‘Crikey,’ they said. ‘Do we have to lie down all the way?’ We reminded them that we were to drive through the night but we promised to stop every two hours once it got light.
It was another wet journey. At Dieppe the customs men took one amused look at our crammed vehicle and waved us through. By three in the morning we had reached a deserted Chartres where we clambered out to stretch our legs, drank coffee in the lee of the great cathedral and gazed in wonder at the magnificent doorway with its serene, elongated figures. On we drove into the rain, joking about buying our house to enjoy more sun, but nothing could dampen our spirits as the wet slates of northern France gave way eventually to the red Roman tiles of the south.
In bar after bar – which sold, to the giggling delight of the boys, a fizzy drink called pschitt – we played innumerable games of le foot, a table football, which kept them happy. By late afternoon, weary but triumphant, we drove into M. Bertrand’s courtyard. Still it rained.
‘I see you’ve brought some English weather with you!’ he joked, emerging in waterproof cape and hat to hand us our key. As we drove slowly up the long track to the house, the mud spattering the white sides of the van, we leaned out, filling our lungs with the fresh, damp air, straining for our first glimpse of Bel-Air. As we climbed up to the last bend the wheels spun helplessly before finally getting a grip on the stones beneath the soft mud.
‘If this rain doesn’t stop soon this track will be impassable,’ warned Mike, but I was not listening. There it was. Our house, but looking so sad and wet. The bun-faced builder was there with three workmen. I suspect that M. Bertrand must have warned them of our imminent arrival for they had just finished cementing the bedroom floors. The porch was piled high with all the old, rotten floorboards and joists. We looked slowly round the gloomy main room, so very different from our first view on that baking August day, while the rain dripped incessantly from the roof behind us in a cold wet curtain.
‘We’d better try lighting the fire,’ said Mike. ‘If the chimney’s not working it looks as though we’ll have to find an hotel.’ The boys protested and we all helped to lay a fire on the iron plate in the hearth. We broke up some of the old rabbit hutches in the earth-floored corridor and carried in the most worm-eaten of the floorboards. This was the moment of truth. Did the chimney work? The builders came to watch. There were a few splutters, a crackle and then a bright tongue of flame licked confidently upward and within minutes we had a blaze so glorious that we were backing away from the heat. We cheered, opened a bottle and felt ready for anything.
Once we had unloaded the van we could make up our bed but the boys insisted on sleeping in the house. They chose the smallest south-facing room with the garden door – at least it had no holes in the ceiling, other than those made by legions of woodworm. We carried in their mattresses after putting down plastic sheets. They were cautioned about the candles, but they refused torches as not being right for the house. And so we spent our first night at Bel-Air – and still it rained. In the next few days, squelching across to the lavatory which was in six inches of water began to lose its novelty; but there was worse to come.
The moment I awoke on Easter Sunday morning I was aware of a change in the light. Sitting up to wipe a space in the steamed up window of the van I cursed as I clumsily overturned a glass of water. I need not have worried for the contents were frozen solid. Bewildered I looked out on a landscape covered in snow. We could only laugh as, clutching our Easter gifts, we later trudged across the slushy fields down to the farm where we had been invited to lunch.
How wonderful it was to be welcomed into that warm kitchen filled with the smell of good things to eat. They told us that snow was rare at any time and completely unheard of at Easter. ‘Jamais! Jamais de ma vie,’ cried M. Meligny, returning from his Sunday morning card game at the café where no one could remember such an event.
M. Bertrand, his children and his mother-in-law (ma belle-mère as he called her – how much more gallant a name) had all been to Mass and wore their Sunday clothes. Véronique handed round peanuts shyly as we drank our aperitifs – Pernod for the men, and for the women, my first taste of the Vin de Noix, the home-made fortified wine flavoured with walnuts. In the inner kitchen Mme Bertrand and her mother, now wrapped in her usual flowered overall, scurried back and forth, cutting, stirring and sprinkling. Finally came the call. ‘Allez! Allez à la soupe!’ and a great tureen was carried in. Grandpa took the head of the table with M. Bertrand on his right. Mike was invited to sit on his left and I beside him. The children sat opposite each other wriggling in anticipation and Madame and her mother sat at the far end.
‘Servez vous! Servez vous!’ insisted Mme Bertrand.
‘Come on Mum!’ implored Matthew, and thus began the tradition that I serve the soup whenever I am there. In vain we warned the boys against taking second helpings. One bowl of the tasty chicken broth with noodles was swiftly followed by another. After the soup came an hors d’oeuvre of tuna fish, hard boiled eggs, potatoes and thinly sliced sweet onions in a creamy mayonnaise. The mounds of fresh bread at each end of the table were already gone and Mme Bertrand went to cut more before bringing in a dish of asparagus which she had bottled herself the previous season. ‘I’m afraid it is nothing like as good as when it is fresh,’ apologised M. Bertrand, dipping it in the vinaigrette, and eating three helpings.
Next came a shallow tureen with a delicate aroma. ‘What is it?’ the boys wanted to know.
‘C’est ris de veau,’ answered Madame proudly, ‘avec olives et petit champignons de Paris.’ She smiled as she watched them taste it and we wondered how they would get on with sweetbreads, but one trial mouthful of the succulent pieces in their rich sauce was all that they needed. Neither were conservative eaters; later that holiday they even tried roasted sparrow which Philippe shot, and they caught fish in our pond which they cooked on sticks over a camp fire. The French family watched with approval as they ate their way through plates of roast duck and pommes forestières. These were potatoes sautéed with garlic and cèpes – the highly prized toadstool found in the woods behind Bel-Air – and sprinkled with fresh parsley. After salad we were offered cheese. We had brought some English cheeses for them to try. Grandpa enjoyed the mature cheddar but the rest of the family clearly found it too strong, preferring the Wensleydale and the Double Gloucester.
With the first few courses we had drunk a dry white wine from Alsace but with the duck M. Bertrand produced a dusty bottle very much like the one that we had so enjoyed in November. Sure enough it was a vintage Cahors, and had been bottled by Grandpa some twenty years before. We sipped and savoured it with due reverence. For dessert Madame presented a large home-made rhum baba which she cut purposefully into ten slices, and while we were eating these I was disconcerted to see the substantial Dundee cake which I had brought for them given the same brisk treatment. I felt that I would have to wait until I knew her a little better before I could explain the keeping qualities of a Scottish fruit cake. I had not thought of rhum baba as a French dish and I learned later that it was first introduced into France in the middle of the eighteenth century by Stanislas who, besides being the colourful king of Poland, was the father-in-law of Louis XV. It has remained popular ever since.
While Grandma poured the coffee Grandpa left the table to return with two bottles from which he offered us a choice of eau-de-vie made from plum or pear. This spirit was made on the farm by fermenting the fruit in wooden barrels. It was then distilled by the travelling still or alambic and it was so strong that I was glad that the glasses into which he carefully poured it were the smallest that I had ever seen. I noticed that neither of the women drank it and Mike finished most of mine. More to my taste was a delicious prune marinated in eau-de-vie which had been sweetened with sugar, and which had to be served into our still warm coffee cups.
This wonderful meal at last finished – it was by now past three-thirty – the children hunted for the Easter eggs which Madame had hidden. Philippe and
his sister were intrigued with the English eggs filled with chocolate drops. I helped Madame and her mother to wash up while the men sat talking – not a situation encouraged in my family but when in Rome…We were given a lift back up to our cold little ruin before it got too dark and loaded into the car with us were eggs, potatoes, onions, jars of jam and gherkins, wine and a lethal-looking scythe to tackle the waist-high brambles. It had been a marvellous Easter day in spite of the snow.
Mercifully the cold weather did not last and as the skies cleared the brilliance of the spring sunlight made us screw up our eyes each time we came out of doors. With the warmth came the wild flowers and the fields around Bel-Air were splashed with the sharp green and yellow of wild daffodils. White narcissi and vivid grape hyacinths glowed in the long grass. A cuckoo called confidently in the nearby wood, frogs in the now full-to-the-brim pond croaked in chorus night and morning and we could even hear the plaintive call of the peacocks in the garden of the château which, we were told, was just a few kilometres across the fields. We were simply too busy to go and look.
The wheat in the field at the back of the house (it was not to be maize this year) grew incredibly fast. The leaves on the ash trees began to uncurl. All this energy and activity exactly suited our mood and each time we came out of the house, on whichever side, we found ourselves saying ‘Just look at that view!’ It became a joke, but after London the sense of space was like a miracle. On cloudless days the sun was already hot enough to sit in without a coat. This was what we had come for. Our only problem was that we could not afford the time to enjoy just being lazy, there was so much that we wanted to do indoors.
The children from the farm often came up to help us. We seemed to be an attraction. With Véronique’s assistance I cleared all the rubbish from the wide earth-floored corridor. In order to see we threw open the big oak door on the west side of the house and the strong breeze swung the thick cobwebs and the tattered shreds of linen bags of dried herbs, long since crumbled to dust. Véronique swept expertly with a besom, pressing the flat bristles into each corner like a rosy-cheeked Cinderella. Underneath yet more boxes and coils of rusty wire we found, set in the wall, the original, hand-hewn, granite sink and I determined to scrub it out thoroughly the next time we came.
As neither of the stoves in the main room worked we reluctantly moved them, chimney pipes and all, in order to clean the filthy wall behind them. There were only two lights in the house, both in the main room. One hung in the centre of the ceiling where, alas, the handsome original lamp had been and was no longer, and the other was a grimy bulb on the inside wall of the chimney which illuminated the fireplace. I cooked most meals on the open fire, burning up every single floor board from the great pile in the porch. I sat on Anaïs’s special cooking chair with its cut down legs peering through the steam as I stirred my iron pot, my hair filling with wood smoke. My father’s ancestors were gypsies and perhaps the contentment I felt had something atavistic about it, even though I was indoors – just. If I glanced up the wide chimney I could see the sky!
We scrubbed each wall in the main room and painted it flat white. We mended the ceiling, replacing the rotten and missing boards and we put down plastic sheets in the attic until the charpentier could repair our roof. The children talked a wonderful mixture of English and French. Strangely, and without any prompting, our two attempted a sort of French while Philippe practised his very good English. On being asked which English book he was reading at school he replied in his precise tones ‘The Canterville Ghost by Oscar Wilde.’
‘Blimey!’ said our two and he learned another English word.
Almost every day M. Bertrand would pass on his tractor but with exquisite tact would turn to look away from the house and only stop if we went out to greet him. Once he did stop however, he was clearly eager to see what we were doing. He told us how pleased he was to see Bel-Air cared for once more. ‘It looked so sad before,’ he said. On the second week of the holiday he warned us that the electric fence would have to be switched on as he would be bringing up some of his cows to their summer pasture.
All the next morning, helped by Grandma, he rumbled slowly back and forth up to the house, the tractor in the lowest possible gear, with two cows at a time tethered to the trailer. Grandma walked behind with a stick, wearing Wellingtons, a flowered overall and a large straw hat, and calling encouragement to the cows as they nodded their way nervously up the track. The first to be untied was the largest and oldest. She was to be ‘Mother’ and look after the younger ones. Slowly and carefully M. Bertrand untied her while we watched at a distance. It amused us to hear him talking to her incessantly in soothing tones, praising her sagesse and the beauty of the morning and the lushness of the grass in the her horns if she panicked – and also her value; she was worth almost seven hundred pounds. By midday nine young and beautiful Blondes d’Aquitaine stared at us over the fragile fence. Every few hours, led by Mother, they would trek past the house to drink at the pond and then, just as leisurely, file back up again to stand, like animals from a child’s toy farmyard, in a straight line along the horizon.
The newly cemented floors in the two bedrooms were now solid enough to walk on. We took measurements. Each room was almost twelve feet square. We looked forward to moving into the bedrooms on our next trip in the summer. One had a magnificent view southwards down to the village and miles beyond. The other, once we had hacked away some of the straggling box trees, looked up the meadow to the cows and the distant woods. I decided that I would one day get rid of the box trees altogether. I hated their sour smell.
Our time was running out. We drew endless plans for studying back in London. We called again on the charpentier who confirmed that the roof would be done before July and that he would re-use as many of the old tiles as possible, mixing them carefully with the new. He showed us one of the new stop tiles which he intended to use underneath; these would, he said, prevent the upper tiles from sliding down as the old ones did whenever the French Air force jets made them jump with their supersonic bangs. ‘They were not designed for that!’ he smiled.
With a M. Albert, the plumber from the next village, we discussed the possibility of putting a lavatory and basin in the far pigsty. We did not feel we could face another holiday without that, but the bathroom proper would have to await more funds. He was another large, smiling man and very agreeable, but he explained that before he could begin we must contact M. René, our maçon, to install a septic tank or fosse septique first.
Consultation with M. René resulted in his arrival a few days later with a huge concrete fosse on the front of his bulldozer. There it hung until later that day when he came back with two of his workmen who immediately began to dig like beavers. M. René sped off in his van and the boys watched in amazement as the two small workmen went ever deeper throwing up great great clods of earth as they gradually disappeared. Not until they were down about ten feet did they stop and call for the ladder to get them out. Alas, it was on the van which had gone with M. René.
The boys searched the barn and dragged out the only ladder that they could find. It was completely worm-eaten and as we lowered it down we mimed that they must only tread on the outside edge of the few remaining rungs. Once the fosse was in situ M. René filled it with water. He told us that otherwise it would float up again if it rained hard. How much rain were they expecting we wondered?
No one would let us pay them. It was very strange. They said they were all friends of M. Bertrand and it could wait. The last days sped past and the morning when we had to leave for England arrived all too soon. We took a last look round. We covered the mattresses in plastic sheets and wondered about damp and mice. We loaded the van, locked the door and walked round once more to look at the view. How could we bear to go? High in a cloudless sky a lark poured out its effortless coloratura. The japonica was in flower, irises under the window were just beginning to unwrap their white, scented petals and everywhere there were swellings of buds that I would not see unfold.
We climbed into what seemed an incredibly spacious van, took a last look at our beloved house and drove very slowly down the track to the farm. There on the table, lined up for us to take, were a carton of eggs, a jar of prunes in eau-de-vie, bottled greengages and pears, bunches of onions and the wicker-covered bonbonne of wine. We stowed them all in the van and went in for a last cup of coffee. Grandma had made a tin of gauffres, a rolled-up crisp wafer biscuit, for the boys to eat on the journey. They all hoped the dreaded channel would not be too rough.
As we climbed at last into the van Grandpa came to say goodbye clutching what looked like a bottle of mineral water. We guessed from the grin on his face that it was in fact his precious eau-de-vie. ‘I haven’t filled it to the top,’ he said. ‘That way it will look more like water for the journey. If they ask you can always say it’s from Lourdes.’
‘And if they taste it?’
‘Say it’s a miracle!’ he shouted throwing up his arms in delight. They all stood waving until we turned the corner and set our faces northwards.
CHAPTER FIVE
Mike, who was then still lecturing at Goldsmiths’ college, had eight weeks’ summer vacation and I simply drew a line through the whole of Matthew’s school holidays and accepted no bookings. For the first time in my life I did not want to work, I just longed to get to France. Our other son Adam was, alas, off on yet another tour. Many friends, eager to see what we had bought, announced their intentions of coming to stay. In vain we described its near derelict state; the one, cold, outside tap, the distinct possibility of our lavatory in the pigsty not being finished; but it was impossible to dissuade them and I suppose that we did not try very hard. One of the many joys of Bel-Air has turned out to be the sharing of it with friends.
A House in the Sunflowers Page 4