A House in the Sunflowers (14 page)

It is the system of pricing that helps make
la friperie
such fun. There is very little grading according to quality so that, for example, all the skirts on a stall will be marked 30 francs but they will range from a garish horror in multi-coloured crimplene to a fine, wool-georgette silk-lined model with a Swiss label. Some stall holders don’t even separate the garments. Everything is in a great heap and it is there that the best bargains can sometimes be found. I bought an elegant shirtwaister, unsure until I checked in a German dictionary that it was 75% raw silk. It washes like a dream and cost me a pound. All you need to learn are sizes and fabric names in French, Italian and German, and it helps to carry a tape measure in case the labels are missing.

With prices like these you can take a chance on the most outlandish garments, and if they don’t fit tear them up. They are cheaper than dusters and much more fun. All our visitors indulge and on our return from market, after we have unloaded the wonderful selection of seasonal delights that make shopping here such a joy, we always finish with a fashion parade from
la friperie
.

When Adam brought Cas, my daughter-in-love, for the first time she came back with six carrier bags crammed with clothes. He watched her pirouetting past him in a succession of garments, an olive-green jump suit, an outsize red and white striped shirt, a blue velour dressing gown with a hood, and a duster
coat in black moiré taffeta. ‘The coat alone would have cost me a fortune in King’s Road Chelsea,’ she crowed. Adam grew paler by the minute. They were on a tight budget. Eventually, the parade finished, she picked up the clothes and headed for the washing machine, calling triumphantly over her shoulder. ‘Relax!
Tout pour
fifteen quid!’ The best bargain I have bought so far is an apparently unworn almond green cashmere sweater for a pound. But of course there’s always the next
friperie
.

That summer, when we first arrived, we were surprised to see, hanging on a wire at the entrance to our track a row of furry pelts. Too large to be moles, we wondered what they were. Not for long, our village was agog with the great plague of
ragondins
. As they were described they grew larger and fiercer. What could they be? Philippe fetched the dictionary; coypu. None of us had ever seen one. Were they dangerous? No, well at least they thought not. They were reluctant to spoil the drama entirely. Then what exactly was the problem?

Grandpa explained that the
ragondins
were destroying the ponds and lakes by making huge nesting holes in the banks which allowed the water to escape. Now we understood the general consternation. Water for both crops and animals is at a premium during the long hot summers.
As in England, coypu had once been farmed for their fur, nutria, which had been popular. But to have perfect pelts they demanded a great deal of feeding and as the fur became increasingly out of fashion the farmers of Savoy simply released them.
‘Et maintenant ils viennent dans notre Sud-Ouest,’
everyone complained bitterly.

Each day new sightings were reported. At this farm and that another one had been shot, another had got away. They bred faster than rabbits, we were told. One morning we were down at the farm when Grandpa returned triumphant. ‘
Venez voir,
’ he shouted. There, laid out in the courtyard for all to see was a dead
ragondin
. Large as a well-fed cat, with two huge bright orange front teeth which protruded over its lower jaw, it was not an attractive sight. And such a thick strong rat-like tail! A small crowd gathered, neighbouring children arrived on bicycles and inevitably someone enquired whether or not it was edible. Grandpa shook his head. ‘
Ce n’est qu’un gros rat
,’ he said, picking it up by its tail and looking pleased with himself. The children shrieked and backed away.

The weather became hotter. The maize in
le grand champ
grew, it seemed, by inches every day. Raymond looked at it anxiously. ‘If the
ragondin
gets in there she’ll do a lot of damage,’ he muttered.

‘Do they eat maize?’ we asked. ‘
Bien sûr!
’ By this
time they were rumoured to eat almost everything. One morning M. Girot, our other neighbour through whose farm we had so carelessly driven on the day we had found Bel-Air, stopped his tractor outside the house. Apart from Raymond, he and his sons are the only people who ever drive past.

‘
Bonjour.’

‘Bonjour.’

‘Ça va?’ ‘Ça va.’

‘Vous avez vu?’

‘Quoi?’

‘Le ragondin!’

There was one in our pond he declared. Had he seen it? No, but he’d seen the tracks. We went to look. Sure enough, his farmer’s eyes had noticed the round tunnels through the long thick grass. ‘There and there, look!’ he said. It was undeniable. What to do? ‘
Il faut le tuer
,’ he said simply and got back onto his tractor.

The pond is about a hundred yards from the house. That evening as we sat watching from the garden a large ripple disturbed the water. Through binoculars we saw her clearly. Why
her
I do not know. The great teeth were still curious and repulsive but in the water she was graceful and a joy to watch. As she dived to pull up the weeds with those specially designed teeth the strong thick tail lashed up to balance her. Not as sleek as an otter she nevertheless had her own
appeal and we were loth to destroy her. We took to creeping along to the pond and sometimes we got close enough to see her slide into the water from the far bank.

The next Sunday we were to entertain
toute la famille
for lunch. I was busy preparing a menu, searching for extra dishes to amuse and intrigue them. This time it was Scotch eggs, which they had never seen before, and slices of pear stuffed with Roquefort and sprinkled with poppy seeds. I had intended to try this the previous holiday but had discovered that edible poppy seeds were unheard of here. I remember the smart grocer in Villeneuve looking astonished at such a request and suggesting that I might find them in the
Agrilot
where they do indeed sell seeds, but for planting, not cooking.

It was another very hot day. The family arrived, as usual, dead on twelve-thirty. Claudette brought a huge bowl of strawberries which she had just picked and Raymond a bottle of his own dessert wine to drink with them. Grandpa however, when he appeared, chugging up the track with Grandma in their 2CV, brought a shotgun and handed it to Mike.
‘C’est pour le ragondin
,’ he roared. Mike took the gun and did not answer. ‘Otherwise I shall set traps,’ said the old man, taking his usual place at the head of the table.

The thought of that beautiful, sleek body helpless
and bleeding in a trap was out of the question as well he knew, and about three-thirty, when we had finished eating, Mike took the gun. He and Raymond went to sit on a grassy bank near the pond. In a post prandial stupor it was difficult to concentrate on the dark water. Patterned by fierce sunlight filtering through overhanging branches, it was alive with dragonflies and water boatmen. A movement caught Mike’s eye and, turning, he saw
le ragondin
running down the field towards the pond. He nudged Raymond who had by now actually dozed off. ‘
Elle est là
.’ he whispered.

Raymond shook himself awake. ‘
Tire, tire
,’ he hissed urgently. Aiming slightly ahead of the running animal, Mike fired. To his astonishment she stopped, rolled over, quivered and was still. Mike’s sadness was eased by having killed her outright with one shot. His reputation as a marksman was high in the village but our
ragondin
was no more.

There was an abundance of greengages that summer. Claudette, Fernande, Grandma and I sat in the shade under the hangar cutting up fruit for jam until our thumbs were sore. Fernande and Claudette went to pick pears and Grandma to cut lettuces for supper and I was left to watch the jam. The frothy mixture seethed gently in a great copper pan on a large iron trivet. The outsize gas ring flickered and flared. When,
from time to time, I stirred the jam with a metre-long black wooden baton, which had apparently belonged to Grandpa’s mother, it bubbled fiercely. Everything was so extra large that I felt like a character in the giant’s kitchen in ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’. Satisfied that it was not burning, I lay the baton across the pan and lazily watched a narrow band of sweet scum like an encrusted bracelet, dry a few inches from the end. As the scented steam rose, the cooing of the turtle-dove in her cage merged with the gentle bubbling of the jam. Two flies crawled across the table. The dog looked up, stretched his front legs, yawned and went back to sleep.

I wondered whether Anaïs had sat like this up at Bel-Air stirring the jam. Perhaps she had left Alaïs to mind it while she went to cut the lettuces. From the
rente viagère
contract that Raymond had shown me I now knew that she had been born in 1871 in a village some ten miles away but that her husband Justin, the eldest of three sons, was born at Bel-Air in 1866. When the youngest boy was barely five years old their mother had died leaving their father, one
Sieur Pierre Costes
, to bring up the three children. He was described as an ‘
ancien tisserand
’, and I wondered if those crude and worm-eaten tools for the teasing out of wool that we had found in the attic, had once belonged to him.

In the hat-box, the contents of which were becoming
ever more fascinating, were some fragile letters in an elegant, spidery hand, addressed to M. Costes and dated February and May 1876. They suggest that his wife may have already been in poor health. The first letter is in reply to M. Costes’s request for a consultation by letter from
la
somnambulla
– an old word for a clairvoyant. This, it is explained, is not possible because she does not give written advice for fear of being brought before a tribunal. The writer, a cousin living in Bordeaux, suggests that M. Costes should write again, enclosing a lock of hair which he will take personally to her. In the second letter he writes in detail of the visit and lists the prescribed treatment.

1) One tablet of
blancard
each morning and two at night.

2) A tisane made from the roots of wild strawberry and linseed to be taken half an hour after the tablets.

3) A demi-enema every day for fifteen days.

A diet of good meat stock, made from undercooked mutton or beef, and vintage wine to drink – ‘because she has need of blood’. On the 22nd of May he writes again asking his cousin for a progress report. He warns him against using any other treatment and says he will warn him when another lock of hair is needed, the present one sufficing for a second consultation. He ends his most concerned letter,
‘Recevez les salutations de celui qui reste votre ami
pour la vie
.’ If the remedy was for Justin’s mother it does not seem to have helped for she died three years later.

Anaïs was eighteen when, in 1889, she and Justin were married. Old Sieur Pierre Costes then made over the property to the young couple but retained the life interest and the revenue, Justin working the land. The farm was much smaller and with many debts outstanding and so Anaïs continued in service. I have been told that at one time she worked in a large house which is just visible on the brow of the hill. Did she look down and wish that Bel-Air was really hers, I wonder. Alaïs was born three years later. Did she take him with her to work or leave him for the old man to look after, and how old was he when he caught polio? No one can tell me.

Although handicapped, Alaïs was able to work. In her account book for 1910 his mother proudly records her eighteen-year-old son giving her 50 francs. She seems to have spent it all on him buying three shirts, a jacket and trousers and a pair of
brodequins
, a kind of lace-up boot. Old Sieur Pierre Costes lived on until 1912 when Justin paid 800 francs to each of his brothers and at last, he and Anaïs were master and mistress of Bel-Air. It was then that they had the little house enlarged, building on the differently roofed section with its two bedrooms below and extended attic above. They must have made many plans together,
long-term plans as farmers must do, but within two years the horror of the Great War would overturn them all. Alaïs, handicapped though he was, would be drafted into the reserve and, the cruellest irony of all, Justin, spared the battle would, in 1918, die of a heart attack.

C
HAPTER
T
WELVE

On Sundays, if we are not eating chez Bertrand or they with us, we like to go some ten kilometres away to the village of Lacapelle Biron. On the borders of Lot-et-Garonne, it was created almost by accident by a long forgotten Marquis of the nearby château of Biron. Suffering from both asthma and gout, this unfortunate nobleman could not bear the noisy market which was held each Monday beneath his walls. ‘Send them somewhere else,’ he wheezed and so, taking their name with them, the traders of Biron moved down the hill and across the fields to the ancient hamlet of
Lacapelle. The two names joined together, the village flourished and Monday is still market day.

It is essential to book at the Restaurant Palissy which is named after Bernard Palissy, renaissance potter, scientist and philosopher. Born of humble parents in the next village of St Avit, he spent years researching his glazes, becoming so impoverished that he was reduced to burning his furniture and floorboards to fire his kiln. For Catherine de Medici he built a grotto in her Tuileries Gardens, decorating it with enamelled lizards, toads and serpents. He travelled widely and wrote on a wide range of subjects but always begged his students not to listen to those scientists who sat all day propounding theories. Always a craftsman he wrote ‘with all the theory in the world you can make nothing, not even a shoe. Practice must engender theory.’ He became a Huguenot and eventually Royal patronage could protect him no longer. He was imprisoned in the Bastille where, at the age of eighty-one, he died. There is a statue of him in Villeneuve-sur-Lot, a gentle, scholarly figure holding one of his famous dishes, a tiny creature curled up inside.

Outside the restaurant which bears his name the tables are always crowded with customers taking their aperitifs. ‘We have laid a hundred and seventy places today,’ announces M. Allo, the head waiter, as he greets us. Teeth flashing, M. Allo plays his role as though Feydeau himself had written it, glorying in every detail.
Perhaps it is because he is really the local postman and only has two performances at the weekend. Otherwise he must tear across the countryside in his yellow van. Today all that is forgotten. Resplendent in a dazzling white, starched jacket, head to one side, he whirls and weaves between the tables at ever increasing speed. ‘
J’arrive. J’arrive!
’ he calls, sweat already trickling down his florid face. He loves every moment.

The menu hardly ever varies but I suspect there would be an outcry if it did. This is what we come for, the
jambon du pays
, the
écrevisses
, the
ris de veau
. Restaurant Palissy is respected by local families and it is they who eat there in the winter when the tourists are far away. The dining room fills quickly. Many of the customers know each other and there is a lot of kissing. Most of the families are of three generations, all stylishly dressed, even though most of them will be at work in the fields tomorrow. Trays of melons, already on the table, perfume the room which reverberates with serious debate as menus are studied. The most expensive with seven courses will not cost more than twelve pounds and you can eat extremely well for seven. There is a choice for each course but no pressure to decide. Lunch will go on until four o’clock. Friends wave as the last stragglers take their places in the crowded room.
Bon appetit!

Our soup is a tasty
consommé
in which float tiny beads of sago called, more poetically in France,
perles
du Japon
. After the soup we sample the house wine, a
vin ordinaire
in name only, for the local Cahors is good. The melons are perfect; grown locally, they can be harvested at precisely the right moment. One of our party, not liking seafood, has chosen a cheaper menu. Her thin slices of home-cured ham hang over the edge of the plate. ‘Don’t worry,’ we urge, ‘you have plenty of time.’ And we begin to demolish our mountain of langoustines, mussels, clams, winkles, prawns, shrimps and cockles in their shells.

M. Allo speeds past, balancing three trays piled with debris. He works twice as fast as the waitresses, all half his age, apart from his wife who is short, plump and calm, and smilingly approves his performance from across the room. ‘
Eh voilà!
’ he beams and with a flourish presents the
écrevisses
, bright coral red, succulent and gleaming, sprinkled with chopped garlic and parsley and flambéed in Armagnac.

The first time we tasted
écrevisses
was chez Bertrand. Early one morning Grandpa had taken Mike and Matthew to his secret spot on a nearby stream. They had baited a line of square muslin nets with his special bait, chunks of pork fat dipped in Pernod. When the nets were slowly raised after a short wait the black shiny
écrevisses
were clinging to the underside, trying to reach the bait. ‘When I was a boy,’ grumbled the old man, ‘there were scores in this stream. Nowadays…’ he shrugged, throwing his hands in the air.

In the event they caught a mere half dozen and the following day at Sunday lunch, after the first three courses, Claudette solemnly presented them in the centre of a large plate. ‘How are we going to divide them?’ she asked. ‘I suppose those who caught them should have first choice.’ She put one onto each plate and then went back into the kitchen laughing, appearing again with a heaped bowl of
écrevisses
which she had generously bought at market.

Now, as then, we are surrounded by sounds of sucking and crunching and sighs of pleasure. Bread is dipped in the sauce and fingers finally licked before being almost reluctantly wiped on the scented tissues provided.

One of us had the
ris-de-veau
. ‘How were they?’ we enquire. ‘Wonderful,’ she sighs, ‘have a taste.’ The sweetbreads are in a delicate sauce with olives and tiny mushrooms and they melt in the mouth. At every other table sampling of each other’s dishes is going on. This is what Le Palissy is all about. Greasy-chinned faces beam at each other and M. Allo beams at everyone.

With our
rôti de veau
and
confit de poulet
we drink an older wine but still a Cahors. More sampling follows. We decide that the chicken has been preserved in goose fat, delicious! M. Allo brings a fresh green salad and then the cheese board which is small but interesting, a
bleu des
Causses
from the stony hillside to the east, a fresh goat cheese and a Pyrenée.

Dessert is a choice of ice creams, chocolate, sorbet of lemon or blackcurrant,
vacherin
– vanilla with slices of prune inside, or a slice of
tourtière
. As he finally brings our coffee M. Allo is anxious to know if we have enjoyed our meal. We assure him it was wonderful. He beams. We have a favour to ask. May we take his photograph? His jaw drops. He stares at us blankly then rushes from the room. Have we offended him? He returns at a run frantically combing his hair, and poses. His great shoulders heave as he tries to suppress a sudden fit of giggles. In an effort to be serious he clasps his hands tightly. Click, it is done. He rushes off again to return moments later with a baked Alaska. It is a special treat for someone’s birthday and with a flourish he lights the sparklers stuck in the top. As we leave Le Palissy customers still left are singing Happy Birthday, M. Allo as loudly as all the others.

Outside the heat bounces off the pale stone houses. We narrow our eyes and search for sunglasses. We cross the square and pause as each well-fed customer will on emerging into the sunlight to face the unique monument in the centre. It gained for its sculptor, Buisseret, the Grand Prix de Rome in 1947. One cannot fail to be moved by the simplicity and eloquence of the line of arms which rises so starkly from the earth. The hands hold a massive stone slab which bears the names of those who never returned to their beloved
Sud-Ouest.

The old people need no monument to remind them
of that other Sunday morning. A Sunday morning in May 1944 when, just after dawn, a battalion of the SS Das Reich under General Lamerdine, infamous for ordering the total destruction of Oradour sur Glane, encircled the village. The Resistance were active in the surrounding wooded hills and as a reprisal all the men of Lacapelle Biron were rounded up and taken to a derelict paper mill further up the valley. As the day wore on, other men arriving to visit relatives were also seized. A father hearing that his son was held went to protest. The Germans took him too. By the evening the hostages numbered forty-seven. They were transported to Auschwitz where more than half of them died. The monument marks the spot from which the trucks left.

The crickets are singing as we walk slowly to our car parked under a tree. Is it perhaps the knowledge that life can never be taken for granted that makes these sturdy people enjoy their work and their leisure with such intensity?

The sun grew fiercer each day. By the end of the following week
une canicule
, a heatwave, was officially announced. Under our north-facing porch, which had funnelled the bitter wind at Easter, it was still 92 degrees long after the sun had disappeared, flaring the horizon with streaks of fire. Adam and Cas were due to leave the following day and we had been invited to spend their last evening with friends some twenty
miles away. Later, on leaving for home at about eleven, a few spots of rain began to fall and thinking of our parched garden, we were glad. However, within a few miles our windscreen wipers were unable to cope with torrential rain and we were forced to stop. We drank coffee at a bar and waited for the rain to ease. The tree-lined roads were winding and difficult to negotiate. When we were able to start again it was with relief that we eventually neared home and familiar territory but it was never to be quite the same again.

Since the great storm in London in October 1987 what happened that night in our little part of France becomes perhaps insignificant, but at that time I had never experienced anything like it. Adam, having already got out of the car two or three times to move fallen branches climbed out yet again as our headlights picked out another obstacle. A whole tree blocked the road. We turned to try to get home from another direction, splashed along the muddy, debris-strewn lane and eventually, with relief, climbed our own winding track up to the house.

‘Never mind,’ I shouted as I raced to get under the porch and unlock the door, ‘we’ll soon be warm and dry.’ I reached for the light switch. Nothing. I did not need a light to tell me something was wrong. I could hear the water dripping inside the house. Once inside a torch revealed a dark hole in the ceiling, and we splashed across the floor to our bedroom to see
our saturated bed standing in several inches of dirty water.

Mercifully, Adam and Cas’s bedroom was dry and the bed in Matthew’s room had only one damp corner. It was pitch dark and still raining and nothing could be done. I knew that I would need all my energy the following day and so, after covering our bed with plastic sheets, just in case, we tried to sleep.

The following morning as I opened my eyes to already strong sunlight I wondered briefly what I was doing in the other bedroom. We soon discovered what had happened. The top half of our chimney had been blown off and had crashed through the roof. There were broken tiles everywhere. We dragged all our sodden furniture out into the blessed sun and mopped the floors, pushing the water out of the house on each side. It was exhausting and, I found, curiously depressing, as though one had been singled out for punishment by the gods, a totally irrational but very powerful feeling.

All morning we worked. Sooty water had streaked the wall soaking clothes, books and foodstuff. Suddenly we realised that we had seen nothing of Raymond or Claudette. They invariably appeared to share with us anything unusual. While Mike drove down to the farm I went into the garden and saw that several of the great branches on the west side of the ash tree had been torn off. I then realised that they were lying
scattered some hundred yards away up the field toward the wood. Coming round to the south-facing garden I saw the shredded leaves on my sumach trees, even the Virginia creeper was full of holes.

Mike returned to describe the devastation on the farm. He had found Claudette weeping in the courtyard, Raymond trying to comfort her and, twelve hours after the storm, there was still a high drift of hailstones against the wall of the farmhouse. The tornado had cut a swathe across the land as it advanced from the south.

‘The noise!’ Claudette shuddered. ‘It only lasted a few minutes but I’ll never forget the noise.’ We surveyed the damage and then I understood why they had always talked about hail,
la grêle
, with such fear. In the largest plum orchard where hardly one tree was undamaged, branches and fruit littered the ground. Any fruit still on the trees was cut to pieces and the maize in the next field shredded. The tall, forty-year-old pine trees, planted to protect the orchard, had been twisted out and hurled down. Roof tiles were everywhere, barns blown down and fences blown completely away. Our hole in the roof seemed trivial by comparison.