A House in the Sunflowers

by Ruth Silvestre

  The ancient étuve was already alight, smoke rising, a triumphant Grandpa replenishing the wood. As soon as he had heard the news he had lit it, knowing that the drying of the remainder of the plums would be up to him. Grandma laid out the flat wooden trays on two long planks supported on oil drums and we tipped the wet sticky plums in, pressing them down gently into the corners. Once they were filled Mike helped Grandpa to load the wagonet and push it into the heat. As the first load began to dry Grandma was already filling the next lot of trays. Their système needed once more, they were content. From every farm spirals of smoke arose from étuves that had long been abandoned but were now reborn.

  At last the backlog was cleared. The Coopérative once more accepted as many crates as the farmers could deliver and there was talk of adding another oven before next year. The crisis was over. The weather returned to normal and the new machine once more unfurled its great green umbrella beneath the trees. The little iron ladder was reserved for those too fragile for its rough embrace. Mike stayed to help whenever Raymond needed a driver for the fork lift but I went back to work in my garden. For me the charm of harvesting plums had been the peace of the orchards, the quiet chatter under the trees and the sweet smell of warm fruit.

  La machine necessitated much yelling of ‘STOP’ as it was positioned and the fumes from the old tractor which pulled it lingered under the low trees. Yet another harvest had become quelque chose d’autrefois. Raymond felt it. Proud though he was of his machine he regretted the passing of another tradition.

  ‘But what else can I do?’ he said. ‘My parents-in-law are old and my children?’ he shrugged. Philippe was studying economics at college in Bordeaux and Véronique was learning office skills. Neither was interested in a career as a farmer. ‘Eh alors,’ he said, ‘il faut acheter les machines.’

  But in the warm, wet woods, under the ageless layers of leaf mould another harvest waited that needed no machines. Two spells of heavy rain followed by long, hot days had begun a relentless underground movement, soon to reveal itself. Grandpa had already taken to disappearing between the trees in the early morning mist. When we commented he smiled, tapped the side of his nose, raised his eyebrows and said ‘In a few days.’

  It was the beginning of the season of the Boletus edulis or le cèpe de Bordeaux and its imminent arrival was the signal for a frenzy of searching in the steaming woods. On our early morning trips to market there were cars parked along the edges of the wooded lanes and signs CHAMPIGNONS INTERDIT began to appear nailed to the trees. ‘C’est la guerre,’ said Raymond. ‘If you get up at seven your neighbour will get up at six.’ It sounded to me very much like the three little pigs.

  One morning, well before eight, Claudette in her flowered hat, apron and Wellingtons and carrying a long stick, arrived on our porch. Flushed with excitement she opened her carrier bag to show us a dozen or so brownish-orange tops with thick white stalks which broadened at the base. Some six inches across, others no bigger than her thumb, she took each one out as tenderly as though it were alive, laying them on the well cover before sitting down to drink coffee. She admitted that it was the fascination of finding, even more than the eating of these white fleshed edible toadstools that obsessed her. ‘C’est la passion,’ she laughed.

  Normally too busy to take even an afternoon off, once the cèpes had begun she neglected the farm and spent hours in the woods. ‘Elle est toujours comme ça,’ said Raymond in apparent indulgence, except that his passion is eating them. We were invited to try them, a whole dish full, freshly picked and cooked crisp. ‘Sentez, sentez,’ said Raymond, in a kind of ecstasy. ‘When they are cooking they perfume the whole house.’ I really felt quite guilty. They were perfectly edible but, try as I might, their appeal was lost on me. ‘Oh, c’est une question d’habitude,’ he said kindly.

  The excitement of finding them was something I could understand. Into a soft, humid world of dappled light and shadows, the very concentration of looking, adjusting one’s eyes to each patch of patterned ground, turning the leaves gently with a stick and circling round and round, anxious not to miss an inch, was mesmeric.

  The wood was full of fungi, underfoot and hanging like thick, leathery lips from the trunks of the trees, but, by now, we knew what we were looking for. Each worked in their own small section but at the first cry we would converge for the cèpes were always in a cluster, some clearly visible above ground, others just the faintest concavity beneath the thick carpet of leaves. We pulled them gently and then tried to remember the exact location, for tomorrow there would be more – if we managed to get there first.

  With no arduous preparation of the ground, no expensive fertilisers or seed, no watering or weeding, I could understand the fascination of such a harvest for the farmer. It was a gift from the gods and that year was especially bountiful. Grandpa returned one morning with several kilos and refused to tell anyone where he had found them.

  The biggest joke in the neighbourhood was old M. Boulloner, a retired Parisien, not the most popular person in our village. Each day he would bump slowly up the track to the woods in his red car. On one occasion he couldn’t find the way out of the wood and had to be rescued. Each evening he would return with a bulging carrier bag which, wisely, he would take down to the farm for Raymond to check. With cries of ‘Mauvais, mauvais,’ Raymond would reject one after the other until poor M. Boulloner was lucky to be left with one miserable mushroom for his evening omelette. Sadly, his smart city cap on his head and his sleek little dachshund at his heels, he would plod out to the car.

  ‘Poor M. Boulloner,’ I said.

  ‘Huh, les Parisiens,’ Raymond was unusually unsympathetic. ‘What do they know about la campagne? I remember when I was trying to sell Bel-Air the agent said to me, “You’d do far better to sell it to les Anglais que les Parisiens.” ‘He suddenly smiled at me, surprised, ‘She was right, wasn’t she?’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  ‘Did you ever know someone called Alphonse?’ I asked Grandma as we sat together one day shelling coco beans for bottling.

  She lifted her head and smiled at me. ‘Those old letters again, I suppose?’ she said. Deciphering the letters in the hat box was still a never-ending fascination, and so many of them were written during the Great War.

  ‘Alphonse?’ Grandma’s busy hands stilled and her small face wrinkled up like an end-of-season apple. ‘I never knew Alphonse but I think he was married to Delphine.’

  ‘That’s right,’ I said, ‘and who was Delphine?’

  ‘Delphine was a friend of Anaïs.’ I waited. ‘She used to write to her.’ I nodded encouragingly. Grandma must not be hurried. ‘They’d gone away long before I came here to be married but I’ve often heard Anaïs talk about her. She was in service at Au Bosc.’

  ‘It looks as though Anaïs sent Alphonse food parcels when he was in the army in the first war,’ I said.

  ‘C’est possible,’ said Grandma, and got on with the beans.

  ‘Grande était ma surprise hier soir,’ begins Alphonse expansively, in a letter from Secteur Postal 145, dated August 20 1916, ‘to find your unexpected parcel. The civet was excellent.’ I imagined Anaïs filling a bottling jar with perhaps civet de lièvre, which Grandma sometimes makes when one of the few remaining hares is inevitably flushed out by a chausseur.

  But the letter continues, ‘My comrades with whom I shared it wish to send their felicitations to the cook.’ Clearly it was a large civet. How on earth did she pack it? In his other letter Alphonse thanks Anaïs and Justin for un bon morceau which will be eaten ‘en Champagne dans le pays où les canons sont en action et les permissions suprimées,’ leave cancelled. As I became familiar with the names of these reluctant soldiers I wished that the mice had not ravaged so many of their letters. Some used for ancient nests fell into shreds as we lifted them from the box. Fortunately many were still intact and with dictionary and magnifying glass I began to learn a little about what life was like during the Great War.

  There were
several letters from Anaïs’s brother, one Henri Mauriac who was with the 130th Territorial Brigade. He begins cheerfully enough on a postcard marked Correspondance des Armées Françaises. It has a design of an optimistic looking soldier, hands clasped on his upturned rifle, as he stands against a background of crossed tricolours. Henri hopes to see his sister, brother-in-law and nephew Alaïs before too long and sends them all une bonne poignée de main, a good handshake, but as the war continues his letters change. In civilian life he may have been a chef, for in January 1916 he writes that at least cooking, mon ancien métier, is helping to make the winter, with its constant skirmishes, endurable. He hopes that it will all end soon, ‘c’est mauvais la guerre.’

  Anaïs is also sending him parcels and his letter of May 29, 1916 thanks her for his present. Financially he is doing rather well, he says, as he has almost no expenses and nothing on which to spend his pay. Under canvas in a wood he is safe from shelling but he writes, ‘by the time this letter arrives je serai pour sûr a la côte du poivre, a name that you will have already seen in the papers.’ I assume that this must be a euphemism for the hottest part of the front line, something like Hell-fire Corner.

  By July Uncle Henri Mauriac is back near Soissons where, in spite of sporadic gunfire, he wishes he could stay for the duration. He is still in a bad state as a result of his recent experiences ‘ce que j’ai vu autrefois,’ and in his letter of October he writes ‘Nothing changes, this life has disgusted me now for a long time and there is no sign of an end to it.’ Imminent leave temporarily cheers him in November when he hopes to ‘mettre pied à terre chez vous’ on the evening of the 13th. But sadly he does not manage to see his sister as he has unexpectedly to travel home via Bordeaux. He writes later to tell her that he tried to see them on market day at Monflanquin, which ever since 1256 has been held on a Thursday morning. But he arrived very late and they, presumably not knowing that he might come, had already left. He explains how the few days of leave flew by, especially since he had to plant his seeds, nothing having been done while he was away. He finishes by saying that he is back at Soissons but not for long. ‘If this goes on much longer I can assure you one would be better off dead,’ he adds bitterly.

  The preoccupation with work needing to be done on the land is clear in another letter written in 1916 by a neighbour, M. Coupé, a gendarme attached to the British Army. ‘Cher et brave Anaïs,’ he writes, ‘as soon as possible would you please prune my plum trees, taking care not to strip them too bare.’ He writes of the dreadful wet weather and of the ‘Canadiens, Australiens, Ecossais et les Anglais chantant constamment jouant leur belle musique’. This puzzled me until an expert on the First World War explained to me that the French considered the habit of the British army to march everywhere to music extremely odd. They had regimental bands but they were not sent to the front line.

  M. Coupé continues, ‘At the moment I have a droll task. Each morning before daybreak, myself and another gendarme enter an unhappy village, so bombarded as to be almost demolished. We hide in the cellars and at dusk we return to the billet where we must report the exact number of fallen shells. Needless to say we are excused inspection,’ he adds wryly. My expert again explained that these would have been enemy shells which were counted because each new gun crew taking over an emplacement fired off twice as many shells to check their range. In this way enemy troop change-overs could be checked.

  By far the largest group of wartime letters was written in an almost illegible hand. The letters spanned two years and were from one Fernand Lacoste. He was Anaïs’s nephew and something of a hero and confidant to Alaïs, his handicapped cousin. He mentions his wife, Clothilde, who lives at Viallette. This was interesting to us as Viallette is about a kilometre from Bel-Air. When the trees are bare we can see the roof. In 1976 when we first came, it was a shell without floors. Only the roof had been repaired to stop the walls from crumbling away. Now it is being lovingly restored by, unusually, a French couple who, tiring of town life, have made it their home. He is a lecturer in a technical college and he works on this long-term project in the vacation. They raise a few sheep and chicken as a side line.

  Fernand Lacoste, the earlier inhabitant of Viallette, wrote many letters in his small, cramped hand. I assume that paper and ink was expensive but, in those days of oil-lamps and candles, I wonder how difficult they were to read. There are twenty-five letters, written between January 1916 and August 1918, which give interesting glimpses of the war and also of his relationship with his, I assume, younger, and certainly less worldly cousin, Alaïs, at Bel-Air.

  In January he writes that he has changed his billet and that although very draughty it is better than the trenches. He finishes affectionately ‘Reçoit douceur et bons baisers de ton cousin.’ By September, realising that the war will not be quickly won, he forsees at least another winter of fighting. Anaïs has been sending more food parcels. As I read, I imagined the whole of France criss-crossed with civets and saucissons. Fernand thanks his Aunt for le bon morceau which he has tasted but is saving for Sunday, when he will have a feast before leaving for eight days at the front, having already endured four days of shelling. ‘I am up to my stomach in mud,’ he writes, ending wistfully, ‘the grapes at home must be ripening’.

  The next letter which survives was written in the following January and seems to be in answer to a letter from Alaïs about some romantic problem. Fernand describes ‘les jeunes filles’ as having to make themselves agreeable ‘à ceux qui restent et n’ont pas trop besoin de le faire difficile’. He warns Alaïs against talking about any conquest that he might make, but also tells him that it is high time that he found himself a girl. He speaks bitterly of having to abandon his own love to go to war and concludes by promising to bring his cousin a lighter when he next has leave.

  Whatever amorous pursuits Alaïs was engaged in were cut short by his own sudden and unexpected call-up sometime in May 1917. He was sent to the barracks at Montauban where he was very unhappy and constantly trying to convince the Army that he was sufficiently handicapped to be invalided out. The first mention of his conscription is in a letter that he received from Fernand’s wife Clothilde, at Viallette. She tells him that his mother walked down through the fields from Bel-Air bringing her son’s letters, and explaining that his call-up must be a mistake. Clothilde writes, ‘you will not have to stay long. I wish you luck and a speedy return. I shall write to tell Fernand what has happened.’ She ends by thanking Alaïs for his ‘jolie carte. Tu as un jolis logement.’ I doubt if poor Alaïs considered his barracks in this way.

  His cousin Fernand writes, appropriately on une carte lettre de l’espérance, and tries both to cheer and to warn him. ‘I got your card,’ he writes, ‘and I can see that you don’t find ce metier trop désagréable. Do your best to keep your bosses happy for it’s what you do to begin with which will make all the difference to the way you are treated.’ Two days later Fernand writes to reassure his Aunt and Uncle that their son is not complaining too much, but from his letters to his mother it is clear that it was only to cousin Fernand that Alaïs kept up a brave face. He was only at Montauban for about a month but in that time there are sixteen letters written between mother and son.

  His mother is also anxious for him not to complain to the authorities and get une mauvaise note, ‘Tell me if you have enough bread,’ she writes, ‘and if you are bien couchée’. Once again she turns to her school book and has underlined the words that La Petite Jeanne uses to comfort her daughter when she must leave her. ‘Quand j’ai perdu ton père, je ne suis pas morte, parce que j’ai pensé à vous, mes enfants; et tu penseras à moi pour te donner du courage.’

  Alaïs is angry at the questions he is asked by the board who assess his eligibility for invaliding out and his hopes of a discharge fade with every letter. He writes almost every day.

  His mother reminds him, as no doubt others pointed out to her, that he is better off where he is than at the front, adding that they’ve had no news in the v
illage of ‘young Perault’ for two weeks. Alaïs agrees but tells her just what he thinks about the noise, the awful soup, the mouldy bread as hard as wood, and the undercooked meat.

  Uncle Henri Mauriac, clearly behind with the family news, writes to reassure his sister that poor Alaïs will not be called up. ‘I’ve sent him your address to show him that you did have to go,’ writes Anaïs crossly.

  On May 28 Alaïs has some contact with a sympathetic Brigadier who asks him details about the plum harvest. ‘I told him I’d like to show him myself,’ says Alaïs. On the last day of May he is at his most despondant. He is being made to march commes les autres. ‘I would much rather be at home doing my one kilometre a day,’ he writes. His mother tries to cheer him with snippets of local news. ‘Your father is going to market to sell a horse. Delphine is selling a cow next week,’ and sadly, ‘Young Perault is dead. The news has just come.’

  The letters of both mother and son are extremely difficult to understand as, apart from the minute writing, neither of them can spell. They most certainly would have talked patois together so that French was almost a second language. I have a copy of a beautifully written and faultlessly spelt letter from Alaïs to his mother, written when he was eleven years old and clearly copied from the blackboard, but fourteen years later and left to himself he writes as he speaks. ‘C’est’ is ‘sais’!

  At last the army decided that he was too handicapped to be much use and in his final triumphant letter of June 9 he writes, ‘I still have a few more days left but on Monday or Wednesday I shall leave for Grèzelongue et puis la guerre sera finie pour mois sais un salle metier. It’s a dirty business.’

  ‘He never forgot the experience,’ said Raymond, when I showed him some of the letters. ‘I didn’t realise that he was in for such a short time. He made it seem much longer when he talked about it.’