by Mary Moody
Over the next eight to ten weeks there is a market at a different village or township virtually every weekend, and I learn to be quite discriminating about those which are worth visiting and those which are a waste of time. Like most visitors I regard them as the highlight of the week. Nearby Loubejac, with its wonderfully ancient church and village green, hosts a memorable brocante with goods of a quality and price that would easily allow a newcomer to furnish a house and equip it with all manner of household goods very cheaply. I weaken and buy a stylish pastis water bottle for 35 ff and a pair of weird earrings in the shape of cat’s heads. Very sixties and rather naff. While we watch various acquaintances exploring the stalls, Jock and I have a beer followed by a mouth-watering baguette stuffed with spicy sausages. The weather is perfect, the setting is bliss and I feel completely happy and at home in this foreign village watching the fun of the fair. It’s intriguing comparing purchases and looking at other people’s discoveries. Jan and Philippe find a magnificent gilded picture frame and I see Danny on the way home with a classic wrought iron light fitting that he is planning to mount in his downstairs hallway. Jock buys a couple of aluminium gravy boats for 10 ff and is happy as a sandboy.
The grandest of the brocantes is in the popular bastide township of Monpazier, displayed in the elegant square surrounded by cafés and upmarket tourist shops. By this time Jock’s gorgeous blonde stepdaughter Claudia has arrived on her honeymoon from America, with her new and slightly bedazzled young husband Michael. She and I fall upon the treasures on offer, staggered at the quality and comparatively low price of the china and glassware, the antique furniture, the books, paintings, prints, carpets and kitchenware. I discover a linen stall with perfect white handmade nightdresses, and buy several as presents for my daughter and daughters-in-law back home. Claudia is also into ‘linens’ as the Americans call them, and while Michael and Jock sit patiently in a café sipping beer, we dash back and forth with our purchases. After an hour or so even I am worn to a frazzle, but Claudia is just getting into her stride. It’s a shoppers’ paradise, and very seductive.
The largest secondhand sale of the season is at Cazals, a village about twenty minutes from Villefranche that dates back to the twelfth century. Cazals has a handsome square and a network of old back streets and narrow lanes and its fair has so many stalls that it is impossible to take it all in. Whereas once I tried looking at virtually every item on offer, by now I find I am incapable of absorbing it all. I wander through the square and around a massive arched street that is crammed with displays, and realise I have lost the desire to buy anything much at all. It’s the same sort of feeling that often overwhelms me at home in supermarkets and department stores. I am suffering from object overload. I am always attracted to kitsch, however, and Cazals has more than its fair share of hideous items including clocks in the shapes of horses, ashtrays that are women’s breasts and tasteless statues of black people that are either moneyboxes or cocktail stands. Some sculptures made by a local ‘artist’ are beyond belief both in their concept and clumsy execution. I cannot resist a pair of chubby baby legs, obviously moulded from a child’s plastic doll, that have been painted blue and sit, torso-less, on a coffee table—perfect for the outdoor bar of my new friends Miles and Anne, who are also into collecting ugly and somewhat offensive objets d’art.
Miles and Anne are relative newcomers to the scene, arriving every August from their smart townhouse in London for six weeks or more. Their rambling house and garden in Frayssinet-le-Gélat is not their first holiday home here, but they have only been in Jock’s friendly circle for a couple of years. Unlike some of the other part-time residents they have made the effort to speak French, and employ several people to help them with gardening and renovating, so they are well liked in the village. Miles is a most unlikely character for me to get along with, being English and male, for a start, which has often been a bit of a problem for someone as irreverent as me. A Cambridge graduate, with all the baggage it carries, he works as an executive in the mining industry and has links to Australia that involve the exportation of uranium from our shores. Shock horror. At our first meeting I exclaim with delight that I have probably been involved in more than one greenie protest against his various export operations, but he shrugs this off with good grace. He turns out to be a charming man with a sense of humour akin to my own and it’s a good lesson for me in learning to put aside staunchly held political positions and get along with people whose company I would normally shun.
Anne is a talented artist and potter who somehow manages her handful of a husband with good humour—for Miles is a bit of a party animal, who loves long lunches and dinners and any occasion where drinks can be served liberally. Anne has great plans for their beautiful, wild garden. She is quite knowledgeable about plants and appreciates my help with ideas on ways to get her untamed woodland garden established. Yet another convert to mulching under my belt. Miles and Anne usually bring a team of their oldest and dearest friends along for part of the summer holiday. Mostly ex-Cambridge mates and their wives, many of Indian origin, they are a highly entertaining and witty bunch when they all get together. We enjoy some memorable outdoors summer lunches and curry feasts while they are in residence, making it little more than one long summer party. Suddenly I spy them and their assorted friends and houseguests having a beer in the café over the road and before long we are joined by most of the others who have turned out for the Cazals fair.
Frayssinet-le-Gélat also has a vide grenier and it’s a real mixed bag of delights. Here I again encounter Anne, who finds a handsome old tin hip bath that she tells me she’ll convert into a giant ice bucket to set up beside the bar at their numerous drinks parties on the terrace. This time I resist making a purchase and we all repair to Miles and Anne’s for drinks, which is the beginning of my downfall. Miles insists that everyone around him should be having a good time, preferably with a glass in their hand. He is making martinis, not my normal tipple, as beer on a hot summer day is my drink of preference. But I suddenly find myself clutching an ice cold martini, one hundred per cent gin, with the vermouth sprayed lightly over the chilled surface from a perfume bottle. It’s delicious and I have a second one, followed by a glass of champagne and some white wine. We enjoy a late lunch of salads, bread and cheese and continue talking and laughing and drinking wine well into the mid afternoon.
Without giving it a second thought, I jump into my car and head back to Villefranche to sleep off the excesses of the day. As I am driving towards the Dordogne border an oncoming car flashes its lights at me, but I ignore the warning. Suddenly I see the reason—the gendarmes are out in force and they are waving me over to the side of the road. The rest is history. I have never been breathalised before and certainly at home in Australia I would never, ever consider driving home after a long, boozy lunch. But here everyone drinks at lunchtime and drives home and I have been stupidly lulled into an unrealistic false sense of security.
Back at the station I am found to be ‘just over’ the limit and am given an on-the-spot fine of 600 ff and told I can pick my car up after four hours. I am driving on my Australian licence and luckily therefore have no points deducted. I can’t help but think I have escaped very lightly indeed. At home I would have automatically lost my licence, would have had to make a court appearance and would have been gleefully written up in the local papers. Here I am given a relatively small fine and offered a lift home by the boys in blue (which I decline). I feel chastened and terribly ashamed at my irresponsible behaviour. I slink back to my room to assess my situation. Late in the evening I walk the five kilometres to the car and drive nervously back to Villefranche as the sun is setting.
The gang reacts to my ‘misdemeanour’ (the actual word written on the gendarmes’ receipt for my fine) with surprise and nervous amusement. I almost become the local hero because I am the first one to ever be caught and fined for drink driving. However I notice a sudden restraint emerging at lunch and dinner times, and sense that generally few
er glasses of wine are being consumed. Main roads are being avoided in favour of trips home through the woods, and suddenly people are teaming up to travel to parties in groups with a ‘designated’ driver. While the incident certainly does not result in general sobriety, it has given some friends among my circle food for thought. Cynics claim that it would never have happened after one of the St Caprais lunches in the restaurant across the road from Jock’s, because the gendarmes are careful not to dampen local businesses by arresting customers for drink driving. All I know is that I will be drinking a lot less if I have to drive, and maybe that’s not such a bad thing after all.
There’s an irony in the fact that I have been spending so much of my French retreat drinking beer and wine when my young life was so painfully damaged by the excessive use of alcohol by both my parents. The terrible fights in my family, the infidelities and even the attempted and successful suicides can be clearly linked to alcohol abuse. Yet drinking is a part of life that I really enjoy. I love the taste of it, and I love the effect of a couple of glasses of reasonable wine, and I certainly love drinking wine with good food. The French have a very relaxed attitude to drinking, and wine is considered a basic necessity of life—like bread and milk—and is therefore not heavily taxed. The French drink wine every day with meals—both at lunch and at dinner—but they certainly don’t drink to get drunk. They just have a couple of glasses of wine and think nothing more about it. You rarely, if ever, see a drunk person around the villages and towns of rural France; there are always a few alcoholics hanging around the squares in the larger cities, but drunks are still relatively inconspicuous compared to other major cities of the world.
When I was working as a young journalist in Sydney, drinking at lunchtime was the norm. We did our interviews in the morning, drank two or three schooners of beer with a sandwich or a pie in the pub at lunchtime, then went back to the office and wrote up our articles for our daily or weekly deadlines. Looking back, I have no idea how we functioned at all, with our bellies full of beer and our brains thick with its numbing effects. Yet it was an accepted part of the journalistic lifestyle, and I can appreciate how my parents were both so easily sucked into regarding alcohol as a vital lubricant in the creative process. When I started working as a freelance writer from home my children were little and those bad lunchtime habits were quickly abandoned—although I did frequently continue to enjoy a cold beer at the end of the day, as a reward and as a way of winding down during that frantic time of evening when children are at their most fractious and the dinner needs to be cooked. For years, when we were strapped for cash, I made my own home-brewed beer, which was quite a lethal drop. One bottle was more than enough to get me through the evening.
Here in France I feel there’s something a little bit wicked and self-indulgent about drinking wine with lunch, but because I am in the mood to let my hair down I am loving every minute of it. Deep in my heart I suspect that I could very easily go the same way as my mother, but somehow I seem to manage a greater level of self control. Mum always said that she drank to block out the sadness and trouble in her life, but I realise now that this rationale was just a convenient excuse for not facing the real issues. Alcoholism generally starts quite innocently as a daily ritual then develops into a bad habit, then an addiction that escalates to major social, physical and mental health problems. I am acutely aware of this, having lived with it virtually every day of my life. I am determined it will never happen to me. I enjoy drinking and I intend to continue enjoying it for as long as I can, but I don’t intend to allow it to rule my life.
I hope I’m not kidding myself.
16
AS A JOURNALIST, FROM A large journalist family, the daily business of keeping on top of the news and maintaining constant communication with people around me has always been a vital part of my existence. Back home, never a day passes that I don’t read the newspaper from front to back, watch at least three or four television editions of the news and listen to several more news broadcasts on the radio. I talk to the members of my immediate family every day—often more than once—and we get together for meals or outings at least two or three times a week. I am also a keen reader, preferring to cuddle up in bed with the latest book on the top ten bestseller list than to watch a television drama or serial.
Travelling always poses problems in the area of communication, and to survive as an obsessive news junkie it’s a matter of linking into whatever communication resources you can find, be they international news such as CNN or Sky News on a hotel television, or international editions of newspapers.
Travelling to India always means forgetting about news for a week or two. Once we leave Delhi and the comfort of a large hotel, there is no further possibility of getting information about the rest of the world, especially after the trek actually begins. There is something rather interesting about being so far removed from all the troubles of the world, it’s as though you are living in a state of suspended animation. Everything just stops for a while and nothing that’s happening in the outside world seems to matter. And what you don’t know doesn’t hurt you. You can’t be worried about plane crashes and cyclones and terrorism when you are walking along one of the most ancient goat tracks in the world, surrounded by glorious snow-capped mountain peaks.
Lying at night in my tent, when we have reached the highest point of the trek and are at least five long days walk from the nearest electric cable or telephone, I am always struck by an exhilarating sense of isolation and separation. I would hate to live like this on a permanent basis, but being elevated beyond the chaos of daily news for a few days is really quite invigorating. When I get back to Mussoorie after the long walk I always manage to track down an English-language newspaper with as much determination as I track down my first cold beer. I gradually get back into the ways of the world, and by Delhi I am up-to-date with international events. Australia is rarely, if ever, mentioned in the news unless it’s in relation to sport, as it was during the Olympics, or when there’s a cricket test match which is, of course, the national Indian obsession. Otherwise Australia is an invisible place. David and my daughter Miriam tell me snippets of local goings on when I call reverse charges from an Indian phone box, but that’s about it.
Once I get to France I am confident I will be better informed, and certainly Jock is well set up in the area of information technology. He has a newish computer with email, and a separate phone line, a radio with the BBC World Service and a television that gets both American and English international news channels. However I don’t like to monopolise his equipment so for the first three or four weeks, before I move to Villefranche, I only have telephone conversations with home twice and I only catch brief snippets of the news, generally in the mornings before we start our busy day of socialising. Jock buys the Sunday Times every Monday morning, a good read except that half the magazine inserts have been left out for the long trip to France. And it’s always a day late—in fact all the English papers arrive a day or so late and from a journalist’s point of view, old news is stale news. But I am so desperate for the feel of newsprint between my fingers, that I will buy any English language newspaper and read every article, except the business and sport. The English newspapers are also very expensive here, costing up to 25 ff (more than $6) for a paper that would cost 45p ($1.80) in its own country. The number of English holidaymakers during the summer means most of the papers are represented—the Times, the Guardian, the International Herald Tribune, the Telegraph and the Independent. I have a go at all of them, but end up opting for the Times, despite its conservative political leanings, because the arts and news magazine supplements have more interesting articles.
When I finally move to Villefranche I find myself completely cut off from the outside world, without television or international radio or phone. I have an aversion to mobile phones and have never succumbed to having one at home, in spite of the fact that there is a lot of pressure to carry one in my line of work. I rather enjoy being the odd one out, e
specially when other people’s phones ring at inopportune moments. It makes me feel quite smug. So despite various friends suggesting that I simply buy a mobile to use while in France, I resist the temptation. I realise it would be easy and convenient, but the idea of being able to be contacted wherever I might be, whatever I might be doing, certainly does not appeal. I am enjoying the escape from being ‘on call’ too much to allow a mobile phone to come between me and independence.
I have exhausted Jock’s supply of novels and for the first time I feel adrift in the world. It’s a strange and rather unsettling feeling. I am anxious to keep in touch with home as my daughter-in-law Lorna’s pregnancy progresses and as David is now filming in Queensland. There is no phone line into the little apartment, so even if I felt inclined to have a connection put in it would be very costly. Without a phone connection, of course, I can’t get hooked up to the Internet and therefore I can’t communicate via email. In any event, the five-year-old laptop which I carted from Australia with a view to writing letters and sending messages home is now obsolete, unable to cope with the software provided by the Internet service providers in France. The problem is that the laptop only takes floppy discs while the software needed to set up an email link is installed with CD roms, so I am unable to get it working even on someone else’s phone line. Every day I drive over to Jock’s at St Caprais and check my email messages on his computer, then quickly take in some international news on the television. Before leaving Australia I thought I had finished with the manuscript of my huge gardening book, but now the publishers are wanting me to add some lines of text to several entries. Jock’s computer can’t read the attachments they are sending me, so I have to ask them to send it by snail mail. It is all very frustrating.