they make an obscene noise, especially so if you are trying to sleep a yard or so away from their roost. When we lived in that benighted place the mango fruit ripened. Flying foxes eat mango fruit greedily and slobber when they do so. June soon found us a villa with a view of the sea and no mango trees in the garden.

THE QUEEN’S DOCTOR

For some years, our home was in a suburb of Benghazi. Our near neighbour was a Sicilian doctor who lived much of his life on the edge. He was a government doctor who also treated private patients. Amongst them was the Queen of Libya. He was living with a beautiful Belgian lady who had just left her husband. He augmented his income by embalming expatriates whose mortal remains had to go home for burial and by attempting to beat the roulette wheels in the casino. He liked to hunt and kept the badly cured skin of a cheetah which he had shot in the desert. He had a pet gazelle in his back garden and was upset when it was bitten by a scorpion.

He often needed rescuing from himself, sometimes by me. He was good enough to reciprocate. His influence was invaluable, for example, when our daughter had bitten off the end of a mercury thermometer and we thought she had swallowed it.

I asked no questions when he appeared at our door and instructed me to dash to the pharmacy in town and collect some saline drips. I did as he asked under the impression that one of his patients had turned up at his house in need of urgent attention.

I met him sometime later and asked him if his patient had recovered. He explained that the supplies I had collected from the pharmacy were not for a patient but for the Belgian lady. He and she had had a fierce difference of opinion. She had become very angry indeed and locked herself in the bathroom. To persuade her to come out he decided to frighten her by firing his pistol. He reasoned that if he shot downwards into the wooden bathroom door the bullet would embed itself therein, but the noise of the shot would persuade her to stop arguing and come out. He fired into the door, but the bullet penetrated it and ricocheted around the bathroom. She had been sitting on the water closet which was shattered by the bullet, depositing her on the broken shards. She was deeply shocked.

On another occasion, he turned up at our door looking somewhat worse for wear. He asked me to drive him to the hospital with great care as he thought he had broken a shoulder blade. He was in too much pain to explain in detail, but he and his lady had been out in the desert in a government Landrover ambulance in which he had topped a sand dune at speed and rolled down the steep side. He had landed heavily but the Belgian lady had only minor injuries. I left him at the hospital entrance.

He had indeed broken a shoulder blade and one of his colleagues fixed the pieces together with a wire and encased his chest in plaster of Paris. There was a piece of the wire sticking out of the plaster so that it could be removed later, leaving the plaster cast in place.

The full story emerged soon enough. He and his Belgian lady were in a government Landrover ambulance but not on official business. They were hunting gazelles. They had spotted a herd and given chase, topped a dune at speed and rolled down the other side. He was accused by the government of using the ambulance for private purposes but offered the implausible, but apparently acceptable, excuse that he had received a report of a typhus outbreak and had gone to investigate.

He held a party in his house when he decided to have the wire removed from his shoulder blade, to which he invited June and me and several doctors. They gleefully insisted that I removed the wire using a pair of pliers from the garage tool kit.

THE ENGLISHMAN’S TROUSERS

There was a terrace cafe outside the main bar of the Berenice Hotel in Benghazi. It was on the right-hand side of the great marble steps and from it drinkers could see across the corniche to the harbour mole. It was at its most popular in the summer evenings when the notables from the town sat with the oil folk and the airline crews and talked.

One night they heard a taxi coming too quickly from the sailing club. Some saw two men walking from the basement laundry around the casino towards the steps. Most heard the thump and saw a dead body fly through the air from the taxi’s bonnet into the sunflower garden.

News passed up and down the terrace amongst the drinkers. The dead man was a worker from the hotel laundry. It was the best laundry in town and many people had known the man by sight. The police came and did their work and an ambulance took the body away.

The next day an Englishman was arrested and questioned for some time in connection with the case. The dead man had been wearing his trousers which had been at the laundry for dry cleaning.

The Englishman remembered to be calm about the event. Many clients wondered what adventures their own trousers had seen whilst they were at the dry-cleaners.