Deep France Page 12

  Imagery turned out to translate more accurately, so it was much easier to talk about the process metaphorically: ‘C’est une sorte de danse, de chorégraphie, ou, par le jeu de l’imaginaire, l’auteur et le lecteur, en harmonie, se plaisent a créer, ou plutôt recréer, des images dont ils son porteurs.’ This sounded like the splendid stuff I heard French intellectuals discussing on the radio. Indeed, the translator herself was an adept user of ‘effectivement’.

  Translating only two paragraphs took over three hours, so we decided that the best way to manage ‘la conférence’ was for me to speak in English and for Annie-Claire, on her sit-up-and-beg typewriter, to provide a digest of the lecture in French. I would then input this on my computer and print out lots of copies to distribute to the audience.

  Having reached decisions with which everyone was happy, Annabel made a fresh pot of tea, we discussed the eternal question of why this golden triangle of three magnificient mediaeval towns, Saliès, Sauveterre and Orthez, had remained such a well-kept secret for so long, to the detriment of the built heritage, much of which needed urgent restoration.

  There are so many stories of similar failures, and so many tourist enterprises which fizzle out, that I suspect the Béarnais have never been convinced that they needed the help of outsiders to make their economy work. They’re extremely jolly with travellers at a person-to-person level, but they’ve never liked the idea of hundreds of visitors traipsing through their valleys. Perhaps the sleepy air of the South-West makes it all seem like too much trouble. Or maybe they simply share the live-and-let-live philosophy of their Basque neighbours. The story of the decline of Sauveterre is a sad example.

  Once, Sauveterre-de-Béarn was a prime destination on the pilgrim route to Compostela. For pilgrims from the north of France, trekking down to St-Jean-Pied-de-Port and planning to cross the Pyrenees through the pass of Roncesvalles and head for Pamplona, the most direct route lay through Sauveterre, which had a splendid stone bridge across the deep waters of the Gave d’Oloron.

  In the days when the Landes was a pestilent swamp, even pilgrims from England, who used to sail over to Bordeaux before they started walking, favoured this route. In the Middle Ages, two million pilgrims were making the trip every year. Three of the principal routes, the chemins de Tours, Vezelay and Puy, converged just north of the town.

  Pilgrims were huge business. Not only did they pay top prices for their guides, board, lodging and walking gear, but they were also happy to make big donations to the churches they stopped at along the way. Throughout the north of Gascony there are many imposing Romanesque abbeys whose stonemasons were paid with pilgrimage money.

  Before its fortunes changed, Sauveterre also managed to build itself a splendid pilgrim church, with a beautiful Romanesque doorway and the traditional blue ceiling painted with gold stars. The bridge, however, fell down some time in the eighteenth century. Instead of rebuilding it as fast as they could, the townspeople began a leisurely debate about the sort of bridge they wanted, no doubt fuelled with whatever was preferred as an aperitif in those times.

  They ended up arguing for forty years, in which time the pilgrims had to make other arrangements to cross the Gave. By the time Sauveterre finally built a new bridge, the pilgrims had found another crossing and taken their custom elsewhere for good.

  The Most Beautiful Brocante in France

  I wanted to go to Ahetze. All I knew was that Ahetze is a tiny Basque village near the coast and on the third Sunday of almost every month it has a flea-market fair, one of the biggest in the region. I forget who told me about it, but something about the idea sounded excellent. Besides, I had a yen for some twirly garden chairs in nice rusty ironwork.

  Willow was away and Fiona wanted to take the children up to Iraty to play in the snow. Annabel, used to trawling the auction houses of Pau for fine art, was not attracted by the prospect of a flea market. Sandy-and-Annie were doing lunch for the young Irish couple who were thinking of buying her house. In the end I went on my own with instructions to call in on Les Écossais on the way back, and give the Irish husband a motivational chat about skiing.

  Lorries are forbidden on the roads in France on Sunday, and there was so little traffic on the motorway that I counted the vehicles I passed on the forty-minute trip to the junction with the busier coast road. Six other cars going in my direction, twenty-two coming the other way. If bliss can be attained on a motorway at all, I made it that morning.

  Ahetze was easy to find, hardly ten minutes from the St-Jean-de-Luz Nord exit from the coastal motorway. The road, typical of the inland lanes of the Basque Coast, ran purposefully along the high ground, between fields which even in the dead of spring were like emerald velvet, patched with russet swatches of bracken or copses of beech.

  Suddenly you found yourself running downhill, and there was the village in front of you, a picture-postcard vision of half-timbered Basque houses standing majestically around the church. In the flat, whitewashed bell tower, two bells swung in round-topped niches.

  Even here, less than twenty kilometres into the foothills of the Pyrenees, Basque architecture is quite unlike that of the Béarn. To new eyes, the houses look more Tyrolean than anything else. They’re massive, made to shelter an extended family under a low-pitched red-tile roof. Under the eaves is a space for the doves, who come and go through neat triangular holes in the outer wall.

  There’s usually a decoratively carved wooden balcony at first-floor level, traditionally used as a dry storage area for firewood. The window shutters and the exposed beams are painted a bold colour, most often ox-blood red, though dark green, brown and blue are also popular. The massive front door is hung under a stone lintel on which the names of the family’s founding couple are carved, with the date when they set up the new home.

  Often the Basque national symbol is often carved in the top corners; it evolved from pre-Christian sun-worship and looks like four teardrops swirled together into a rounded swastika. A Basque house tries to face the east and always has a name, written diagonally on the front wall, in paint or wrought iron.

  The price of the emerald velvet, of course, is that the Basque Country has the highest rainfall in all Europe; it’s even wetter than Éire. The Irish are going to feel right at home here. On that day, however, the sun was smiling down through big fluffy cumuli, burnishing the green grass and the white-walled village houses.

  The flea market was clearly a whole-village effort. The children were out on the hedge banks directing vehicles to park in neat lines on the nearest field, from which it was a short walk down a lane lined with primroses to the first stalls. These were selling the high-end of brocante desirables, the vintage cafe-ware, cottage-kitchen enamels, early twentieth-century coffee bowls, dressing-table sets, ‘bedroom’ pictures and small mirrors.

  Moving on, I came to the realm of agricultural antiques. Here were the old cattle yokes, forks, spades, rakes, trowels, bird cages, horse shoes, rat-traps, watering cans, butterfly nets, fishing rods, sieves, shoe lasts, bottle stands, plate racks, egg carriers, grape baskets, milk churns, plough shares and prune dryers. The prune dryers are shallow ovoid wicker scoops, like giant snow shoes, on which plums were spread out in the sun to turn into the famous Agen prunes.

  So far, the stalls had lined the narrow village streets. As I drifted out of the agricultural tat section to the serious old iron department, where garden seats, tables, urns, statues, bedsteads, light fittings, plant stands and fountains lay about, their rust patches twinkling in the sun, I realized that every inch of available space in this village was going to be covered in goods for sale. Every lane, every alleyway, every sports ground, every large room, every car park – everywhere except the church itself and the graveyard around it.

  The car park in front of the village’s two shops was a battlefield of buying and selling, where everyone with furniture had set up to take advantage of the space. The dealers’ vans, circled like cowboys’ covered wagons, were parked with their wheels on the grass
verges and leaned at crazy angles. In front of them were the tables covered with sheets and sheltered by fluttering sunshades, crowded with a pell-mell selection of goods.

  True tat rubbed handles with real pearls. You could buy anything from a very nice art nouveau marble sculpture of a child’s head to a well-used photocopier, circa 1979. Ahetze was like Portobello Road in the Sixties, though the clientele were more conservatively dressed and the breeze carried a whiff of the Atlantic ocean rather than of patchouli oil.

  The school sports hall housed the down-market textiles, the linen tea towels monogrammed in traditional red cross-stitch, the frayed damask guest towels, the washed-out napkins and their cotton envelopes, the scalloped fabric shelf-edgings edged with lace or embroidered naively with animals and fruit.

  Up a stone staircase, and the posh linen was discovered in the pelota court, transformed into the bottom drawers of a thousand Basque brides. Here I could have spent all day among the snowy mounds of treasure, reverently unfolding and refolding the embroidered sheets and admiring the drawn-thread work, the stylized deco or nouveau monograms, the insets of lace, the embroidered flowers, the matching pillowcases, bolster covers, nightdresses and curtain panels.

  More steps led up to the church car park and the funky textiles, the chenille curtains, the velvet cushions, the lengths of faded chintz and printed linen, the smocked farmhands’ shirts, and the very old and very rustic linen sheets, woven in the nineteenth century and earlier, by hand, on small cottage looms, from thread that had been hand-spun.

  Once these old linen sheets, some of them nearly as thick as blankets, were despised as coarse and fit only for peasants. Now they are one of the most prized items in the fashionable catalogue of French country antiques, the first choice of the international yuppie designer for running up loose covers or curtains with ‘the divine flop factor’.

  Dealing in linen is strictly a woman’s business, so the most prized buy, the ultimate fetish item, is one of the yellow-glazed earthenware pots originally used for confits, on which both the men and women dealers are comfortable making a profit. To give you an idea of the scale of the profits they make, I was buying coarse linen sheets at around €15, while they sell in London at up to £150. Fine linen sheets without embroidery were up to €20, sold in London for up to £100, and the confit pots, depending on size, were up to €50 at reasonable brocantes and up to £120 on the King’s Road or in Portobello. I have even found a confit pot – admittedly a very fine specimen – on sale for £300 in Notting Hill Gate.

  Every confit pot is a different shape and the golden glaze is a different shade; the older the pot the darker the glaze. Some, which were used for haricot dishes, are dappled with the marks of the beans. They are wide-mouthed and made with a pair of looped handles on the shoulders, through which they could be suspended from a ceiling beam. Confit pots are so fashionable, and such easy items to sell, that some dealers simply barged through the door of small country sales as soon as they opened, bought every confit pot in the room, and drove off for breakfast twenty minutes later without wasting a thought on the more obscure collectables. This market means that the confit pots are becoming rare.

  Possibly the pot dealers missed a trick or two. The single biggest mark-up I discovered was on a humble moulded-glass salt and pepper cellar, which nobody at Athetze would have bothered with and at a Béarnais vide grenier, the equivalent of a boot sale, would have gone for €1 or less. At one of London’s temples of French country style, these were offered with a ribbon-tied hand-lettered label reading £29.50.

  I sat down with a coffee in the weak spring sun, outside the village’s one buzzing restaurant. The array of gorgeous, evocative and underpriced goodies felt overwhelming. I needed a budget and buying policy. For today, it would be €100 and nothing for which I didn’t have a specific use. For the future, I would run to embroidered linen only if it had my own initials on it. And, if the price was right, old linen sheets and confit pots, because … well, it would be daft not to and they were lovely.

  The squirly ironwork chairs of my dreams were sitting right across the alley from me, at €7 each. €21. The table to go with them, big enough for four, or for one writer and her laptop, was down in the car park, painted mud brown but it would be the work of a lunch-hour to fix that. A bit of a rip-off at €40, but it was in good nick. €61.

  On the way back from leaving a deposit on the table, I passed a sweet-faced, white-haired woman fussing over a pile of sheets, while a man of the same age, presumably her husband, sat on the tailgate of their van, enjoying a pipe. She was evidently too much of an amateur to have a pitch in either of the main linen areas. Perhaps … yes! A few minutes’ browsing revealed three gorgeous sheets of fine, pure linen, with simple ladder-stitch borders, priced at €15 each. They would have been the last remaining undersheets of a trousseau; the more decorated top sheets had already been sold.

  Haggling is expected, of course, though it goes against the grain with an English person when something so lovely is priced at a fraction of what it would be in London. ‘Would you take €40 for the three?’ I asked her.

  Her husband, who had abandoned his pipe and bustled over to watch his wife make money, got quite excited. ‘Three fifteens are forty-five,’ he calculated, ‘but she’s offering forty for all three … that’s a good deal, you ought to take it.’

  ‘Is this your husband?’ I asked her jokingly. ‘Whose side is he on?’

  A pained look flashed into her eyes. The husband looked utterly foxed. Clearly the Gascon sense of humour stopped at the Basque border. I apologized as fulsomely as I could. She apologized back. Her husband concentrated on relighting his pipe. The money changed hands and I scuttled away before another opportunity for embarrassment opened up. €101. I wasn’t going to beat myself up for one euro.

  Listening to the babble of conversation around me, I realized that Ahetze was a trilingual event. French, obviously. Basque, obviously. And Spanish. The Spanish dealers were unmistakable. With their dark hair, flashing eyes, cowboy boots, leather jackets and tight jeans, they out-Lovejoyed Lovejoy. The Spanish were buying strictly for their home market, anything in black metalwork or dark wood, no twee faded French cottage knickknacks for them.

  As I wandered back to the car with my arms full of sheets, trying to pick out phrases I recognized from this agreeable babel, I heard something completely familiar and utterly unexpected: an East End voice, speaking English. It came from a tall young man with a number-two haircut, who was talking to an even taller young man with a small white dog in his arms and a Paul Smith scarf. A Paul Smith scarf? An East End accent?

  ‘Good heavens,’ I said, the words hopping out of my mouth before I could stop them. ‘I haven’t heard a London voice for weeks.’

  ‘Nor have we,’ said the speaker, and he laughed a good, nasal, East End heh-heh-heh.

  They had been in France two weeks. They lived in Castagnède, a pretty village on the far side of Sauveterre, famous for its restaurant, la Belle Auberge. The speaker couldn’t remember his phone number. The one with the dog could. We agreed to do tea the following Tuesday.

  At Iraty, Fiona’s dog, a wire-haired terrier called Scruff, was whirled up in a tornado and dropped from a great height – fortunately into a snow-drift.

  Lunch with Marie and Robert

  Marie, of course, had invited me to lunch immediately I arrived in Orriule, but on a day when Annabel was away and I had already invited Gerald over for pot luck. Like most of my neighbours, she and Robert have enough to do with keeping up with their family, but at last we found a date that worked for both of us. ‘Come and eat some confit!’ she chortled down the phone.

  If you want to do justice to lunch with Marie and Robert, it’s a good idea to fast for a couple of days first. Robert and their son, Christian, are capable of sitting at the table and watching her bring a procession of home-prepared delicacies out of the kitchen, then graciously selecting a few morsels and passing the loaded plates onwards, but
my admiration for the cook won’t let me do that.

  Indirectly – and not very indirectly at that – it is thanks to Robert and Marie that I am here at all. Some years ago, Willow and Tony, having decided to settle in the region, began house-hunting. Willow’s method of doing this is simple. She goes to every estate agent in the chosen area and asks to see their cheapest property.

  In this case, it was a small farm cottage with no main services, surrounded by maize fields, near Ossages. Robert and Christian Lafargue were the nearest builders, and got the job of converting the cottage into an elegant home, complete with a galleried double-height reception room and a wide balcony overlooking the valley.

  Ossages was then almost a ghost village. The last auberge was shut and the dépôt-de pain, less than a shop but still a place you could buy bread, closed at the same time Willow and Tony moved into a caravan in what was supposed to be their garden. Some of the finest houses in the village were either standing empty or seriously dilapidated. Robert and Marie’s children were still in the area. Their two daughters were married to local businessmen and Christian was living at home, running the building firm with his father and still, in theory, looking for a wife. However, their grandchildren, like the rest of the young people in the village, had moved away, first to study and then to build careers in Bordeaux or Bilbao.

  Slowly, Robert and Marie looked over these foreigners who had bought into their community, who wanted walls built lumpy, beams left exposed, window sills shaped freehand and a bathroom with a power shower to every bedroom, who ate dinner instead of lunch, had friends instead of relatives and were content to rattle around in a vintage Mercedes instead of trading in a brand-new Peugeot every couple of years.