‘I’m not so sure about this, Gilles,’ I yell above the din. But the war-machine is already enveloping the hill in a cloud of destruction, from which fly clods of earth and the departed souls of mulched rodents.
In the silence that follows, I contemplate the strip of yellow devastation that I have sanctioned. It’s the Rape of the Lock, the shaving of Aslan’s mane and Delilah’s betrayal of Samson all rolled into one.
‘So what do you think?’ asks Gilles, rubbing his hands.
‘Très impressionnant,’ I gulp.
Some days later, however, I take another look at Gilles’s Strip of Death. Despite the season, it is beginning to look almost green, and tufts of late-autumn grass, not weeds, are beginning to appear. Birds are scratching for grubs. The demon barber appears, brandishing a local newspaper called ParuVendu. ‘Look, Ouessant sheep for sale,’ he chirrups.
‘But I’m not ready for sheep, Gilles. I don’t have any grass. And why Ouessants?’
‘I’ve already rung the lady,’ he says. ‘There’s one ram and three ewes, with four extra rams thrown in as a donné. Ouessants are really tiny and easy to look after. You should go and see them.’
So I phone the lady about the sheep, and arrange to go and see them. I don’t really want to go, because I know I’m not going to buy them, and Aubusson is a long way away. I’m not ready to buy them, because sheep need fences and feed troughs and water-drinkers and all sorts of other things that I currently know nothing about. My Sheep for Beginners book is quite clear on this point: don’t go buying a flock of sheep until you’re ready to house them.
My first brush with sheep, as a child, was not propitious. I was eight years old and firmly in my Spitfire phase, when Mum and Dad decided that they wanted to give up the rat race in Surrey, buy a huge house in Scotland and run it as a bed-and-breakfast. So we drove all the way up to the Highlands for the weekend and camped in a big tent – Abdul the Damned II – in the pouring rain.
I remember that all the fields were full of sheep, and Mum and Dad stayed up late drinking whisky with a German couple they met at the campsite. But their sulkiness next day could not compare with the rage of the farmer who came shaking his fist at us as we were about to drive off, his face the colour of beetroot, his yellow spittle spraying the car window, after our sausage-dog, Ceilidh, made the mistake of chasing his pregnant ewes.
‘Yerra wee duggie has been baiting my sheep,’ he roared. ‘They’ll all be losing thurra wee lambs a-cause a-ye.’
I was shocked, for this was the first and only time I have ever heard anyone shouting at my parents. I didn’t think you could talk to grown-ups like that.
We never did hear if Ceilidh’s antics ultimately proved fatal to those unborn lambs. But I was left with a sense of the fragility of young sheep, and the irascibility of farmers. Here was an entirely different world from my narrow Surrey universe, with a different set of rules and rhythms and facial expressions. Even people’s spit was a different colour.
In Guildford a fortnight later, Ceilidh climbed through a fence and ate both our neighbours’ guinea-pigs. The neighbours said not a word, as dictated by Surrey protocol. And my parents decided not to move to Scotland after all.
Throughout the two-hour drive down to Aubusson in le Pug Rouge, I promise myself I will not be swayed into buying any sheep.
On the way, a gendarme with an outsize moustache stops me, and gives me a forty-euro fine for not carrying a spare brake-lamp bulb. I hope he doesn’t notice that I am also chewing gum and didn’t brush my hair this morning.
The farm outside Aubusson must have been deserted for weeks. Even the ‘En Vente’ sign is cracked and faded. The stable doors hang open, and any horses have presumably bolted. Weeds a foot high mark out the paving-stones in the yard, and a frayed halyard slaps against a broken flagpole in the wind. The empty windows of the house gape like groaning mouths. I shiver, and dial the number the sheep lady gave me when I spoke to her. Inside the dead house, I hear a phone jangle, unanswered.
Behind the stables is a lush hillside. A squat cabin, like a ski chalet for children, breaks the horizon. Perhaps the sheep are hiding in there, although it doesn’t appear to have a door or any windows. A light rain is starting to fall.
I’m toying with wandering over to the cabin when a car with a broken exhaust draws up, unseen, on the other side of the buildings. I hurry round to meet it, anxious not to look too much like a snooper, even though that’s what I am.
‘Bonjour, Madame,’ I say, extending my hand to a fierce-faced woman with an untamed scramble of black-and-peroxide curls. A handsome man shaped like a crooked drainpipe lurks in the background, steps forward to say hello, then fades away again.
‘Les moutons sont déjà vendus?’ I ask hopefully.
‘So you’ve come to buy my babies,’ barks the woman. She is clad head-to-foot in khaki, with a fake-leather jacket bursting at the seams that completes the destitute-storm-trooper effect.
‘Well, just to have a look, really,’ I burble. ‘As I explained on the phone.’
‘I’ve driven a long way to be here,’ she grumbles, peering into the carrier-bag she’s holding.
‘So have I,’ I remind her.
She considers this for a moment, frowns, nods and goes striding round the back of the house.
‘You’ll see that they come to their mother,’ she says, motioning me to follow. Now she launches into a complex series of whoops and whistles and hollers. And then we both wait. I can hear a stream rustling at the bottom of the hill. But nothing stirs.
‘Probably it’s because it’s wet,’ she harrumphs. ‘They don’t like the rain. But they love bread.’
She begins to shake the carrier bag, loudly, in the breeze.
A brown muzzle appears on one side of the cabin. On the other side, another. And then, in a thudding, flying, waggling, galloping melee, eight tiny sheep come hurtling over the hillside towards us.
Oh. My. God. These creatures look like some extinct species dreamt up by Darwin to explain evolution. Each is the size of a microwave on legs. Their prehistoric mahogany wool reaches down to the ground in matted dreadlocks; a primordial fire glitters in their bright eyes, and there is something bewitchingly pagan about the curled horns of the chief ram, and the sheer aliveness of their twitching flanks.
These are not sheep. They are microdinosaurs; proto-moutons sun-bleached to almost the same colour as the Woolly Mammoth in the Ladybird book about the Stone Age.
‘Mes bébés! Mes bébés!’ cries the woman, causing the eight galloping missing links to hesitate in mid-stride. But then she shakes the bag, and they’re racing towards us again, my heart racing with them.
I must not buy any sheep. I cannot buy any sheep. I don’t have any fences. And I certainly don’t need eight of the things. A couple of old ewes, that would do nicely.
‘Just look at the ram,’ she says, snapping pieces off the baguette in her bag, and feeding them to the nuzzling muzzles. ‘Have you ever seen such a fine beast?’
‘Non,’ I agree, marvelling at the satanic horns, and wondering what is the French for ‘But that’s not saying much.’
‘And this little one,’ she adds, struggling to catch hold of an even smaller ram, whose curled horns are as tiny as tiger prawns. Caught, the young creature flails as if in fear for its life.
‘Mon bébé! Mon bébé!’ she cries.
‘Do they like being held?’ I ask.
‘They haven’t forgotten me,’ she says, breathless with the strain.
‘Looks like they haven’t been shorn for a long time,’ I observe, my head on one side. I must not buy any sheep.
‘Oh, they only need to be shorn every two years, because they’re wild creatures. And look …’ – she points at the chief ram – ‘… I did him myself, with scissors, last year.’ No kidding. The poor fellow’s fleece looks like what’s left of a half-knitted jumper after it’s been sucked into a vacuum-cleaner. My heart goes out to him as he gazes at me, side on, his h
ead held high. I know he’s daring me to laugh.
‘He’s worth at least a hundred euros, alone,’ says the woman, tossing her own dreadlocks, fixing me with her own fierce stare.
‘I’m surprised he’s so thin, compared with the others. I thought rams were usually bigger.’
‘Oh, that’s just because the ewes are coming on heat and he’s been chasing them.’
I nod, not really listening. No, no, you mustn’t, yelps a voice in my head.
‘So you want three hundred and sixty euros for the lot of them?’ I ask.
‘Oui,’ she says, setting her jaw. ‘That’s for the ram and the three ewes. The other four rams are a gift.’
‘It still seems a lot of money …’
‘Ouessants are very rare,’ she snaps. ‘They easily fetch eighty euros each. But these are not sheep for eating. You do understand that, Monsieur?’
‘Absolutely.’ I’m not interested in eating them, any more than I’m interested in questioning her maths. I just want to learn something about animals. Mind you, I should have started off by learning about sheep before dashing out to not-buy some. I know I’m supposed to look at their teeth. But what am I looking for?
‘I’ll give you three hundred,’ I say, my toes curling in my shoes. I am the world’s worst haggler. And I’m not meant to be buying any sheep, anyway. Just as I feared, she is disgusted at my offer.
‘You’re saying you’ll give me three hundred for these sheep?’ Not so much disgusted; more like incredulous. I shift uneasily from foot to foot.
‘That’s right,’ I say, sticking manfully to my guns.
‘Is that francs or euros?’ she asks, cogs visibly ticking in her brain as she flounders in mental-arithmetic land.
‘Euros, obviously.’
‘Étienne!’ she yells. From nowhere, the drainpipe man appears, shambling out of the shadows, grinning shyly at me. ‘The Englishman is offering me three hundred euros for my sheep. What do you think?’
‘They’re your sheep,’ he says, trying to hide his smile by stroking his chin.
‘Of course they’re my sheep.’
‘And I assure you that I will not eat them,’ I add, the expert haggler twisting the knife in the bosom of his helpless victim.
‘You promise?’ That glinting glare again. This lady would make an excellent gypsy fortune-teller, if she didn’t frighten all her customers away.
‘Oui, je promets.’
We have a deal. I even give her twenty euros cash, there and then, as a sign of my good faith. It’s going to take me a fortnight to create a properly fenced field for her babies, and I don’t want her thinking I might try and back out now. Nor do I want her selling my sheep to anyone else.
I drive away, singing. For I am a sheep farmer in spite of myself. Never mind that what I have bought is a ramshackle bunch of munchkins of uncertain parentage. Unloved, overpriced and trailing their manky black dreadlocks, they resemble nothing so much as a gang of Rastafarian street kids. And I now have just a fortnight to fence my jungle, freshly mown for their arrival.
17
THE MAN-EATING HORSES
OF DIOMEDES
‘The first and biggest hurdle to keeping animals,’ Jean-Louis the woodsman told me when we were at Jérôme’s for drinks, ‘is enclosing the land on which to keep them. In the city, hedges and fences are for keeping people out. In the countryside, fences are all about keeping animals in.’
‘How big are your sheep, Monsieur?’ asks the smiley blonde assistant in Alliance Pastorale, the farmers’ wholesaler from which Gilles has recommended that I buy my fencing sundries, including grillage. This is the squared wire mesh that is to be stretched between my wooden posts. I am determined to do better with this fence than the last one.
I hold my palm out flat, about two foot off the ground.
‘Ah, c’est une blague,’ she giggles.
‘Non, non, it’s not a joke,’ I reply. ‘They’re Ouessants, the smallest sheep in the world. From the isle of Ouessant, just off the coast of Brittany.’
‘Ah, so they’re dwarf sheep!’ she says, brutally conjuring up a world of garden gnomes and toy windmills. ‘In that case I should think eighty centimetres should do you.’
‘But won’t they jump over it?’
‘Well, how much grass do you have?’
‘About a hectare.’
‘Only one hectare?’ She stifles a guffaw. ‘For how many sheep?’
‘Eight,’ I declare, trying to sound modest as I straighten up and expand my chest.
She examines my face carefully. ‘Quite honestly, Monsieur, for eight little sheep, I think that will be plenty.’
While the smiley lady looks up the codes for the grillage, I wander around the racks of syringes and pincers and powders and pessaries, wondering what other Useful Gadgets I can justify. What about all those sticks of dye, the buckets with half a dozen teats sticking out, the shepherd’s crooks? Shan’t I need a crook?
Next, I head off to Beaumarin to buy my fence-posts. Acacia is best, Gilles tells me, but chestnut is most common. He’s told me to use concrete posts for the corners, and to set these in concrete, too.
The snag here is that I know about as much about making concrete as I know about two-stroke motors. At Windlesham, hatchet-faced Mrs Smollett taught us how to bake a sponge cake, and mine did achieve a startling evocation of concrete, but it wasn’t the real thing.
Seeking concrete wisdom, I go and see Émilie’s husband, Fred the Viking. Now Fred is always covered in a fine coating of masonry dust, so he is sure to know all about concrete. Especially since he has just bought himself a cement-mixer, the manliest power-tool of all.
‘Yeah, no problem,’ he says, lowering his sledge-hammer and pushing his fair hair out of his eyes with the back of his hand. We are standing in what Fred describes as the kitchen of the house he is rebuilding, though it reminds me of the dungeon of a ruined castle. ‘You’re welcome to borrow the cement-mixer. I’ll come and give you a hand, if you like. I’m no expert, but Douglas has shown me how to do it.’
‘Douglas?’
‘Huge bloke, from London. Built like a brick privy.’
‘He doesn’t live just over the hill from me, does he? My neighbour, Gilles, mentioned an English giant.’
‘That would be him,’ laughs Fred. ‘I thought you’d already have met.’
Douglas, it emerges, is an ex-City boy who lost all his teeth and nearly lost his eyesight playing rugby, and now supports his wife and four children by working as a plasterer. ‘He’s huge and looks a bit scary,’ explains Fred, ‘but he’s very gentle when you get to know him.’
Fred sends me off to the builders’ merchants to buy sand, gravel and four sacks of cement. For once in my life, I feel positively gritty. In London, at B&Q or Homebase on the Old Kent Road, I never bought anything more hardcore than a few pots of paint and some wood to build a house for the cat; a complex, sloping-roofed bungalow which took me several days to construct, and which she has never deigned to enter. This, from a cat who cannot resist a cardboard box, even the ones so small that she can hardly fit one cheek of her vast bum inside.
Today, back at La Folie, Fred and I are manfully hauling two dustbins full of sand and gravel out of the car and firing up a cement-mixer. This makes me want to beat my chest and roar, or at least to swagger just a little, as proper workmen do, with their arms held stiffly away from their sides to imply the vast muscles that prevent them from lowering them, like toddlers zipped into quilted anoraks.
Spots of rain are beginning to fall from an iron-grey sky. Into the juddering mixer go the sand and gravel, then the cement, and Fred sloshes in water from a bucket until the required consistency is reached. It’s just like making a cake with sulky Mrs Smollett, only with manlier ingredients.
‘I think I would enjoy working on a building site,’ I declare, leaning on my shovel.
Fred narrows his eyes at me.
‘Well, maybe for a week or so,’ I correct myself
.
He keeps on staring, his head on one side.
‘All right, for about a day and a half, then.’ I laugh. ‘But you know what I mean. There’s something about manual work … it just feels more honest to me than sitting in front of a computer and writing about Macbeth.’
‘It’s atoms and bits, isn’t it? With your PC, you’re just manipulating digital impulses. Whereas here we’re actually shifting stuff. And it feels better to me, too.’
‘It must be a lot of atoms,’ I say, pressing my fist into the small of my back.
‘On a computer, it’s a lot of bits. Is that your phone?’
I hurry inside, leaving a trail of white footprints on the tiles of the winter sitting-room, like a page from a ballroom-dancing manual.
It’s my brother, Nicholas, on the phone. I can picture him sitting there in his swanky office in Farringdon, meditating on computer networks and partitioning hard drives while our cement-mixer thunders out its musique concrète in the rain.
Last night I left a message to see if Nicholas would be willing to come and help me collect my sheep – I’m already beginning to fret about the journey back from Aubusson – and he sounds only slightly suspicious about what will be required of him.
‘Do they bite?’ is his first question, intoned with the whispered theatricality of a 1970s wildlife presenter. I picture him raising one eyebrow. Nicholas has never taken anything too seriously, and tends to live his life as if it were a movie. I suspect he regards my adventure at La Folie as he might regard a spoof documentary about the hunt for the Loch Ness Monster.
‘No, of course not. They’re very tame.’ I’ve read that Ouessants are extremely wild, and I’ve no idea how the sheep will react to a two-hour car journey. Apparently the stress can sometimes kill them. But I’m not about to tell Nicholas that.
‘So where do I come in?’ I can hear he is eating a sandwich. Probably an All-Day Breakfast from Prêt-à-Manger, although it might be the chicken-and-bacon club. I suddenly feel very, very hungry.
‘Well, perhaps they’re not that tame. And I need you to stop them trying to climb into the front while I’m driving.’
C'est La Folie Page 14