ISSUE 1450
Saturday 15 May 1999
Exodus from Genesis
 

At 17, Chris Stewart lost out on the ultimate teen dream - stardom with
Genesis. At 48, he's living the ultimate mid-life dream - of bucolic bliss
in Spain. And now he has written the book that could make him the new
Peter Mayle. Could stardom beckon again? By Giles Milton

<Picture: Chris Stewart>

LIFE has not always smiled upon Chris Stewart. At
the tender age of 17, he was sacked from the little-known rock band that
he and several fellow pupils at Charterhouse had formed. He was given a
generous, "no-hard-feelings" cheque for £300.

Unfortunately, the band was called Genesis, the drummer who replaced him
was Phil Collins, and within a few months of his departure, they had hit
the big time. Collins, Peter Gabriel and Mike Rutherford suddenly found
themselves on the road to super-stardom.

Stewart recalls his (brief) rock 'n' roll past with a wry smile. He seems
faintly bemused by his untimely exit and doesn't feel an ounce of
bitterness. For while Collins and Co were busy making their millions and
living out the ultimate young person's dream, Chris Stewart held on to
that £300 and, many years later, invested his limited funds in a remote
chunk of mountain in southern Spain, buying himself a crumbling farmhouse,
a swathe of land and a handful of sheep and chickens.

In so doing, he unwittingly realised the other ultimate British dream:
that of abandoning the grey grind of daily life and establishing a
paradise of rural simplicity in a foreign clime.

And, indeed, there the story might have ended, with no one hearing a peep
from him again, were it not for the fact that he has just written an
exquisite account of his life as a rustic sheep-farmer. The book, Driving
Over Lemons, is so darn good that he is already being talked of within the
publishing industry as the new Peter Mayle. This publicity-shy ex-drummer
is about to have his second shot at becoming a household name, and this
time there is no one around to sack him.

The story of how Stewart, his (English) wife, Ana, and later their
daughter, Chloe, restored their sheep farm is endearing, funny and
altogether more honest than A Year in Provence. Stewart is a working
farmer, not a retired advertising executive, and has neither the time nor
money to spend his life glugging wine in local restaurants. Nor can he
afford to poke fun at half-witted "peasants" à la Mayle, since he is
totally dependent on his neighbours when the river floods, the sheep
escape or parts of the house fall down.

His story is more a cross between the BBC self-sufficiency sitcom, The
Good Life, and Thomas Firbank's 1940s classic, I Bought a Mountain. He and
Ana certainly have something of the Tom and Barbara about them and, since
this is gin-swilling southern Spain, there are plenty of walk-on parts for
Gerrys and Margots, as well.

Stewart - originally a Sussex man - had spent much of the Seventies and
Eighties writing Rough Guide travel books and earning money as an
itinerant sheep-shearer. It wasn't until 1988 that he set off on a
reconnaissance mission to Spain with instructions from Ana to find a
suitable plot of land - a place where they could settle and farm. Stewart
had fallen in love with Spain some years previously when, as a youngster,
he had studied guitar in Seville; his love of flamenco guitar never
diminished.

On top of that, he says, "We'd recently got married, after many years
together, and instead of feeling elated, we were strangely depressed. It
was as if all our dreams were coming to an end." Although Ana had built up
a successful horticultural business, they were fast tiring of living in
the shadow of Gatwick Airport.

It was a bossy English ex-pat called Georgina who gave Stewart a tour of
the local farmhouses. This was a fateful meeting, for she drew his
attentions to El Valero, a small-holding tucked away in a wild,
little-known region called Alpujarras, where the southern end of Sierra
Nevada stretches its valleys out towards the sea. She also (unwittingly)
provided him with his book's title by admonishing him for stopping the car
every time there was a lemon on the road, "Drive over lemons," she
commanded.

El Valero was a hopelessly impractical place to buy. The only road was a
wretched dirt track strewn with giant rocks. The house itself was fast
crumbling to dust, and its water supply depended upon a hosepipe tied to
an oil-drum far below the house. "Worse still," says Stewart, "the
solar-powered electricity worked only in summer, and there were rumours
that a dam was soon to be built across the valley." If true, El Valero
would soon find itself under 60 feet of water.

He wavered for a few minutes before allowing Georgina to bully him into
parting with £25,000 of his money. For this, he got one almost habitable
house, two ruins, five acres of orange and olive groves and 175 acres of
grazing land - more than enough to set up his sheep farm.

He was so excited that he forgot to telephone his wife before pledging his
money. He also found himself in the unfortunate position of inheriting the
previous owner, Pedro Romano, who decided he did not want to leave after
all. It was only when Ana sent an ultimatum, "him or me", that a reluctant
Pedro shuffled off to join his wife in town.

"Pedro had vastly overcharged me for the place," says Stewart, "and was
stubborn and difficult. But he was passionate about El Valero and
transferred that passion to me."

From the outset, Stewart was determined to muck in with local life. "I
didn't want to be an observer," he explains. "I wanted to become a part of
the community." This would have been all but impossible in this remote
backwater had he not spoken "tolerable" Spanish and, more importantly, was
an expert sheep-shearer whose speed and skill earned him the grudging
respect of local farmers.

"I was adopted by Domingo, owner of the neighbouring farm, and found
myself treated not as a foreigner but as a farmer." His proudest moment
came when he learnt that, like all farmers, he had been given a nickname.
"They dubbed me El Ingles - the Englishman. This is a great honour, for
there are thousands of English living in southern Spain. They have singled
me out as the Englishman."

There is a hilarious account in the book of Stewart's attempt to make El
Valero habitable. "Domingo arrived with tools and trestles and a set of
straightedges that he had just had made up in town. 'Right,' he said,
'first we'll take the roof off, then we'll knock the wall down.' And he
pitched into the work like a wrecking machine. By the afternoon of the
first day, we found ourselves standing on a pile of rubble where a
tolerably good and rather pretty house had stood a few hours earlier."

Slowly, however, the building rose from the rubble and the present house -
which looks centuries old - took shape. Stewart was amazed at Domingo's
skill and asked him where he had learned masonry. "Why, here, working with
you," he replied, as if surprised by the implication that he had ever
wielded a trowel before.

Now, after many years' work, the main house is finished, even though it
requires constant repairs. A recent hurricane lifted the stone porch and
hurled it across the terrace.

It is a simple, pebble-built farmhouse with a flat roof supported by giant
cedar beams. This, Stewart has subsequently learned, is a serious design
flaw. In summer, the place gets stiflingly hot; while in winter, when the
mountain rains crash down, he and Ana chase around with 15 buckets trying
to catch the leaks. The main room is long and low, with a large fireplace
and a flagstone floor. Occasionally, chickens and lambs try to force an
entry, only to find themselves politely but firmly evicted.

The house sits in a commanding position on a bluff of crumbly rock. Its
view includes several mountains, two silvery rivers and a neat patchwork
of orchard. It is so beautiful that it comes as no surprise that the
nearby pass is Suspiro del Moro - the Moor's Sigh - where the last Muslim
king turned to weep as he was exiled for ever from his beloved land.

The valley's patchwork of orange groves does little to conceal the
brooding menace of the surrounding mountains. "This has always been a
harsh and savage land," explains Stewart. "It's a place of severe
droughts, thorns and erosion. Life here is a constant battle. This is why
I love it so much. When the storms come and the river rages, you feel
slightly uneasy. I think that's a good thing."

Stewart never romanticises life at El Valero. When he goes to a pig
slaughter, the description is so bloody that you can almost hear the knife
entering the jugular. And then comes the feast of chicharrones, which
requires a strong stomach. "Chicharrones are the fatty excrescences which
appear along the long intestine," explains Stewart. "Fried in olive oil
until the outside is crisp, they are absolutely delicious, and better
still as a cake - a big, sweet, sumptuous doughy bun shot through with
gobbets of intestine fat."

The drawback to writing such an evocative portrait is that Driving Over
Lemons is likely to send a wave of enthusiasts to the Alpujarras. Shortly
after A Year in Provence became a best-seller, Peter Mayle had tourists
knocking at his door, demanding pastis and hoping to glimpse his idyllic
life.

But, even if he does become a best-selling author, Stewart's fans will not
easily beat a path to El Valero. Hurdle number one is the hair-raising
mountain track of dust and pebbles. Then there is the river that separates
the Stewarts from the outside world. For their eight-year-old daughter,
Chloe, this brings its own excitement.

"In winter," explains Stewart, "the only way for her to reach the school
bus is to clamber into a rubber tyre suspended on a wire-and-pulley
contraption and hoist herself across the foaming waters of the mountain
river." Sometimes, El Valero is cut off for weeks and the pulley is their
lifeline to the outside world.

In summer, the journey is marginally easier. When the dry heat reduces the
torrent to a trickle, Chloe has the benefit of a rickety (and decidedly
homemade) cedar-wood bridge.

Once you have crossed all these hurdles, you are at last in the Stewarts'
very own fiefdom. If you honked loudly enough as you drove down the dusty
mountainside, you will have woken the two dogs, Big (who's small) and
Bodger (who's big). Five minutes later, a beaming Stewart will appear in a
battered Range Rover.

It has taken a huge amount of physical labour to rear sheep, produce crops
and grow vegetables. The Stewarts scratch a living from selling their lamb
(they have recently applied for organic status, which will increase their
income) and growing what they can. Orange and olive trees thrive in the
valley, as do almonds, apricots and lemons. In the vegetable plot, Ana
coaxes tomatoes, peppers and aubergines to life, but often finds her hard
work ruined by badgers and mice.

I ask why the couple enjoy such a hard and unpredictable existence. "This
will sound terribly pompous," he says, "but we see ourselves as stewards
of a part of God's earth. Here, in the Alpujarras, we can change the
landscape we live in, tame it and transform it, in a way that is no longer
possible in England."

Dip into the daily routine and it seems idyllic, though Ana assures me it
is a constant grind. The day begins at 7.45am when Stewart drives Chloe
down to the river where the trusty school bus is always waiting to pick up
the few children who live in the valley. Chloe has made contact with local
Spaniards even easier. "She has drawn us into their orbit," says Stewart.

On the way back to the house, he feeds the sheep their daily diet of
grass, oranges and olive branches, and adjusts the all-important
irrigation hoses. Then, after a quick breakfast, the day's work begins in
earnest: irrigating, planting trees, scything the crops and pruning trees.

It all seems romantic, but the Stewarts' fight with nature is a continual
financial battle. Money is what drove Stewart to write his book. "If I
earn a few thousand pounds I intend to spend it on employing hired
labourers. I'm 48 and Ana is 43. Physical labour doesn't get any easier."

Farm work halts at midday, when the temperature has been known to climb to
a stifling 118F . By late afternoon, it is marginally cooler and Stewart
is often in the fields until it is dark. At midnight, he and Ana eat
supper - usually roasted pepper salad, aubergines, bulgur wheat and
yoghurt, washed down with the local wine. They eat lamb only at slaughter
time. "Then," says Stewart, "we eat nothing else."

Their most loyal friend for the past 11 years has been Domingo, whose farm
is on the far side of the valley. "Domingo adopted us and became a close
friend," says Stewart. "He sorted out numerous disputes with other
farmers. I often stop at his house for supper after a long day's work."
Domingo has recently fallen in love with Antonia, a friend of the
Stewarts. We will need a second volume to learn how the romance
progresses.

I ask Stewart if he is worried that the locals will resent his book. Will
they - as happened with Mayle - turn against their English neighbour and
drive him from the valley? "I was quite concerned at first," says Stewart,
"and so was Domingo. He asked me to change his name, as well as those of
his friends."

Later that day, we bump into the cheerful Domingo down by the river. He is
walking with his donkey, improbably named Bottom, and is rounding up sheep
for the night. I ask him (with Stewart as interpreter) what he thinks of
the book. "I can't read," he says.

Stewart reserves his harshest criticisms for the English in the area,
especially the New Age travellers who cause great tension with locals. Nor
is he too keen on Amanda and Malcolm, militant vegans who are quite likely
to recognise themselves, in spite of the name-changes.

The couple are adamant that they are here for good and will only return to
England to visit friends and family. "There is much I love about England,"
says Stewart, "not least the rain. But I could never live there again. My
mother lives in Billingshurst, in Sussex; it's the antithesis of
everything I want from life.

"When I die, I want to be able to look back and say that I've left the
land in a better condition than I found it. If so, I hope to lie down
under an orange tree and die with dignity."

The family does go back to England now and again. Most recently, Stewart
was flown "home" by his former band mates to celebrate a new box set of
Genesis recordings. "I hadn't seen Peter Gabriel for almost 30 years,"
says Stewart, "and I'd only met Phil Collins once before. I thought he was
a smashing bloke."

Stewart chuckles as he recalls the day he was sacked from the band.
"Jonathan King [who had started to manage the band] decided we all had to
leave school if we were going to play in the band. My folks were against
me leaving: they said no. So I was booted out.

"Jonathan sent Peter Gabriel to me with a pre-written letter resigning all
my rights to the songs we'd recorded in return for £300. It was a lot of
money at the time and I was only too happy to accept. Besides, I was a
rotten drummer.

"I was sad at the time and, in the years that followed, I practised eight
hours a day and hired a teacher. But it doesn't bother me now. I'm not
remotely bitter about what happened. I hadn't seen most of them until the
dinner. I met Mike Rutherford 12 years ago and we had little in common.

"The fact that they've gone on to earn their fortunes," he adds, "is not
remotely galling. I'm glad I'm not a pop musician. I've done things I
would not have missed for the world."

I ask if he still has that drum rhythm beating in his blood. "Actually,"
he says, "I've just begun playing again for a local group called the
Bancalillo Blues Band. But I have to borrow the drums - I don't have my
own any more."

It is hard to know if Stewart's fame will eventually come from drumming or
his book, but I have a hunch that it will be the latter. If I'm wrong,
I'll send him £300.

© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 1999.