La Honoria - Part One (of two)

(A brief apology - I've been unwell for a while and haven't been able to blog, much as I wanted to.  I had a Christmas post to upload, but never finished it and now the time has past, so it will have to wait till next year.  In it I wanted to thank all of you who read this blog, whether or not you comment.  Thank you, and may 2013 be good to you).

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I’ve often written about my closest friend Michèle on this blog. We were at school together from the age of thirteen, and I am godmother to her eldest daughter. This is another aspect of her life I’ve long wanted to write about, and she has helped me with some of the background details.

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Michèle married into a farming family which had settled in Argentina many generations before. The O’Dwyers had originally been gentleman farmers in Ireland before moving to England to pursue politics and the corridors of power. One branch of the family migrated to South America in the mid 19th century.

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The O’Dwyers have always had a strong connection with the land on whichever side of the ocean they have found themselves, and somehow despite the economic problems in Argentina those who chose to settle there have always managed to make it pay sufficiently to lead fulfilling lives and have enough with which to educate their children.

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Drought, fire and flood were easier to cope with than the recently introduced export restrictions, which have left them not always able to sell their harvests. Despite it all they have a genuine respect for the soil that feeds them and a love for the land they hope to pass down to the next generation. Michèle’s husband Mick has instilled in his sons the importance of combining good farming practices with keeping apace of new agricultural technology and ideas, and the willingness to try new sources of income from the land. There is no room for sentimentality in the business, and no prospects for the gentlemen farmers of yesteryear – today it is hard work from sunup to sundown.

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Mick’s grandfather Gil and his English wife Honor purchased a tract of land in the province of Entre Ríos, 400 km north of Buenos Aires in 1906, and Gil named the farm La Honoria, after his wife; it was the family seat during their lifetime. Unfortunately his was destined to be short however, because he died in his late forties following complications after an operation, leaving his widow with 5 children to bring up – four boys and a girl. They returned to the United Kingdom for some years, but after they had finished their schooling, two of her sons and her daughter returned with Honor to Argentina to take up their farming inheritance. One of her sons, Carew, remained unmarried, and stayed on the farm for the rest of his life, helping with the day to day tasks and administration.

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Mick and his family shared the house for a while with Don Carew, as he was known by all (“Don” being the ancient title of respect accorded to people of stature in Spain, and later in its colonies). Don Carew was a man whose personality stood out as being different from other members of his family, but to any British person was easily recognised as being the epitome of the true-blue Brit from before the war who spoke with heavily accented Spanish and had a hint of the proverbial stiff upper lip proper of Englishmen ‘out in the colonies’.

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He was a young man living in England during World War I and later was enlisted as a Special Constable during the General Strike of 1926. Except for these few short years, La Honoria had been his home and his life’s work for the ninety years he had been on this earth, and he loved every inch of it.

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By the beginning of this current century when the generation of Mick’s father and his uncle Carew had passed on and a new ones had taken their place, the land has progressively been divided down into smaller portions, as the laws of inheritance in Argentina dictate that all assets are inherited equally. The land itself has not been split, however; the arrangement was that a designated member of the family should administer it for those who preferred to live in the capital, and by the time Mick had established himself as manager of the farm the others agreed to sell their shares to him.

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He gradually added to the acreage when adjoining fields came up for sale, and lived in the house with his wife Michèle and their five children.

The rambling farmhouse had been built by the previous owners, another family of British descent. They did what was logical for the northern hemisphere, where houses were designed to face the sunny south. Consequently, the handsome colonial style house had some serious drawbacks simply because it had been positioned the wrong way round. The bedrooms faced the broiling summer sun and the front of the house tended towards chilly gloom. The rooms were arranged around a square patio which had once had an old wrought iron well in the centre.

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Michèle slowly started to modernise the house and turn it from a traditional and plain estancia building into a warm and inviting home. Her first action was to rearrange the use of the various rooms in the house so as to turn it effectively from back to front, and to install a false ceiling under the roof over the whole building creating loft space which helped to keep the sweltering summer heat from the rooms below.

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By the time I saw the house in the spring of 1994, it was gleaming with polished wooden or tiled floors and copper ornaments. With the help of a gifted local artist who specialised in painting on wood she turned the old bathroom used by the children into a cosy Beatrix Potter themed one. The house had never really finished settling since its construction, so the doors would not always cooperate when you tried to close them. I discovered this as I was contemplating Peter Rabbit and his friends one day, and found myself the centre of a crowd of small children looking at me curiously…

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Curtains in muted warm colours brightened the walls. The kitchen was remodelled to double its original size with a wood-burning stove to keep it warm in the winter and the welcome addition of a powerful ceiling fan to keep it cool and airy during the long hot summers. This had the additional advantage of helping to keep the flies out and encourage the family to congregate within. The old wooden ice chest which had functioned for many generations by being fed with large blocks of ice brought from the village wrapped in straw was finally given an honourable retirement and replaced with a large modern one.

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The patio was traversed by high beams which one day would hold pretty creepers and climbers...

...and the same treatment was given to the sunny side of the house, to afford some shade and provide an anchor for sun and heat-loving plants. When I visited them in 1994 Michèle had launched herself into clearing out unused rooms, where there were also mice amid the dust and cobwebs. I have tried without success to find the picture I took of her standing on a chair looking down at the floor in horror where a mouse had just scuttled past her.

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She found two large, rusting biscuit tins, of the type used by grocers in the 60s, with glass windows so that you could see the type of biscuit being stored within...

... densely packed with letters written by Honor over the decades she had lived at La Honoria. We started to read the unique and fascinating record of her life in the thirties, but we didn’t get very far before we were obliged by other events to put them away for another day. We still hadn’t been able to open the tins again before I left, and I promised I’d be back to continue to delve into Honor’s account of the pre-war era. I learned later that they also told of a long term, long distance love affair between the lonely widow and someone 300 km away who visited occasionally.

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The inside of a ramshackle shed which had remained untouched for several generations at last saw the light of day...

... and amid the thick network of cobwebs was evidence of a colonial past – British machinery and Royal baking powder...

Don Carew was still alive during that time, and I had several long and enjoyable chats with him under the tipa trees (Tipuana tipu) ...

(Google image)

...as we sought a cooler place to sit in the 100 degree heat of the spring siesta hour. We usually spoke about the British Royal Family, which he revered, and what life was like in the Britain of today. He kept the youthful portrait of the Queen by Pietro Annigoni in a prominent position in the house – 

I got the strong impression that had he visited ‘the old country’ he would have felt totally out of his depth – he had been too long in his rural idyll.

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Michèle has always felt a strong bond with the soil, and particularly enjoys the prospect of transforming a large and wild garden, the more unkempt the better – whether it is her own or anyone else who has given her a free rein in their garden. (I have found her to be a very useful gardener when she has visited me in Bristol...).

Entrance to the vegetable garden

At La Honoria she planted a large vegetable patch, on raised beds on top of straw to discourage leaf-cutter ants and snails, and encouraged climbers to conceal the wire fence around the property.

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Sometimes it was by the use of branches from local trees...

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The bane of the gardener’s life in the subtropical part of Argentina is the leaf-cutter ant, which with its cohorts can strip a plant completely overnight. The other chore is the endless watering required in spring and summer. From November to March tender plants must be watered at least twice a day if they are to survive, and hoses like giant snakes could always be seen in the vicinity. There were always elaborate arrangements to be made when Michèle was absent for more than a few hours for the thirsty plants to be watered. There would be fifteen or so hoses all going at once, despite it being an area of high rainfall. The searing heat of the sun was such that large cracks would appear in the baked soil in summertime, large enough to conceal a hose.

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On the opposite side of the house there was a patch of grass which in time grew into a very pretty flowering meadow. I was dismayed one morning to find it had been razed to ground level, but Michèle reminded me that the area was a good habitat for snakes, particularly the venomous yarará, or pit viper. She had small children at the time, and did not want to risk them getting bitten. I looked down nervously at my open-toed sandals and retreated nonchalantly back to the verandah trying not to give in to the temptation of walking bent double, the better to scrutinise the ground.

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I was told that on one occasion a bowl of fried potatoes was placed on the hearth in the sitting room as a treat for everyone to help themselves, and it wasn’t until one of the children screamed that it was discovered that a pit viper had managed to insert itself underneath and was enjoying the warmth. Another time the same species went unnoticed for a long while as he cuddled up to the bellows by the fireplace.

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A capybara was once spotted running away from the barking dogs and taking refuge in one of the bedrooms, where it established itself under a night table and had to be dragged out and returned to the wild out of the reach of the family pets.

(Google image)

Next time:  tragedy at La Honoria

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Photo Finish

- from Lonicera's non-digital archive

Province of Salta, Argentina

Province of Tucumán, Argentina

Ditto above

Antique Market, San Telmo, Buenos Aires

... with old Victrola for sale

Old but immaculate

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