Deep France Read online

  He looked at Tarmac’s eyes and mouth, felt his stomach, which made him squeal, and told me that there was a big lump in his abdomen and he wanted to take an X-ray. The X-ray revealed the white mass of a tumour the shape of a cuttlefish under his ribs. This, said the vet, was almost certainly in his liver, since he was very anaemic. As Tarmac was already too ill to survive a general anaesthetic, he proposed giving him shots of saline solution, vitamins and stimulants and hoping for the best – if he survived, he’d operate on Friday.

  Tarmac died that night. I sat up with him, though he didn’t want company, but lay on the rug, panting, with his eyes wide open but not responding. At eleven, he was just about fit for a last cuddle. I watched him go, telling him how much we loved him, which I had been telling him for more than a year, ever since he’d been looking thinner and his coat had lost its gloss. He died just after midnight. I phoned Chloe to tell her, ruining her night’s clubbing, and then stayed up, drinking whisky, until four. Among the many splendid cats who have lived with me, he was the best.

  Next day, crying my eyes out in a howling storm, I dug a hole in the garden, under the hedge but within sight of the kitchen window, and buried him with a big chunk of white stone to mark the grave. When I went to pay the vet, I stretched my French to say that Tarmac had been the master of the house. So who will replace him? he asked, flirting in the good-natured way that Englishmen can never manage. I said I’d see. I sent the X-ray to the vet in London, who had passed Tarmac fit to travel only a month ago.

  Mistletoe: in French gui, in Latin, Viscum laxum

  I took the axe from the woodshed and cut us our very own mistletoe bough. Now I understood how mistletoe came by its sacred reputation. In the depth of winter, when all the trees are brown and leafless, the huge bunches of yellow-green mistletoe that bristle from their branches do indeed look as if they’ve been given life by some supernatural force. Some of the great spherical bunches are as much as six feet across.

  Mistletoe won’t grow where the air is polluted, which means you don’t find it for miles around London, and nowhere in England have I seen it in the abundance that I found it in Orriule. There is a grove of trees, mostly acacias and oaks, between my garden and the tile factory, and every one is crowned with great bunches of mistletoe. It has also infested the hazel bushes, the apple tree and the blackthorn in the hedge.

  Mistletoe is a semi-parasitic plant. Instead of sending its own roots into the earth, it grows on a bigger and stronger host which holds it up in the light and lets it toss in the winter storms and scatter its sticky poisonous white berries around to find new homes on nearby branches. Being the image of life-in-death, and having healing properties, it was sacred to the Celts, and could only be gathered by the druids, as fans of the Asterix cartoons will have learned from the character of Getafix, the druid, forever bustling about with his sickle looking for the holy plant to harvest and stuff in his cauldron. Getafix is, of course, the English version of his name; in French he is called Panoramix. His wisdom is probably well founded, since herbalists use a tincture of young mistletoe stems to treat heart and artery problems, and as a stimulant to the immune system.

  The Road to Emmaus

  Sandy and Annie, the friends who found Maison Bergez for me, took me to Pau for a day of brocanting. Known as ‘les Ecossais’, since they’re Scottish, they own a house in a village in the valley, which, between Annie’s colour sense and eye for furniture and Sandy’s talents as a builder, they have made very lovely. They are fugitives from the London design industry who moved to France over twenty years ago, and their profession is really creating the international French country-living fantasy for their more timid compatriots. In the summer, they move out into another property which they are restoring, and rent their home to tourists. This gives them just enough to live on, frugally. They can’t afford a TV, so on most long winter evenings, they sit on their bentwood dining chairs at their farmhouse table, each with a paperback in one hand and a fork in the other, and share a budget meal. Now it’s time to sell on the house, and organize their finances to make their lives more comfortable. All they need is a handful of extra accessories to set the rooms off to perfection.

  Brocanting is their passion as well as part of their business. They are always ready to add to the collection of bentwood chairs, or the trunks full of gorgeous textiles which Annie keeps in their attic. One of their happiest hunting grounds is on the outskirts of Pau, at the vast recycling centre run by an organization called Emmaus.

  Emmaus is possession Armageddon. The unwanted things of half the department are brought here, sorted by the workers in the morning, priced and arrayed neatly to wait for the buyers, who will be queuing outside the doors when they open for business in the afternoon. It is the bot­tom of the food chain for the brocante industry, and the dealers are usually first in the queue, followed by the poor, the thrifty and the opportunistic, such as us. In the gloom of the warehouses, young couples setting up home come to look for fridges and washing machines, immigrant families turn over the pillows and blankets, DIY fanatics measure old window frames and amateur collectors cruise the shelves with roaming eyes, searching for art deco, art nouveau or earlier.

  This time, Sandy and Annie found a chair, a discarded Le Creuset casserole and a chandelier for their hall. I treated myself to some fluted glass plates for 1 franc each, a 1950s red-ringed glass bowl and a bolster in black-and-white striped ticking. Our sales were processed by the workers, who are mostly prisoners at the end of their sentences, for whom the centre is a halfway house to the community.

  Emmaus is far more than a convenience. It is a movement, which was founded in 1951 by Abbe Pierre, a priest and MP. Abbe Pierre is now in his nineties and the best-loved public figure in France, on a par with the footballer Zidane. During the Second World War, Pierre worked for the French Resistance, helping Jewish families escape the Nazis. After the war, he became a priest in Paris and was persuaded by General De Gaulle to stand for parliament, representing a poor mining constituency in Moselle.

  Always devoted to the poor and the marginalized, Abbé Pierre took up the cause of the refugees, displaced persons and beggars who still crowded the Paris streets in the post-war chaos. He turned his presbytery, and his own rambling house in the suburbs, into hostels, hoping to foster reconciliation among the post-war generation. Then, with another former Resistance worker, Lucie Coutaz, he established the first Community, who became known as Les Chiffonniers d’Emmaus (the rag pickers of Emmaus) and who began to support themselves by recycling, refurbishing and re-circulating other people’s rubbish.

  Emmaus now has a hundred and thirteen communities in France, which help four thousand vulnerable people at a time to find their feet in the material world. In line with the Abbé’s founding principles, they are completely self-supporting and receive no state aid. Any profit the Communities make is sent to partner villages in Africa. Their mission statement is written out on a hoarding by the compound gate: ‘When you choose Emmaus at Lescar-Pau, you are acting in solidarity with us in France and Africa; you give us work; you contribute to helping hundreds of people, men, women, couples and families; you enrich a spirit of sharing rather than a profit-making business; you keep people off welfare and you help us to help others. It’s easy to do. All you have to do is bring us your bric-a-brac or telephone for free collection from your home.’

  Christmas

  Did I miss the round of parties in London? Unexpectedly, no. The French do Christmas differently. Between the religious and agricultural calendars, there is an excuse for at least one festival every month, and Christmas is just another one. There is no frantic round of festivity, with friends and lovers desperate to connect before family duties pull them apart. Nor do whole towns disappear under tinsel and fairy lights. The municipalities stick kitsch little bows on their Christmas trees, the shops discreetly apply fake snow to their windows, and a few send the undermanager out abseiling from the roof to fix an effigy of Father Christmas, in his re
d suit and boots, carrying a sack-full of presents, to the exterior of the building. At great risk to life and limb, these life-size figures are posed in the act of climbing towards the chimney. The mairie in Sauveterre went for a particularly convincing Santa, shinning up a drainpipe.

  The main event in most French families is on Christmas Eve, when the presents are exchanged and a big family meal, which may well be centred on a turkey stuffed with chestnuts, is shared. This fortifies the children for the lighting of the bonfires in the garden which will show Father Christmas the way to their house. The fires will still be smouldering enough to add a touch of magic to the car ride to midnight mass afterwards. In the Béarn, they often leave the feast until after the mass, when a warming daube comes out of the oven to feed the famished faithful.

  By the time Chloe returned by TGV, I had bought a tree of the perfect size at the trusty Leclerc supermarket in Orthez. The Christmas decorations were waiting for her, having arrived in the container. Dressing the tree is her job, buying it is mine. Family traditions are important, even in a family of two. We installed the tree on the front window sill of the sitting room. It isn’t really a window sill at all, but the old kitchen range, surfaced with the traditional blue and white tiles. I also bought some little glass balls, red and silver, to put in the bushes by the front door. The rat immediately mistook them for an enticing new kind of nut and tried to eat them. When I came out the next morning, I found broken red glass all over the doorstep.

  We were entering the coldest winter the region had seen for thirty years. ‘You’re so unlucky,’ said everyone apologetically. ‘Normally you can eat outside on Christmas Day.’ Indeed, we had done just that the year before at Sandy and Annie’s house, listening to the happy sound of strong men opening oysters in the kitchen.

  Now an armour of hard, gleaming frost covered the fields and in Saliès all the fountains were frozen into icebergs. Maison Bergez, being built on a slope, has an air space under the ground floor, which made it a relatively easy house to heat, if you were wasteful with wood and kept the fire in all day. Friends with houses in the valley, and stone flags laid directly on the bare earth, found their floors turning into skating rinks over night, when the walls exhaled enough condensation to freeze into a skin of ice. Our floors are quite cold enough, however.

  In the special Christmas market at St-Palais, while hundreds of ducks and their festive livers were traded in the main hall, I bought Chloe a pair of goatskin slippers, with shaggy cuffs of silky white fleece, from a young Basque woman who kept mohair goats. The Auberge du Foirail was packed, and a group of young Basque musicians came in to entertain the diners. A violin, a clarinet and three of them played the txistu, a simple pipe with three holes, which the pipers played with one hand while keeping time on a small drum with the other.

  Hospitably, the South Africans had invited us to the party at their chateau. Annabel regards giving directions to other drivers as a rather despicable branch of witchcraft, and prefers to lead a caravan of fellow-guests from her house. In the freezing fog, the man who was said to be a former SAS commando managed to drive into a ditch.

  In the high-living north of France every farmhouse tends to be a chateau, embellished symmetrically with turrets, French doors and œil-de-bœuf windows, and every village seems to have several of them. Down here a farmhouse is a farmhouse and a chateau a rare luxury. The South Africans, however, had the real thing, an imposing grey stone edifice with towers at each corner, surrounded, at a respectful distance, by stables and outbuildings in red Toulouse brick.

  Inside we found a Versailles set-dressed by Visconti, room after room of museum-quality paintings, mostly nineteenth-century still-lifes and landscapes, plus blazing chandeliers, massive encrustations of ormolu and curtains fit for a small opera house.

  Our hosts greeted us in the wood-panelled hall, accompanied by three large dogs of the kind usually kept to deter a Zulu army. The guests of honour from Africa, their grown-up children and teenage grandchildren, were in the art zone, looking tanned, golden-haired and bewildered. ‘Don’t tell my mother,’ said the son of the chateau, ‘but my business was robbed by gunmen just before we came away.’

  ‘And our car was stolen five times last year,’ his wife added.

  Around them were a modest throng of international guests, at least two of whom were French – Babi and Thiérry, who, with the help of their six children, had a small concert hall in the hills. Among the remaining Anglophones, I recognized several faces from our French class in Orthez.

  Buffet may be a French word, but as an entertaining concept it is understood completely differently in France and England. At an English buffet supper, guests are expected to eat standing up, or perch on chairs, sofa arms or the stairs with their plates on their knees. The food offered is usually in pieces small enough to manage with a fork.

  The French regard this as madness, and need to sit down at a table with a knife and fork to eat anything more than a few peanuts. Thus a French buffet will offer man-sized portions. This cultural dissonance meant that although Christian had been true to his word, and supplied dozens of lobsters, these had been neatly chopped in half lengthways, then reassembled, pinned together with cocktail sticks and draped over the stainless-steel stands used in restaurants to raise a plateau de fruits de mer above the tabletop.

  The guests were at first baffled and shunned the display of lobsters in favour of the humbler dishes below them. After an hour or so, a few diners figured out how they were actually real lobsters, not plastic decoration, and that we were supposed to eat them. Some of the crustaceans were tentatively disassembled and the bravest guests went on to the next challenge – figuring out how to eat a half-lobster from a plate balanced on your knees, without the use of clawcrackers and without making a mess of the surrounding silk-damask cushions.

  ‘Do you know Fay Weldon?’ asked a fine-looking man whose white hair waved strongly off his forehead. We were at another party by then. It wasn’t the first question I’d expected to be asked in Deep France. ‘Not really,’ I said, ‘I’ve met her once or twice. She’s been awfully kind about my books.’

  The speaker turned out to be a painter, the artist whose panorama of Saliès-de-Béarn was then one of the must-sees of the town. Roger came to Saliès ten years ago, with his wife. She didn’t like living in France and returned to England, where Fay Weldon was one of their friends. So he had a tenuous link to the world of books.

  Roger lived more or less alone, in an eccentrically spiky modern house in a beautiful valley on the outskirts of the town, and could often be seen driving around in one of his cars – a vast cream-coloured Mercedes for formal occasions, or a dilapidated Mini Moke for every day. His fox terrier, Fanny, sat on the seat beside him, enjoying the wind in her ears.

  It was, I discovered, hard on a marriage when a couple decided to make a new life in a new country. It seemed to be rare for both partners to feel equally happy, and common for one spouse to suddenly develop a social disability which kept the other one reassuringly enslaved. Often a husband wouldn’t learn French. Often a wife would declare she couldn’t possibly drive on French roads. Annie, who refused either to drive or to learn French, had clearly gone for the belt-and-braces approach to anchoring her mate.

  On Boxing Day, I was determined to drive up into the mountains, where the snow was lying deep and white and magical. My goal was the forest of Iraty, halfway to Pamplona, not from the pass of Roncesvalles where Roland, commander of the Franks, supposedly blew his horn to call his uncle Charlemagne to help him after he had been attacked.

  According to the eleventh-century epic poem The Song of Roland, he was attacked by the invading Moors. According to history, however, Charlemagne’s army, retreating from the invasion of Catalonia, roused the enmity of the Basques in August 778 by sacking Pamplona. In revenge, a small number of Basque fighters let the Frankish army march into the narrow pass, then ambushed and massacred them.

  I wanted Chloe to see this real primeval woo
dland, the largest beech forest in Europe. Iraty is awesomely lovely under the snow and a perfect place to watch showers of tiny crystals fall upon the bottomless drifts as some rare Pyrenean bird hops from twig to twig.

  The trouble with trying to get in the mountains, as I had discovered before, is all the stuff you come across on the way. This time plans were derailed as early as St-Palais, where we found a horse fair in progress. Or, more accurately, a donkey and pony fair. Including baby donkeys. Irresistible. We parked the car and went to investigate.

  Only one horse was on offer, a skinny young bay, whose owner, following the tradition of the fair, was dressed for the animal’s work and carried the tools of its trade. Which meant that she was got up in her best dressage jacket and carried the saddle in her arms. She stood shyly apart from the farmers, who chatted in small groups, their Basque berets pulled low over their long noses, leaning on the yokes or the panniers belonging to their donkeys.

  The donkeys were mostly of the Pyrenean breed, relatively large animals with chocolate-brown coats and markings like a panda in negative, with pale rings around the eyes and muzzle. The ponies had shaggy golden manes and chestnut coats, typical of those seen in the fields in the Basque Country. Their colouring suggested they shared some ancestry with the pottocks, the wild ponies who must once have roamed the whole of south-west France, since drawings of them exist in prehistoric caves as far north as the Dordogne.

  Their phenomenal strength and tiny stature – a pottock is never more than 120 centimetres at the shoulder – made them useful pit ponies and some were exported to Britain in the last century to work in the mines; their chunky build also made them good eating, though, since France had its own BSE scare, the bouchers chevalines buy 95 per cent of their meat from Argentina.

  The demands of these two trades nearly drove the breed to extinction, but the mayor of the small Basque town of Sare stepped in and saved them. There are still wild pottocks in the Pyrenees, most of them now in protected reserves. The ponies in the square in St-Palais, however, with their gentle faces and big dark eyes, looked safe enough and, judging from the number of small girls pulling their indulgent fathers in their direction, were destined to be pampered pets.