Deep France Read online

  In memory of Glynn Boyd Harte

  Contents

  Introduction

  November

  December

  January

  February

  March

  April

  May

  June

  July

  August

  September

  October

  Epilogue

  Bibliography and Information

  Index of Recipes

  Introduction

  On the Road

  It’s after 2 a.m. and I’m driving through the Landes. And driving through the Landes. And driving through the Landes. And driving through . . .

  Sometimes I think the Bearnais arranged the creation of this wilderness to make sure that northerners would despair, turn back and leave them alone. If it wasn’t dark, the landscape would be putting me in a trance. Flat, covered in pine trees, ferns and heather, a dark forest stretch­ing away to infinity all around us. The Sleeping Beauty’s best defence.

  My daughter Chloe is dozing in the passenger seat. About an hour ago, I missed our turning off the ring road and we went round Bordeaux twice. She woke up long enough to point out that we’d driven off the Pont Francois Mitter­rand before. The first time I said improving parentlike things, like: ‘See, the French are happy to name a big public monument after a politician. You can’t imagine anyone in Manchester wanting to name a bridge after a Prime Minister, can you?’ She’s gone back to sleep now. She’s taken a few days off from university to help me start this adventure.

  On the back seat are our three cats. They stopped yowling about six hundred miles ago, but they are not happy. Tarmac – well, guess what, he’s the black one – is sitting on top of the cat boxes keeping watch; he knows he’s the only being in the household with a decent sense of responsibility. Piglet, the long-haired tabby, is sitting in his box with outrage on his whiskers. His mother, the Duchess, has crammed herself under the seat. She’s a James Bond cat, a white Persian. Long pedigree, no brains. Everybody warned me not to have one.

  Behind the cats is the rest of my life. A box of books, the computer, the duvet, a bag of clothes. You’re a writer, you can work anywhere. Can I really? People have been saying that to me for years. Now I’m going to find out if they’re right. Nobody, but nobody, warned me not to do this except a writer friend of far greater distinction, whose eyes widened in horror when I said I was taking off without a contract for my next book. Apart from him, the hardest part of the last few weeks has been dealing with the universal envy which I provoked every time I said, ‘I’m going to live in France for a year.’

  Friends, family, neighbours, colleagues. The bank manager, my accountant, the estate agents who’ve rented out our house, the lady in the dry cleaners, the guys in the garage. They gave me back my elderly Daihatsu jeep with a card: Have a good time in France, Easy on the wine. That’s how the average Brit thinks of France. A place to have a good time. With wine.

  I could be having a better time. I’m tired. I’ve driven hundreds of miles and I don’t actually like driving. I’ve packed our possessions into a container and turned our home into a neutrally decorated wood-floored rental property. I’ve said tearful goodbyes to my friends, a whole ocean of emotion poured into the few stress-free moments we could find in our diaries.

  I’ve lived on the same page of the London A—Z since I was twenty. Page 73, with a few short excursions to Page 74. I used to love living in London. Now I’m tired of the crackheads and the chewing gum on the pavements. I’ve been a writer since I was twenty; I still love writing but after eight novels and a mountain of non-fiction, a girl gets cabin fever. And I’ve brought up Chloe alone for twenty-two years. From the tooth fairy to the tuition fees, and beyond – that’s a long time to do two people’s jobs. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ I said to her about six months ago. ‘I could rent our house out and go and live in France for a year. What do you think?’ ‘Go for it, Mum,’ she said at once. Now maybe she’s not so sure.

  The guys in the garage, bless ‘em, have buggered the electrics so the stereo doesn’t work. Somewhere in Portsmouth I bought a blue plastic battery radio that looks like a foetal Dalek. It’s hissing at me on the dashboard while it tries to pick up a French station. I don’t think I’m starry-eyed, but that’s something you never know about yourself until it’s too late. Will I be able to live with French radio for a year?

  I’m driving south, south, south. My destination is almost as far south as you can go in France. Just half a valley away from the Basque Country, an hour’s drive from the Spanish border. Deep France in the geographical sense and Deep France in the cultural sense. La France profonde, the France of fields and farms, of little villages and ruined castles, of vineyards, of cows and sheep, chickens and ducks, corn and cabbages. Actually, the Béarn is not noted for its cabbages, but for garlic and Jurançon wine, the national symbols.

  What am I looking for? What everyone, French or otherwise, has always looked for in Deep France: a simpler, more authentic life. I’m a modern Marie Antoinette, I want to play at being a shepherdess with freshly washed sheep in my model village. Well, it would be nice to grow artichokes and keep chickens, anyway. The key to my new home is heavy in my bag, a great iron key about eight inches long. A real key to a real life.

  I am also looking for the spirit of the land. For ten years I’ve been visiting this small and overlooked corner and it seems as if I’ve never been here long enough. The mountains always call me. Of course, when you get into the mountains, the peaks beyond them are still calling. Already, I’m ten years older than when I first saw the snow shining in the far distance beyond the green hills, and if I don’t set off now, maybe I’ll never get there.

  Finally, the never-ending Landes gives way to the undu­lating hills of the Chalosse. Outside Dax, we pass the statue of the écarteur, the cruelty-free Landais matador who stands weaponless in the path of a charging bull. The road from here is a Roman road, leading straight as a die into the dark­ness. I turn off and drive through the sleeping village of Ossages, with its commanding church spire and the house of the friends who introduced me here, but they’re away now so we’re on our own.

  Between the Chalosse and the Béarn is the valley of the Gave de Pau, a broad green river that rises in the Pyrenees, above Lourdes. The river has been joined by the motorway and the Route Nationale 117, which we cross at a village called Puyoo, built a hundred years ago as a railhead and dormitory for the rope-making industry. The rope-works sign, Tressage de Puyoo, is still painted on a wall by the side of the bridge.

  Now we’re in the Béarn, though it hardly shows. Thick patches of mist lie across the road as it sweeps up a steeper hill, then descends to the roundabout with a fountain outside Saliès-de-Bearn. Nobody about. No police running a stake­out for ETA terrorists or drunk drivers, no customs officers hoping to catch a foreign truck importing drugs from Morocco. It’s November, thank God, so the begonias on the roundabout have been removed. The roundabouts of France, the nadir of municipal art, the proof that not all the clichés are right, that everything French is not automatically more stylish than everything not-French.

  Chloe is awake now. I turn off, and we pass an avenue of plane trees. They look too young to have been planted to shade Napoleon’s army, about the same size as those painted more than a hundred years ago, by Monet and Pisarro, up in the north, safely close to Paris. No Impressionist ever ventured this far, not even Van Gogh.

  Three deer leap across the road in front of us. The road starts wavering, pottering, winding, climbing, twisting. I can feel that it’s running along the spine of the hills, following an old shepherd path chosen for the best sight of the sheep. The night is now absolutely dark and starless.

  Su
ddenly the Dalek radio bursts into life and the joyful voice of a Basque singer resonates through the crammed body of the car. Somewhere out there are the mountains, and somewhere in the mountains is a lone DJ, getting ready to talk to his compatriots in the oldest language in Europe. All five of us revive instantly. We’re nearly there.

  At the crossroads, turn right past the one-time auberge, then left by the pollarded plane trees outside the ex-bar, then right where the signpost says ‘orriule’. That will be our village. Or rather, my village. I’m out of ‘our’ now, I’m into ‘my’. After twenty-one – well, twenty-two really – years, Chloe and I are taking different paths.

  The gate is on the right, past the bamboo. The gate is open. To be truthful, the gate is half off its hinges and looks like it’s been in an open condition for several decades. Through the gate lies the house.

  It is a tradition of the English-abroad genre of writing that somebody falls in love with a house. I did not fall in love with Maison Bergez. This is an arranged marriage. I’ve seen the house only once before, on a sulking day last August. All I can remember are small dark rooms crammed with crazy furniture, and my friends telling me that it’ll be fine, I’ll be able to make it nice, and anyway, it’s the only house to rent for miles around.

  The door is massive and studded, and the key won’t open it, but I’ve been warned about this, and given a tutorial in key jiggling. After some minutes, the lock reluctantly turns and the door opens. A beamed ceiling. A tiled floor. A light switch. The staircase.

  I remember the staircase, a handsome little feature of polished oak. The house has a lot of modest status symbols like this, two stone steps to the front door, a false balcony at the landing window, the pollarded catalpa trees outside; the date carved over the front door: 1897; small embellishments to emphasize that this is not a peasant hovel.

  It’s not a traditional Béarnais house, either. The Béarnais style is a tall, narrow stone-walled building with a steep brown-tiled roof whose hipped ridges run down to drooping eaves. It’s the house you know from fairy-story illustrations, as owned by Cinderella’s father. Maison Bergez isn’t typical. Its roof shape is low-pitched, like the Landais or the Basque houses, and it boasts the plastered walls and the double-fronted layout of a nineteenth-century town house. Only the dark green shutters are of the region.

  Inside, half the wall in one of the front rooms is taken up with a magnificent stone fireplace, with a massive iron basket and a chain to suspend your cauldron from. A full-on peasant-style cheminée, no pretensions here. Upstairs is some of the original furniture, lits-bateaux in oak and mahogany, huge armoires, one with a key labelled, in tiny writing, chambre de maman. This maman chooses the smallest bedroom, for the ease of heating.

  It’s the beginning of November and deadly cold. The house’s guardians have left a vase of red canna lilies, a welcome card and a bottle of wine. We carry in our bags, shut the doors and open the cat boxes. We make the beds and Chloe sleeps, but I can’t. I am as wide-eyed as the night after childbirth. A new life starts here.

  In the morning, we give the cats the run of the house. Obese metropolitan that he is, it takes Piglet about five seconds to realize that there are mice in the kitchen, and to jam himself under the hot-water tank in pursuit of them. We hear squeaking and scuffling, then the bulk of our youngest reappears, cobwebby and elated. Just like us.

  We go outside to stand on the steps and look at the mountains. The house faces south, with the two catalpa trees in front of it. The fields slope down to the valley from the far side of the road, and the Pyrenees fill all the horizon, a 180 degree kaleidoscope. Foothills, blue and purple ranges, snow-capped peaks. As the clouds race up from the Atlantic, the air changes constantly, and the view with it. One minute you can see the grey crags of the middle ranges as clear as a photograph, the next there are only the peaks, sparkling in the sun.

  ‘Are you in my dream or am I in yours?’ asks Chloe.

  We could watch forever but there is work to do. The owner of Maison Bergez has left in situ a vast quantity of knick-knacks which would shame a car-boot sale: dozens of postcards with curly corners, metres of dog-eared romance novels, malevolently bad paintings, ugly lamps, a sinister doll in a blue velvet dress with a rabbit-fur hat who flops like Coppelia on a bedside table.

  From the beams hang macramé plant-pot holders dripping with sad spider plants. The sofa is in the dining room, the table and chairs in front of the hearth. It takes two days to move the basics into position.

  There is some urgency, not only because a writer has to keep cheerful and my mood tends to crash in ugly surround­ings, but because our first house guests are expected for Christmas. ‘You are still going, aren’t you?’ asked Glynn, the painter. ‘Of course I’m still going,’ I replied. ‘Oh, good. Because I’ve got an exhibition of paintings of France and the gallery got tremendously excited when I promised them some of Biarritz. Only thing is, I’ve got to be back in London by January the sixth.’

  We shop, briefly, to fill the fridge, and I cook some of our favourite things, pumpkin gratin and poulet basquaise, recipes from the region which we love and have put in the family cookbook. I want to convince both of us that the basic things in life aren’t going to change. When I realized that I was to be a single mother, I vowed to make an extra effort to prepare good meals and serve them with proper ceremony, realizing that our home was to be the centre of our social life and afraid that one day Chloe would be judged inferior if she wasn’t used to napkins and home cooking. Besides, my mother was a cook by profession. She taught me to stir sauces as soon as I was old enough to hold a wooden spoon, and it seemed the right thing for me to do in my turn with my daughter.

  So there will be recipes in this book – how could there not be? The South-West is the breadbasket of France. Farming is the bedrock of the regional economy. The rolling hills are perpetually changing colour with what they are producing, gold with corn, white with flocks of ducks or sheep, brown with kiwi fruit, russet with vines, red with apples, grey with melon vines, black with the plastic that brings on the strawberries. Every week throughout the summer a different town puts out the flags and opens the bars for the festival of whichever harvest it claims – the peppers, the beans, the ham, even the salt.

  People eat what’s grown and raised around them, which seems to me the way things should be. Amazingly, even though I grew up in a desolate London suburb, only a few streets away from the neighbourhood where Zadie Smith’s White Teeth was set, our family grew their own fruit and vegetables, and kept chickens. We had Hitler to thank. My parents had lived through World War II and obeyed the government’s exhortation to ‘Dig for Victory’ and turned their suburban plot into a market garden. Food was rationed in Britain for years after the war was over, so they kept on gardening and never completely lost the habit.

  With childhood memories of collecting eggs and picking raspberries, I have always felt uncomfortable living in a greedy, ignorant metropolis, and being tempted by invisible food chemists to live off the labour of harvesters in another continent. I am that woman who causes a trolley jam in a London supermarket as she stands rooted to the spot by the fruit chillers, trying to calculate the food-miles per grape in a bunch labelled ‘Country of Origin: Guatemala’. I was also that mother who grew tomatoes on the balcony and runner beans on the patio and took her daughter fishing. If I have to be the last link in the food chain, I’d like to be at least partly conscious.

  Besides, this is also one of the great gastronomic regions of France. Food is its past, its present and its future. And its politics. Its greatest king, Henri IV, started out as plain Henri of Navarre and won the heart of his people by promising that in his reign every peasant would have a chicken in the pot every Sunday. Many dishes that ordinary people from here have cooked and eaten for centuries were eventually reinvented in Paris and became the basis of classic French cuisine. Many others – for me, the better ones – remained the keynotes of French country cooking. And if Alexandre Du
mas, the supreme mythologist of all Gascony, could travel round Europe writing cook books, I think I’m allowed a few recipes.

  After two days, Chloe went back to university. She had just begun her second year of a degree in literature and film studies, and she was anxious to do well. On our last evening we drove to St-Palais, a little Basque market town about half an hour to the south, to have dinner at the cheap and cheerful Auberge du Foirail on the main square. It was packed with beefy young men having a piss-up after the kiwi harvest. For the coming year, for me, there will be no more heaving bars, no more slumping girls with pierced navels, no more slobbering lads going on about the footy, no more irony, no more vodka-with-everything and no more getting mugged for your mobile on the way home.

  Chloe hates flying, so next morning she took the TGV from Dax to Paris, then the Eurostar to Ashford in Kent, which is handily near her university in Canterbury. It was a slow and hair-raising drive, because a thick white fog came down overnight. Maison Bergez is on a hill. Actually, half of the Béarn is made up of steep little hills, laced about with hedges and copses, the hollows filled with woodland. It is the landscape of a medieval tapestry, full of flourishes and short perspectives, embroidered with oak trees and mythical beasts. When a fog gathers, however, you can’t see a thing.

  I waved goodbye to her on Dax station. She sent me a text. ‘Don’t be sad, Mum. It’ll soon be Christmas.’ I saved it, next to the clever message featuring a semaphoring stick person made of letters, saying:

  HEY YOU!

  WANNA KNOW HOW MUCH I MISS YOU?

  THIS MUCH!

  The fog was melting away and the sun rising over the invisible mountains as I drove back. The tops of the hills were clear in the sun, but where the mist still filled the valleys it looked as if someone had poured milk into them. I’m on my own now, for the first time for twenty-one years.