Notes from the Cévennes, page 4
The Germans laid their main telephone cable to Spain through the village, its anaconda-like remains still visible on the rougher tracks; it was revealed running some 50 yards below our house when some works were done on the lane. It ran right in front of Elie’s farm, too, and when the men from the Resistance came one night, Elie’s mother pleaded for it to be sabotaged further away. They conceded. He brushes at some dead leaves with his boot and a small numbered plaque appears. ‘Look – those Germans were so efficient,’ he says. ‘The Alsaciens were friendly enough, though. One officer sat me on his knee in our kitchen and said I reminded him of his little blonde boy back home.’ I wondered at what point simple expediency – his mother’s pleading, the friendly officer in the kitchen – might become interpreted as a collaborative tendency. Certainly, Elie despises the village and the village does not think much of him, but this might be for quite other reasons.
A village is a complex tangle of heaped twigs and branches, I reflected recently, as I began making inroads with handsaw, telescopic loppers and secateurs into the small stuff that the village woodsman had left me to deal with after tidying up our trees. It was all destined for the hearth – actually, a large wood-burning stove. Twigs for kindling, thicker branches for the fire proper, to be added to the sawn lengths of log waiting in the cellar and stacked outside against the back wall for winter. Villages resist such ordering, thankfully, outside tyranny or war.
Speaking of which, Elie never attends our Armistice Day ceremony, which takes the form of a tour in the school minibus driven by the mayor. In 2012, an act of parliament instructed that 11 November should honour ‘tous les Morts pour la France’ and not just those of the Great War. Our village has long done so, the mini-pilgrimage pausing at the two places where locals were killed by the occupiers in 1944, before it reaches the main hommage in the cemetery, with a coda of cloudy pastis in the mairie. It feels like a polite cloth drawn over the unhealed wounds and seething enmities, with only the minute’s silence resonant with unsaid things.
When I first took part some 20 years ago, there were several veterans of 1939–45 still present, just as my father eventually became the last representative in his adopted village in Berkshire. Maurice told me that he had literally no stomach following his storming of a machine-gun nest in 1940. Sitting on the edge of the village fountain – its brass tap emerging from the wall of the mairie – he lifted his shirt to show the puckered scar, like a half-buried rope, running from flank to flank.
‘How do you eat then, Maurice?’
‘The surgeons left me just enough to keep drinking,’ he joked. He spent most days in the café, downing pastis.
It was Maurice who told me that you could slip from one end of the village to the other via its cellars, intercommunicating by secret passages from the Camisard era. Our own back cellar has a recess covered in chicken wire, ostensibly for rabbits, separated from the neighbour’s house by the thinnest of walls. One kick and you’d be through, dragoon or SS soldier left empty-handed.
Alain, with a poodle as white as his shock of hair, had witnessed the ‘coups de feu’ in front of the eight-sided Protestant temple. Quite by chance, three maquisards (members of the French Resistance operating from the maquis or ‘bush’) had arrived from their mountain hideout in a clattery Citroën just as a German convoy of troop carriers and armoured cars was emerging from the narrow main street. Instead of pulling in, the Citroën reversed in a panic and was summarily dealt with by the lead machine-gunner. The car finished in the ditch and its occupants on the big table in the mairie, their guts (according to our neighbour) dangling down and touching the floor. The schoolchildren were forced to file past and look. The car was torched where it lay and the convoy moved on. Teenage Alain then joined the Maquis.
Not every account of those days is so memorable: when we first arrived and for the next decade or so, veteran Resistance members were almost two-a-penny. They were tough, and would be around forever with their tales, it seemed. Recently, when there was almost none left, I interviewed (for a BBC radio documentary) a local Resistance leader in his late eighties, who had seen a lot of action. He was perfectly compos mentis, but everything he said was dull. Ambushing the Waffen-SS, in his minimal account, was as thrilling as a trip to the supermarket.
The deadly spot is now marked by a small stone, its inscription blunt with anger: ‘Ici ont été tués par les Allemands . . .’ This rather blunt statement (‘Here the Germans killed . . .’) is always the first shrine, although these days it’s been shoved a few feet to the right by a modern villa’s metal fencing. A medal-heavy veteran (not old enough for the Second World War) holds the banner, a large bouquet is laid, and the same bugle player for the past 20 years – a plump woman with short hair and sideburns whom I long mistook for a teenage boy – struggles through the Last Post.
Next stop: the stone bridge over the stream. In 1944, middle-aged Marcel was on his way to the café to pick up eggs for his mother, when the jittery occupants of an armoured car, approaching from behind, screamed a few Verbotens, the common signal to jump into the ditch with your hands up. Marcel, stone deaf from birth, ambled on. His body, riddled by bullets, was casually hurled over the bridge. We gather below the memorial stone, set high up on the bank and rarely without flowers.
The mayor always gives the little speech by the monument up in the cemetery. Last time, despite parliamentary instruction, he stressed the First World War, backed up by the unfaded porcelain photographs of its many local victims, kept under glass in a large iron-framed showcase beside the column. As usual, however, we remembered the village mother killed in Nîmes hospital when the city was bombed by the Americans. The olive trees rustled in the silence.
The wreath had been placed by two little girls roughly its size; I remember the time my equally diminutive daughter (now in her twenties) was assigned this task along with her best friend. On that occasion, the minute’s silence was broken by old Gilbert: waving his arms, he shouted that he could still hear the bells pealing out on the same day in 1918. ‘Everyone was rushing into the streets yelling about peace and victory – and my mother was in floods of tears. I couldn’t understand it!’ It was an extraordinary outburst, a cold rush of historical air as well as a sort of gift to the gathering. Gilbert did not survive that winter.
Last year’s ceremony had its own bonus: Monsieur Jouve, a retired builder with a touch of the Protestant illuminé, took me through the many names on the monument after I had noted that one of them shared his own. ‘This Jouve was a very distant cousin,’ he said. ‘My father, however, went right through the war – Verdun, the Dardanelles, you name it – and survived with just a graze on his forehead. On the front line, hand-to-hand combat, the lot. But he died prematurely of hepatitis, his liver like an alcoholic’s. So the war did get him in the end. You know what his worst experience was? Coming back here on leave for nine days. It was the thought of returning to that hell. When the hell was all he had, it was bearable.’
That reminds me of boarding school, I commented. We agreed that the steep green valleys of the Cévennes do feel paradisal in the right light. Back in the mairie, we gathered around the big old table and sipped our pastis. Monsieur Jouve cornered me and talked serious life-philosophy for half an hour, tinted by religion. I nodded politely, helplessly conjuring what the table had once displayed some seven decades before, the dark liquids pooling on the very same bare-boarded floor.
5
Our Baker Is Missing
When our boulanger vanished some years back, the villagers hung about as Parisians might do in a catastrophic power cut: the bakery stood dark and forlorn, with no explanatory note on the door. Alain had got up at 2.30 a.m., six days a week, year in year out, and since he had teamed up with Lisa, had been utterly reliable in the way bakers should be. Pre-Lisa, Alain was unshaven, his baguettes singed, his croissants unavailable because he had slumbered until five. But with the firm hand of the pâtissière, whose cakes were divine – rich and creamy without being filling – Alain had got his act completely together.
The village admitted that this was because Lisa was from the north: they do things differently up there. For a start, Northerners know how to work. We Southerners, goes the refrain, regard work as something inconvenient between siestas, meals and pastis. On arriving some years before, Lisa had married the village restaurateur, Yves, nephew to the then mayor. Yves’s copious menu had not changed for ages, and neither had the prices, so the restaurant was always full (as it still is). Lisa, possibly frustrated by this, promptly left him for the baker next door. There her considerable energy transformed Alain’s domain from a gloomy room sporting the customary few loaves to a vibrant establishment selling honey, eggs, quiches, local books and crafts, and the aforementioned cakes.
Most striking of all to a casual visitor, though, are the paintings. Lisa paints in oils and acrylics every day. She built a studio in the barn at the back and adores the smell of turps and paint. ‘Even white spirit does something to me,’ she once told me. Her paintings, some of them very large, go through phases and differing influences (currently Edward Hopper) but, whatever the subject, are always bold and brilliantly coloured. You order bread with a huge, framed Alain staring at you as he cuddles a large cockerel. If you ask Lisa why, she gives you one of her cheeky smiles, the twinkle in her eye positively dazzling, and says, ‘It just came to me.’
For a year or so she went through a ‘dream’ phase, and the imaginary landscapes were replaced by a seethe of naked bodies: Hieronymus Bosch crossed with the Kama Sutra. Some showed nudes engulfed in red flames or purple waves; others showed them blissfully interlacing in Douanier Rousseau-like undergrowth. She is prolific, the canvases stacked several deep or crowding every inch of wall, so I never quite know what might be facing me as I queue for croissants with the village’s stumpy, stern old dears trailing their Calvinist heritage.
‘Yes,’ she reassured me one morning as I ordered her signature chestnut bread, ‘I have strong dreams, but I don’t interpret them.’ Again the twinkle pulsed. ‘I just paint them.’
Soon the dreams faded into Turneresque washes of golden light in which a few surreal figures floated, reminding me of near-death experiences as reported by survivors, and I wondered if the inspiration had gone. Fortunately, she began to take classes and veered into plein-air landscapes. (I bought one.) She obsessively depicted not only our hills, fields and lanes but neighbouring villages and their markets in the same vibrant hues that had little to do with the region’s sombre Protestant colour scheme; going in for a loaf or a dozen eggs past the jolly cut-out figure of a baker was to put on a pair of new lenses.
But even Lisa has to have a break, and every year she goes up north, leaving Alain in sole charge. Since this involves serving as well as baking when no one else is available, things get a little erratic as the fortnight goes on. The difference that dramatic morning when the boulangerie remained shut was that a sleepy Alain did not appear at all. In fact, his white van was missing. Lisa was telephoned and had no idea where he might be, and neither did his extended family. Past sorrows in the latter meant that the police were alerted.
Soon the sound of helicopters disturbed the rural calm. Things were much more serious than an absence of bread. I watched the helicopters from our terrasse, with its view south almost to the sea. They were searching low, following the steep valleys, their blades fanning the limestone flanks of the hills and their sombre holm oaks. By the third day, we were fearing the worst. I imagined the boulangerie walls over the next few years covered in the equivalent of Goya’s Pinturas negras. Lisa returned and was glimpsed looking anxious, but not despairing. She was an incorrigible optimist and was apparently cross with Alain for just hiving off without warning anyone. ‘She can’t face the reality of it,’ was the general consensus.
On the fourth day, a phone call came and the news spread swiftly along the lanes. Alain’s van had been spotted in Nîmes, where it was, coincidentally, the fourth day of the bullfighting feria – one of the biggest public festivals in Europe, when tens of thousands descend on the city and convert its streets into an extravaganza of drunken celebration while bulls die by the score in the vast Roman arena. Alain was found not far from his van, the back of which contained a sleeping bag and pillow: he was slouched at one of the many temporary bodegas, merrily consuming his umpteenth pastis, far from the blistering heat of the ovens, the trays, the dough in serried ranks, the night-time labour that made the profession one of the least popular to be apprenticed to back in the Middle Ages.
‘Why shouldn’t I enjoy myself?’ was his first remark on being approached. ‘Everyone else does.’
The key to it, we were told, was just walking out on everything and everyone. Planning and announcing a break would, he explained, have made everyone just as grumpy. How could he then enjoy it? Anyway, Lisa would never have let him. This way, the village was worried, not grumpy. They actually welcomed him back. They appreciated him. They noticed what a dreadful job it was, being a baker, and they couldn’t blame him. Before, no one had seen past Lisa and her twinkle and her paintings to the gloomy engine-house where the real work happened. His going AWOL had been spontaneous. He’d taken nothing with him except the sleeping bag: no pyjamas, not even a toothbrush. Like a true wandering renegade, he stank on his return.
There were jokes about what Lisa’s rolling pin would do to him once they were alone. She must have given him a big hug, and the huge ‘Alain with cockerel’ appeared soon after. Ever since, its subject has been much more cheerful, and we all make an effort to catch his eye and say, ‘Bonjour, Alain, ça va?’
When Lisa took a trip to London shortly afterwards, it was sensibly over a single weekend. I asked her what she was going to visit. ‘Oh, only one place: the Tate Gallery.’ (This was in the days before Tate Modern.) ‘Good idea,’ I enthused, waving my baguette. ‘You’ll love the Turner wing.’ She frowned as she gave me my change. ‘I’m only going to one room. Room 15. That’s all I’m going all that way for. I’ve dreamed of it for years.’ Room 15? ‘The Surrealists, of course.’ She sighed at my ignorance.
Between our village bakery and that single room hung with the likes of Dalí and Picabia and Paul Nash, there was a straight, unwavering line. Starting, as I fancied it, from Alain’s weary eyes staring at me over the coxcomb.
6
Reprisal in the Oxbow
During our first three years in France, we lived in a small stone building which had once been an olive mill. It dated from the twelfth century, lay about half an hour nearer Nîmes than our present house, and we rented it for 2,000 francs a month. It stood on a near-island formed by an oxbow, or horseshoe-shaped méandre, the Vidourle river meandering dramatically between hills along that stretch. The term ‘oxbow’ dates from the fourteenth century, when it still meant an ox’s collar, likening its curve in turn to a longbow; the subsequent riverine use was originally American and only dates from 1797, when I fancy that some imaginative pioneer looked at a map and had a synthesising moment. No prizes for visual accuracy, however. Our oxbow looked much more like the outline of a limp penis from the air than either a horseshoe or an ox’s collar. Some locals called it a larme: a teardrop.
We spotted herons and buzzards above its heathy hectares, while everything from wild boar to grass snake busied itself among the clumps of holm oak, pine, alder and ash or scuffled between the modest rows of vines; in the river itself, otters, beavers and water rats joined the perch and trout and a legendary pike. Frogs and toads sang through the night, dippers flitted past our heads as we bathed. This scene of bucolic calm was misleading: the Vidourle is one of the most dangerous rivers in France, notorious for catastrophic floods, even after three flood retention dams were built. Occasionally, after heavy rain higher in the hills, the river would take a short cut and leave a drastic smear of thick sludge across the lower part of the U, cracking trees like twigs and uprooting mature specimens so that a path would be completely blocked.
I had never seen such devastation in my life before. Yet it soon settled back, the suspended clumps of dragged vegetation hanging like nests many feet over our heads, marking the maximum flood-level for several seasons. Down grassy, overgrown paths pungent with wild fennel, there were three or four spots suitable for swimming: we still use them from time to time. We reckoned it was an earthly paradise, even when failing to keep warm through the winters. Apart from an open fire and walls two feet thick, the mill was unheated. We were too broke to buy logs and brought back the remnants of broken trees – ‘floodwater wood’, as the drifter George calls it in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. This wood had to be sawn, and I only had a handsaw. The greed of the flames vied with the then-youthful energy of my forearm muscle, and almost won. The wood was sometimes suspiciously light – it had been rotting for years in riverside places where no one ventured – and was fairly useless as tinder. When I recently asked my grown-up children for their happiest memories of childhood, they immediately chose these firewood quests, and especially the return journey along the tracks in our clapped-out Renault estate, their small forms crouched in the front passenger footwell under trunks and branches draped in moss and waterweed.
I would walk every morning alone for an hour or more, finding a temporary space away from small children and domesticity and to reflect, teasing out the tangled threads of my writing (I had received a small advance for my first novel, and had a regular reviewing spot for the Observer). We bought a little fibreglass rowing boat second-hand, and childhood readings of The Wind in the Willows floated through my mind as I rowed up and down the long reach just a field’s slope away from the house, working the oars right up to where the weir hissed: Ratty plopped out of sight yards from the hull, and there was the odd blue flash of kingfisher. This has to be better than the choking air of London, I reflected, whenever a certain sense of alienation, even isolation, crept in. Or, in other words, a fog on which the words What on earth have I done? were projected. I had left my full-time salaried teaching post and extended the sabbatical into something theoretically permanent. We had very few resources. We had moved country, leaving England so that I could continue with a novel set in deepest England. The poet Peter Porter, when I told him I was off to the Cévennes, looked alarmed. ‘Oh my God,’ he said, ‘you’ll never come back. We went there last year and saw peasants with hay forks silhouetted on a ridge. It was like a shot from Bergman’s Seventh Seal.’
A village is a complex tangle of heaped twigs and branches, I reflected recently, as I began making inroads with handsaw, telescopic loppers and secateurs into the small stuff that the village woodsman had left me to deal with after tidying up our trees. It was all destined for the hearth – actually, a large wood-burning stove. Twigs for kindling, thicker branches for the fire proper, to be added to the sawn lengths of log waiting in the cellar and stacked outside against the back wall for winter. Villages resist such ordering, thankfully, outside tyranny or war.
Speaking of which, Elie never attends our Armistice Day ceremony, which takes the form of a tour in the school minibus driven by the mayor. In 2012, an act of parliament instructed that 11 November should honour ‘tous les Morts pour la France’ and not just those of the Great War. Our village has long done so, the mini-pilgrimage pausing at the two places where locals were killed by the occupiers in 1944, before it reaches the main hommage in the cemetery, with a coda of cloudy pastis in the mairie. It feels like a polite cloth drawn over the unhealed wounds and seething enmities, with only the minute’s silence resonant with unsaid things.
When I first took part some 20 years ago, there were several veterans of 1939–45 still present, just as my father eventually became the last representative in his adopted village in Berkshire. Maurice told me that he had literally no stomach following his storming of a machine-gun nest in 1940. Sitting on the edge of the village fountain – its brass tap emerging from the wall of the mairie – he lifted his shirt to show the puckered scar, like a half-buried rope, running from flank to flank.
‘How do you eat then, Maurice?’
‘The surgeons left me just enough to keep drinking,’ he joked. He spent most days in the café, downing pastis.
It was Maurice who told me that you could slip from one end of the village to the other via its cellars, intercommunicating by secret passages from the Camisard era. Our own back cellar has a recess covered in chicken wire, ostensibly for rabbits, separated from the neighbour’s house by the thinnest of walls. One kick and you’d be through, dragoon or SS soldier left empty-handed.
Alain, with a poodle as white as his shock of hair, had witnessed the ‘coups de feu’ in front of the eight-sided Protestant temple. Quite by chance, three maquisards (members of the French Resistance operating from the maquis or ‘bush’) had arrived from their mountain hideout in a clattery Citroën just as a German convoy of troop carriers and armoured cars was emerging from the narrow main street. Instead of pulling in, the Citroën reversed in a panic and was summarily dealt with by the lead machine-gunner. The car finished in the ditch and its occupants on the big table in the mairie, their guts (according to our neighbour) dangling down and touching the floor. The schoolchildren were forced to file past and look. The car was torched where it lay and the convoy moved on. Teenage Alain then joined the Maquis.
Not every account of those days is so memorable: when we first arrived and for the next decade or so, veteran Resistance members were almost two-a-penny. They were tough, and would be around forever with their tales, it seemed. Recently, when there was almost none left, I interviewed (for a BBC radio documentary) a local Resistance leader in his late eighties, who had seen a lot of action. He was perfectly compos mentis, but everything he said was dull. Ambushing the Waffen-SS, in his minimal account, was as thrilling as a trip to the supermarket.
The deadly spot is now marked by a small stone, its inscription blunt with anger: ‘Ici ont été tués par les Allemands . . .’ This rather blunt statement (‘Here the Germans killed . . .’) is always the first shrine, although these days it’s been shoved a few feet to the right by a modern villa’s metal fencing. A medal-heavy veteran (not old enough for the Second World War) holds the banner, a large bouquet is laid, and the same bugle player for the past 20 years – a plump woman with short hair and sideburns whom I long mistook for a teenage boy – struggles through the Last Post.
Next stop: the stone bridge over the stream. In 1944, middle-aged Marcel was on his way to the café to pick up eggs for his mother, when the jittery occupants of an armoured car, approaching from behind, screamed a few Verbotens, the common signal to jump into the ditch with your hands up. Marcel, stone deaf from birth, ambled on. His body, riddled by bullets, was casually hurled over the bridge. We gather below the memorial stone, set high up on the bank and rarely without flowers.
The mayor always gives the little speech by the monument up in the cemetery. Last time, despite parliamentary instruction, he stressed the First World War, backed up by the unfaded porcelain photographs of its many local victims, kept under glass in a large iron-framed showcase beside the column. As usual, however, we remembered the village mother killed in Nîmes hospital when the city was bombed by the Americans. The olive trees rustled in the silence.
The wreath had been placed by two little girls roughly its size; I remember the time my equally diminutive daughter (now in her twenties) was assigned this task along with her best friend. On that occasion, the minute’s silence was broken by old Gilbert: waving his arms, he shouted that he could still hear the bells pealing out on the same day in 1918. ‘Everyone was rushing into the streets yelling about peace and victory – and my mother was in floods of tears. I couldn’t understand it!’ It was an extraordinary outburst, a cold rush of historical air as well as a sort of gift to the gathering. Gilbert did not survive that winter.
Last year’s ceremony had its own bonus: Monsieur Jouve, a retired builder with a touch of the Protestant illuminé, took me through the many names on the monument after I had noted that one of them shared his own. ‘This Jouve was a very distant cousin,’ he said. ‘My father, however, went right through the war – Verdun, the Dardanelles, you name it – and survived with just a graze on his forehead. On the front line, hand-to-hand combat, the lot. But he died prematurely of hepatitis, his liver like an alcoholic’s. So the war did get him in the end. You know what his worst experience was? Coming back here on leave for nine days. It was the thought of returning to that hell. When the hell was all he had, it was bearable.’
That reminds me of boarding school, I commented. We agreed that the steep green valleys of the Cévennes do feel paradisal in the right light. Back in the mairie, we gathered around the big old table and sipped our pastis. Monsieur Jouve cornered me and talked serious life-philosophy for half an hour, tinted by religion. I nodded politely, helplessly conjuring what the table had once displayed some seven decades before, the dark liquids pooling on the very same bare-boarded floor.
5
Our Baker Is Missing
When our boulanger vanished some years back, the villagers hung about as Parisians might do in a catastrophic power cut: the bakery stood dark and forlorn, with no explanatory note on the door. Alain had got up at 2.30 a.m., six days a week, year in year out, and since he had teamed up with Lisa, had been utterly reliable in the way bakers should be. Pre-Lisa, Alain was unshaven, his baguettes singed, his croissants unavailable because he had slumbered until five. But with the firm hand of the pâtissière, whose cakes were divine – rich and creamy without being filling – Alain had got his act completely together.
The village admitted that this was because Lisa was from the north: they do things differently up there. For a start, Northerners know how to work. We Southerners, goes the refrain, regard work as something inconvenient between siestas, meals and pastis. On arriving some years before, Lisa had married the village restaurateur, Yves, nephew to the then mayor. Yves’s copious menu had not changed for ages, and neither had the prices, so the restaurant was always full (as it still is). Lisa, possibly frustrated by this, promptly left him for the baker next door. There her considerable energy transformed Alain’s domain from a gloomy room sporting the customary few loaves to a vibrant establishment selling honey, eggs, quiches, local books and crafts, and the aforementioned cakes.
Most striking of all to a casual visitor, though, are the paintings. Lisa paints in oils and acrylics every day. She built a studio in the barn at the back and adores the smell of turps and paint. ‘Even white spirit does something to me,’ she once told me. Her paintings, some of them very large, go through phases and differing influences (currently Edward Hopper) but, whatever the subject, are always bold and brilliantly coloured. You order bread with a huge, framed Alain staring at you as he cuddles a large cockerel. If you ask Lisa why, she gives you one of her cheeky smiles, the twinkle in her eye positively dazzling, and says, ‘It just came to me.’
For a year or so she went through a ‘dream’ phase, and the imaginary landscapes were replaced by a seethe of naked bodies: Hieronymus Bosch crossed with the Kama Sutra. Some showed nudes engulfed in red flames or purple waves; others showed them blissfully interlacing in Douanier Rousseau-like undergrowth. She is prolific, the canvases stacked several deep or crowding every inch of wall, so I never quite know what might be facing me as I queue for croissants with the village’s stumpy, stern old dears trailing their Calvinist heritage.
‘Yes,’ she reassured me one morning as I ordered her signature chestnut bread, ‘I have strong dreams, but I don’t interpret them.’ Again the twinkle pulsed. ‘I just paint them.’
Soon the dreams faded into Turneresque washes of golden light in which a few surreal figures floated, reminding me of near-death experiences as reported by survivors, and I wondered if the inspiration had gone. Fortunately, she began to take classes and veered into plein-air landscapes. (I bought one.) She obsessively depicted not only our hills, fields and lanes but neighbouring villages and their markets in the same vibrant hues that had little to do with the region’s sombre Protestant colour scheme; going in for a loaf or a dozen eggs past the jolly cut-out figure of a baker was to put on a pair of new lenses.
But even Lisa has to have a break, and every year she goes up north, leaving Alain in sole charge. Since this involves serving as well as baking when no one else is available, things get a little erratic as the fortnight goes on. The difference that dramatic morning when the boulangerie remained shut was that a sleepy Alain did not appear at all. In fact, his white van was missing. Lisa was telephoned and had no idea where he might be, and neither did his extended family. Past sorrows in the latter meant that the police were alerted.
Soon the sound of helicopters disturbed the rural calm. Things were much more serious than an absence of bread. I watched the helicopters from our terrasse, with its view south almost to the sea. They were searching low, following the steep valleys, their blades fanning the limestone flanks of the hills and their sombre holm oaks. By the third day, we were fearing the worst. I imagined the boulangerie walls over the next few years covered in the equivalent of Goya’s Pinturas negras. Lisa returned and was glimpsed looking anxious, but not despairing. She was an incorrigible optimist and was apparently cross with Alain for just hiving off without warning anyone. ‘She can’t face the reality of it,’ was the general consensus.
On the fourth day, a phone call came and the news spread swiftly along the lanes. Alain’s van had been spotted in Nîmes, where it was, coincidentally, the fourth day of the bullfighting feria – one of the biggest public festivals in Europe, when tens of thousands descend on the city and convert its streets into an extravaganza of drunken celebration while bulls die by the score in the vast Roman arena. Alain was found not far from his van, the back of which contained a sleeping bag and pillow: he was slouched at one of the many temporary bodegas, merrily consuming his umpteenth pastis, far from the blistering heat of the ovens, the trays, the dough in serried ranks, the night-time labour that made the profession one of the least popular to be apprenticed to back in the Middle Ages.
‘Why shouldn’t I enjoy myself?’ was his first remark on being approached. ‘Everyone else does.’
The key to it, we were told, was just walking out on everything and everyone. Planning and announcing a break would, he explained, have made everyone just as grumpy. How could he then enjoy it? Anyway, Lisa would never have let him. This way, the village was worried, not grumpy. They actually welcomed him back. They appreciated him. They noticed what a dreadful job it was, being a baker, and they couldn’t blame him. Before, no one had seen past Lisa and her twinkle and her paintings to the gloomy engine-house where the real work happened. His going AWOL had been spontaneous. He’d taken nothing with him except the sleeping bag: no pyjamas, not even a toothbrush. Like a true wandering renegade, he stank on his return.
There were jokes about what Lisa’s rolling pin would do to him once they were alone. She must have given him a big hug, and the huge ‘Alain with cockerel’ appeared soon after. Ever since, its subject has been much more cheerful, and we all make an effort to catch his eye and say, ‘Bonjour, Alain, ça va?’
When Lisa took a trip to London shortly afterwards, it was sensibly over a single weekend. I asked her what she was going to visit. ‘Oh, only one place: the Tate Gallery.’ (This was in the days before Tate Modern.) ‘Good idea,’ I enthused, waving my baguette. ‘You’ll love the Turner wing.’ She frowned as she gave me my change. ‘I’m only going to one room. Room 15. That’s all I’m going all that way for. I’ve dreamed of it for years.’ Room 15? ‘The Surrealists, of course.’ She sighed at my ignorance.
Between our village bakery and that single room hung with the likes of Dalí and Picabia and Paul Nash, there was a straight, unwavering line. Starting, as I fancied it, from Alain’s weary eyes staring at me over the coxcomb.
6
Reprisal in the Oxbow
During our first three years in France, we lived in a small stone building which had once been an olive mill. It dated from the twelfth century, lay about half an hour nearer Nîmes than our present house, and we rented it for 2,000 francs a month. It stood on a near-island formed by an oxbow, or horseshoe-shaped méandre, the Vidourle river meandering dramatically between hills along that stretch. The term ‘oxbow’ dates from the fourteenth century, when it still meant an ox’s collar, likening its curve in turn to a longbow; the subsequent riverine use was originally American and only dates from 1797, when I fancy that some imaginative pioneer looked at a map and had a synthesising moment. No prizes for visual accuracy, however. Our oxbow looked much more like the outline of a limp penis from the air than either a horseshoe or an ox’s collar. Some locals called it a larme: a teardrop.
We spotted herons and buzzards above its heathy hectares, while everything from wild boar to grass snake busied itself among the clumps of holm oak, pine, alder and ash or scuffled between the modest rows of vines; in the river itself, otters, beavers and water rats joined the perch and trout and a legendary pike. Frogs and toads sang through the night, dippers flitted past our heads as we bathed. This scene of bucolic calm was misleading: the Vidourle is one of the most dangerous rivers in France, notorious for catastrophic floods, even after three flood retention dams were built. Occasionally, after heavy rain higher in the hills, the river would take a short cut and leave a drastic smear of thick sludge across the lower part of the U, cracking trees like twigs and uprooting mature specimens so that a path would be completely blocked.
I had never seen such devastation in my life before. Yet it soon settled back, the suspended clumps of dragged vegetation hanging like nests many feet over our heads, marking the maximum flood-level for several seasons. Down grassy, overgrown paths pungent with wild fennel, there were three or four spots suitable for swimming: we still use them from time to time. We reckoned it was an earthly paradise, even when failing to keep warm through the winters. Apart from an open fire and walls two feet thick, the mill was unheated. We were too broke to buy logs and brought back the remnants of broken trees – ‘floodwater wood’, as the drifter George calls it in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. This wood had to be sawn, and I only had a handsaw. The greed of the flames vied with the then-youthful energy of my forearm muscle, and almost won. The wood was sometimes suspiciously light – it had been rotting for years in riverside places where no one ventured – and was fairly useless as tinder. When I recently asked my grown-up children for their happiest memories of childhood, they immediately chose these firewood quests, and especially the return journey along the tracks in our clapped-out Renault estate, their small forms crouched in the front passenger footwell under trunks and branches draped in moss and waterweed.
I would walk every morning alone for an hour or more, finding a temporary space away from small children and domesticity and to reflect, teasing out the tangled threads of my writing (I had received a small advance for my first novel, and had a regular reviewing spot for the Observer). We bought a little fibreglass rowing boat second-hand, and childhood readings of The Wind in the Willows floated through my mind as I rowed up and down the long reach just a field’s slope away from the house, working the oars right up to where the weir hissed: Ratty plopped out of sight yards from the hull, and there was the odd blue flash of kingfisher. This has to be better than the choking air of London, I reflected, whenever a certain sense of alienation, even isolation, crept in. Or, in other words, a fog on which the words What on earth have I done? were projected. I had left my full-time salaried teaching post and extended the sabbatical into something theoretically permanent. We had very few resources. We had moved country, leaving England so that I could continue with a novel set in deepest England. The poet Peter Porter, when I told him I was off to the Cévennes, looked alarmed. ‘Oh my God,’ he said, ‘you’ll never come back. We went there last year and saw peasants with hay forks silhouetted on a ridge. It was like a shot from Bergman’s Seventh Seal.’
