July
St-Jean-de-Luz: le Port des Pecheurs
Despair
I had been doing fine in hospital. It was after Annabel and Gerald drove me home that things suddenly looked black. Dr Suleiman issued stern instructions not to put any weight on the injured leg: no walking, no driving. Hopping about on crutches only. For at least five weeks. The plaster came just below my knee. I had a pair of crutches, on which I could get about slowly and awkwardly, at the price of total exhaustion after half an hour. Orriule might as well have been a tiny island in the Pacific Ocean. I was marooned.
Maison Bergez was suddenly nothing but a hundred more accidents waiting to happen. The tiled floor downstairs was like a skating rink. The polished floorboards upstairs were just as bad. I had to scramble up the high, uneven front steps on my knees, and it took me a quarter of an hour to crawl upstairs. The bathroom, and the loo, were upstairs. Given that all the wooden floors sloped, in places quite steeply, it was the easiest thing in the world for one of the crutches to skid and pitch you over in a heap. I spent a night in tears, wondering how I was going to cope.
Annabel drove me into Salies to see the man who would now be my GP, a young doctor with an Italian name and long curly hair like a Botticelli portrait. He listened carefully, wrote prescriptions in a blur of speed, and explained that he wanted me to have a daily visit from the district nurse, to take anti-coagulants and calcium-fixing enzymes, and to have a wheelchair. I was also entitled to apply to the mairie for a home help; I was grateful that Annabel had already sent me her own cleaner, a young girl called Amandine from Burgaronne who stormed about the house like the white tornado of the TV commercials, pausing only to admire Piglet.
People rushed to my assistance. Annabel lent me her old office chair on castors, then disappeared to welcome Zoe and the first party of school children. Willow lent me her camping toilet. Gordon came over to cut the grass and stayed to help me make up the bed in the downstairs bedroom, ‘boy style’, he said, apologizing for being psychologically incapable of tucking in the sheets. Even Piglet, after watching me hobbling around with an expression of dismay, rushed into the garden and came back half an hour later with a dead mouse, which he dropped generously in front of me, obviously hoping it would build me up.
Bernadette, the senior of the two nurses who made house calls in the area, swooped in and organized me with the blatant joy of a woman who loves to run other people’s lives for them. She banned the camping toilet, announcing that it was dangerous, and whisked the doctor’s prescriptions away to the chemist in Sauveterre, returning with the officially approved commode. The next day she came by with her son, a trainee physiotherapist, who helped her deliver and assemble a gleaming new wheelchair, which I would be able to hire as long as I needed it.
Florists began to telephone, asking with obvious irritation where exactly Orriule was, where exactly was my house. I discovered that the conventional way to identify a house in a rambling village is to specify the colour of the shutters – dark green, and the orientation to the mairie – facing uphill. To a Gascon florist, no work of nature is so lovely that it cannot be improved with cellophane printed with bows of custard yellow and knicker pink, or ribbons of Day-Glo green and orange. However, with her killer style-radar, Tara, my editor at Time Warner Books, found an establishment at Orthez that could not only source sunflowers and delphiniums but wrap them up prettily. The bouquet was over a metre high, and cheered me up considerably. Another well-wisher sent an arrangement in a basket, which the florist had watered so enthusiastically that about five litres spilled all over the floor as soon as I took off the wrapping. This gave me a very nervous morning, slipping on the wet tiles as I hopped around with a mop in one hand and a crutch in the other.
Margaret rushed over with a wonderful basket of vegetables from her garden, and stayed to repaint my toenails in Chanel’s most cheerful red. Finally Roger, having heard of my plight, drove over in his Mercedes with another wheelchair. This he had found abandoned at the town dump. It was a 1950s model with a red leather seat, and handy side pockets; just what I needed to get around the garden.
Roger’s speciality is painting panoramas, very large, very precise views of famous towns, full of witty details, which are designed to be exhibited in the round. His best-known work is the panorama of Bath. The wheelchair he had used while painting the panorama of Salies, which was at that time housed in a special circular gallery in the little garden with a bandstand near the Thermes. The wheelchair had allowed him to whiz up and down the giant canvas all day without getting exhausted. It allowed me to struggle around the garden, and keep up with picking the tomatoes, the sweet peas and now the dahlias. Dahlias, I had noticed, were as popular with my neighbours as they are with English allotment gardeners. Every row of tomatoes ended in a flourish of red and yellow sunbursts.
My day quickly settled into a new rhythm. I could get a morning’s work done before Bernadette, or her colleague, Noelle, called in. Being a temporary cripple couldn’t break my habit of lunching off bread and cheese at my desk, after which, if it wasn’t raining, I allowed myself a couple of hours outside, to do some laborious pruning and weeding, or to sit in a deckchair and read. Then it was back to the office, to work through until the evening, when I could expect a kind visitor. Often it was Zoe, calling in at the end of her day, on her way to a head-clearing walk between the maize fields. I envied her hopelessly. No strolling through the fields for me, nor any of those long days I’d planned to spend roaming in the mountains. The walking, like the chickens, was never going to happen.
After visiting time, I made for the kitchen and worked my way through the recipes in this book to test them. Cooking from the wheelchair turned out to be easy, as long as I remembered to cover a frying pan before it spat in my eye. At some point in the evening I would also call Chloe, who was staying in a friend’s flat in the centre of London while she worked for the casting director, whose office was nearby.
She was worrying about me, and I was worrying about her. Talking to a daughter – or a son – who’s living in central London for the first time is guaranteed to wring any mother’s nerves. Every morning, she found a new deposit of used hypodermics in the flat’s window boxes. Of course, when I had heard the ‘don’t touch that, you don’t know where it’s been’ warning from my own mother, I had never imagined that the day would come when I would say it myself. Nor had I foreseen that the object not to be touched would be a drug addict’s discarded needle, implying the risk of Aids. But then, I had never envisaged Aids, let alone the need to explain it to my daughter when she was five years old and terrified by the first public service TV commercials about the disease.
Another evening, when I called, she answered in obvious distress, having just spoken to a friend who had gone out to buy milk from a corner shop around 10 p.m. The friend had found a male-on-male gang rape in progress outside her front door, and turned back in a state of shock. On another occasion, Chloe called me unexpectedly, having suddenly got time on her hands because her date for the evening had cancelled. The reason? His parents had imposed a 10 p.m. curfew on their children after coming home from a weekend away to find that their younger son, a boy of fifteen, had been kidnapped by drug dealers, robbed and locked in the bathroom of their flat in Bethnal Green for twenty-four hours.
In this month two young girls were abducted in the Cambridgeshire village of Soham. In my year away, this was the only event in Britain which caught the attention of the French media. It was reported with an appalled dignity, in sharp contrast to the cynical breast-beating of the British tabloids. Crimes against children certainly happen in France, but in the media the desire to shield the people from these horrors tends to override any ghoulish impulses to exploit them as an audience-building opportunity.
In London, I used to feel oppressed by the inescapable knowledge of the evil abroad in the city. Living in Orriule, where life was shaped by the desire to honour the seasons, the Christian year and the processes of
nature, I felt guilty for having escaped the nastiness of British life and left others behind with no choice but to endure it.
The Singing Sisters
On Thursdays, Andrew came over, with a selection of visitors who’d been regaled with the quaint charm of the market in Saliès. Maysounabe was welcoming a steady stream of house guests now; one London fashionisto, having failed to spot the basic difference between the Bèarn and St Tropez, arrived with a choice of four Rolex watches with which to impress the locals.
Andrew also brought with him a selection of fish from the Otranto sisters, two Basque fish merchants who brought the cream of the catch from St-Jean-de-Luz up to the markets in Orthez and Salies every week. No lurid salmon or limp sea bass from fish farms for them, but rubbery tangles of octopus, a rattling heap of scallops, buckets of petite friture and whatever the sea had provided that morning – once it was a brill as big as a cushion. Their pitch in the market at Salies was next to the music stall, which gave them the opportunity to air their fine Basque voices and sing along with their favourite songs while they scaled and gutted their wares, only drawing breath to pass down cooking advice with the goods.
Andrew’s new favourite dish was one that he had to resign himself to buying ready-prepared, because the Otranto sisters made it a thousand times better, not to mention faster, than any of us. This was piquillos farcis, small sweet red peppers stuffed with a mixture of salt cod and mashed potato. It took us half an hour just to peel the peppers, let alone soak the cod for a day in several changes of water, peel and mash the potatoes, put the whole thing together and make a tomato sauce for it. The tinned piquillos in the shops were revolting. There was nothing to do but keep the Otranto sisters busy. I could see Andrew beginning to fizz with frustration because when he asked how to peel the peppers they told him, willingly and at length, but his French was not yet good enough to understand and I was a prisoner at home and couldn’t translate for him. It didn’t help that they naturally used a lot of Basque words. Some were easy to guess – like atuna for tuna and xardinak for sardines, but others, like ezkirak, which turned out to be prawns, sent us diving for the dictionary as soon as we got home.
Many of the recipes the Otranto sisters parted with so gaily bore the name of kaskarota, meaning it was attributed to the kaskarotes, the women who used to sell fish from the ports of the Basque coast, Hendaye, St-Jean-de-Luz and especially Ciboure, where the composer Maurice Ravel was born. Their ancestors were partly the gypsy boatmen of the Spanish border towns and part cagot, the lost Gascon race of untouchables. In the old photographs they appear as tall strong-featured beauties with smouldering black eyes, and the firm chins and noses which are characteristic of the Basque face. The legend is that the young women stripped naked and plunged into the waves to greet the fishing boats as they returned to port. They did the deal for the catch on the spot, and no doubt the most beautiful got the best price. Then the kaskarotes loaded the fish into their baskets and climbed ashore, where they jumped back into their flounced skirts and espadrilles and raced off to the markets with the baskets on their heads. The kaskarotes could cover forty kilometres in a day, carrying thirty kilos of fish, and could easily reach Bayonne with the fish still fresh. The Otranto sisters, being small-boned, red-haired and fully dressed, and travelling in a white van on the motorway, were obviously their heirs in spirit only.
Las Hestas deu Vilatge
The invitation was written in Béarnais first and French second. The village fête would take place on the 6th and 7th of July. The meal would be at midday on Sunday. Que’vs demandan d’emplea lo paperot acieu devath. Fill in the coupon below. €13 a head. Annabel and I agreed that it would be good form to go, and she called for me in her car to save me struggling down the steep, gritty hill on my crutches.
Our big mistake was forgetting the Béarnais quarter of an hour, which on this occasion stretched to about two and a half hours, to allow the absolute maximum amount of chatting and drinking aperitifs before the party was invited to sit down at the long trestle tables in the salle multiactivités. The former mayor, a jolly, grizzled farmer whose house overlooks the fish pond, insisted on buying us drinks and refused to be fobbed off with requests for a couple of orange juices. Our choice was port or whisky.
Almost every village has a summer fête whose sole purpose is to bring past and present neighbours together to share some drinks, a meal and some dancing. If the patronal festival of the village church – the day awarded to its patron saint in the Catholic calendar – falls in the summer, the two events will be combined, with a processional mass on Sunday morning.
This is what happens in Ossages, where last year I was woken at 5 a.m. by a van from a florist in Orthez delivering a red, white and blue wreath to the church door. It sat on the church-yard wall by the dustbins all morning, until about two hundred people filed out of the church at 11.30. This Marie bewailed as a really sad sight, since in her youth there would have been about two thousand in the congregation. They gathered around the war memorial, and a man with an accordion suddenly appeared beside it. He played the ‘Marseillaise’ as the mayor stepped up to collect the wreath and lay it on the memorial step. A Course Landaise took place in the afternoon, in a temporary arena erected on the car park of the sports hall. At the end of the day, a mobile disco drove into town and parked on the roundabout in front of the church. A bar opened in somebody’s garage, and a handful of citizens passed the night pleasantly, drinking and reminiscing as they watched a few couples dancing under the street lights.
Orriule did things in a more Béarnais style, with two live bands which delighted the revellers with non-stop folk songs. In England, the mere expression ‘folk song’ conjures up pictures of sad blokes in beards and sandals wailing lewd ballads at an audience who can’t understand a word. Between urbanization, American cultural imperialism and the demands of multiculturalism, our own native music has been almost obliterated, along with the communities which cherished it. Only a micro-minority of musical anchorites are concerned to keep this despised heritage alive, and they get very little encouragement from sniffy civil servants, whose concern to promote ‘diversity’ has led to a suppression of our native culture. Ninety-five per cent of the English population probably couldn’t sing one song that was known to their great-grandparents.
The Béarnais, on the other hand, have a great and living musical tradition. Not a tradition as renowned and profoundly nationalistic as that of the Basques, whose stupendous voices are acclaimed all over the world, but a great tradition all the same. The deep, resonant Béarnais voice is also a gift of the mountains, created by generations of people calling to each other, and to their livestock, across the steep valleys.
In recent years, Béarnais music has received firm official support, but it would have been a vital part of everyday life without that. An old man pottering around his garden or a young man setting off for work will let rip a few verses just for the joy of living. In the churches, any member of the congregation with a good voice is welcome to get up and improvise a solo with the choir. There are songs for every occasion, haunting or spirited, with poetic lyrics or hearty choruses. At a family celebration or a public festival a high spot of the event is the singing. So the citizens of Orriule were soon in full cry, with their arms around each other’s shoulders and tears in quite a few eyes.
The meal proceeded slowly, especially after the dancing began. I could see it would be my fate to pass the summer smiling over my plastered leg at other people enjoying themselves more energetically. The men did the serving, giving the women a rare few hours of relaxation. The main dish which had been chosen, apparently after much discussion, was a Basque one: axoa – it sounds like a sneeze, because the ‘x’ is pronounced like a slightly forceful ‘ch’ – is a ragout of veal and peppers.
Worrying about Gerald, who had been left resting alone at the house, Annabel decided to leave at about 5 p.m. Since Maison Bergez was only a few hundred yards from the salle multiactivités, it was
impossible not to know that the festivities didn’t stop until 2 a.m.
An Ill Wind
By the end of the month, I had something like the beginning of a book in my computer. My injury, coupled with relentlessly sulky weather, had grounded me so effectively that I wrote over ten thousand words in the last two weeks of July alone. I wasn’t completely happy with them; I was still struggling between the two languages and my writing seemed to have taken on a stiff, nineteenth-century tone instead of the clean, contemporary zip on which I had been able to pride myself before now.
On the plus side, many of the elements in the story which had been fuzzy and troublesome were clearing like clouds blown away by the wind. Wild Weekend is about the English countryside, and I had been casting about for the kind of threat which the seriously misguided Minister of Agriculture might pose to the landscape in the near future. It wasn’t difficult, since the novel’s scenario was overtaken by reality almost every day. If I wrote about an urban fox, suddenly reports of fox infestation in London were everywhere. If I created a farm which employed illegal immigrants to pick potatoes, suddenly the media were full of stories about the very same phenomenon. My minister, I decided, as the row about building on the green belt built up, was going to be in charge of turning Suffolk into a giant patio. The major problem with this scenario was that the way things were going, there was a real danger that it would be a reality before the book was due to be published in May 2004. The minor problem was the language which this harpy should use to make her speeches. I was too far away from Westminster to be able to catch the echo of the government’s hideous circumlocutions.
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