C'est La Folie

by Michael Wright

  Olga the spy is standing at the top of the stairs, looking voluptuously maternal in a green velvet dress. She smiles at me, twinkling like a character from Beatrix Potter, when I present her with a box of eggs from Martha and the girls.

  ‘How lovely,’ she says, showing me into a cosy drawing-room where two men and two women, all in their forties or fifties, are lounged on sofas and sipping sherry from antique glasses. ‘This is Michael, who lives with sheep and chickens,’ she explains in French, as she introduces me to a handsome, well-pressed man called Yves-Pascal, whom she describes as the local notaire, and his wife, Ariane, a tall, sternly beautiful woman with a dancer’s build and posture.

  ‘Ah, so you are the Englishman who bought La Folie?’ says Yves-Pascal, peering at me quizzically. ‘I’d have handled the sale myself, but I was on holiday at the time. You’ll have dealt with my partner, Jacques’

  ‘You’re not to start talking shop now, chéri,’ mutters Ariane.

  ‘No, no, but I know the house, and I remember the sale,’ says Yves-Pascal. ‘It was the Polish ecologist who sold it to you, wasn’t it? I saw the house years ago, before he started working on it. It was an awful ruin, and you couldn’t believe anyone could live there. But his wife had fallen in love with it, and insisted he buy it for her. And then … it all ended so sadly.’

  Ralph bundles back into the room, pours me a sherry, and flops himself down into a heavy indentation in one of the sofas. ‘Ah, this is the life,’ he roars in English. ‘And now we can all get pished.’

  It turns out that he and Olga used to live in a cottage next door to Gilles’s shearing-barn, in the hamlet where we sheared his sheep last week. So they know Gilles and Josette, at least by sight.

  ‘What we could never work out,’ says Ralph, ‘was who he was shouting at. Because he always seemed to yell at his dogs, his sheep, and that poor, dear woman in exactly the same way. It used to quite make my eyes water.’

  ‘Was that why you wanted to move?’ I ask, deciding that this is probably not the time to mention Josette’s accident.

  ‘No, we just wanted to feel more in the thick of things, if things in Jolibois can ever be said to be thick,’ he replies gloomily. ‘Just try saying that after a bottle of Armagnac.’ This thought seems to cheer him up. ‘But what about you, my boy? Where would you live, if you won the lottery? Where would you go, if you could live anywhere?’

  I think about this for a moment. ‘Truthfully, I’m there already, Ralph. I can’t think of anywhere I would rather live than La Folie.’

  ‘Well, that’s … that’s marvellous,’ he says, draining his sherry glass and gazing at Olga, who is deep in conversation with Ariane. ‘Shall we eat?’

  Over the next few weeks, I book up several flights to England to collect my plane. I keep a close eye on the weather forecasts for both south-east England and northern France. And the news is never good. If it’s fine here, it’s wet there. On the rare occasions when it’s fine there, the storm clouds gather over France.

  And then, finally, the clouds part to leave a perfect blue sky, and the weather map of Europe is covered with yellow discs, as if a dozen individual suns were expected in the heavens this week.

  So this is it. I am about to fly myself across the Channel to France, in an aeroplane almost sixty years old. It won’t be quite as quick as the outbound jaunt on Ryanair, but nor was Odysseus’s journey home from Troy. Scheduled flights have no place in a heroic quest. And besides, the sedateness of travel is part of the pleasure of flying old aircraft; it simply doesn’t work to be in a hurry.

  I shall need to stop at least twice en route to refuel: once at Le Touquet, to clear customs, and once at Chartres, which looks to be roughly the mid-point of my final leg to St Juste.

  At La Folie, I’ve left Gilles in charge of the animals, with strict instructions not to over-feed the cat. At Rochester, the little yellow Luscombe gleams in the Kent sunshine as I make my final checks. I’ve filed a flight-plan for my first leg to Le Touquet, made fourteen trips to the gents, said goodbye to Nathalie in the café, and packed my stripy pyjamas behind the seat.

  ‘Wheels chocked, brakes on.’ I talk myself through the start-up procedure, reminding myself to slow down.

  ‘Fuel on. Throttle closed. Magnetos off.’ I pull the propeller through a few blades, then walk back to the cockpit to give her three squirts of fuel with the manual primer. ‘Sucking in.’ Pull through another six blades.

  ‘Throttle set. Contact!’ I give the prop a hefty swing, and the engine coughs into life. Dashing round to the cockpit, I check the instruments and ease the throttle open until the engine is steady at a thousand revs. Thankfully, the oil pressure looks good, so I don the regulation life jacket and hang an emergency transmitter round my neck before removing the chocks, hauling myself up into the cockpit and strapping myself in.

  Nigel and the rest of the ground-staff make a big show of sniffling into their hankies as I taxi out across Rochester’s apron for the last time, presumably because I haven’t had time to buy them leaving presents. C’est l’humour anglais, I think to myself. I shan’t miss the insults they hurled at me every time I had the temerity to ask if it would be too much trouble for them to fish out my plane from the crowded hangar. But I shall miss flying over Kent and Sussex, and all the towns and villages I have come to know so well from the sky: Headcorn, Canterbury, Tenterden, Goodwood. I shall miss flying over Windlesham, too, skidding high over the tennis courts and the carpentry shed and the chapel, and the child-ghosts of Clara Delaville, Amelia Blunt, Norman Handley and the rest.

  It is time to let all that go, for my flight-path lies in another country today.

  Soon I am climbing up, up into the ether, and out across the Channel. Clouds are gathering, but I can see a wide break in the clag over the French coast, as if a pair of diaphanous white curtains have been drawn back for my arrival. Beneath me, the oil-tankers drag endless wakes behind them. I glance back for a final look at the White Cliffs of Dover. France, here we come.

  I’m disappointed to find that the huge break in the clouds over the French coast has become rather a small hole by the time I get there. Disappointed, and somewhat alarmed. This does not bode well. Spiralling down through the hole in the clouds, I’m further put out to discover that the base of the weather is no more than nine hundred feet off the deck. Dry-mouthed, and scanning my instruments every five seconds, I track cautiously along the coast. Down and to my left, I can see the ruins of the old German gun emplacements, surrounded by the pockmarks of a sixty-year-old artillery bombardment, and then I’m skirting the huge cranes on the wharf at Boulogne. But there’s little pleasure in flying in this patchy soup. After waiting so long to make today’s flight, I now can’t wait to be back on terra firma.

  At last le Touquet appears, its grey runways just visible against the grey landscape. At least, I hope it’s le Touquet. When I land and clamber down from my cramped cockpit, the man in the fuel lorry speaks to me in French. Phew. So at least I haven’t ended up in Holland. From here at Le Touquet, I still have over four hundred miles to fly, but the clag is lifting and the weather to the south sounds flyable, even if you wouldn’t quite choose it for your daughter’s wedding.

  After a hurried mushroom omelette that is too pale and dank to have enraptured Pa, I climb into the sky once more. But halfway to Chartres, the weather deteriorates. The twin spires of the cathedral loom out of the mist like a drawing behind tracing paper, and a light rain begins to smash itself on to the perspex of the windshield in front of me. This is not good. After landing, I have to taxi to the fuel-bowser with my face pressed close to the windscreen in an attempt to see through the rain.

  Inside the clubhouse, a gaggle of bored-looking pilots regard me with half-hearted curiosity. They seem astonished to hear that I have crossed the Channel, today of all days. The club’s internet connection is down, and so – with the help of a fresh-faced young pilot who braves the rain to stand and photograph my plane – the only weather fore
cast I can get is a recorded one on the telephone. The outlook is not inspiring, but it sounds as if it should be flyable. My new photographer friend phones ahead to a pal in Blois, who kindly offers me a space in his hangar if I cannot make it to St Juste by tonight and need to divert there.

  While I’m waiting for the sky to brighten, I follow the young photographer into the hangar where his own vintage aircraft is stored: a noble-looking Fairchild Argus in RAF camouflage and markings, squatting purposefully on its huge undercarriage.

  I tell him that I know a bloke called Harry who flies the same type in England.

  ‘Ah, oui, je connais Arry.’ He laughs. It’s a small world, when you fly vintage aeroplanes.

  But it feels like a very big world when you’re droning over unfamiliar French countryside at 1,200 feet, hoping that Blois will appear out of the gloom. I feel like I’m swimming through an ocean of dirty washing-up water, with a frothy scum of clouds on the water’s surface above. Every slight blip and variation in the engine’s steady clatter makes me grip the stick a little tighter and shift uneasily in my straps.

  Please, I really don’t want an engine failure now. Luscombes will glide rather well, even after the engine stops, so there’s always a good chance of landing safely in a field, especially in the middle of the countryside. But at such low altitude and in such conditions, I do not fancy trying my luck. The sooner I land, the bettter.

  When Blois materializes on the nose, it’s obvious from the silence on the radio that everyone has given up in disgust and gone home. The place is deserted.

  And then, just as I am circling for my final approach, I spy a couple of hunched figures in anoraks gazing up at me. People! They look as if they are watching the final scene in Close Encounters, the bit when the aliens finally descend.

  As I taxi over to them, one of the anoraks makes a sign for me to stop the prop, as if he were a marchandeur explaining to me what he is planning to do with my sheep. I attempt to signal that I don’t want to stop the engine, because it is so difficult to re-start when it’s hot. But his semaphore is more insistent than mine, and I back down. I stop the engine, its jagged roar replaced now by the tin-drumming of rain on the Luscombe’s aluminium skin.

  Unfortunately, Blois is a large airport, and the hangar space arranged by my new friend at Chartres is almost a mile away, on the far perimeter.

  ‘Just start her up and taxi over there,’ shrugs one of the men. ‘We’ll drive round and help you get her inside, and then give you a lift to a hotel.’ This is typical French kindness. But the rain is getting heavier, and they have clearly never tried to re-start a hot Continental with no impulse magneto. Every swing of the propeller takes as much effort as splitting a log. Twenty minutes later, my khaki flying-suit black with rain, I must have chopped a full winter’s supply before the beast finally grumbles into life.

  So follow three days holed up as an accidental tourist in Blois, staying in one of those self-sluicing lunar-landscape hotels that I swore I’d never re-visit, waiting for the rain gods to relent. And then I am once again hammering through clear blue skies to St Juste, on the last leg of my journey. I am beginning to think it might have been quicker to walk.

  My route takes me over the top of La Folie and – though I can’t spot my Rastafarians from 2,500 feet – it’s good to see that the place is still standing and that I remembered to bring the washing in before I left.

  We’re home at last, and a small welcoming party is waiting to greet the Luscombe.

  ‘I raced out of the café as soon as I heard the sound of your engine,’ says Peter Viola, strands of his white hair flying in the breeze, as I clamber down from the Luscombe and resist the temptation to kiss the tarmac. ‘I knew it was you.’

  ‘What a pretty aeroplane,’ says Jacques, the flying schoolteacher, beaming with pleasure as he strokes the fuselage. ‘Is it a Cessna?’

  I smile, and shake my head.

  ‘How was the trip?’ growls wily old Marcel. ‘Did it take long?’

  ‘A little longer than Ryanair,’ I murmur, wishing with all my heart that I knew the French for ‘Piece of cake, old boy.’

  As far as I can tell, the main difference between flying in France and flying in Britain is that here in France pilots drink too much coffee whilst waiting for the midday sun to cool, whereas in Blighty they drink too much tea whilst waiting for the clouds to lift. There’s also the niggling worry of over-flying a French nuclear power-station, for which the fine is said to be forty-two thousand euros – or roughly what it costs to scramble two Mirage jets to come and shoot you down. And then of course there are the radio calls.

  Here I am, practising my landings, a day after my arrival at St Juste. I’m comfortably trimmed at a thousand feet, announcing over the r/t that I am vent-derrière pour une touche (‘downwind for a touch-and-go’), when I hear sniggering in my headset. I know that snigger. It’s the flying schoolteacher, Jacques. He must be buzzing around up here, too. I wonder what I’ve said this time.

  As I enter the aeroclub, I can tell from the way people are smirking and hopping from foot to foot that my latest gaffe has already been gleefully shared.

  ‘Ne t’inquiète pas, Michael,’ chuckles Jacques, patting me on the shoulder. ‘We love your English humour.’ He gently explains that what I should have said is that I was ‘vent-arrière pour un touche’. I kick myself, because I knew this perfectly well. And instead, what I have just told everyone from here to Brive is that I am feeling the effects of a surfeit of baked beans, and hoping for a fondle. But no matter: the Luscombe is finally hangared in France, and another stage of my adventure is complete.

  36

  THE MOWER AGAINST GARDENS

  La Folie is unusually silent just now. The house has still not fallen down, although that may be because it is so full of the scaffolding that Jou-Jou’s team of masons erected before disappearing without trace several weeks ago.

  I was going to scramble up the abandoned scaffolding myself, to paint the towering ceiling of the summer sitting-room. Anything, to bring the arrival of my piano a little closer, and to avoid having to sit down and face not starting my unstartable book. But then Jou-Jou, just as he was leaving, made me promise to tie myself on to the scaffolding, in case I should slip and fall. And I suddenly realized that I had urgent digging to do in the vegetable patch.

  The renovations may have squealed to a halt like a train on wet rails but, for the moment, the animals of La Folie are doing very nicely, thank you. Claudette and Camillo are happily springing round their field, and – now that the wall-to-wall mud is beginning to dry outside – the chickens are enjoying being able to dig blissful dust-baths for themselves beneath the lone pine, noisily ruffling their feathers and showering themselves with claw-scratchings of dry earth.

  The first time I saw a chicken having a dust-bath, I thought it must be dead. That contorted mass of feathers looked like something that had been run over, with wings and legs spread-eagled in all directions. And then I thought it was having an epileptic fit, from the way it shuddered and shook. Now I know that it is simply approaching chicken nirvana.

  The vegetable patch does make me cringe. If this were East Dulwich, I could at least call it an urban wilderness, and Southwark Council would presumably give me a grant and an ecology medal. But this is the Limousin, where every self-respecting paysan has his own potager, and mine is a disgrace. The postman glares at it witheringly every time he comes to deliver another catalogue of pork bargains from Netto.

  On the upside, everything in the potager is thriving. On the downside, this means that I now have a prize crop of weeds, creepers and Triffids. There is not a single spud or légume to be had.

  ‘Ah, mais c’est trop grand,’ remonstrates Ariane, Yves-Pascal’s sternly beautiful wife, when she and the well-pressed notaire rumble up to La Folie for an aperitif. ‘Large potagers always fail.’ Now she tells me.

  Gilles needn’t have worried about my having too many potatoes. My two twenty-five-kilo sa
cks are still in the barn, now looking like a pair of giant hairnets sprouting an orgy of excited green spaghetti. I never got around to planting them, because – with perfect male logic – I didn’t want to plant one potato until I had time to plant them all.

  And then there is the jungle, advancing upon me once more. Even in the field that Gilles ransacked for me with his mighty engine-of-war, all those months ago.

  ‘It’s time you mowed that field, Michael,’ he told me, with unusual sternness, last time he was here.

  37

  JUNE: THE ANCIENT MARINER

  Summer has launched an early assault upon La Folie, spear-headed by an air force of angry flies. I’m not sure if this is because the cat has left so many rodent cadavers to fester behind the wood-burning stove, or because the sheep are grazing too close to the house.

  Newly shorn by the heroic Gilles, the Rastafarians have gone from being a bunch of Bob Marley wannabes to smart Sammy Davis Jnr lookalikes in one swift trim. I wanted to shear them myself – ‘Leave some for me, Gilles,’ I begged him, as he buzzed away with the Lister – but thirty seconds of attempting to scalp Daphne was enough to persuade me that I’m not yet ready to go into the hairdressing business. I was too worried about digging the throbbing, jagged teeth of the Lister into her trembling black skin.

  ‘It’s easier to start on large, fat sheep,’ said Gilles consolingly. ‘On your Ouessants, all the angles and corners are too tight. And they haven’t sweated enough to smoothe the shears.’

  The sheep may not be sweating, but I am. The thermometer is pushing thirty degrees, the ground outside is cracking up, and the cat lies cooling her belly on the soothing stone of the kitchen floor. I’d join her myself, but I haven’t washed that floor for longer than I care to admit.

  Despite the heat, there are encouraging signs of progress at La Folie. Claude, the pit-bull from the tennis club, turns out to be a fast-and-furious electrician, and has visited to rub his bald head and to oh-là-là at the Charlot electrics of La Folie. If his wiring is anything like as good as his forehand, I should have illuminations in the maison des amis before Doomsday – which is roughly when I am expecting Monsieur Étang, the overworked plumber, to return. And today, though there is still the small question of how to dress the breeze-block walls, forty square metres of prime oak flooring has arrived for the summer sitting-room. I huff and puff to stack the tight bundles of planks beneath the scaffolding, while the cheery walnut who has delivered it watches me with amusement.