How Blue Is My Valley

by Jean Gill

  Everyone in the queue has a ‘Well there we are then, all explained’ expression but Fleur is feeling sociable so she expands, ‘I always read the headlines of the first paper that comes through – it saves me buying one,’ and then she returns to finish the verdict on the burglars tried at Valence. Perhaps it is the breathtaking honesty that leaves us all speechless – it is after all my paper – but I just think it’s entertaining and the queue waits patiently.

  Eventually I read my own, slight crumpled newspaper, and I note that nuclear protestors are more unhappy than usual and that we are going to have even bigger nuclear reactors just down the Rhône from us.

  Did I forget to mention another less attractive aspect of our beautiful home? We live within thirty miles of France’s nuclear powerhouse, our valley being described in my Almanach as ‘the most nuclearised in the world’. For good measure, the reactors are apparently built along a fault line with a high likelihood of earthquakes, and, as if that wasn’t enough, the reactors had to close down occasionally during last year’s heatwave and there is concern that the exceptional heat might have caused cracking.

  How much consolation is it that Dieulefit has only a moderate threat of earthquakes, which requires only standard earthquake measures in all building regulations. What exactly are standard earthquake measures? Are they affected by council workers destroying your cellar and plumbers destroying the rest of the house? Did I ever ask to be shaken to my foundations? if I did, it was most definitely only metaphorical, and only a wild whim. I was younger then. I have changed my mind.

  I can do nothing about disasters, domestic or international. Instead I am Cleopatra floating along the Nile with beautiful slaves fanning enormous palm fronds, roses underfoot and in the air; I am me, fanned by tiers of acacia branches, through which the blue blue sky offers summer. I am definitely lounging but I call it research – two interesting facts about Dieulefit for every two hours drifting along the sky amongst the roses. A hint of fading lilac and a back note of wild thyme adds complexity to enough roses to drug Mark Antony. Blowsy vermilion peonies flaunt yellow stamens amongst old-fashioned roses all shades of red.

  John’s favourite has a darkness shadowing its crimson petals but then his loyalty wavers as yellow spikes open, and then tiny pompoms cluster on the new pergola ... they grow like weeds and blossom like in a fairy tale. Roses inside the wall and poppies outside, usually scattered through verges, waste and arable land but suddenly torching a complete field with blazing red. We toast the early summer with Côtes du Rhône rosé.

  16.

  Examining Gravel and Live-heading Roses

  We pick up pieces of gravel, consider each one carefully then place them on a piece of wood near where we sit. There are gray edges to some chippings and rose glints in others. We don’t put them in our mouths, although we think about it. Instead we weigh one chip at a time, closing a hand around it, feeling its exact graveliness.

  Not even a Chinese philosopher can meditate endlessly on gravel so we get the ball next. After a spell of bending it like Beckham, dribbling around two hot Pyreneans who have seen it all before, we take position at opposite ends of a plastic sunlounger, tilted to optimal ball-slide angle.

  We make the ball roll down the green smoothness and discover basic laws of physics as the ball uses human energy to go back up to the top. Lots of human energy.

  We are bored with the laws of physics so we go live-heading roses. This is a lot more fun than dead-heading but then destruction usually is. I try to pick roses already on their way out, and I do have sympathies for the pro-euthanasia groups, but there is a definite wince factor as the velvety petals are shredded and rain on the lawn. We have already sung and acted out ‘The Grand Old Duke of York’; now it is Khayyam’s turn.

  ‘Look to the Rose that blows about us – ‘Lo,

  Laughing,’ she says ‘into the world I blow:

  At once the silken tassel of my Purse

  Tear, and its Treasure on the Garden throw.’

  This new little rose has certainly blown into the world laughing and she expects me to join in.

  By this time, perhaps ten minutes has gone by. I am babysitting for my belle-petite-fille of eighteen months and I am exhausted. You forget, don’t you. Her father and pregnant mother are climbing Mielandre. Given the choice of climbing a mountain or entertaining a toddler, John got his boots out.

  Thank God for Auntie-fille who allows me to abandon grandmotherhood for pizza-making. Home on the range. What with the baby and the cooking, we enter other time zones. Baby-time crams a year into twenty-four hours, with action slots of five minutes each and quiet spells of ten minutes if you’re lucky and hours of desperate recovery when it’s asleep.

  Breadmaking slows the pace, takes the time it takes. Now there’s a real meditation for a philosopher – watching dough rise. Another favourite is making a risotto. It’s not only the stock that’s absorbed as I stir and watch the swirl of rice and liquid.

  It has the same effect on me as fishing; you start off impatient, wondering why you’re wasting precious time, you check your watch and only three minutes have gone. Then, as you watch the ripples and your hands cast (or stir) while your brain floats, your friend nudges you and tells you five hours have gone by. You don’t believe her but you feel lighter somehow, as if you’ve cast at least some of your troubles into the water.

  Auntie-fille passes the parcel and we play indoor games. Sitting on the window-sill is the best place to see every kind of mechanical digger known to toyshops, most of them a disappointing cream but some actually are the bright yellow of a two-year old’s dreams.

  We already know that the grabber looks threatening as it swings too close to the house wall, lurches drunkenly down and excavates more rubble than a small girl could sift in a lifetime but it is the roller which rumbles like thunder on approach, rings the ceramic lampshades like tram-bells as it heaves by the house and passes like a minor earthquake only to repeat the process in the opposite direction.

  From the windowsill we can smile right into the digger cab and wave to the men in hard hats, our best French friends, who wave back with the enthusiasm due to a blue-eyed blonde – her, not me. Belle-petite-fille is the sort of baby who is approached by a strange man in Super-U, who asks Belle-grand-mère ‘Which shelf did you get that one from?’ and who is rewarded with baby smiles – from her not me. She could do cute for Wales; I couldn’t.

  After several baby days and four hours twenty three minutes grown-up time, intrepid-fille returns, having climbed her mountain. Like most mothers, she is relieved and disappointed that petite-fille is still in one piece; relieved because she worries when they are apart, disappointed because she half-wants to be irreplaceable, even for a few hours.

  I remember this temporary madness, along with the guilty mother’s knowledge (and is there any other kind of mother?) that the baby was actually in your care, not with the mother-substitute at all, when it fell down the stairs/ate half a clothes peg/was clawed by a tortured cat.

  I am pleased with myself because, in addition to none of the above having happened, I didn’t let petite-fille sleep. I remember how it felt when someone told me how good the baby had been, ‘slept all morning’, and I knew we were in for a long afternoon and night. I am also pleased with myself because I kept to the food rules which come attached by their parents to all modern babies.

  This, I am in no position to mock. Feeding time at the Gilborough zoo is a delicate operation. One Pyrenean has a tendency towards stomach ulcers and our move to France meant that a Kidwelly vet’s brand of chicken-and-rice petfood had to be replaced with risky foreign stuff (my dogs have the gourmet habits of our grandmothers). We settled on ‘special dog food for giant dogs with sensitive stomachs’ for main meals and biscuits ‘guaranteed to give pleasure’ for breakfasts. I am deeply tempted by the biscuits.

  For the cats, we chose dried cat food that had pictures of beautiful Birmans on the front. One sister asked, ‘Do you feel the mar
keting influenced you just a little?’ but the way I see it, if sex sells everything to humans from cars to deodorants, then why shouldn’t my toothless, smelly pets imagine they’re ten years younger when they look at the show-winning pictures and eat their biscuits?

  One month into the new French regime, Sensitive Dog stopped eating. I tried all the usual tricks, including the pills packed in my ‘emergency starter kit’ by my Welsh vet, and we went two steps forward, three steps back. I told myself that it was only her stomach that was sensitive, that she wasn’t pining for Wales, but one morning she looked miserably undeniably in-need-of-vet ill.

  As it was John’s birthday, his treat for the day was our first trip to the French vet. When he saw my expression and realised that I was coming out of the surgery without the dog, he thought that it was going to be a very bad birthday but actually that was going to depend on the vet, the dog and a bit of luck. I had been completely misled by her past history and Sensitive Dog had in fact developed a womb infection and needed an emergency hysterectomy to save her life. Our new vet phoned us personally at lunchtime to tell us the operation had been a success; at tea-time to tell us that the patient was recovering (at which stage we remembered the old joke, ‘the operation was a success but...)

  Next morning we were told that things were going well... but. The ‘but’ was predictable... but she couldn’t come home until she’d eaten something – and she wouldn’t eat anything. Well of course she wouldn’t. She’s a Sensitive Dog, in Dog Prison, where they don’t even speak proper human. It took them three days to coax her to eat something (or to give up and lie about it) and for us to organise a triumphant homecoming. When I called at the surgery to collect her, thinking how little moving country had changed the excellent quality of vet care, the vet himself popped out to see me.

  ‘Wait here’, he instructed, and disappeared behind the counter into the back room, only to reappear with a kidney dish full of wobbly yukky gunge. Beaming, he asked, ‘Do you want to see what I removed?’ I didn’t have to think long to decline the offer, much to his disappointment. Some things are very different here.

  The Other Half of the Pack had been subdued and seemed very pleased at the returnee. There was much tail-wagging and mutual greeting until Well Dog took one huge sniff and inhaled ‘Vet’. She couldn’t be seen for dust and avoided contact – and contagion – for days, leaving Sensitive Dog to muse on the unfairness of life and contemplate her dissolving stitches.

  Since then, we have had several phases of ‘Will I, won’t I eat’ and the current solution involves puffa rice, chicken stock (home-made of course) and one tempting piece of charcuterie – times two of course because, although we are One Pack, we will also kill each other if there’s better food in not-my-bowl.

  I imagine the reactions to be much the same during feeding time at the crocodile park although I have not yet observed this. It happens on Tuesday and Sunday afternoons and apparently crocodiles only eat twice a week so if you fall in with them on any other day, they won’t eat you.

  I am lucky enough to see the crocodiles when I am being Auntie Jean, so I am allowed to be an under-10, staring at the water until a log blinks prehistoric mildewed eyes, or at a pile of fifteen monsters, surely dead, until a forearm stirs and a curiously human hand flexes. Handbags, I tell them, and shoes, but they answer me with their perfectly adapted bodies, their lack of non-human predators and above all their totally silent movement.

  Being Auntie Jean is differently tiring from being Grandma. We dress up as Provençal beekeepers (so those hats and the white overall from the garage were useful after all) and we visit the yellow box hive in the woods. It is active and end-of-day busy as the workers return with their treasure.

  We look at the empty nest in the stone porch where two families of black redstart have hatched since the spring. We pick pears and magic them into jam (I can prove it is today’s jam because it has today’s date on it). I do the disappearing act, using the magic of an old house’s architecture and am flattered that my sister thinks, even if for only a minute, that I might have climbed up the chimney or out of the window.

  We walk around the garden and eat some of the flowers (like small print, I warn that this is not to be tried at home or without an irresponsible adult). We eat the blue borage flowers and the orange nasturtiums, and casually give Mum the nasturtium seeds, laughing when her tongue zings with heat. It is allowed to laugh a little at other people when you are under ten, but not for long, and not if it makes them cry. Mum does not cry, not even when she tries the disappearing act, gets stuck in a wardrobe and discovered. Instead she laughs, we all laugh, and the house hoards the laughter for echoes after they have gone.

  We go to a jazz concert from a seven-piece band in the old Knights’ village of Poët-Laval and the hall swings with summer, the old songs reaching a new generation. Under-10 is not too young to play the clarinet; not too young to say that if you hear the same things played on the same instruments by different people they will still never be the same; not too young to be treated seriously as a fellow musician by the jazz clarinetist who gives his autograph along with technical advice on mouthpieces. He is German, I am Scottish-English from Wales, and we talk in French; his music spoke to us all, in a hall-full of tourist languages.

  And if nine is not too young, seventy ? eighty? is not too old for the presenter who, encouraged by the audience, replaces the pianist at the end of the second and final set, and plays the jazz he loves. Throughout the concert, his mouth has made little moue shapes along with the rhythms, he has followed the flights of improvisation with a smile and the tilt of his head, and now his hands are where they wanted to be, chasing the keys into the past, outside time and back into the moment of enthusiastic applause.

  To be nine and full of curiosity. Or to be six, before the word ‘real’ has power to destroy the corner where the toys discuss their numeracy work. My niece and nephew charge about, and fade, and charge about and fade, while the grown-ups take turns to play and – more often – fade completely. The rhythms of parenting soar bright and brassy as each player contributes, miss the odd note as someone extemporises and the others miss the clues, and cross-over in a mixture of the familiar and the individual. We reinvent the old tunes as best we can.

  I have learnt about myself through my visitors, and not all of it is welcome knowledge. I am older than I thought, very set in my ways. I get up too early in the morning, go to bed too early at night, and like food at set times in between. I prefer spontaneity to be planned so that I can organise the cooking. I feel vaguely demeaned by hanging out visitors’ underwear.

  I must put the record straight here; no-one asked me to hang out their underwear but when washing was left in the machine and the visitors were out holidaying... I have been taken back to old, old resentments about gender and roles that I thought I had left behind years ago. How can I blame my male visitors, for assuming that women do washing, when that’s what happens? How can I blame my women visitors when they thank me for helping them? I get very different reactions when I say, sometimes truthfully, that John hung it out. Then, there is a sense of guilt at making the poor man do such a thing (or shock at me making the poor man do such a thing). It has been interesting, the underwear test, a sort of touchstone of gender roles, but I am me and from now on I will be grandma, mother, auntie, friend and host without being pushed into stereotyped behaviour I never adopted in the past.

  I decided long ago that domestic chores are an irritating game of chicken, won always by the person with the highest tolerance of dirt and untidiness. Unfortunately, this is not usually me. From curiosity, I once left a cat furball lying where it had been puked, on the worktop in the utility room. It wasn’t that the two adults with whom I shared a house were unwilling to clean it up; they didn’t even notice it. By the time you can think of nothing but furball, you have four options; go insane, leave forever, clean it up yourself or ask someone else to do so. If you choose number four, however politely, you are a
domestic tyrant and, whatever is said, the person you’ve asked is wondering why the hell you didn’t clean it up yourself and why you make such a fuss over such simple things. Sometimes, life is full of furballs.

  17.

  Lavender and the Blues

  Happiness is an utterly selfish emotion. How can you be happy when someone close to you, isn’t? How can you be happy in the face of war, starvation, poverty... And yet. How does your misery change others’ lives for the better? Who is helped by your depression? Isn’t it from some kind of secure self that you can reach out a helping hand?

  I am surrounded, and sometimes overwhelmed, by others’ blues. I know about survivor guilt and it is not only those who have been through genocide and war who feel this. It is also the burden of those who know that, in the face of logic, they retain an underlying sense of happiness, or, at worst, the belief that it is possible to be happy.

  I escape the indoor blues into the outdoor ones. The lavender is in bloom. Sprig by sprig and field by corrugated field, the valleys turn lavender blue. The hybrid ‘lavandin’ alongside the road is first to bloom, one field actually planted in curves to follow the bending road. On impossibly steep slopes, high into the mountains, true lavender, ‘lavande’, is later.

  We argue about ‘blue’. Why, when the colour is actually lavender, a shade of purple, do both English and French refer to ‘bleu lavande’, ‘lavender blue’. I wonder what the Welsh is, knowing that the colour ‘glas’ can be the blue of the sky or the green of the fields, something I have only ever understood as a consequence of the Welsh weather. Whatever our disagreements about colour, there is no mistaking the scent, delicate over the fields and summer markets or blasting the car as we drive past a distillery. When we are lazing in the garden, a sudden whiff of lavender follows in the wake of every metal-gridded trailer, stacked high with blue? lavender?-flecked bales en route for la Roche St Secret or Nyons.