The Dolce Vita Diaries. Cathy Rogers
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pretty Italian photography coffee-table books, with olive trees in neat lines and matching shapes. This grove presented all the ramshackle-ness and chaos that the house didn’t. The lines were mostly not even straight. The trees had been pretty much abandoned, with only the ones right at the top of the very steep hill having even been harvested for probably a decade. Worse, the bleak, bleak winter the year before had done some serious damage to the trees. A properly pruned tree can take snowfall because the snow just falls through the branches. But a great big ’70s Afro of a tree leaves nowhere for the snow to fall through and it just sits there. Add that to a really cold winter where that snow sits for weeks and even months and the result is broken branches and in some cases even split trunks.
Of course, we didn’t know most of that then: we saw lots and lots of olive trees. And we knew we wanted lots and lots of olive trees. The fact that they needed a bit of a love-up was actually almost a plus, in that it would give us something to get stuck into and would immediately help us form a sort of bond with the grove. It would be thanks to us that it would be healthy and productive again. We’d feel that we’d done a bit of good in a little corner of our new world.
We spent about an hour in the grove, frolicking about in the wild flowers and running down the hills and thinking about people thinking how lucky we were. And feeling pretty lucky, even when Jason, who (in contrast to me) is a very unjumpy person, jumped at least two feet in the air with a loud shriek.
‘Oh my God, what is it?’ I yelled, certain that he must have broken a leg at least.
‘A massive snake,’ he said. ‘Like this long’ (he held his arms at full stretch) ‘and jet black. It just went right across the grass in front of me, almost over my feet!’
Yikes. I’m not sure I like snakes. Though these ones are harmless, according to Monica.
There was another beautiful piece of perilous wildlife. On one of the upstairs windows, attached to the outside of it and protected by the shutter on the other side, was a nest of calabroni. They’re sort of giant wasps, like hornets but bigger—twice the size of a big bumble bee each, and apparently it only takes a handful to kill a horse. Babies have been killed by a single sting, apparently. I realize that we are going to use the word ‘apparently’ a lot. It’s a slim cover for ignorance. The nest spread over almost the whole window and was an intricate work of practical art—tunnels carved out and passing over each other in all directions to make a crazy and complex lattice of waspy dwellings.
We didn’t mind the feeling of sharing our future home with some worthy other dwellers but apparently (you see?) we’d have to call the firemen out for these fellas.
We had planned to make another trip to the house before we committed, but when we tried to return on our own a few days later there was a rainfall so heavy that big chunks of road were gushing away down the hill. I was driving and it was quite nerve-racking, swerving around and skidding all over the place, with flumes of gravel and mud rushing past and round the car. It was almost a relief when the road ahead was closed and meant we couldn’t heroically battle on to get there. What this rainfall meant is that we were about to decide to commit our money and our future to a place that we had seen for less time than I would interview someone for a temporary assistant’s job. But commit we did.
Back in Los Angeles, the process of idealizing the house began in earnest. Our photos of mouldy cellars and wild flowers running riot evoked in viewers a mixture of cheesy images culled from the vile and legion films romanticizing Italy. In most people’s minds, we would have a beautiful room with a view where we would ponder life’s mysteries under the Tuscan sun. We half hated their schmaltzy idealization of our future life, but allowed ourselves the odd enigmatic smile, because who is immune to a bit of romance?
A few days after being back, we phoned Monica to tell her that we wanted to buy the house. Slightly chary after our Upupa experience, we made an offer of 215,000 euros, a little less than the asking price of 225,000 euros. Within a few hours, she had phoned back to say that the owners had accepted our offer. And that was that! It seemed too easy. We had a house in Italy. It was in a place called Loro Piceno which we’d learned to pronounce properly. And we had enough olive trees—God, I couldn’t wait to count them myself—with which to start our new life.
Life continued as normal in LA. We were in the middle of filming the umpteenth series of Junkyard Wars, the American version of Scrapheap Challenge, and it was boiling. On several days, the temperature in the valley where our salubrious junkyard lay reached 120·F. It was relatively fine for us, the production team, but the poor on-screen teams would be slaving away against the clock to finish their machines with welding torches and grinding discs, lugging cars and machinery all over the place and working their backsides off. We had a few cases of heatstroke, all dealt with calmly by our medic Roy, who had no nose (a result of diving in toxic polluted waters).
A house in Italy with lots of olive trees couldn’t have seemed further away.
Then one day I found out I was pregnant. I say it as if it was a shock but it wasn’t really. We’d been to see a fertility ‘dude’ in LA, who was one of those doctors who sees it as his moral duty to bring more children into the world. All around his office—his baby shrine—were pictures of beautiful smiling babies of every colour and shape, offerings to the gods of procreation.
We went to see him because we wanted some more facts about this whole business of ageing and having children. There’s so much written about it by a slightly disapproving media, and so many prejudices about older mums, that we just wanted to know the truth. His speech went along these lines. ‘Well, you guys seem happy. You’ve probably been together a while—you’ve had lots of fun together, right? I mean you’ve had enough fun, haven’t you? You can’t play about all your lives. Have kids! Get on with it! I swear to God you’ll regret it if you don’t.’
Then he drew a chart on a blank piece of paper—I was impressed because it was really good even though he drew it upside down so that it was facing us on the other side of the desk. On the horizontal axis was ‘woman: age’ and on the vertical ‘fertility: odds of getting pregnant’. The line just went down and down till it almost hit the line at the bottom. He then drew a cross where I, at the age of 35, sat on the graph and I felt uncomfortably close to where the line stopped being a graph line and started being an axis. It was one of those pictures that spoke at least a hundred words.
‘Do you want more than one child?’ he asked.
We’d never really talked about that—it was a big enough thing to think about having one. But, on the spot, we both thought that we probably did.
‘Well, then, you really need to get on. This graph doesn’t stop just because you have one under your belt. So think about how old you’d be by number two or number three or number—’
‘No more than three!’ we both yelped.
‘Well, whatever, you’ve still got to think that by then you’ll be what 38, 39, maybe even in your forties by number three.’
It was a clear and resounding ‘Go forth and multiply’, in American.
So we did. And here, astonishingly efficiently and with a distinct V-sign to that maudlin graph, was a tiny growing baby.
I think pregnancies are nine months long not because that wee thing needs that time to get its act together but because the carrier does. Nine months to get your head around the idea, nine months to work out how it might affect your life decisions, nine months to make plans about the future.
In many people’s cases, these nine months are a time to nest and to settle and to move house and prepare for a life as more than two. And so it was with us. Before the pregnancy, we hadn’t made a definite plan about leaving LA, but as soon as it was there, we did. We both felt we wanted to be at home in London for when the baby was born, near friends and family—so that gave a very clear schedule for our departure. It also gave enough time for our company to make plans for our replacements—another great reason for this nine-month preparation time, clever babies.
As to our bigger future plans,