Out in the barn, I’m pretty sure that the last few eggs will not hatch, now that both Martha and Melissa are busy teaching their chicks to peck, cluck and do the Charleston. Frankly, I’m relieved. From what I can tell from the size of the tiny combs on the chicks’ heads, I have a nasty feeling that the fluffy brood includes just three trainee hens and four cockerels-in-waiting.
There may be trouble ahead. I happen to know that keeping even two cockerels is a recipe for disaster. It’s also a recipe for coq au vin, although I don’t like to think in those terms.
When it comes to animals, you can’t have too many women. Girls are just plain better. They lay their eggs in the hay each morning. They produce their hop-skippety lambs in the spring. They are always gentle and sweet-natured. It’s the chaps who cause all the mayhem, and – when I think of Charlie and the boys – the heartache. Those couilles de mouton have a lot to answer for.
This is chauvinistic of me, of course. But I speak as one who has just staggered half a mile across three fields and two barbed-wire fences – the second of which now sports a significant fragment of my trousers – with a sweaty black ram in my arms. Fed up with being butted and baited by Ramekin and even the tiny Camillo, Gaston went AWOL over the weekend, treating himself to two full days of Bunburyism in a ewe-filled field so distant that I didn’t even think to search it at first.
My heart went out to Doris, Ella and Daphne as they stood abandoned in their field, gazing at each other with ‘so what do we do now?’ wretchedness. Some of the light appeared to have gone out of their lives. If I walked near them, they began to follow me in a kind of daze, rather like those desperate rock groupies who, if they fail to pull the lead singer, will latch on to the bass guitarist instead. And when I finally brought Gaston back, they gathered round the old boy, nuzzling and nibbling at him, re-establishing the old intimacies of the flock.
Only Ella, his constant companion, stood apart. The deep mahogany of her wool is now beginning to go grey. I suppose she has seen it all before. And from her wounded stance, I cannot help thinking that, each time, it becomes a little harder to forgive.
Still slightly out of breath from my exertions with Gaston, I peer at the remaining eggs in the barn, and listen. I’m sure I heard something. There it is again. I can just detect a muffled cheep, and see something poking through a hole in one of the speckled shells.
My chicken book is very clear on this subject: don’t help any chicks to break out of their shells, because they’re unlikely to survive even if you do. But what if the eggs have become too hard and dry to crack? It can’t hurt to help just a tiny bit, can it?
Once I’ve pulled away one piece of shell, the cheeping intensifies. And then I shudder as a thin line of blood trickles from the egg. The chick’s delicate skin is coming away with the shell. I try to push the fragment back into place, but it’s too late.
The torn chick looks like ET. In a panic, I pick up Martha, and lay her beside her stricken baby. But Martha isn’t having any of it. Seeing the blood, she pecks viciously at the helpless chick, which shrivels like a crisp packet on a fire.
So I snatch away ET and take him outside into the light. I can see that his own light is fading fast. What we call the beginning is often the end. Bleeding and contorted, he looks like a day-old swallow that has fallen from its nest. I lay the twitching body on a rock in the shade, and find another stone, shaped like the head of a sledgehammer. And then it’s done, and I feel like I’ve turned into someone else.
43
AUGUST: ENEMY AIRCRAFT IN SIGHT
One day I shall rebuild the old well at the top of the hill behind the house. Right now, it looks like something out of the final scene of Planet of the Apes. All that’s left is a pile of rubble surrounded by some unusually lush greenery: an oasis amid the scorched scrub of La Folie.
High summer has hit town, bringing with it a disconcerting invasion of tourists: big-bummed bumblebees in fur coats and thigh-high boots; lizards sipping fly-daiquiris as they soak up the rays; ants on a cheap package tour; tattooed wasps gunning mopeds; stoned crickets strumming guitars; hornets in hairnets; and so on.
I tend to think of the local creepy-crawlies as people, because they’re less scary that way. Rural France may not be the Colombian rainforest or the Malaysian jungle, but there’s no doubt that you get a bigger and better class of beastie here than you do in East Dulwich.
Bees and wasps and hornets have always given me the willies, though I have never in my life been stung. Even I find this hard to believe. But as a child, I saw my little brother, Nicholas, savaged between the toes by a bee, and was quite sure I would die of pain if the same thing happened to me. From the way Nick yelled and squealed and hollered, it was obvious that this was the worst thing that could befall a six-year-old; worse even than missing Crackerjack or discovering a slow puncture in your Space Hopper.
I haven’t become much braver as an adult. I will don a pair of gardening gloves just to put one of the cat’s lizard lunches outside the door. I have been known to shout at mosquitoes in the dark. And if I’m having lunch outside, I have Very Bad Thoughts about people who flap ineffectually at wasps with their napkins. I just know that the enraged beastie will soon be turning his gun button from SAFE to FIRE, at the very moment when he’s got me in the cross-hairs of his gyroscopic sight.
Even ladybirds unnerve me, ever since Great-Aunt Beryl’s husband, Jock, got one stuck in his ear. The thing buzzed and buzzed against his ear drum, until he managed to kill it with a cotton-bud. And then it went septic. And Great-Aunt Beryl was awfully cross.
The trouble with all this, of course, is that I am a bloke, and blokes are not allowed to be frightened of insects. Our job is to catch them and put them out the door, and to announce that it’s quite safe to come out of the larder now, chérie.
In the cool stillness of the kitchen, I assemble my usual lunch. A slab of pâté forestier and a lump of glistening goat’s cheese, a tomato the colour of Titus’s comb, a loaf of pain aux céréales from Céline’s boulangerie, and a glass of cheap Gamay. Melissa, Martha and their chicks – already looking like gangly adolescents – come clucking to the open back door in a hop-skippety frenzy when they hear me hacking into the loaf, and the shorn Rastafarians start up a cacophonic bleating in sympathy. Ah, the peace and stillness of the French countryside. I carry my plate and wine glass out on to the sun-dazzled terrace, my bare feet almost sizzling on the hot gravel.
‘They won’t sting you if you leave them alone,’ I tell myself, resisting the urge to scarper as two wasps buzz around me like a pair of Me-109s pestering a Lancaster. And then, utterly without provocation, one of the blighters stings me on the forearm.
‘What the …!’ I exclaim. And then: ‘Rrrrrghhhh!’ And finally: ‘Gosh.’
This poetic little monologue charts my three-stage response to the assault. First: righteous indignation. Next: panic, because I’m worried about the mounting pain and lingering death from anaphylactic shock that are even now winging their way towards me. And finally: embarrassed relief, as it emerges that being stung by a wasp is not half as bad as I expected.
The sting feels like lemon juice in a cut, or the first mouthful of a cheap vindaloo, or as if I’ve just been flicked hard with the end of a furled, damp towel. It’s hot, it throbs, and it is decidedly bearable. I can’t imagine how I could have spent thirty years fearing this.
By next morning, any trace of discomfort has vanished. I am just about to don my boxer shorts when I hear a low-frequency buzzing, and something heavy drops out of my undies on to the bedroom floor. It makes such a thud that I think I must have dropped my watch. And then I see a hornet – a hornet, I swear – roughly the size of a Renault Clio, crawling under the bed. Sacrebleu. That was a close one, vicar. Two stings in two days, after a lifetime of being spared, simply wouldn’t be cricket. And I know from the size of that wee beastie that the pain he could inflict would be exponentially worse than yesterday’s baptism of fire: a Grand Slam after a
Tallboy; the cane, rather than the slipper.
I resolve to shake out all my clothes in future, before putting them on. Yet even the wisest resolutions are soon forgotten and the next night I am nonchalantly pulling up my pyjama bottoms when I hear that same ominous buzz. I freeze.
It’s coming from inside my PJs. And in a most unsporting spot, too.
Time stops. I have a nasty feeling that I know exactly what is going to happen in 0.2 seconds’ time, and that this is going to hurt – like when le Pug Rouge and I were spinning uncontrollably across the route nationale last year, a moment before hitting the ditch. Tonight’s emergency is less likely to be life-threatening … but that doesn’t include the possible impact on my prospects of fatherhood.
I am the dangling climber watching the rope fray; the surfer surprised by the dorsal fin. And then the buzzing stops. The doodlebug is about to strike.
‘Phhhgghh!’ I yell, clutching my goolies, hopping around, desperately trying to rip off my jim-jams. I feel like Hercules struggling to fling off his poisoned cloak – except that he was a heroic demigod in the throes of death, whereas I am an Englishman stung in the organ loft by an insect the size of a suppository.
The hornet falls to the floor, and I respond to his assault with disproportionate force, grimly registering the crunch of thorax and abdomen as I despatch him to hornet heaven with my slippered heel.
A subsequent examination will reveal that the late hornet has missed Targets A and B, and merely made my inner thigh feel as if the fairies are having a bonfire there. So perhaps I over-reacted. But when someone’s jabbing you with what feels like an acid-tipped red-hot needle wired up to a 24-volt car battery, it’s not always easy to pinpoint where they’ve hit you.
Next morning, the cat brings me a large green lizard, and lays it beside the bed, presumably to cheer me up. An hour later, wounded by my sniffy response to her first gift, she raises the stakes. Her next love offering is a baby viper, still very much alive.
Granted, this snake is not much thicker than a bootlace with a knot in one end. But some bootlaces can be deadly. And the way the serpent blinks and flicks out its forked tongue at me is unmistakably snaky.
‘That’s very good, Eva,’ I tell the cat, partly because I’m impressed, and partly because I don’t wish to spur her into going back for Momma. This week is proving to be character-building for both of us. Catching a snake is not something the cat ever achieved in East Dulwich. And as I eye the serpent from what I hope is a safe distance, it dawns on me that I’m not scared of wasps or hornets any more.
Leaving me with her catch, the cat saunters back out through the cat-flap. I notice that she has adopted a Gallic swagger, presumably to reflect her elevated status as a scourge of rodents and reptiles. And then there is a frightful shrieking, as four young cockerels rocket past her with Titus on their tails.
If hornets and snakes are an occasional pain, the local mosquitoes are a constant irritation. One unexpected corollary of living alone is that there is no one with whom to share the mosquitoes. With a full household, they could have a Happy Meal each, and feel sated. As a child in Colombia, I was almost never bitten, because the mozzies preferred my mum and my sister. The two of them complained bitterly as they became lunch, and the rest of us – unbitten – naturally felt that they were both being big girls’ blouses, because we didn’t know what we were missing.
But with only me to gorge themselves upon, I am a daily buffet for the buzzing nasties; a human pin-cushion; a gold-star blood donor. I have counted thirteen bites on my left ankle, and fourteen on the right. Most are so close together that they are beginning to agglomerate into a single red welt of irritation. But at least the bites on my ankles take my mind off the ones on my knees, behind my knees, in the small of my back and – worst of all – the one just under my watch.
Marie-Claude arrives to do the cleaning, tapping on the back door so quietly that I assume she’s one of the chickens.
‘Oh-là-là, il fait chaud, oui … What the hell is that doing there?’ she demands, with a grimace that would not disgrace the Gorgon Medusa.
‘Oh, it’s just a young snake that the cat brought in,’ I murmur.
‘But why is it on the kitchen table?’
I don’t have an answer to this. The truth is that I’m fascinated by this snake. I’ve only ever seen them in reptile houses, before now. And I like watching the way it slowly straightens itself as it grows in confidence, and then coils up again when I come too close.
‘I’m seeing if it will recover.’
‘What are you going to do with it?’
‘I suppose I’ll put it outside again.’
Donning my thickest pair of chainsaw gauntlets and a pair of wellies, I trap the little snake in a tupperware box, and carry him outside. After the cool of the kitchen, the heat hits me like the blast of hot air they blow at you when you walk into Debenhams on a cold day. My sunglasses are no longer dark enough for this sun. I really need to buy myself an arc-welding mask.
Holding the box out in front of me, I wander round to the back of the house, and on up through the wild jungle of that part of the hillside that I have not yet fenced for the sheep. The weeds and grasses are almost waist high in places as I make my way to the old well in the furthest corner of the field, and gently tip the baby snake out – coiled up like a mini-pretzel – on to the grey earth.
A few feet away, I notice a length of thick rope lying coiled on the stones. Funny: I don’t remember that being there before – but it should come in handy when I get round to repairing the shaft. It will be good to do some grubby masonry work myself at last, instead of always leaving it to others.
Bending down, I am about to pick the rope up when it smoothly uncoils itself and disappears into a hole in the earth.
44
BLESSINGS
I had expected the long summer evenings to prove easier than the icy darkness of winter at La Folie. But somehow the lovelier this place becomes, the lonelier it gets, just as the more content I feel, the more I find myself craving a special someone with whom to share that contentment.
Night after night, the cat and I sit outside on the terrace, gazing at the long shadows across the valley. I sip a glass of Sauvignon from a five-litre box that should last me a fortnight but probably won’t, and wonder if she remembers London.
All those cranky neighbourhood cats she used to flirt with; the stream of human visitors to the house in East Dulwich; the sounds of revving engines and police sirens and hip-hop. It all seems so far away from here, where the only sounds are the whirring of a billion crickets, the shrieking of the owls and – every so often – the drowsy hum of a bourdon buzzing home from the wisteria.
I had no idea, when I bought La Folie, how many hours we would both spend in this one spot, absorbing this one view, noticing the way it waxes and wanes with the changing seasons. Views lend perspective: thoughts shift, when the eyes can relax into the far distance.
Having a cat helps, too. Chat boulanger, I learn, is what the French call it when a cat sits on your lap and kneads you, making you flinch as the claws dig into your skin, but also persuading you to accept the pain as the necessary price for this most perfect sign of pleasure. I can feel alone and tired and worried about the sheep, and this happy cat makes everything all right.
Gilles and Josette come to supper and we eat some vaguely Mexican tacos I’ve produced from a kit. I hoped these might amuse Gilles, and am not disappointed.
‘C’est quoi?’ he demands, wrinkling his nose as if he’d just found an eel in the bath.
‘Tacos,’ I reply. ‘Ils sont mexicains.’
‘Ah, nous sommes très international, ce soir,’ he says, taking a huge bite. His eyes widen in surprise. ‘Et c’est bon.’
‘Gourmand,’ whispers Josette affectionately. Though I have given her a cushion for her back, her stiff movements betray her constant pain. I have never heard her utter a single word of complaint.
‘Is it still bad?’
I ask.
‘Yes, it hurts,’ she admits now, not looking up. ‘But I’m used to it.’
Gilles pushes his food around his plate with his fork, saying nothing.
‘It’s very kind of you to invite us,’ he says at last. ‘Comme ça on se sent moins seul.’
Alone? You feel alone? You, who have been married for more than thirty years, who have farmed in this region for ever, whose cosy house is set in a cheery little hamlet of other dwellings? I look at my friend, touched by his admission, and my heart goes out to him. One does not have to live all by oneself in a foreign country to feel alone.
Next morning, having left the chickens to guard La Folie, and the cat to guard the chickens, I am flying the Luscombe over a sunlit landscape, en route to Sarlat in the Dordogne. It lifts my spirits to be here, high in this crystal sky. I have been spending too much time merely pottering in the airspace near St Juste, zooming high over the top of La Folie for a look at the Rastafarians from a different angle, and occasionally rocking my wings over Gilles’s farm. I was hoping that Peter Viola and I might make some flights together in our two machines, double-barrelling through the sky in a loose formation. But Peter has had to return to England for a while – ‘various secret projects, old boy’ – and although I have taken some of the other aeroclub pilots for flights in the Luscombe, it’s not the same as gazing down at the fields and seeing the shadows of two planes side by side, or tail-chasing each other through the tops of the shining clouds. Last night Gilles said he would come flying with me ‘bientôt’, but I think he wants me to fly a bit more without crashing before he puts his life in the hands of an Englishman.
I’ve chosen Sarlat because it’s there, and because my flight-guide says the aerodrome has its own restaurant. In England, pilots will fly miles across the country for a hundred-pound cup of tea. In the USA, it’s a hundred-dollar hamburger. Here in France, where both food and flying are relatively cheap, one hopes for rather more for rather less. A month’s hangarage for my plane at St Juste costs roughly the same as dinner for two at Pizza Express in Dulwich Village. Whereas for the money I was paying to house my Luscombe at Rochester, I could take thirty people out to lunch at the Café Limousin in Jolibois.
C'est La Folie Page 29