The next summer, having been spoilt by the flight to Toulouse but needing a car in France, we sought ways of making the journey less arduous. At six o’clock one evening we put the car on the train at Boulogne, ate a picnic, slept peacefully all night and awoke refreshed to breakfast in the station buffet at Brive, in the Dordogne, at five o’clock. All that remained was a few hours of leisurely driving through glorious countryside in the early dawn.
We had always previously avoided the town of Rocamadour, knowing it to be like any shrine in the tourist season, crammed with visitors and charabancs. Now we took a chance and, slipping in quietly before seven, found it deserted. Alone we climbed the great stone staircase where thousands of pilgrims have passed, some on their knees to expiate a crime, and found at the top, by great good luck, a friendly woman who was just about to clean the chapel of the Dark Virgin. We stood, the three of us and the vacuum cleaner, for a few moments of silence before the simple wooden statue with her compelling smile.
This was the first summer that we really began to notice the northward march of the sunflowers. Previously confined to Van Gogh country they had already begun to move west to the valley of the Garonne. Now we saw their huge green heads in bud in the Dordogne, oddly out of place in this region of sombre valleys and castled crags. As we drew nearer to our village we saw that some of our neighbouring farmers had also planted les tournesols. We wondered about Bel-Air. Normally we would have known what Raymond had planted that spring but, determined that the danger of having a second home and never going anywhere else must be avoided, we had taken our early holiday in Crete.
As we drove into our village we stopped to greet Mme Barrou who was weeding yet another crop of carrots. Proferring the back of her muddy hand through the car window she beamed, ‘Eh alors, vous êtes arrivés…très bien.’ We discussed the weather and the crops. No, she hadn’t planted sunflowers, she was waiting to see how the others got on. We started to go. ‘Attendez, attendez,’ she yelled, and two large bunches of carrots fell onto the back seat of the car.
Raymond had one field of sunflowers to see how they yielded but it was ripe wheat which covered le grand champ in a sea of shimmering bronze. At the side of our track, waiting for the combine harvester to arrive, lay the long green container for the grain. ‘When will she come, la moissoneuse?’ we asked.
‘Demain ou après-demain s’il ne pleut pas pendant la nuit,’ Raymond answered, looking anxiously at the sky. I could see no sign of rain. The night was hot. The thermometer on our porch read 79 degrees when we went to bed, but by the next morning pale clouds drifted across and there was the sound of distant thunder. The smell of grain was sweet on the stormy air for la moissoneuse had started early and we knew that as long as the rain held off she would trundle back and forth until the field was finished. Happily all the corn was harvested before three nights of heavy rain were each followed by brilliantly sunny days. The earth steamed, growth was so rapid as to be almost visible, and the distant fields of sunflowers changed from a golden flecked green to a blaze of yellow.
A strange bird flew into the house. Panic stricken it beat its wings in a frenzy to escape and we opened every door and window trying to assist it. Later as we described it to Raymond he said that it sounded like a quail. ‘If it was la caille,’ he grinned, ‘it would have been better to have opened the door of the oven.’ The next day we heard the quail’s strange ‘whoop whoop whoop’ call across the fields and he told us the old saying that the more times she repeated her call, the higher would be the yield of corn.
The old, clacking baler had been put away in one of Raymond’s many barns to become another machine d’autrefois. After the combine harvester another new monster munched le grand champ in a tenth of the time, turning the straw into giant rounds, seven feet high, which waited solemnly to be collected. Raymond bought a great two-pronged fourche, which transformed the tractor into a dangerous stag beetle. He came up to Bel-Air to show it to Mike, clearly hoping for some moral, if not physical, support while he tried it out. Mike, always happy to drive a tractor and trailer, disappeared and I watched them working together, Raymond, with lowered fourche, charging the bales and once they were impaled, levering them up onto the trailer.
When the straw had been in small bales we had all helped to stack them neatly in the barn. We tossed them from the trailer onto a monte-charge, a mounting conveyor belt, which, as the stack grew higher, carried them to the top of the barn where Raymond arranged them in neat row after row. Inside the barn the temperature rose as the sun-drenched straw filled every space. He took great pride in having his barns in impeccable order. Now it was quicker but much more difficult. When, after an hour of manoeuvering the massive rounds with la fourche, Raymond surveyed the tall, off-centre columns, his face was glum. ‘Ce n’est pas aussi joli que d’habitude,’ he said sadly, as he shut the barn doors. Other things were changing too. He grew no tobacco that year. It was partly the low prices the dealers were paying but also a matter of conscience. Grandpa was becoming frailer and worked less in the fields. He spent a great deal of time checking the fences and making sure that the cows had water.
We decided to convert our old prune oven on the west side of the house into a small studio. The hedgehogs had found another home and we stacked the wood in Raymond’s barn. Mike had taken early retirement and was increasingly busy writing and illustrating children’s books. Since all our visitors congregated just outside the front porch for breakfast and then moved gradually eastwards, we thought it might make a quiet haven. M. René, also now officially retired but happy as ever to earn argent liquide, came one morning for consultations bringing with him le Barbu, his new assistant. A Spanish Basque with a silvery beard a foot long, he had lived locally for over twenty years but his French was so idiosyncratic that it took a great deal of getting used to. Although in his early sixties, le Barbu was lithe and energetic. He drank no alcohol and would work, apart from the usual two hour break at midday, from eight in the morning to eight at night with no sign of fatigue.
M. René was in the process of helping him to build a house which was almost finished. Le Barbu, having run out of funds, now worked for M. René who paid him, not in cash but in materials and labour. ‘Where is your house?’ we enquired.
‘Oh, not far from the Château,’ he said. ‘There was une très vieille maison there on the lane but it was a ruin – falling down. I’ve used a lot of the stones and of course I have to keep the old name. It’s called La Cavalière.’ This was an odd coincidence for on one of Adam’s early visits to Bel-Air he had roamed the countryside with a camera and the place which had most fascinated him, and to which he had later taken me, was this same ruin near the Château. I remembered the pear tree which grew through the roof. At supper one evening he described its haunted atmosphere to Raymond, telling him of a crumbling, ex-army greatcoat which still hung behind the door. ‘The last person to live there,’ said Raymond, ‘was a Polish refugee from the war. The house is called La Cavalière.’ But that was not all. We had recently managed to decipher the oldest documents in the hat-box, finding that they pre-dated the Revolution and they concerned one Pierre St Antoine Laroque. In various contracts written in 1758, 1765 and 1768 he is reminded that he must pay les impositions Royales and la rente au Seigneur. The next document, written in the seventh year of the Republic and dated le dix-neuf Prarial, the new name for June in the Revolutionary calendar, concerns his son, Citoyen Jean Roquer demeurant au lieu appelé La Cavalière. Now, working with us at Bel-Air was le Barbu who had finally demolished everything except the name, La Cavalière.
The work on our new atelier began with deliveries of sand and gravel which M. René typically dumped in the least convenient place, right in the path of anyone wishing to unroll the hose to water the garden. There were two small openings in the walls of the prune oven, one where the chimney had protruded, which we filled, the other, a small window about ten inches square, covered in Virginia creeper, which we planned to enlarge. As we hacked down the creeper and dug out the roots, as thick as arms and with laterals ten feet long, we discovered that they had penetrated into the drain which took away the clean water. When we pulled out the solid, woven mesh we understood why the creeper flourished so abundantly and the bath water took so long to run away.
We bought a simple, ready-made wooden windowframe and chose a section of an old oak beam for a lintel. We imagined that M. René would first knock out just enough of the wall to insert the lintel before enlarging the hole for the window, but nothing so simple. Le Barbu who, I then learned with some unease, was by trade a shepherd, pounded away with a crow bar until it seemed to me that there was a hole large enough for two windows. The pile of stones from the wall grew higher. Just as I felt that the whole structure might well collapse, they decided that it might be the moment to put in the heavy lintel, and with many a groan and cry they inched it up. Then the wiry little shepherd appeared to be supporting most of the weight on his back while M. René struggled with two well-worn adjustable props which he had clearly forgotten to check before this precise moment. ‘Ah malheur!’ he repeated, the sweat rolling down his fat red face. The corroded pegs were reluctant to budge. Le Barbu said nothing.
Each day they made an early start as by four in the afternoon the sun had moved round to beat on their backs. We noticed that M. René had begun to set the window in with grey cement and were glad that we were there. He cheerfully admitted that a cream colour would be more attractive and, unperturbed, drove off some eight miles to get it while we rigged up a tarpaulin to protect both them and the cement from the blazing heat. The window finished and the rebuilt wall cemented we were pleased with the result. The other interior wall we decided to leave pierres apparentes like the one in our bedroom and we asked M. René about having them both sandblasted.
A few days later the machine and its operator arrived. Protected by thick gloves and a sort of diver’s helmet, inch by inch he began to clean the wall of the new atelier and also the high narrow pine doors which began to look very handsome. The following day he planned to do the wall in our bedroom. We had cleared the room by the time M. René arrived, bringing a large roll of plastic which he cut into lengths. He and Mike stapled them over the window and doors but unfortunately they missed a long, hairline crack between the door frame and the wall into the living-room. I was sitting at the table when the sandblasting began and after the first twenty minutes had become accustomed to the noise in the next room. The operator suddenly changed direction and down the whole length of the unsuspected crack a jet of sand blasted into the living room, covering everything, including me. In seconds the air was full of it, the room like a scene from Lawrence of Arabia, but my yells were inaudible and it was not until I had run right round the house to the door of the bedroom that they stopped the machine. And the next day we were expecting guests! That night, by the time we had washed all the china on the dresser – each cup contained a tablespoon of sand – shaken out every book, cleaned the cooker and every surface and swept about three feet of surprisingly heavy sand from our bedroom floor we were exhausted; but the wall looked good.
For the next two days M. René and le Barbu patiently pointed the stones with a cream cement leaving them proud, as asked, and we were pleased with the whole project. The new atelier had a splendid view. It now needed a floor and we planned to tile it with a terracotta brick which we would extend to cover the whole porch area – but that could wait until the following spring. We had to admit that we no longer had the same energy as when we first bought Bel-Air.
We lazed in the sun and swam in our friends’ pool. More new friends, this time an English couple, Ruth and Edward Thomas, had a house about two miles away. Extremely rich and even more generous, their hospitality was lavish and unbounded and they invited us and any of our friends to use their beautiful pool. We introduced Raymond and Claudette and this year Raymond has finally conquered a very real fear of water and begun to swim. After his first few strokes he laughed aloud for sheer delight. ‘C’est incroyable! Quelle sensation, c’est bizarre,’ he said, shaking the water from his ears. ‘Eh Claudette, regarde, regarde,’ he cried, plunging in once more.
In Monflanquin posters went up for a performance of Molière’s L’Avare, The Miser, which was to be held in the square at the summit of the town, using the church wall as a back drop. The company Les Baladins D’Agenais tour the whole south-west region during the summer and our town was to get one performance. Had les Bertrand seen them before? Were they any good? Raymond shrugged. He had no idea, but if we were going they would like to come.
Billed to start at nine o’clock, half an hour later a small army of technicians was still making sound and lighting checks. The audience of about a hundred and fifty, many seated on wooden benches, were getting restless and I wondered what we had let ourselves in for. Suddenly it was dark, the lights came up, music began and streaming out from the house of the Black Prince came a wonderfully costumed troupe of actors. Running, leaping, cartwheeling, walking on their hands, they were so skilled in the style of the Commedia del Arte that they took our breath away. The set was a high wooden scaffolding with a staircase on each side and downstage a simple wooden step ladder, the steps facing the audience.
Much of the first scene which takes place between the daughter and her lover was played while swinging high on the scaffolding, without for one moment impairing the speaking. The girl often hung upside down and just as it seemed that her delicious breasts must tumble out of her low cut dress she would swing upright again as the audience sighed. Crouched motionless at the top of the tall stepladder, his back to the audience, sat the miser. When he first turned to reveal the grotesque white face, black lines on either side of the mouth, the crowd gasped. With infinite slowness, back braced against the steps, he began to descend the ladder like a malevolent spider, extending his thin black legs and flexing his bony fingers. In the scene where he discovers that his money has been stolen he scuttled into the audience, an anguished and desperate figure. The children shrieked and cried ‘Non! Non!’ when he demanded if one of them had stolen his treasure, but no one laughed. It was a masterly performance and the crowd applauded and cheered.
‘C’etait quelque chose,’ said Grandma as we walked down to the car. Since then we have tried not to miss any of their performances, which included a pageant on the life of Eleanor of Aquitaine played in the now dry moat of the great Château of Bonaquil. The setting was spectacular, they used the battlements and towers, and the great horses which they rode in and out added most powerfully to both sound and smell.
As August ended another scent was beginning to fill the air. Ripening plums were once again weighing down the branches and this year we would inaugurate another new machine. Raymond had talked about it the previous year. Designed and manufactured locally, la nouvelle machine pour les prunes apparently shook and collected the fruit at speed. ‘It’s a marvellous invention, marvellous,’ Raymond had declared. ‘It will do the work in half the time.’ Grandpa had said nothing, just pursed his mouth and wrinkled up his thin nose as though there was a bad smell somewhere.
We cleared the ground of the few plums that had fallen in the night and awaited the arrival of la machine. A triumphant, yet clearly nervous, Raymond appeared, his tongue wagging wildly as he tried to manoeuvre into position what looked like a giant grasshopper with red legs and folded green wings trailing behind the tractor. He backed it eventually to touch the first tree in the row and at the pull of a lever a claw grasped the slender trunk. ‘Attention!’ he yelled as suddenly the great wings unfurled to encircle the tree with an upside down umbrella five metres across. At the touch of a third lever the tree shook and shuddered as if in ecstasy, the leaves in a frenzy as the lavender-coloured plums pelted into the green canopy and then tumbled through the central holes into the bright red containers beneath. Once empty the umbrella swiftly refolded and la machine moved to the next tree while we, the humble retinue, bent to retrieve the few plums that had fallen off the edge. It was a pretty spectacular performance.
All went well and Raymond was beginning to relax a little until we came to the end of the row. A small branch, hanging very low with fruit, obstructed the unfurling. Before it could be lifted clear it was ripped off by the force of the umbrella. Throwing his arms in the air and cursing loudly Raymond jumped from the tractor, picking up the torn branch as tenderly as though it were a human limb. ‘Ah, il y a des défauts,’ he said sadly, looking at his new toy.
Claudette comforted him, ‘Oh il y a toujours des défauts.’
‘C’est vrai. C’est vrai.’ Reassured he climbed back and began again.
It was certainly all much quicker. There were far fewer of us and yet by midday we had harvested almost two tonnes of plums and were finished. The small plastic crates into which we had emptied our baskets in previous years had been replaced by great wooden paloxes each holding two hundred kilos which had to be loaded with the fork lift – another tricky manoeuvre – instead of being nonchalantly swung onto the trailer by M. Demoli’s strong brown arms. M. Demoli was, sadly, absent. We had hardly glimpsed him all summer. His wife, not unreasonably, had grown weary of living in a hovel and had accepted the offer of a neat, new, council bungalow on the edge of Monflanquin. He had refused to go. Even worse, the scrap dealer for whom he had worked on an extremely freelance basis, in the winter, had suddenly moved to another district. Unable to cope with two desertions, M. Demoli, it was said, had taken to his bed and no one could get him out of it. Raymond, with typical kindness, had tried but even he had given up. Fernande, his wife, unperturbable as ever, worked with us and admired the new machine but the days of pelting her with plums were now quelles d’autrefois.
After lunch a delighted Raymond drove out of the courtyard to take his loaded trailer to the Coopérative where the plums would be dried. Before getting the machine he would have worked all afternoon climbing up and down the iron ladder to shake by hand and was often so tired at night that he would fall asleep over his supper. The weather was glorious and all the talk of the bumper harvest. Neighbours came to admire la nouvelle machine and everyone, except Grandpa, was delighted.
However, several days later Raymond returned from the Coopérative in a state of shock. There were too many plums! He was not the only farmer to have planted more trees in the last seven years, trees that were fruiting fully for the first time, nor was he the only one to have bought a machine. The Coopérative, though working flat out both night and day, simply did not have enough ovens to dry all the plums and they had decided to limit each producteur to two crates a day. It seemed there might be a plum mountain. What could be done? Each day some ripe plums would fall whether the trees were shaken or not, but that night there was a strong wind which blew in from the west and by next morning a gentle but persistent rain was drenching a thick carpet of plums. They would rot if they were left but the machine could not be used.
With raised voices and anguished gestures telephone calls were made. Distant cousins arrived to help and very old, rarely seen neighbours put on galoshes and ancient oilskins and crept out to join them. While la machine stood idly by with folded wings we picked up the plums in the way they had always been picked. Grandma had often talked about the problems of harvesting plums in the rain. This was our first such experience and, as we scraped the mud off our leaden boots for the tenth time we knew what she meant. The rain, now heavy enough to penetrate the trees, dripped relentlessly down our bent necks.
Once the two crates were full Raymond drove them glumly away while Claudette unearthed a few dozen of the smaller plastic crates which, by midday, we had filled. We loaded them and took them down to the farm.
The ancient étuve was already alight, smoke rising, a triumphant Grandpa replenishing the wood. As soon as he had heard the news he had lit it, knowing that the drying of the remainder of the plums would be up to him. Grandma laid out the flat wooden trays on two long planks supported on oil drums and we tipped the wet sticky plums in, pressing them down gently into the corners. Once they were filled Mike helped Grandpa to load the wagonet and push it into the heat. As the first load began to dry Grandma was already filling the next lot of trays. Their système needed once more, they were content. From every farm spirals of smoke arose from étuves that had long been abandoned but were now reborn.
At last the backlog was cleared. The Coopérative once more accepted as many crates as the farmers could deliver and there was talk of adding another oven before next year. The crisis was over. The weather returned to normal and the new machine once more unfurled its great green umbrella beneath the trees. The little iron ladder was reserved for those too fragile for its rough embrace. Mike stayed to help whenever Raymond needed a driver for the fork lift but I went back to work in my garden. For me the charm of harvesting plums had been the peace of the orchards, the quiet chatter under the trees and the sweet smell of warm fruit.
La machine necessitated much yelling of ‘STOP’ as it was positioned and the fumes from the old tractor which pulled it lingered under the low trees. Yet another harvest had become quelque chose d’autrefois. Raymond felt it. Proud though he was of his machine he regretted the passing of another tradition.
‘But what else can I do?’ he said. ‘My parents-in-law are old and my children?’ he shrugged. Philippe was studying economics at college in Bordeaux and Véronique was learning office skills. Neither was interested in a career as a farmer. ‘Eh alors,’ he said, ‘il faut acheter les machines.’
But in the warm, wet woods, under the ageless layers of leaf mould another harvest waited that needed no machines. Two spells of heavy rain followed by long, hot days had begun a relentless underground movement, soon to reveal itself. Grandpa had already taken to disappearing between the trees in the early morning mist. When we commented he smiled, tapped the side of his nose, raised his eyebrows and said ‘In a few days.’
It was the beginning of the season of the Boletus edulis or le cèpe de Bordeaux and its imminent arrival was the signal for a frenzy of searching in the steaming woods. On our early morning trips to market there were cars parked along the edges of the wooded lanes and signs CHAMPIGNONS INTERDIT began to appear nailed to the trees. ‘C’est la guerre,’ said Raymond. ‘If you get up at seven your neighbour will get up at six.’ It sounded to me very much like the three little pigs.
One morning, well before eight, Claudette in her flowered hat, apron and Wellingtons and carrying a long stick, arrived on our porch. Flushed with excitement she opened her carrier bag to show us a dozen or so brownish-orange tops with thick white stalks which broadened at the base. Some six inches across, others no bigger than her thumb, she took each one out as tenderly as though it were alive, laying them on the well cover before sitting down to drink coffee. She admitted that it was the fascination of finding, even more than the eating of these white fleshed edible toadstools that obsessed her. ‘C’est la passion,’ she laughed.
Normally too busy to take even an afternoon off, once the cèpes had begun she neglected the farm and spent hours in the woods. ‘Elle est toujours comme ça,’ said Raymond in apparent indulgence, except that his passion is eating them. We were invited to try them, a whole dish full, freshly picked and cooked crisp. ‘Sentez, sentez,’ said Raymond, in a kind of ecstasy. ‘When they are cooking they perfume the whole house.’ I really felt quite guilty. They were perfectly edible but, try as I might, their appeal was lost on me. ‘Oh, c’est une question d’habitude,’ he said kindly.
The excitement of finding them was something I could understand. Into a soft, humid world of dappled light and shadows, the very concentration of looking, adjusting one’s eyes to each patch of patterned ground, turning the leaves gently with a stick and circling round and round, anxious not to miss an inch, was mesmeric.
The wood was full of fungi, underfoot and hanging like thick, leathery lips from the trunks of the trees, but, by now, we knew what we were looking for. Each worked in their own small section but at the first cry we would converge for the cèpes were always in a cluster, some clearly visible above ground, others just the faintest concavity beneath the thick carpet of leaves. We pulled them gently and then tried to remember the exact location, for tomorrow there would be more – if we managed to get there first.
With no arduous preparation of the ground, no expensive fertilisers or seed, no watering or weeding, I could understand the fascination of such a harvest for the farmer. It was a gift from the gods and that year was especially bountiful. Grandpa returned one morning with several kilos and refused to tell anyone where he had found them.
The biggest joke in the neighbourhood was old M. Boulloner, a retired Parisien, not the most popular person in our village. Each day he would bump slowly up the track to the woods in his red car. On one occasion he couldn’t find the way out of the wood and had to be rescued. Each evening he would return with a bulging carrier bag which, wisely, he would take down to the farm for Raymond to check. With cries of ‘Mauvais, mauvais,’ Raymond would reject one after the other until poor M. Boulloner was lucky to be left with one miserable mushroom for his evening omelette. Sadly, his smart city cap on his head and his sleek little dachshund at his heels, he would plod out to the car.
‘Poor M. Boulloner,’ I said.
‘Huh, les Parisiens,’ Raymond was unusually unsympathetic. ‘What do they know about la campagne? I remember when I was trying to sell Bel-Air the agent said to me, “You’d do far better to sell it to les Anglais que les Parisiens.” ‘He suddenly smiled at me, surprised, ‘She was right, wasn’t she?’