Reflections of Sunflowers

by Ruth Silvestre

  We first became acquainted with M. Duparq when we needed someone to build a small, stone wall to edge the terrace by the newly dug swimming pool. Although he was highly recommended, we were unsure at first for he hardly spoke, apart from a sort of breathy ‘Hmm,’ through his nose, as he gazed down from his great height at the job in hand. We soon learnt, however, what a skilled craftsman he was and, when we can afford it, have used him many times. He loves stones and is sensitive to old houses, and that has been essential when having any work done at Bel-Air. We have been determined, if possible, to conserver le style of this very old, simple house.

  The most recent part of Bel-Air was built sometime just before 1889 when my predecessor Anaïs came here as a young bride. At that time, Justin’s two brothers and her father-in-law were all living there. The new and highly necessary addition consists of two adjoining bedrooms and a continuation of the attic above just tacked onto the east side of the original house, which is much older. I suspect that this older part was once just one large, simple space with an attic above. In the centre of one wall is the chimney, two meters wide and resting on oak corbels. On the adjoining wall is set a sink, hand-cut from a single slab of granite, which drained water to the outside. On the opposite wall two window openings are cut, one above the other, a stone transom between them. They had no glass but each closed with its own oak shutter, much-mended and studded with great iron nails like the ancient door of the church. A small glazed window frame was added later in the bottom section but the top opening remains as it was.

  The light from this window would have made it possible to climb the crude, uneven stairs to the attic. This is where the family must have slept, long before Justin, the eldest son, grew up and married Anaïs. I can imagine his father, Pierre Costes, a former weaver, now presumably working the land, chasing his three sons up to bed in the 1870s. Their mother died in childbirth when the youngest boy was only five years old. They also used the attic for storage, for we found piles of old corn-cobs, wine bottles, ancient wooden hay forks and crude teasing and carding tools. Downstairs, the opening on the west side of the building was originally large enough for a small cart to enter and the animals probably also came in when the weather was cold.

  Of the actual date of the building there is no record, even in the Archives in Agen. So many documents were destroyed during the revolution. Some old deeds that have survived we found in the attic in a battered, cardboard hat-box. It was on the top shelf of an ancient sideboard pushed right to the back of the more recent addition. Mouse droppings and dead insects fell out as we gingerly unfolded the stiff packets of paper with their spidery writing. They do not tell us anything about our house, but those documents that didn’t immediately fall to pieces and are just possible to decipher give intriguing glimpses of long ago life, not at Bel-Air itself, but not far away, in the same commune.

  The earliest document is dated 1765 and records the troubles of one Sieur Antoine Larroque. He has fallen behind with the repayment of a loan of twenty-five livres, sixteen sols, to one Jean Domengie, who takes him before the tribunal in Monflanquin, the cost of going to the tribunal being thirty-six sols. Livres, and sols, are pre-Revolution coinage and date from Roman times. The smallest coin was a denarius and it is from these three coins that our own pre-decimal money, L,s,d, was named. When the Normans came to England they used their own coins, which were marked with a star. Norman French for star being ‘esterlin,’ this was the origin of ‘sterling’.

  Antoine Larroque also had to pay interest on his debt, and his land and goods were to be mortgaged. He must have worked hard for the next document confirms that within three years he has paid it all off. His only liabilities now are taxes to be paid to King Louis XV and to the Seigneur of the local chateau. There is also mention of his owning some fallow land, which he gained from his wife’s dowry. This land is further south and west in the department of les Landes.

  A later but almost indecipherable document details the responsibilities of his son, who, post-Revolution, is now addressed as Citoyen Pierre Larroque. In a flourishing script it begins, ‘Au nom de la République française, Salut, savoir faisons que…’

  Interestingly, this document is dated Premier Ventôse (very roughly the end of February) Cinquième année de la République, using the new Republican calendar, which was instituted in 1793. The Republican year began at the Autumn equinox on the 22nd September and was divided into twelve months of 30 days each. The problematic five or six days left over by this calculation were to be simply dealt with by being dedicated to Republican holidays. The names of the months are fascinating and often poetic.

  Autumn is divided into Vendémiaire, Brumaire, Frimaire.

  Winter becomes, Nivose, Pluviose, Ventôse.

  Spring is Germinal, Floréal, Prairial.

  Summer consists of Messidor, Thermidor, Fructidor.

  So, according to this post-Revolution document, Sieur Antoine Larroque is now dead and his son, Citizen Pierre, is concerned with the enlargement of the room in which his father died. Also mentioned are his responsibilities to care not only for his mother but also his mother-in-law. There is also another document confirming that he has received fifty francs, the new money, in cash from his brother Jean, who will now take over the land inherited from their mother. Why these documents were brought to and kept at Bel-Air I shall probably never know. I imagine that the old sideboard, in which they had lain for so many years, was put up in the attic when the tall, heavy sideboard we use now, the new buffet, was bought. Perhaps the new sideboard was Anaïs’s wedding present. Perhaps she brought it as her dowry. According to Sylvie’s grandmother, Anaïs was very proud of her buffet and always kept it well polished. I give it an extra shine.

  It did eventually stop raining during that spring holiday and work began again in the sodden garden. I planted up pots of morning glories and hoped that it would at least rain again before July to germinate them. We congratulated ourselves that even after thirty-six hours of a non-stop downpour, our house was as dry as a bone. That was until we went into the chai, our large outhouse. A chai faces north and fulfils the same purpose as a cave, or cellar, being a cool place to store wine. Our house is presumably built on rock, which would have precluded excavating. The chai is large, roughly fifty square metres, of which we have divided and converted half to use as a fourth bedroom. Not having any guests this holiday, we hadn’t actually been in there. The shutters were still closed. The bed, covered with a plastic sheet, was fine but, as our eyes adjusted, we suddenly realised that all the rugs were moving, floating in three inches of water. Two dead mice swirled gently between them.

  We grabbed every available mop and pushed the water and the corpses out. We had only just finished by the time Hugh arrived for supper. We cooked veal cutlets from the famous, family calf, on the griddle over the fire but, sadly, they were not very tasty.

  The next day we looked for the leak in the chai. Where exactly had all this water come in? Dirty stains on one area of the wall gave us a rough clue. Mike, ever ingenious, drilled a hole through the pine panelling on the ceiling inside and by poking up a wire we gradually narrowed down the area outside on the long, sloping roof. We lifted and replaced the tiles carefully, one after the other. It took much patient investigation to eventually locate the cracked stop-tile. In the process of removing it, we found a chicken leg, picked clean, no doubt left by the fouine, when she was in residence. Whose chicken it had been would remain a mystery.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  On Sunday the weather was still very hot but the air was heavy, and by evening there was just a suggestion of something brewing on the other side of the horizon. We had spent a lazy day alone. We swam and lay in the shade, ignoring the piles of garden rubbish that would soon, if the strong young men appeared as they had promised, be cleared for us. Raymond and Claudette had taken a few days holiday in that period which they call here ‘entre la paille et la prune,’ when the wheat is cut and the straw baled, but before the preparations
must begin for the first plums to be harvested. They had gone to Cap d’Agde, where Véronique and Jean-Michel, their son-in-law, together with some of his five sisters, had bought a small apartment overlooking the harbour. We are thankful to escape from London to our rural idyll in Lot-et-Garonne; some of those who live and work in this wonderful space and quiet choose, for their diversion, a crowded, modern port.

  While they are there Claudette will still do most of the cooking and Raymond will, as usual, get up very early, but only in order to explore all the surrounding area by bicycle. He has always loved to travel, taking advantage of the annual trips organised by the Syndicat Agricole to look at the differences in farms in various departments of France and abroad. This idea of taking a few days off from time to time by themselves, however, is new and is gradually establishing for them both a more agreeable kind of life. Raymond had long been worried about becoming too old to work the farm and the idea of future leisure seemed impossible. Now, Jean-Michel takes on increasing responsibilities and, although not from a farming background, proves himself more than capable, although their frequent disagreements about the right way to do things, ‘les systèmes,’ can clearly be heard across the fields even over the roar of the tractor.

  As Jean-Michel did ten years ago, Raymond married into the farm, but unlike Jean-Michel, Raymond’s parents had always worked the land. In spite of this, he had to endure many a ticking off from Grandpa, Claudette’s father. On becoming part of the household, Raymond, always polite, would sit at the table, continue eating and fume quietly while the old man roared his disapproval of the new and less than traditional way he had sprayed the plum trees or treated the vines. Claudette, tactfully, would not take sides. Jean-Michel is neither tactful nor deferential. He is confident, gives as good as he gets and confounds Raymond by, as well as having become a competent farmer, being also able to build and decorate, repair and weld machinery and still find time to play football. It just seems rather unfair that Raymond should have had to endure criticism from first the older and now the younger generation.

  As we often do at the end of the day we walked slowly up through Raymond’s newest vineyard toward the wood. When we first came, in those early days, going for walks to gaze at the view was a rare luxury, so much needed doing in the house. Now, after twenty-five years, there are changes even in the view. Then, the lower half of this long slope was still a meadow, bright with buttercups. A dozen of the large cream-coloured cows, les Blondes d’Aquitaine, would graze quietly here before trailing down at regular intervals to drink at the pond, and the wood itself extended further down towards Bel-Air. Over the years the lower half of the wood has been gradually cleared and the top section of the land ploughed, leaving a smaller but adequate pasture for the cows, who still come down to gaze at us solemnly when we first arrive. One glorious summer this top field was planted with sunflowers, and with le grand champ, as Raymond always calls it, on the other side of our house also a blaze of gold, we were, indeed, ‘a house in the sunflowers’.

  Plans for planting this new vineyard took a long time to come to fruition. The first we knew about Raymond’s intentions was when, one spring, several years ago, he asked Mike to help him measure out the field for vines. Sunflowers seemed to be temporarily out of favour with Brussels and the thought of having a vineyard that we would be able to see from our front door was appealing. Back and forth the two of them trudged with canes three metres long. When they finally returned, exhausted, to sit and drink, Raymond appeared slightly alarmed to find that there was space for over 3,000 vines, which would also need the same number of stakes to support them.

  Mike had sometimes been on stake-choosing expeditions with him in the past, and the cutting and trimming of the small acacias, the favoured tree, was quite arduous. They had never needed anything like 3,000!

  There was also, it seemed, unlimited bureaucracy attached to the purchase of new vines. After permission actually to plant a new vineyard was finally obtained from Le Bureau de Viticulture in Bordeaux, Raymond learnt that no new licences to buy vines were being issued. All he had succeeded in obtaining was permission to buy up old licences. To plant even a single vine, never mind 3,000, he had to find growers who still had unused licences, usually because their vines had been uprooted and the land cleared. Raymond spent many months buying a few at a time, a licence for 50 vines here, another for 200 somewhere else. He would set off, confident of a bargain, having spoken to an elderly proprietor on the phone, only to find that by the time he got there the farmer had had second thoughts, or had discussed it with his sons, and the price had risen. The best deals were to be done when an old person had forgotten all about his licence, only valid for seven years, and had almost, but not quite, let it expire, which would have made it worthless. This lengthy process entailed many carefully planned visits around the region and Raymond enjoyed his quest.

  When we returned that summer of ’95 the sight of the great expanse of bare earth studded with strong, newly cut stakes was brutal. Each row of stakes was hammered through a wide strip of black plastic to prevent any weeds overwhelming the tender new vines, which could not be treated for the first three years. We had arrived just in time, for planting was to begin the following day. We were part of a willing but somewhat inexpert team on that sultry morning, as a co-opted pastry cook, a technical college lecturer, a Portugese welder, and Mike and I followed Raymond’s instructions and carefully placed the small plants into the holes, turning the slender stems to curve towards the stake. As we worked, Jean-Michel roared up and down in the van, keeping us supplied with ever more plants.

  Now those same vines are eight years old, strong and lush. We can see this year’s grapes, still fairly small, already tightly packed on twisting stems. In the early morning light the long, neatly trimmed rows make dark tunnels. As the sun moves round, the shadows narrow and disappear, and by the evening, the tops of the rows are burnished. They are planted a metre apart to allow space for them to be harvested by machine. The few exceptions that we must still pick by hand are those vines nearest to the electricity pole, one of a line of poles, which march across the landscape, the cable providing perches for hunting kestrels and buzzards.

  The first time the tall, unwieldy machine bumped up the track to harvest the new vines Raymond was very nervous. A large empty trailer stood ready for the grapes. Raymond and the driver of the machine, a small, disgruntled gnome of a man, eyed each other warily. No, he did not want anyone to help. He wasn’t too happy to see me either, especially with a camera, and when he began to work we soon understood why. He was incredibly clumsy. At that time there were not many vines harvested by machine in this area. The driver was clearly inexperienced and consequently the last thing he needed was an audience. The mechanical battering and stripping of the grapes is a rough, cruel affair anyway; with this operator it was painful to watch.

  At the end of each row he turned the machine so inexpertly he almost ripped the last vine from the ground. The whole noisy apparatus swayed and tottered astride each row and every time he unloaded into the trailer, grapes and leaves spilt all over the place. Raymond threw his arms into the air and cursed. Of course it was all very quick. The vineyard is so wide and the rows so long, a score of pickers would have taken several days to complete the harvest. But they wouldn’t have made such a mess of it, or lost so many grapes. We were all relieved when the assault was finished. Thankfully we never saw this self-styled expert again and the following year the operator was much more sympathetic and skilful.

  As we continue our walk we reach the edge of the wood and turn back to look at Bel-Air. It nestles into the landscape, the long slope of the roof just visible through the branches of the great ash tree in front. The Mediterranean cyprus on the other side of the house barely reached my chin when we planted it. Now, for the first time, I realise I can clearly see it from this side too, grown so tall that it appears like an exclamation mark above the roof. The little pine that Grandma dug up in the wood so long ago and
carried down to plant for us is now a huge tree. She was always planting different things in our garden, sometimes in very inappropriate spots. Like many French gardeners she was a stickler for even spacing. Neat rows of zinnias or French marigolds would, with us away so much, soon be overwhelmed with weeds. Other offerings were inspired. I have two small rose bushes and the beautiful peony she planted for me in a perfect position, which seems to grow larger every year.

  Grandma died in ’97. Parkinson’s disease, which she endured so bravely, finally reduced her to a shadow. Each October when we said goodbye we wondered whether the old people, both well over eighty, would still be there the following spring. At the end, Claudette nursed each of her parents with a tenderness she rarely displays. Raymond’s feelings are immediate and uncomplicated, every emotion unashamedly expressed. Claudette is sharper, more protective of any inner vulnerability. She is like her father. Grandpa Jean would roar and rage, but he was the kindest, fairest man. He just didn’t want anyone to know it. I miss them both.