Notes from the Cévennes, page 15
A phone call from our friend Delphine. She switched on the radio and thought she’d misheard. She invites us over for a solidarity supper with her husband Yves in the Hameau – a cluster of ecological houses deep in the woods, self-built over some eight years without a centime of subsidy. Pierre and Marie appear on the new wooden terrasse. ‘Ah,’ cries Pierre – something of a joker, except when he’s driving the school bus – ‘you two immigrants still in the country, then?’ We sit round salads and wine as the encircling trees darken against an emerald dusk. ‘The thing is,’ Pierre insists, ‘they’ve pissed us off, slowed Europe down, but we don’t want them to leave.’ I’m glad he isn’t saying vous; in the village, we are still ‘les Anglais’.
The real worry is that the same will happen in France. Pierre waves his fork around. ‘The French seem ever so nice, all happy with their little suburban house and garden, but when things explode . . .’ He draws a finger across his neck. A guillotine? ‘The Front National first, then real violence. Take Vichy: 85 per cent of the French were collabos in the war!’ I protest at the figure, and insist that the circumstances were different. Yves reports on the meeting about the anticipated Syrian families to whom the municipal council has offered a big youth centre as refuge, in true Cévenol tradition. ‘One bloke who shall be nameless stood up and all he said was, “I’m frightened”, then sat down again. A young woman who’d worked in the Calais camp tried to explain and was told to “go back to your own place, you don’t understand us here”.’ She lives 10 minutes away, in the nearby market town.
We all agree that a lot of people are cons, especially the hunters. Yves yells sardonically to the forest at large, ‘I adore hunting!’ and we listen to the echoes with amused dread. I ask if anyone was talking about Brexit in the village café today. Pierre, who often serves behind the bar, gives a dismissive snort. ‘Nobody. Not even football. Alcohol! C’est tout.’ He did, however, discuss the issue with the village’s lone Luxembourgeois, who thought the English were ‘arrogant’ and we were well shot of them. Well, I say, raising my glass, ‘at least he’s not French. Aux Français!’ The rest of supper is taken up with an account of failed attempts to shoot a huge rogue boar that destroyed the hen coop, having omnivorously munched through its residents. Maybe Yves wasn’t being sardonic, after all. As we bump away along the track, our headlights reveal a large and shaggy hulk with a glittering eye, crouched in the foliage. ‘That’s him,’ I remark. ‘Boris himself.’
I’m about to go up to bed around midnight when the phone rings. It’s Jacques from down the lane. He’s bourré and sounds almost tearful. ‘I’ve read what you wrote about Brexit on Facebook. I wish to salute your effort before you depart.’ I reassure him that we’re not going to be expelled, as we’re French. He sounds surprised. In all the 20 years we’ve known each other, it’s simply never come up. ‘Je t’embrasse, mon ami. Très fort.’ I picture us hugging each other, like Lear and Gloucester, in a howling storm.
On Saturday morning, I walk down to the village for bread. The economic turmoil I have been hearing about on the radio gives me hope that the decision will have to be abandoned and the dry bank of regret held onto before the whole country is swept away. It would be missed by the French, at least: my students at the art school love our islands’ relaxed, informal vibes. Several of them, with my encouragement, have gone over on extended Erasmus sojourns, returning with better English and a stronger appreciation of their own country’s food. All this is at risk.
Locals and incomers standing outside their houses slow my progress with questions and commiserations. Carlos, whose parents (like many others in the village) were refugees from the Spanish Civil War, agrees with the others that the EU is far from perfect. ‘Can you believe it? They’re even fudging the bee issue.’ Since the village is trying to turn itself into a non-pesticide zone, this is a hot subject. Under pressure from the ghastly Bayer and, it has to be said, the reliably non-green UK, the Union’s banning of the pesticides responsible for the collapse of bee colonies is only for two years, and not total. ‘It’s the corporations that really run Europe,’ we conclude.1
The modest Saturday market feels emptier without the bulk of Laurent, booming jokes from his big white butcher’s van (‘Would you like a bit of my thigh with that?’). He’s away in Ireland for the salmon fishing, his chief passion. Lisa, our painter-boulangère, greets me with a look of concern. ‘The thing is,’ she says immediately, reaching for a warm baguette, ‘it’s the old versus the young. Only the young should have voted. After all, it’s their future that’s been cocked up. The old will be dead and gone.’
She’s interrupted by Rémy, the former mayor, standing behind me, who has burst uncharacteristically into song. A grumpy, ultra-gauche detester of all incomers (he ‘lost’ our naturalisation papers for a year), racked by arthritis from working his organic smallholding, he seems peculiarly merry. I have to admit that he has a fine voice.
1In November 2017, the UK government finally agreed to a total ban on neonicotinoids in the face of the alarming evidence.
20
Floodwaters
Until the October rains, the heat had been unremitting since late June. The relief arrived with the abruptness of a slammed shutter, and the cobbled path behind our house became a torrent. Two ancient stone uprights, knee-high and with a single vertical groove in each, stand either side of the back door: they puzzled me until a local told me they were to block the floods with the help of a board slotted in. It works well. Without that defence, the water rushes enthusiastically over the sill and spreads through the room, for when the rains do come, it’s always with a kind of bottled-up, monsoon zeal: the equivalent of Paris’s annual rainfall can fall in a single day. The temperature drops abruptly, fresh breezes waft through. It is pleasant, if disconcerting.
The mountains and steep valleys of the Cévennes produce micro-weather patterns, so that one village can be soaked while its neighbour stays dry. The area’s proximity to the sea, separated from the coast by a large plain, creates a unique phenomenon known throughout the world as l’épisode cévenol: warm air from the Mediterranean strikes the mountains and swirls into the autumnal currents of colder air arriving from the north: the result is an unstable spawning ground for tempest and flood, anticipated to worsen with climate change. On 3 October 1988, the equivalent of the Seine poured through the centre of Nîmes for seven hours, drowning nine of its citizens. A grand piano was filmed floating down the street, and has become an abiding image of the trauma, due mostly to human idiocy: ancient retention basins (known locally as cadereaux) had been built over. Hundreds of millions of euros have been spent replacing them.
A few years later, our village found itself in the eye of an épisode. Neighbours gaped at water rushing through their living rooms, especially where ancient discharge tunnels had again been stopped up thanks to modern ignorance. In the old houses built on the hillside, the rather off-putting staircases, steep and straight, were turned into cataracts, although these proved harmless once you opened the front door. ‘Never try to stop water having its own way,’ as old Albert explained years ago. ‘Wave it through. The quicker out, the better.’ Parked cars from a less appropriately adaptable era were unceremoniously swept off and the streets gouged out, displaying the recently installed sewage system. We all knew the builders had done a botch job, back-filling with rubble, and here was the proof. The village was declared a disaster zone, but patched itself up in a few weeks.
This was nothing compared to 2002, however. After a friend’s wedding, we set off en famille towards our newly acquired weekday flat in Nîmes. We knew there might be rain, and the wind was oddly warm and moist. Suddenly, the daylight deepened to twilight and buckets of water were hurled at the windscreen amid raw-boned cracks of thunder. The robust main road, originally Roman, was replaced in minutes by a river sliding across with mud-brown equanimity. We watched a foolish car approach tentatively, reach the middle and stop. The driver tried to get out as the vehicle began to be nudged sideways. Cars are fine in floods until they become boats, as a volunteer fireman once put it to me.
‘We’ll try the back way,’ I announced, the storm still in its juvenile phase, but no sooner had we hit the twisting country lanes than it had fully matured, our windscreen wipers smothered by liquid lashings as loud as hurled pebbles. The false twilight was deepening to a premature midnight relieved only by flashes of bolt lightning. The floodwaters, pouring down the vineyards and olive groves, had turned the steep verge on the left into an endless weir that spilled across the gulley of the road, the level rising alarmingly fast. As we crept forward, I feared our old Renault station-wagon was beginning to lose its grip, and our narrow shelter would become our doom.
We reached a small village on a hill and stayed put, to sit out the evening and much of the night in an empty, unlit street. I quoted King Lear, to my family’s dismay: ‘Rumble thy bellyful! Spit, fire! Spout, rain! Now please go away!’ Like our Nîmes flat and our village house, the car leaked: water gathered in the footwell, the odd drip struck our necks. But we were alive – and hungry. I loped to the door of the house opposite. I was ushered in by an old lady paddling in rubber slippers through several inches of water that lapped at stolid oak furniture. ‘Oh,’ she said, as I expressed alarm, ‘I’ve got used to this, over the years. I was born here and we’ve always survived!’ She was much more concerned about the three children, and gave me a packet of Petit Beurre and a bottle of Evian. Such resilience was heartening: the storm had been boxed safely into historical precedence, and what seemed wildly beyond control was tamed and contained.
Back in the car, as we munched our biscuits, we were blinded by a flash, its sharp explosion bouncing the vehicle: a lightning bolt had struck just yards away, instantly followed by its sinister aural companion. My children wondered what would happen if lightning hit the car itself. ‘You stay calm,’ I advised, heart still racing, ‘then take a jump. Don’t touch the car and the ground simultaneously.’ Over the storm’s two days, the Gard département would be struck 60,000 times.
A fire engine stopped behind us and a fireman emerged. He shouted that we were not to stay in the car, it was too dangerous. We could sleep in the village hall. Under bright neon, around a hundred people and accompanying blankets were failing to nod off in plastic bucket chairs or on the floor. Orange juice and biscuits were being distributed. We decided it was not for us, and during a lull made a break for it, inching past a landslide’s spilled boulders and reaching the roundabout on the main road. I asked some firemen next to their vehicle whether it was safe to carry on, given that the rain had eased. ‘As long as you go right now and take care!’ They seemed peculiarly agitated: a call had come through. Another body had been recovered. The fifteenth, one of them shouted.
The gleaming black camber stretched towards Nîmes, occasionally under shallow sheets of water like molten metal, but we reached harbour – the lightless city centre – without incident. When the storms resumed a few hours later, and the rivers delivered their full load, it ripped up the main road like liquorice. When it was all over, 80 per cent of our département had been underwater at one time or another, and 24 people were drowned. It could so easily have been 29, I reflected.
Rain is good, as the locals put it, as long as it doesn’t arrive all at once. By early September, most years, with the spectre of wildfires haunting the parched vegetation, you are willing on the first rumble of thunder. Climate change means we should expect even more extremes, but this autumn’s downpour was all bluster, merely bringing out the buckets (terracotta roof-tiles can only take so much water at a time). The hills have been plumped into greenness again, their southern scents unbottled. This is no guarantee that the next episode won’t be a more direful spectacle. As Lear implies, storms return you to the origins by addressing all the senses with one elemental message: there are no messages. This is how life began, and not necessarily for any reason. Not that this philosophical attitude helps when it comes to it: in the eye of a storm you feel the entire world convulsed and crumpling, and all your old realities are so much broken rigging.
21
The Ballot
The 2017 Presidential election was the climax of an extraordinary year in French politics. It began with a prospect about as enticing as an Arctic ice sheet: either the Catholic right-winger François Fillon or the extreme-right Marine Le Pen; the Socialists were disintegrating in the wake of catastrophic approval ratings for the outgoing President, François Hollande. Then their centrist Economics Minister, Emmanuel Macron, announced he was forming a new party. The ice began to thaw, but the result was cracks and confusion. The over-confident Fillon became embroiled in a corruption scandal. Macron was sweeping up support with his youthful fervour and sheer charisma. His main rival was now the far-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon. The stable two-party system of old, left and right, with the Front National an ominously growing third force, was disappearing. Which floe to join? Which would carry us to safety?
With the ballot for the first round of the Presidential elections already underway, I was still an indécis. So was a quarter of the electorate. The evening before the vote, dinner with a large group of friends had resolved nothing. All French (four of North African origin), they had grown impassioned, shouting simultaneously and waving their hands. Everyone present was more or less divided between the two main candidates. One or two regretted (as did I) the fate of Benoît Hamon of the socialist party, who was backed by the Greens. He had already fallen to 7 per cent in the polls. A vote for him would be wasted. I observed that Macron was a fan of that most engagé of writers, Émile Zola, so he couldn’t be that right-wing. Our old nightmare – a second round between Marine Le Pen, whose makeover from fascist thuggery to alt-right respectability was fooling a lot of those impoverished by France’s economic difficulties, and the disgraced François Fillon, with links to the ultra-conservative Catholic network, was still possible. How could we vote for Fillon if he made it to the second round, even as the only bulwark against the Front National? The suspense by Saturday night was sleep-destroying.
Every French citizen receives a brown envelope in the days before the first round of the election, stuffed with relevant party tracts and small slips of paper, each of the latter bearing a candidate’s name in block capitals. One of these can serve as your ballot. I usually slip my choice into a back pocket before walking down to the village. It pays, in a small community, to be secretive about your politics. My wife had reluctantly decided she would vote Mélenchon, but I was still hesitant, despite his ecological credentials: he was too Euro-sceptic. Viper’s bugloss flowered on the steep cobbled path, as dependable as ever. We passed clusters of locals outside the café, looking self-conscious. A couple of them I knew to be FN supporters, but we greeted one another with neighbourly bonhomie. Our village is predominantly left-wing, with a hippy underlay, and the atmosphere was surprisingly tense under the morning sunlight.
Or maybe I was being over-sensitive. Although (like Jo) I have dual nationality, and was born in Paris, I am un Anglais – a foreigner. The shadows behind Marine Le Pen are dark and dense, populated by SS-admiring tycoons and youthful strategic advisors with iced-over blue eyes. As we approached the mairie, our friend Pierre, a fervent supporter of Mélenchon, raised his hand like a gendarme and cried, ‘Sorry, you’re English, forbidden to vote!’ I made light of it. If Le Pen were to win, dark jokes might come true. We entered the old building under its squat clock tower. The two booths looked oddly imposing in the narrow room beyond, where the mayor presided over the slot in the Perspex ballot box. Macron? Hamon? Mélenchon? Their final syllables kicked up in a row like the skirts of a can-can chorus. Never Fillon, anyway!
The queue shuffled forward. My back pocket was empty. I had omitted to bring the ballot. No matter: the official procedure, after registering your presence and receiving a little envelope, is to pick at least two names from the lined-up piles on the table. In this instance, closely flanked by Pierre and others demonstratively choosing Mélenchon, I followed the herd.
Once behind the flimsy, thigh-length curtains of the isolation booth, I noticed a single ballot left on the shelf. Benoît HAMON. Uncreased, almost virginal. I ignored it, folded my paper, placed it in the envelope, closed the flap (no glue, no licking) and re-emerged. There is something faintly absurd about this whole business, I thought, as the mayor flicked the lever to open the slot, the envelope joined the pile, and the cry went up: ‘Monsieur Adam Thorpe . . . a voté!’ Your gesture is infinitesimal by itself, it only makes sense as part of a group, accumulating weight as it moves from village to district to nation. It’s an abstract idea with a concrete outcome, able to smash as much as to build.
Outside, we met 95-year-old Ferdinand, a long-retired Protestant pastor and amateur painter whose effulgent watercolours continue to grace the village’s annual art show. In contrast with around half of the nation’s youth, he had bothered to exert his democratic rights, tottering down with the help of a zimmer frame. He had cast his first vote during the time of Vichy – a regime which Marine Le Pen claimed, just a month ago, ‘n’était pas la France’, in a troubling echo of her father’s denial of the Holocaust.
The results, at 8 p.m. on Sunday evening, brought relief as well as disappointment. The village had been heavily for Mélenchon, predictably, but he hadn’t made the second round. During the fortnight’s entr’acte, my journalist son arrived to tour the area for the BBC’s World Service, visiting boarded-up towns and villages where economic despair and racial tensions provide a feeding ground for the extreme right. Our Gard département is one of France’s poorest, crippled by factory relocations and agricultural decline, resentful of Paris and globalisation. He found few willing to support Macron openly, and felt unnerved in Beaucaire, whose soft-voiced FN mayor crouched nervously in the town hall like a baron in his besieged fortress.
