Deep France Page 16

  Even in the nineteenth century, only farmers in the north of France were rich enough to keep shire horses to work their land. In Gascony, the draught animals were cattle. They were looked after just as the members of the family which they almost were, and sent to work with a crocheted fringe over their eyes to keep off the flies, and often a linen smock over their backs and forequarters to protect them from insect stings. Theophile Gaultier, travelling down to Spain in 1840, noticed them as soon as he reached the Landes.

  ‘Around here you meet the first vehicles drawn by oxen. The chariots looked quite Homeric and primitive; the oxen were harnessed by the head to a single yoke, decorated with a little frill of sheepskin; they had a soft, serious and resigned air, truly sculptural and worthy of an Egyptian frieze. Most of them wore trappings of white cloth, which protected them from midges and horse-flies; nothing was stranger than to see these oxen in shirts, who slowly turned towards you with their wet, shining muzzles and the big dark-blue eyes which the Greeks, those connoisseurs of beauty, found so remarkable that they described the goddess Hera as having “cow’s eyes”.’

  The Blondes are also wonderful parents. The cows get pregnant readily and the shape of their pelvis makes it par­ticularly easy for them to give birth. A Blonde cow will produce six to eight calves in her lifetime, which means she can still be a productive farm animal up to the ripe age of fifteen.

  Another of the breed’s useful characteristics is that the calves are born very small-boned and slim, so their survival rate is very high. They bulk up quickly and when it comes to be sold, the veal is proudly labelled ‘élève sous la mère’. The label often has a picture of a calf diving for its mother’s udder, reassuring the purchasers that this is free-range meat, not the product of a cruel and unnatural rearing process.

  The breeders created the Blonde in 1962, when it was clear that tractors had replaced ox-ploughs and the northern beef cattle, the Charolais and Limousin, were going to take over unless the Gascons took steps to stop them. They described the process as a ‘reunification’. The registered Garonnais and Quercy breeds were crossed with the pale Pyrénéen cattle, among which many separate strains were recognized including the toffee-coloured Béarnais.

  Their mixed heritage shows in their crazy horns; some just look like the nursery-rhyme cow with the crumpled horn. Some of them have incurving horns carried almost over their eyes, and some of them develop the wonderful lyre-shaped horns which are characteristic of the old Béarnaise cow.

  The Blondes turned out to be terrific beef cattle, muscular, lean and light-boned. Their hides also turned out to have a unique type of hair which stopped them sweating excessively in hot weather. By the Seventies, the Blonde had been exported not only to Northern Europe, America, Canada and Australia, but also to Brazil, Colombia and Mexico.

  While the new Blonde was taking over the world, however, the old mountain breeds were dying out. Only three Béarnais bulls and a few dozen cows survived by 1981. Béarnais nationalism came to the rescue and by 2001 the numbers were up to fifteen bulls and 112 cows. The rare cattle were celebrities: when a couple of prize specimens went to the Paris Show, the Sud-Ouest put their picture on the front page. So we were honoured that two lyre-horned Asturian cows and their calves were sent to meet the public at the opening festivities of the Château at Laàs.

  From Caravan to Château

  By 1 May, it was, as the Gascons say, raining like a pissing cow. Fiona and her children watched the black clouds and the dripping trees with dismay, since the family had just moved into the smallest caravan any of us had ever seen, just about big enough for the four of them to lie down to sleep if all their possessions were stuffed under the bed.

  They had been thrown out by their business partner, who decided that he needed the whole building as a ‘party house’, and that the children would just cramp his style when he arrived with his guests. Their partnership in the tree-fern nursery had thus been terminated.

  The guests for whom the family had been evicted were allegedly to be major investors interested in underwriting their ex-partner’s scheme to create a Disneyworld-style dinosaur theme park on the outskirts of Salies. It was not a total fantasy – Roger, in his round of chats with the mayor, had seen the plans for it – but it seemed unlikely that international financiers would go for it.

  The caravan was on what should, by then, have been their own land. The notaire, the lawyer handling the sale, had promised them that the process would be completed by May Day. The transaction showed no sign of emerging from the various committees who have to approve it, but the owner of the property had graciously allowed them to be squatters on the land.

  The caravan was in a little village called Bellocq, uncomfortably close to the RN117, and mostly made up of rather urban nineteenth-century terraced cottages. Although it’s not typically rural, Bellocq is still not completely devoid of romance, having also some vineyards, a wine-making cooperative and an imposing ruin which is the oldest bastide, or fortified town, in the Béarn, built around 1200.

  Their property was made up of three small buildings crushed together on a back street. Between them, they had quite a few walls, a couple of roofs and a bit of a ceiling. They hadn’t got water, electricity or drains. Until Gordon’s British friend came round with his digger to flatten the land at the back, they had a lot of brambles and stinging nettles. The garden ends in a steep cliff, at the bottom of which the Gave de Pau runs shallow and swift. They had visions of running a scenic B&B, maybe, if they could get planning permission, even a little cafe, with tables overlooking the sparkling river.

  The day they moved in, various members of the foreign community descended to wish them well. The rain held off for a few hours, and the children ran about, playing with their new neighbours and bringing us sprays of cream-coloured acacia blossom.

  Sandy-and-Annie arrived with the camping toilet they’d used when they began restoring their own house. Andrew and Geoff arrived with a platter of barbecued chicken. I brought a pastis landais, a dessert cake which is an extra-rich variation on the brioche, from the famous baker near Amou. An elderly English couple who’d set up a B&B close by came empty-handed, perhaps to reassure themselves that they would have no competition.

  Gordon had decided to start burning the old, infested timbers and we sat about in the smoke, wishing them well and trying not to look as horrified as we felt. Being British, we considered renovating a house a normal rite of passage. All of us had gone through a time of plaster dust and negative plumbing. We remembered the meals eaten off tables made from old doors and breeze blocks, the loos flushed with buckets and the showers begged from friends.

  We were itching to sort the site out with plastic canopies, duckboards and camping gas, but Gordon and Fiona seemed too exhausted and traumatized to move. Most of the tiny tree-ferns were sprouting green now, but it would be another year at least before they were ready to sell. Gordon was confident that their partner would pay them back their investment, but there was no contract. ‘They shook hands,’ said Fiona gravely. ‘In New Zealand, if you shake hands on something, that makes it square and legal.’

  It was still raining a few days later, when Fiona, Margot and I left the boys to be boys and went to the festival at Laàs. Laàs is a village in the valley below Orriule, on the edge of the Gave d’Oloron. It’s a fine example of what a mayor with ambition can do for a rural backwater. While the surrounding hamlets snooze in contented decay, with crumbling buildings and muddy cart tracks, Laàs is tarted up to the eaves, with fresh paint and blooming window boxes. This titivation works for everyone, and Laàs is a popular place for a family stroll on Sunday afternoon.

  The war memorial and the tiny bridges over the little River Laa are in perfect repair. Every house has a former function which is proclaimed by an artistically engraved slate plaque on the wall – ‘The Skittle-Maker’s House’, or ‘The Pottery’. Another plaque records the history of the tiny old church. There is also a new church, on the main square, and
a hostel for the Compostela pilgrims equipped with the essential pelota court. Across the road is an ambitious but erratic restaurant devoted to Béarnais specialities, the Auberge de la Fontaine.

  The square itself is called the Place Brigitte Bardot, because, as a plaque with very tiny print explains, Brigitte Bardot could perfectly well have been born there. As the whole of France knows, BB was actually born in a Paris suburb and now lives near St Tropez, but these facts have not been allowed to stand in the way of the village’s pride in its attractions.

  The grandest of these is the Château, a small but pretty mansion of seventeenth-century origins, built in the classic style rather than the Béarnais, with a slate roof and three rows of tall, white-shuttered windows. Its position, on a wooded cliff overlooking the Gave, is spectacular and its gardens exquisite – when, of course, it’s not raining like a pissing cow.

  The Château’s last owners were some art collectors from Normandy, who died childless and left the building, with some good paintings, a lot of curiosities and some magnifi­cent Aubusson tapestries, to the departmental government. To amuse visiting children, the home field is planted with a maze of maize every year, while the grounds are the site of festivities all summer long, beginning with what was billed as ‘Transhumances Musicales’.

  At this time of year, the farmers in the mountain villages move their sheep and cattle up to the summer pastures, where, after the cleansing of the ground through écobuage, the new grass is already long and sweet. The process is called transhumance; it’s the excuse for another festival. The Basque shepherds used to decorate their cows with wreaths of flowers and their sheep with stripes of paint and pompoms of wool in bright primary colours, originally so that they would know whose was whose after all the animals were herded up into the mountains together.

  The animals are still decorated, and there is still much consumption of aperitifs and exhibition of old photographs to make everyone pleasantly damp-eyed and nostalgic. The transhumance, however, is nowadays accomplished by cattle truck and horsebox, which means that flocks of the long-fleeced Pyrénéen sheep could spend the winter in pastures as far north as Orriule. On days when it was too misty to watch the mountains on my way into Sauveterre I would stop and watch the sheep instead, bustling around their field in twos and threes, their long dreadlocks swinging down to the grass as they cantered around.

  The sheep are a nimble mountain breed and are allowed to keep their horns, which are as long, twisted and curved as an antelope’s. The first time I ever saw a sheep with a full-grown pair I was driving up on the road to Pamplona with a friend, another novelist, called Mavis, an inherently lady­like character who did not take to the bucolic charms of deep France at all. We were crawling along in thick fog, which suddenly cleared to reveal an extremely startled ram, poised on the tips of his hooves in the centre of the road, his horns quivering with alarm.

  Behind the ram emerged first one, then several, then a whole herd of massive Pyrénéen cattle, all with big iron bells clanking around their neck. The road was well and truly blocked; visibility was about ten metres.

  Mavis suddenly found some African Queen spirit, and stepped regally out of our rented Renault. She approached the mixed herd at a dignified pace, clapping her hands like a school teacher and calling out, ‘Come along, now. Come along.’ The ram freaked completely, leaped vertically in the air off all four hooves at once, then bounded up a crag and away into the wall of mist. The cattle followed him serenely, and we were able to drive on.

  The ‘Transhumance Musicales’ turned out to be five days of music and dancing in a large marquee, observed from a distance by the lyre-horned cows, who stood patiently in their muddy enclosure, munching the wilting remains of their garlands.

  The inside of the tent was divided into three sections: an auditorium, with a stage, curtains and seating for at least three hundred; a changing and backstage area; and the bar, which remained open throughout all performances, selling softs, half-litres of beer and generous plastic beakers of Rose de Béarn.

  We decided to see a spectacle called La Flabuta de Pyréne, starting at 2 p.m. In this relaxed part of the world, there is a tradition called the Béarnais quarter of an hour, which is usually around three-quarters of an hour, and is the minimum permitted period which may elapse after the official starting time of any event before things really get under way. The custom of the Béarnais quarter of an hour allows for two vital regional pastimes, chatting and con­suming aperitifs.

  Even in these grand surroundings, it was exactly 2.45 p.m. when the master of ceremonies took to the stage. He looked familiar; I had last seen him with a violin, leading the dancers at the carnival in Pau. Keeping time with crisp beats of his bow, he reminded me powerfully of Pete Postlethwaite in Brassed Off.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘the Béarnais quarter of an hour is up so let’s get started.’ The audience laughed. As the spectacle was to have two hundred performers, it was likely that all the spectators, except us, would be their relatives. They were completely mixed in age and social status, from immaculate middle-class children to elderly men in workers’ overalls.

  The dancers and singers too were of all ages, shapes and sizes. There were some sturdy teenage girls in orange chiffon, but most of the rest wore variations on the Béarnais national costume. For the women, this meant a long skirt with a printed apron, a white blouse, a fringed shawl and a headscarf, with white espadrilles tied with red ribbons. The men appeared in white shirts with black waistcoats, dark, striped breeches and knitted leggings of natural wool pulled over black espadrilles. They all wore berets, and in one dance the most acrobatic boys held the beret in both their hands and jumped over it.

  The master of ceremonies helped us out by narrating the legend of the creation of the Pyrenees. ‘Hercules, coming back from the edge of the known world, stopped here and thought how nice it would be to live the life of a simple shepherd.’ The audience sighed in agreement.

  ‘He fell in love with Pyrene, a shepherdess, but the gods were angry when he said he wanted to marry her and sent a pack of wolves to tear her to pieces. In his rage and grief, Hercules picked up the biggest rocks he could find and hurled them at the gods. Where they fell to earth, the Pyrenees were born.’ The audience sighed again, this time with what sounded like the sheer contentment of living within sight of such a magnificent geographical event.

  The local edition of the Sud-Ouest reported that the spectacle was full of joie de vivre, and said that the two hours rolled by sans lassitude, which in Margot’s case was not exactly true. She perked up considerably when we took the guided tour of the Château and were invited to admire the impressive bourgeois dining room, with its built-in china cupboard stuffed with Baccarat crystal and fine porcelain.

  Fiona talked about how she could see Cam and Margot learning the Béarnais songs or maybe playing recorders in a school orchestra. She adored the Château, and said she was longing for the house to be habitable so she could invite her mother over to see it. But as soon as she stopped talking, Fiona’s eyes filled with tears.

  At the caravan in Bellocq, it took a month to get the electricity connected, largely because Gordon didn’t under­stand the man from the electricity board when he explained that the meter needed to be in a waterproof cupboard. People dropped by with casseroles. After a couple of weeks, in which the rain never let up, Gordon got some sheets of industrial plastic and fixed up a canopy over the camping toilet, and another outside the caravan door to keep the immediate area dry. The children stayed in school until 6 p.m. to do their homework, because there was nowhere they could work in their new home.

  One day when the rain stopped for a few hours I called in and found Fiona alone with a smouldering fire of termite-eaten Béarns. She was wandering about the garden with her eyes unfocused, clutching a small tortoiseshell buckle set with diamanté which she’d found in the mud, the picture of a gutsy girl in the process of losing it.

  May Day, May Day

  Until the se
cond round of the presidential election on 5 May, the Béarn suffered agonies of anxiety. The normal favourite topic of conversation, the weather, certainly provided enough incidents for people to talk about, but all they wanted to discuss was politics. In a nearby village, Burgaronne, one man had voted for Le Pen; everyone knew who he was and nobody was speaking to him.

  In Bordeaux on May Day, the Western Revolutionary Communist League and a dozen less grandly named organizations staged a demonstration that got at least forty thousand people out on the streets. In Paris, four hundred thousand people hit the boulevards to urge their fellow-citizens to vote against Le Pen.

  The Club Internationale de Saliès-de-Béarn was in ferment, and no member was more tortured than Annabel. One of their French members was said to have stood up at a Socialist Party meeting and made racist remarks about Muslims. The report came from a woman, who was no longer a paid-up member, but was determined to get an apology out of the guilty one before the name of the club was besmirched, and wrote a letter to the whole committee about the alleged outrage.

  As vice-president, Annabel found herself in the hot seat, pressurized by the accuser to do something but having no idea of what to do and a great fear of doing anything. Her tele­phone rang all day, with committee members eager to chew over the issue. The club’s treasurer, a Hungarian businessman whose English wife’s family had owned a holiday home near Castagnède for thirty-five years, felt so hassled by this pack of warring women that he resigned.

  Nobody, however, had said anything to the alleged offender, who whizzed obliviously about the town on her bicycle with her lips fixed in the habitual half smile. She seemed to be living in a world of her own, unaware of the conversations that ceased abruptly as she approached and the speculation that erupted as soon as she was gone. In a few days later, she announced that she would give a little party, on a Moroccan theme, and warmly invited us all. A few days after that, she called the party off, saying that not enough people could come.