A Short Walk from Harrods

by Dirk Bogarde

  Henri and Marie arrived for an interview with me three days later and stayed for five years. After which they retired but were still available to ‘house-sit’ in an emergency.

  They were, it must be confessed, a great deal older than they had claimed to be. Marie must have been in her early seventies but hacked off ten years, and wore a geranium-red lipstick and thick white powder to hide her wrinkles, making her look rather like a dried fig. Henri was probably older, and had dyed his hair a sort of sherbert yellow. I suppose, at one time, it had been fair.

  However, they were clearly all that Madame Ranchett had said, and we all liked each other right away. Marie cooked extremely well but would do nothing else, except buttons and darning. Henri, on the other hand, was the house-man and would drive the car to get the marketing, and polish the floors and make the beds. Except that after a short, agonizing trial run with Forwood in the Simca Brake he was never allowed near any machine again unless it was connected to a plug. Like the floor-polisher. He was quite incapable of driving anything. Except a hard bargain when it came to his ‘leave’ every year.

  But we all managed very well, and when, eventually, the time came for them to retire to their small flat down below in the valley, I went to Madame Ranchett again and sought her help. The only problem, and it honestly was not a real problem, was that with Henri and Marie we lost any chance of guest accommodation. Which didn’t matter right at the start, but got a bit irritating as the years went on, and we had to farm chums out in the village in one of the not very attractive little hotels.

  So this time it was decided that a daily lady was all we needed. Two hours a day, and we would cope with the rest.

  Well, we got her. She was discovered by Florette Ranchett wandering round the shop one day, a small child on one hip, looking bewildered. She was Spanish, could speak scraps of French, but with signs and a certain amount of shrieking at each other it was established that she had just moved into the area (a small, neglected house by a junk yard) with a husband who had got a job at the local golf course, mowing the greens. She had no money, or very little, and that day wanted some broken biscuits or stale bread. She could, and did, pay for some milk.

  Madame Ranchett called me to alert me and a few days later Soleidad arrived up the track on a sputtering mobilette, with her awful child strapped into a chair on the back, head lolling, dummy sprouting from dribbly lips. She came round the house with me doing a full tour. I showed her the fridge, the sink, the baths, the beds, the linen cupboard, the china and all the rest. She was silent, feeling a piece of linen between thumb and forefinger here, weighing a glass there, studying a saucepan intently, opening and closing the fridge door time and again, apparently delighting in the light which sprang up each time she did so. I thought her to be one of nature’s originals.

  And she was. A gypsy from Granada with exceptionally bandy legs and a voice that could splinter granite. She nodded agreeably at everything I said in complete and total incomprehension, but when I said, ‘Okay?’, she shrugged and nodded casually, and I wrote down the figure 9 and then 12, meaning the hours she might work. And she, taking my pencil in filthy fingers, laboriously wrote 8½ and 11½ and then made a sign by rubbing her finger and thumb together. I counted out what I felt I could afford in franc notes (Madame Ranchett had advised me), which she accepted with a cackle and a nod. Then she hitched the child on to her hip and wandered down the stairs singing lightly. At the front door she called out in her rasping voice: ‘Mañana! Eh!’ And the deal was made.

  She stayed with me faithfully and devotedly, for fifteen years, until the time came for me to leave. By then she spoke fairly reasonable French with a disastrous accent, and ran the house with a rod of iron, washed and cleaned and polished, kicked the dogs, and screamed and laughed and worked like a fiend. And grew, deservedly, rich. Her husband, Manolo, came up at weekends, a pleasant man with a hideous scarred face (carved up in a bar room brawl by broken glass) and a fearful squint so that one spoke to the good eye only, the one on the right. He was a good, kind fellow, useful at the olive harvest, changing plugs, pruning the cypress trees every season, and making himself generally useful. She was always called just ‘Lady’. Le Pigeonnier functioned smoothly from their arrival onwards.

  However, Lady did not cook. And on one occasion when she brought a dish of some wretched famished chicken smothered in rice and saffron as a gift, one was rather relieved. Everything she did was fine – except the cooking.

  So, back to square one. An agreement was made: I would be the scullion, that is to say I would wash up, scour saucepans, lay tables, prepare vegetables, empty dustbins and so on, and leave Forwood to do the cooking. In time he moved uneasily, but successfully, far from cauliflower cheese and deep into pilaffs, risottos, soupe au pistou, ratatouille and all manner of other Provençal delights. Pots and pans were bought, knives of astonishing sharpness, mixing-machines, mincing-machines – an entire batterie de cuisine formed and I did the washing-up. It took me a very considerable time for the simple reason, as he patiently explained, that cooking was not easy, and that he was what is called a ‘messy cook’. That was true. After a simple gigot, flageolet, salad and cheese, it seemed to me that I had to wash up an ironmonger’s. I could never understand really, why? If I made a mild protest it was quietly suggested that I take over. So I shut up … and we managed. But I know, I have always known, that I got the worst part of the bargain. And I had to trail off to the market every morning, sharp at seven, winter and summer, to be sure that only the best was bought for this Escoffier of the hillside. I also had to feed the dogs, but as I have said, this was not difficult, and they got better fed now that there was more variety in the green vegetables, not just bits of old cauliflower bunged in with the biscuits. In time, sadly, cheek became prohibitively expensive, and tinned muck came on the market. Easier, cheaper, and somehow the dogs seemed less aggressive to strangers now that they were no longer fed raw flesh. Like bromide in the soldiers’ tea, it seemed that tinned food rather took the fizz out of things.

  Emigrating to France does not mean that one hurls about the place looking for a suitable house, buys it, moves in, and lives there happily ever after. There is rather more to it than that. You have to get permission to stay there. At least, you did in my time. France is not just ‘any old place’, it’s not somewhere that you can just dump your belongings and say, ‘Here I am.’ To begin with, they are not all that anxious to have you. Unless, that is, you intend to return to the land you occupy something from which you have taken, like love, care and attention. I was prepared to offer all that, and more.

  But I had chosen to live in a particularly sensitive area, the Alpes Maritimes, bordered with Italy, not far from Switzerland, close to Spain, too close to North Africa. Security was tight. The great hoards of unemployed Arabs from Tunisia and Morocco, the abject poor from Calabria, the drug-pushers, the smugglers of every kind of commodity you can name, would easily swamp the A.M. if not severely curtailed. The ritzy-glitzy crowd who swarmed to Nice and Cannes, played the tables in Monte Carlo, and rented, or bought, hideous villas in the hills were watched carefully, but they never stayed very long and fled at the first signs of inclement weather. Meteorological or political. The people who came to live, that is to live for good, were considered with caution and suspicion.

  So, first of all, you had to get your carte grise, which permitted you to live in the area for three months. It was a form of identification – your ID card, if you like – and as such, at an accident, a bank or any monetary transaction, always proved extremely useful. At least you knew who you were, so did they, and that in itself was a comfort. In Britain it would be, and it is, considered a breach of privacy. I can’t think why. All you have to state is name, birth date, address and, I seem to remember, your mother’s name and date of birth. Since she was always uncertain and, I feel sure, fibbed about that anyway, it was nothing I took very seriously. But I was pleased to be ‘on record’. There was a feeling of security. Don’t
ask me why.

  So, every three months I made the climb up my cliff and through the oakwood at the back of the house to Saint-Cyprien to see the deputy mayor. This had to be done between the hours of five and eight in the evenings. On a fixed date. If you missed it for some reason, you could always try to catch him in the bar he ran in Le Pré. But by that time he really couldn’t have signed his name with an X.

  So one got to the mairie early, sat on a rush-bottomed chair with the other emigrants, the ‘legal’ Arabs, the Spanish, the Italians. The anteroom was small, whitewashed, red-tiled, spartan, a poster on one wall with a map of France indicating, by a big black dot, the latest advance of rabies, on the other a notice saying when the blood donor caravan would be arriving in the village for the monthly blood donation.

  The next stage, after your carte grise, literally a bit of grey paper covered with a riot of violet stamps and the deputy’s incomprehensible signature, was your carte de séjour. This was orange, a proper card, and was a permit to live in, work in and inhabit the Alpes Maritimes. It was a heady moment when that was put in one’s wallet. It took for ever to get, and countless journeys, queues and passionate discussions in a vast building in the heart of Nice, where it was always impossible to park a car. However, getting the beastly thing was worth the misery.

  Finally – and it took longer than the others, because one’s request had to go to Paris, then through officialdom in Nice, and then back to the mairie – and finally, one amazing day, you got your blue carte de résidence. Not only were you permitted to live in your house, but you had become, apart from voting and joining the army, a French resident. Taxes compris. This lasted you for ten years and there were four pages already for the stamp ahead. It felt really very good indeed. Because the land had been cared for, because the olives were harvested, the hay cut and sold, because, at first anyway, the sheep grazed, I was classified as an agricultural property and an agricultural proprietor. Which made an enormous difference to my taxes and in the grants made available for the house and restoration. It felt very secure. Objective gained. With no loss of passport.

  Vaguely, at one time, I had thought about taking out French nationality: it was a perplexing idea, but it got pretty swiftly set aside when one realized that it was not impossible that one day, perhaps - perhaps - one could be called upon to fight one’s true countrymen. And that, however remote it might have been, was quite unthinkable. So one quickly smothered the little spark that had glimmered and concentrated, very hard indeed, on being a good resident.

  As the years progressed, the yearly return to England, to see my parents or the family, became slightly depressing. I was starting to feel more and more foreign, I did not quite behave as an Englishman – shaking hands with everyone, calling people ‘Madame’ or ‘Monsieur’ (which always caused embarrassment) – generally feeling out of place. Familiar places faded rather. I even forgot the English words for things, and the changes, between 1966 and 1976, for example, became bewildering to me: the behaviour of people; the clothes they wore; the rubbish and filth everywhere; the lack of cafés and brasseries, of reliable trains, mail or general transport to which I had so easily become accustomed – really quite trivial things, I know. But there were other, more alarming things, like the growing envy and spite of the cheap press, hitting at standards which we once had held dear. Perhaps I was out of touch stuck up on my hill in the sun of Provence? Was I spoiled? Had I got it wrong? But I did feel that the quality of life itself was altering, an apathy was growing, with a resentment against anything ‘foreign’ and therefore unacceptable, cheap, cheating and incomprehensible. I felt, with great reluctance, that we had started to fall back from the race, while on the continent the race was roaring ahead and ready to be won. We seemed to be jellied quite comfortably in aspic. Dunkirk, Vera Lynn, our finest hour and the Blitz! Tourist heaven – but not for today. Surely that was fifty years ago? We were marking time on one spot. Sinking slowly. It was a terribly sad, dusty, uneasy feeling. Driving out to the airport after one of those yearly trips, to catch the early flight home, I drove through the bunting and glory of a full October in the Park: the tumbling leaves, beds of scarlet dahlias, sparkle of the Household Cavalry exercising in the Row, swans on the Serpentine, two youths jogging, their breath drifting like veils in the sharp morning, just-off-frost. Familiar, cherished, but suddenly strange, distant. A complex feeling. Like looking at a sepia photograph of time past, bleached of colour and fine detail, leaving only outline. And then I knew, in one regretful moment, that I now no longer belonged. I was just a visitor in a foreign land.

  The ‘home stretch’ is always the best part of a return. The crunch and scatter of gravel in the lane, rasp and crack of twig, bramble and broom against the bodywork of the car. The spiralling leaves of the big fig, yellow leaflets to announce the end of the season. The overgrown lane winds and dips down past the Meils’ farm, she in straw hat, looking up, waving, Emile doffing his beret, leaning on his goat-crook. And then, right ahead, the big stone column built from jagged boulders long since by Fraj, decorated with bits of red glass from a forgotten accident on the corner, the bent chrome letters ‘FIAT’ crowning its top. His statement.

  Winding then slowly up through the still olives, the tended terraces, late sun throwing orange flares from the windows, dogs squealing, barking, racing ahead to the top to greet one. Past the pond, yellowing rushes bending in a late souffle of wind, pattering on the water. Henri carrying logs in his arms, waving, his yellow hair spiked and flustered by the breeze, apron flapping, laughing at the dogs. Outside the kitchen, Marie leaning over the balcony rail, vegetable knife in one hand, a head of celery in the other, geranium-red lips bared in a gleaming porcelain smile. Skittering, fighting, snarling from the dogs. Marie laughing, scolding, waving the celery. ‘Arrête! Arrête! Tais-toi!’

  ‘All well, Marie?’

  ‘All well, Monsieur: a perfect week. So warm. And London?’

  We unpacked luggage. Plastic bags: Harrods, Marks and Spencer, Goode’s. Henri bustling up, wiping his hands on his apron, laughing: ‘Welcome! Welcome, messieurs.’ Lugging suitcases and hand-grips from the boot. Marie calling down, ‘Oh la! So much! Did you remember my tea?’ Carrying the stuff up the steps on to the balcony, into the kitchen, the smell of simmering lentil soup. ‘I remembered your tea. And the Cooper’s Oxford. Have they been good? The dogs?’ And bending towards the Roman ruin, sitting upright with amber eyes: ‘Have you behaved? I have brought you a big yellow ball! From Kensington!’ A furiously thumping tail, a scream of jealousy from the other dog who might have been forgotten. Marie crying, ‘Poor Daisy! Nothing for Daisy?’ Balls were chucked scudding, rumps went bouncing, and belting, into the dusk. Marie, picking up the beech chopping-block left to sweeten in the afternoon sun.

  ‘No one telephoned, not a soul. As the grave here. The mail is in the Long Room.’

  ‘I bought you a present.’

  ‘Tiens …’

  ‘Bendicks Bitter Mints!’

  ‘Mon Dieu! My figure … my teeth! Oh là!’

  Forwood, setting the kettle on the chopping-block, plugging it in, looking for a cup and saucer. We were home.

  I have the vegetable knife. Still have the chopping-board. I use them both every day, wondering, sometimes, if all the scratches, cuts and scores, the cross-hatching, the random criss-crossing of long-forgotten knives, this kitchen trigonometry, is all that is tangible now of a lost lifetime? A worn peeling-knife, a beech chopping-block? Tangible perhaps, yes. Ephemeral, no: there is much more to it all than that.

  Chapter 5

  Titty-Brown Hill was the highest point on my land. A flat-topped, grassy knoll, scarred with clumps of alien corn, it was an easy walk up from the terrace along what was, many, many years before, a cart and cattle track to Saint-Sulpice. On the top it was all absolutely secluded, no one could possibly see a thing; so female guests got into the habit of wandering off up through the sapling oaks and tumbled walls (this area had been rather more neglec
ted than anywhere else) to strip off, happy in their security. The only possible observers of their behaviour would have been the little owl, a chatter of magpies or perhaps an ambling tortoise.

  It wasn’t very long before the grassy knoll was baptized, and became Titty-Brown Hill. I seemed to have a wish to name parts of the land, or the trees on the land: something to do with knowing, in shorthand language, exactly where one was working, or where work had to be done. For example, if one said, ‘I’ve done all the scything among the five sisters,’ it was understood that the two lower terraces beside the path down through the five cypress trees had been cleared. The density of the trees prevented the mowers from raging about, thus causing me to break my back with the scythe but saving the lives of countless lizards, praying mantises, grasshoppers and crickets. Tragically the super-efficient German giants chumbled up the slow-moving insects in vast quantities. A slender stick-insect, even a dashing mantis, simply hadn’t a hope in hell of escaping the roaring red machines which whirled them into chaff in a split second.

  All the trees which I bought from the nursery in the plain to give my domain instant ‘timelessness’ were given names so that one would know exactly where one was. ‘Charlie’ was the tallest, and oldest, and stood hard by the front door, towering over the corrugated pink-tiled roof; ‘Rosie’ stood like an exclamation mark at the top of the drive; ‘Brock’ (a nephew) and ‘Kimbo’ (his wife) shaded the pond. ‘Antonia and Eduardo’, called after my faithful Spanish staff who had come from England with me to help me get settled down in France, stood beyond the hangar garage and under the kitchen windows. To remind me, if I ever needed reminding, of their loyalty and the sense of loss which they engendered when they, in time, left to go back to Valencia and start up a family, something we had agreed when I left England for abroad. Out of the dozen or so vastly costly trees, only one, called ‘Bella’, actually slowly died off. Her roots struck a giant rock buried deep under the earth and that settled that.