The most unsettling thing about the Alcalde’s men, as I watched them at work, was that all of them, each and every man Jack or Juanito, bore an astonishing resemblance to a British footballer called Graeme Souness, who played for Liverpool in that club's high and palmy days, and later managed it for a while. Each workman had a Latino moustache, drooping at the corners, and a stiff bush of hair, and a squarish nose, and a look of narrow appraisal about the eyes, ruthless tackler's eyes that might make a passer-by regret leaving his old shin-pads at the bottom of the wardrobe back in Chorlton-cum-Hardy. I can only say, to anyone familiar with the appearance of Mr Souness, that had you been there you would have said “Graeme Souness!” straight away. Those not familiar with the appearance must imagine it. The Graham Sounesses went about their work of destruction with an awful, implacable merriment, leaving no stone unturned, no wall standing, no street lamp undisplaced, pausing only to yell, in response to piteous pleas for information, “Remodelaciónes!” Our friend Gloria, she of the fashion shop, a woman next to whom the Queen of Sheba would have seemed a dowdy slattern, came down from her apartment at the corner of the plaza, came down in shimmering raiment, came down painted and beringed, came down barefooted, softly, softly, and then, her hand planted on her hip, enquired, seductively: “Say, guys, what in hell is going on here?” And the Alcalde’s men, the Graeme Sounesses, paused only to smirk lustfully and cry:”Remodelaciónes!”
It was not apparent what form the remodellings were to assume, and the Alcalde’s men were not about to say. In response to desperate queries of “¿Cuanto tarda?”, “How long is this going to last?”, they bellowed in chorus, “¡Sei' semana' !”, “Six weeks!”, as though they had been rehearsed before the armoured column set out that morning, or possibly because seis semanas is a general Canarianism meaning “as long as it takes”. When our old friend Frank B., long resident in the island and well versed in local estimates of time, passed by, walking his dog Ben on a necessary errand, he glowered at the rubble and said:”More like two and a half years”. This turned out to be a remarkably accurate forecast, made before the remodelling had even begun.

But no one could say on what model our plaza was to be remodelled. Popular consultation is not a feature of Canarian provincial politics, the guiding principle of which seems to be that those who need to know may be told and the others can make shift to find out. There may have been a notice posted somewhere; or a couple of paragraphs at the bottom of page 17 in the Diario de Avisos; or possibly a loudspeaker van came round, with the announcement that the centre of the village was to be devastated at 7 o’clock sharp on Monday, 7th November; but as most of us, or at least the foreigners, have learned by experience and diligent enquiry that the loudspeaker van is either selling fish, soliciting votes, or giving notice of the Saturday flea-market in a nearby village, few people would have taken much notice of that, or have been inclined to treat it as a reliable source.
The Spanish population had a firm notion that the old plaza was to be levelled throughout, to make an entertainment area, with a permanent stage to accommodate the periodical fiestas, the visitations of dance troupes, of rock bands from Barranco Hondo, of youth orchestras from Buenavista, of charity days with the British Lions (super raffle, bouncy castle for the kiddies, all your Yuletyde Fayre), and most of all, the excesses and delectations of our yearly Carnaval. (So spelt; to spell it “Carnival” marks you as a gringo). The British residents and semi-residents, true to their pragmatic nature, were mostly of the opinion that we were to have a car park, quite possibly a two-storey job, though some had more romantic notions of an underground bus depot.. The rumour that caused the greatest unease and irritability among the British was the one that speculated on the possibility of a church. “Now, who’ve you being listening to?” said Jake, our factotum and source of all local knowledge, when we told him this. He said it impatiently, angrily even, as though we spoke conjecturally of an onset of bubonic plague. It was irresponsible of us, he seemed to imply, to be circulating these frightening tales; churches were so bad for trade. But in any case there would be no church, because the steeple or tower would rise higher than the upper storey of the surrounding flats, obscuring the view from their balconies. Jake’s own version of the remodelling, based on his personal relationship with someone close to the Alcalde, was that the new plaza was to be for strollers to take their ease, with walkways at different levels, and a fountain in the middle. I found this an attractive possibility, and clung to it for a long time, until I got to know Jake better.

The Alcalde’s boys took no hostages. They assaulted everything that stood upright before them, including the palm trees. Especially the palm trees. Palm trees, having straight roots that go vertically into the earth, can be yanked like teeth, given the right equipment, and our bulldozer gang set about pulling them with maniacal zeal. There would not now be a single palm tree left in the plaza, had it not been for the timely arrival of the man we instantly named Él de Santa Cruz, “He from Santa Cruz”. Modestly dressed, driving a small hatchback carrying a sack or two of cement for the remodelaciónes, and apparently armed with a tree preservation order, Él behaved like a man having authority. He spoke to the Alcalde’s men, to the massed ranks of the Graeme Sounesses, and they paused in their frantic toil to listen to him. As a result, they were persuaded to save two of the remaining palm trees by moving them to a new position.

Would you know how to transpose a palm tree, as easily as re-potting a house plant? For this you need a couple of earth-movers, plus two or three lads with shovels. The shovellers, under the direction of Él de Santa Cruz, dig a hole, a straight shaft, in diameter hardly greater than the girth of the palm itself, and about three or four feet deep. Then the earth-movers come into play, and they are used as an infant at table uses his pusher and spoon. One of the earth-movers operates as the pusher, with an upright girder that the driver lays, with infinite gentleness and dexterity of levers, against the palm tree. At this, the Alcalde’s men, transformed as though by some angel of solicitude, take long straps of canvas and cunningly bind them round the pusher, uttering muted prayers for caution roughly translatable into English as “Over to you, Harry”, and “A bit more on your side, Bert”. When this swaddling is completed to their satisfaction, and that of Él de Santa Cruz, they cry (approximately) “Away you go now, John” and the driver performs acts of virtuosity among the levers, raising the pusher and with it the palm tree. Now begins an operation of the greatest collaborative delicacy. The driver of the other earth-mover, using its shovel like a spoon, or a cupped hand, places it under the roots of the lifted palm tree, and the two machines together gentle the tree towards its new hole. Once there, the shovel-spoon is cautiously withdrawn, and bit by bit the pusher is lowered, not without exclamations of “Steady”, “Whoops”, and “Go on you’re all right” (it is difficult to find convincing Spanish equivalents for these phrases), as the straps are taken away and the tree is gradually settled into its new place.

I would not have thought it possible, but the two trees they moved that morning promptly put down roots and took to their revised positions as though they had never known any other. It was amazing that they never leaned sideways or so much as shivered.. The tree that had stood in front of my balcony, to the right, shielding me from the glare of the four o’clock sun, now stood in front of my balcony to the left, obscuring my view of the stage whenever Paco y sus Rumbaleros or Los Musicantes Jovenes del Norte blow into town. In five years, that tree has stood fast and looked picturesque. A man fell out of it once, standing on an unsecured ladder and trying to lop unreachable branches with a chain-saw, but that is the only event of note I can recall in the history of a noble tree, since Él de Santa Cruz rescued it from the destructive fury of the Alcalde’s men.

After the fury of the first onslaught, and the calming intervention of Él de Santa Cruz, activity in the square settled down from insupportable tumult to barely tolerable cacophony. In the days that followed, the Alcalde’s men razed a good two thirds of the old plaza, leaving an eerie prospect resembling photographs of the moon landings, or a Hollywood notion of the Western Front. Jackhammers assaulted the decency of the day, all day, with a bare ninety minutes of ceasefire for siesta in mid-afternoon. Rarely can that civilised Spanish custom have been so thoroughly justified or so utterly blest. In the early evening, the workforce would disperse, after Él had made his final tour of inspection, leaving behind their tools and sundry materials strewn haphazard among the hills and valleys of soil and rubble their incomprehensible labours had thrown up. Darkness brought peace, disturbed by nothing much worse than the noise of the current Elvis impressionist bellowing “The green, green grass of home” from a neighbouring cafe-bar, but the prospect before our balcony was indeed bleak and charmless. It looked like the old World War II bombsites before the dandelions and the rosebay willowherb had a chance to put a softening touch to them.

Very occasionally, it suggested dramatic possibilities. One night, two drunken Britons called - this is true - Dominic and Justin, fought a duel among the soil heaps and the rubble, not with swords or pistols, but with a length of piping and a couple of metres of four-by-two, deadly weapons in accustomed hands. It happened around ten o’clock in the evening, when the clubbers and football fans had begun to take exception to each other’s attempts at stimulating conversation, eg. “On the whole, would you not agree with me that Aston Villa might win the League, in the event of pigs taking off from Gatwick?” or “Cor, Charlie, your bird ennahf got fat legs, don’she?” Such observations are easily taken amiss when the men are on draught bitter and chasers and the ladies are steadily downing Baileys or whisky sours. So it was this evening. Into my view, dodging among the soil-heaps and the rubble, came two figures who were obviously not, at that moment, the best of friends. One of them, the taller and even at a glance the tougher, was shouting something, possibly Turkish, that sounded like “Basha bleed Ned orf”. To this the other, shorter man, retorted (I approximate) “Ah, Pharcoff! Yoonoo zarmi?”, which might have been Slovenian, or anything of a generally Balkan flavour. Their articulation, throughout, wanted something in clarity. At this point the antagonists broke off, to choose their weapons from the miscellany of objects left lying by the workers. The shorter man picked up a length of timber, the taller a few feet of lead piping, and with these they jousted as they dodged round one of the larger soil heaps, uttering cries of menace, eg. Yarrabass! and Shitnyow!

The combat had reached the stage of cuts and abrasions, when a third character made an altogether splendid entrance. I have always thought of him as Don Alfonso - why, I cannot say, except that his was a Don Alfonso-ish sort of role, that of mediator and conciliator. He was a middle aged man, grizzled, and a trifle paunchy. Advancing confidently, he placed himself between the antagonists, stretched out his arms (rather like a boxing referee) and appealed, in a loud voice and with great emotion. “Joostin!”, he cried. “Dommyneek! You are broothers!” This information, a useful reminder of consanguinity, for the benefit of the combatants themselves as much as for the information of an attentive audience, was conveyed with such dramatic elan as to demand, one might have thought, an instant suspension of hostilities. The brothers, dodging round him, took not a bit of notice, but went on with their darting attacks on each other, or wielded their weapons in great swiping movements, one of which (from the four-by-two) caught Justin a nasty blow on the side of the head, while another (from the lead piping) hit Don Alfonso in the midriff and put paid to any further attempts at conciliatory arbitration. For the moment there was a tableau: Don Alfonso, centre stage, wheezing, Dominic left, cackling, Justin right, bleeding unconstrainedly. Then enter, from the wings, a young woman, shrieking. This is the Lady Blahdyell, or so I call her, in imitation of her outcry of horrified reproach: “Blahdyell, Dominic, wotchoodoon?” Hers was a promising intervention, and we were looking forward to the development of a major character, when, however, the local constable arrived; some concerned citizen, or spoilsport, according to your point of view, having spoken to the police, who rarely leave their village station for any lesser cause than impending massacre.

The constable’s was a silent role, or more accurately an unheard role. Approaching the company grouped at centre stage, he muttered a peremptory something to Dominic, who laid down his four-by-two, and to Justin, who hastily dropped his lead piping, and to Don Alfonso, who straightened up, with difficulty, and to the Lady Blahdyell, who giggled. Then, obediently following him to the village lock-up, they walked in single file among the spoil-heaps, to a round of applause from the diners at the Restaurante Asturias. That was the last I saw of them, and indeed the last I heard of them, though I half expected next day that Dommyneek and Joostin would be the talk of the barrio. But the village is well enough used to the excesses of Brits boozing and brawling, and perhaps found nothing very remarkable about these. I imagine they were cautioned, put somewhere to sleep it off, and possibly recommended to finish their holiday elsewhere.

The memorable episode of Dominic and Justin was one of the few evening entertainments or nocturnal cabarets offered to us during the remodelling of the square (an expression that might be written with capitals - The Remodelling of the Square, like The Industrial Revolution or The Decline of the West). During the daytime, however, there was entertainment enough and, and more than often too much. This was a time when a great deal of concrete was poured - The Time of the Pouring of Concrete, so to speak - and a great many slabs and steps were laid down only to be dug up again - the Day of the Jackhammer, as it were. There was no evidence of an actual plan for anything, no consultation of blueprints or architect’s drawings, even by the presiding genius, Él de Santa Cruz. He gave his instructions with hand signals and pieces of string.The Alcalde’s men apparently worked by trial and error, laboriously building up the semblance of a stage at the top end of the square. They changed their minds so often, and worked in squads so variable in size and composition, that there was no reason to believe they would ever finish the work. In the meantime, under our balcony, where the generator prattled all day and the cement mixer sounded its incessant kara-de-plim!-kara-de-plom!, two stalwarts, regulars in the squad, began to lay out the shape of the square as we now know it.

We called them Caravaggio and Scoopy Cap, from whimsical first impressions of their appearance. Caravaggio was a lovely boy, with a muscular definition and a jeering ferocity of address straight out of the Renaissance master’s paintings. Wearing shorts of minimal coverage, and plimsolls, and nothing else, he toiled all day with unremitting savagery, hurling cement and rough sand into the mixer, watering the beast, tipping the resultant glop into a metal wheelbarrow, and rushing about the site, as though mere walking would have been an insult to his manhood, to decant the glop where Scoopy Cap wanted it decanting. He performed miracles of athleticism, often in defiance of necessity. I once saw Caravaggio take a standing leap onto a scaffolding plank some two and a half feet above ground level, taking his wheelbarrow with him - and this to save the trouble of trundling the long way round, up another plank set at a convenient angle of access. There was always something drastic about Caravaggio. He must have been about 17 at that time.
Scoopy Cap was much older. How much would have been hard to say, because he had reached a point, observable in many whose lives are passed in physical toil, when a man might be anything from 35 to 65, as one hour trudges into the next. Scoopy had no muscular definition to speak of; he had a beer belly and he had stamina. He wore a pale blue, or bluish, tee-shirt - always the same pale blue tee-shirt - and a baseball cap with a broad peak, bent to a shape like a grocer’s scoop. These garments, like his trousers, were permanently splashed with dried or drying cement, like the droppings of some great Cement Bird. It gave the impression of a man forever breaking out of a cement coat. I wondered sometimes if his wife gave him a fresh covering of cement after she had done his washing - “I’ve just given you a daub or two, dear, then you’re more comfortable”. Scoopy Cap, a slow, deliberate man, never showed any sign of being uncomfortable, or even fatigued. He ambled through the day, unhasting, unresting, laying and smoothing plots of cement, following the indicative strings and pegs of Él de Santa Cruz, while Caravaggio followed him with barrowload by barrowload of paving slabs.

Those slabs, together with other kinds of facing stone, by and by became objects of interest to DIY enthusiasts around the barrio. They were delivered to the site, after the Canarian system of all too soon or far too late but never exactly when needed, in large open crates which stood round the sides of the square, full to begin with but gradually depleted as the nights went by. The Canarians are not pilferers, but temptation was put rather too obviously in their way, and those who took the tiles probably reckoned that they were helping themselves to a little public property, for which they had already paid in their rates and taxes. At the same time they helped themselves periodically to a few shovelfuls of cement or sand from the heaps dumped round the mixer. Él de Santa Cruz, who brought daily supplies of the stuff in the back of his Ford Fiesta must have wondered where it was all going. He certainly wondered what was happening to the paving slabs and facing tiles, and why he was always having to order in another crate to make up for the unaccountable shrinkage. I used to see him scratching his head over this and berating Scoopy Cap with gestures that asked how a supply of flagstones ample enough to pave St.Peter’s Square could be running out so quickly in ours?

While the Alcalde’s men went on trying to work out how to build a stage out of packed earth and concrete, with access ramps no steeper than 45°, for the comfort and convenience of the elderly, Scoopy and Caravaggio toiled steadily, and by the end of winter had floored, handsomely, the lower end of the plaza, some of which was put to use in that year’s Carnaval. I remember an evening during the fiesta, looking down from my balcony and seeing the girls from one of the cumparsas - dancing troupes - all in Marie Antoinette costumes, taking a break from their routine. The crinolines must have been troublesome, because the girls promptly dropped them, the skirts collapsing in concentric rings on the new paving, and stood there in their high wigs, low bodices and black fishnet tights, squabbling like starlings and puffling gratefully at cigarettes. There is something irresistible about a long-legged Marie Antoinette with a Marlboro in her mouth. I began to feel then that we might be in sight of the end of the miseries of the remodelaciónes
I was wrong. We went back to England at the beginning of April that year, expecting that when we returned we would open our balcony doors onto the scene of a plaza restored, repaved, re-stepped, with a fine new proscenium faced with volcanic stone, and for backdrop a trellis to support the ramblings of some shoots of the original bougainvillea, spared at the orders of Él de Santa Cruz. We found, instead, that they had rubbed it all out and started again. It was a prime example of the Hispanic constructional spirit, which is not really the spirit of mañana but the spectre of otra vez, meaning “one more time”, or “fall back on plan B”. Plan B, in this instance, was to build a church, and it seems to have been in somebody’s mind from the very start. There were those who argued that the change had come about because the Alcalde’s men simply could not get the angles right, or perhaps pour enough concrete in the right places, when they were trying to construct the stage. Others, shrewder analysts of affairs, noted that in May the Alcalde had been seeking re-election, and conjectured that a fairly powerful sectional interest had prevailed upon him to change his plans for the plaza.

In either event, a church was to be built - was being built, even as we arrived, mainly by Caravaggio and Scoopy Cap, under the direction of Él de Santa Cruz. The British, or those among them who had held the view that a church was a needless luxury, if not an actual nuisance, stubbornly refused to believe that what was rising before eyes was a house of worship. For a long time our neighbour John A would not budge from his opinion that this was a Community Hall - all right then, available for religious services should anyone need them, but his tone suggested that the latter event was very unlikely. His stubborn resistance to the idea of a church could not very well survive the installation of stained glass windows, but his final concession was grudging. “You won’t like it”, he said, “when you’re lying in bed of a Sunday morning and that bell starts ringing”. He had some reason for anxiety on this account, since his apartment abutted at right angles with the church, at the height where a belfry would have been, had one been built. But it wasn’t - probably because a belfry would have spoiled the symmetry of the church’s west face, as envisaged by the anonymous architect. (Alas, a belfry has since been added, but that is another story)
What a joy it was, all that winter, to see Caravaggio and Scoopy Cap at work. They were as men in whom a sense of worthy purpose is revived. The cement mixer - kara-de-plim! - kara-de-plom! - sang for them. They refurbished the paving of what many now call plaza del iglesia, “church square”, though the bougainvillea flourishes anew and spills in profusion down the walls on either side of the church. With occasional help from the rest of the squad, when these could be spared from remodellings and destructions elsewhere in the district, they raised the walls of a simple, handsome edifice with a sturdily symmetrical west front, with a fine, tall double door of varnished timber at the centre (not oak; hardwood is a rarity in the islands) between arches for windows where beautiful panels of modern stained glass would be installed. They roofed out the building in the bold red pantiles of the mediterranean vernacular, with a lower roof over the side aisles and one somewhat higher over the central part of the nave. Between the levels they put in glass bricks, to make a clerestory. The roofing marked Caravaggio’s coming of age as a builder. He was entrusted with the laying of the first long row of pantiles, and he did it with frowning care; then Él de Santa Cruz came with his critical eye and reel of twine and made him do it all again (otra vez) and get it right this time.

Inside the church, they literally “poured” the columns supporting the central section of the nave. They stand like solid stone, and indeed are collared and footed in stone, but the pillars themselves are of that universal up-to-the-minute constructional stuff, concrete, poured (by Caravaggio and Scoopy) into great tubes of a stout, waxy-complexioned board which could be peeled off in a spiral after the concrete had set. This was a wonderful sight. Even more wonderful was the pouring of arches, into timber moulds, box by box, round the curve of the arch, which was then outlined with a stone facing. Had I been Caravaggio or Scoopy at this time, I would have felt like a master of the universe; with my own two hands, I would have thought, I can build a church, a beautiful church, and whenever I go into it I will know, this is my work, and whenever I pass the door I will know, some of my life is in there.

Others came to furnish the interior - the tilers, the carpenters, the workers in stone and metal, the artists who designed the chancel furniture and, in volcanic stone, the stations of the Cross, and the makers of stained glass windows for the west face and the clerestory. It is as comely a church as I know, airy and cheerful, gracious in all its ornaments but one (perhaps in my opinion only): a huge altarpiece representing the Pentecostal fire descending upon the heads of the disciples, as described in Acts, Chapter 2. In the background are the frowning cliffs of our Acantilado, and a wild Canarian sea, a louring, ball-of-fire heaven, and clouds undershot with red. In the foreground are the apostles and the multitude, each awkwardly bearing a stiff top-knot of flame like a candle-bulb on a Christmas tree, and all gazing bemusedly, as well they might, at a commanding figure, slightly larger than the rest, in the lower left-hand corner of the tableau. This personage, clearly Hispanic of feature, supposedly represents St Peter, but no one is fooled; the word among the cognoscenti is that this is a portrait of the Alcalde, with, some would say, selected members of his Ayuntamiento. I cannot confirm or deny this, having seen the Alcalde, or someone said to be the Alcalde, only once, at a distance, getting into a car after shaking hands with someone. Others must judge. I do know that St Peter would have had a beard, and the man in the picture is aggressively clean-shaven.

There are no likenesses in the picture of Caravaggio or Scoopy Cap, which is sad, because it is their church as much as anyone’s. Their labours, furthermore, put the final touches to the remodelling of the old plaza, just about two years and a half, as Frank B prophesied, from the day the bulldozers arrived. You would hardly guess, looking around the square today, that it had not been in its present picturesque state from time immemorial, or thereabouts. Visitors admire it, exclaim at the quaint old Canarian style of the quaint old Canarian houses, adore the quaint old Canarian church, and can almost be persuade to adore the quaint old Restaurante Asturias and quaint old Luis’ Bar. How wonderful, they say, to live in a place so original, so unspoilt. Like a piece of history, they say. I agree with them. Like a piece of history it surely is; but little can they guess how convincingly history is faked.