by John Baxter
Instant coffee had been around since 1938 but not in Australia. Instead, my mother borrowed a flat-sided black bottle from a shelf in my father’s bakehouse. I’d seen him use it to flavor the coffee frosting on éclairs. On its label, a Scots military officer in full kilt took his ease before a tent while a turbaned Sikh respectfully served him afternoon coffee—made, it was implied, from the contents of this bottle, called Camp Coffee.
Camp hardly deserved the definition, since only 4 percent was coffee. The rest was water, sugar, and an extract from the chicory plant, whose bulbous roots, dried and pulverized, resemble coffee, though minus the caffeine. In hard times, chicory was often added to stretch the precious beans.
During the wartime shortage of coffee, essences such as Camp had flourished. Those who had known the real thing became nostalgic, even slightly manic, for the lost hit of real caffeine. In 1947, Ian Fleming, not yet creator of James Bond, wrote an article for the literary magazine Horizon about the joys of relocating from postwar Britain to Jamaica, where he’d just bought a house. He particularly praised the island’s Blue Mountain coffee.
You will drink this coffee cold-distilled. That is, the coffee, freshly ground, is percolated over and over again with cold water until a thin black treacle is produced. This is very strong and contains all the aroma which, by roasting, would otherwise be lost on the kitchen air. A third of a cup with hot milk or water added will spoil you for all of the more or less tortured brews you drink in England.
Over the next few months, numerous readers wrote to complain that they’d tried Fleming’s method and ended up with nothing but a tired arm and cups of cold water.
The same article described a remote region of the interior called Cockpit Country, inhabited by the Maroons, descendants of Africans enslaved by the Spanish. According to Fleming, these people refused to pay taxes, “the only corner of the British Empire to do so,” and established their own government under a leader known simply as the Colonel, whose badge of office was a British army Sam Browne belt. Readers who protested about the coffee suggested that these stories, too, were a product of the “unbounded drink of all sorts” that Fleming cited as another attraction of Jamaica. Both claims disappeared when the piece was reprinted some years later, although the tale of the Colonel and his private empire was either too hard to kill or too good to waste. It inspired the Eurasian arch-criminal with the articulated steel hand in one of Fleming’s most successful James Bond adventures, Doctor No.
Ironically, Camp Coffee, or at least its label, has a drama of its own. The figure of the Scot was inspired by Major General Sir Hector Macdonald of the Gordon Highlanders. The uneducated son of a Scots farmer, Macdonald became famous for fighting Afghans, savage dervishes in the Sudan, and, finally, in the Boer War, Dutch-German South Africans. His burly frame and bristling mustaches implied rampant heterosexuality, but in 1903 The New York Herald revealed he was gay. After hushed-up affairs in Belgium and with a Boer prisoner, “Fighting Mac” was about to be charged with “habitual crimes of misbehavior with several schoolboys” in a British railway carriage. Rather than be disgraced, he shot himself in a Paris hotel.
Camp retained his picture on the label. It’s there still. The only change has been racial. The Sikh batman, who once stood respectfully by, now sits next to Macdonald, enjoying his own coffee break. If the brand survives long enough, perhaps we’ll see a version in which a dusky hand has crept under Macdonald’s kilt.
A little after 11:00 one Saturday night, the phone rang.
“Boris,” a voice said curtly.
“Boris?”
It couldn’t be Boris. I’d never seen him use a telephone and, if he was asked, would have sworn that he never communicated in any medium more modern than the quill pen.
“You’re still looking for that roasted ox?”
Had he rung just to mock my increasingly fruitless quest? It didn’t sound like his style.
“You know I am.”
“Well, I’ve found one.”
“You’re joking.” But I knew he wasn’t.
“Take down this name. Bugnicourt.”
He spelled it out as I wrote it out.
“What is it?”
“A village. Near Douai.”
That was in Nord-Pas-de-Calais, the farthest northeastern point of France before you entered Belgium. In Cabris, I’d been a few miles from Italy, the farthest point southeast before it became Italy. In search of my ultimate meal, I had covered the country from one end to the other. “And what’s up there?”
“They’re going to roast an ox.”
At last! I’d begun to believe that I’d never find one.
“You’re sure? It’s not just a side of beef? It’s really the whole ox?”
“Well, a whole beef anyway. I don’t know if it’s been castrated. Maybe it’s a cow. Does it matter?”
“No, no. Just that it’s the whole animal. This is great! When is it?”
“Ah. That’s the difficulty.”
“Why?”
“Because, it’s now.”
Twenty-one
First Catch Your Ox
The game’s afoot!
Sherlock Holmes, in stories by Arthur Conan Doyle
In the half hour it took to get ready, Marie-Dominique and I tried to research Bugnicourt—pronounced “Boon-e-core.” Its modest and almost perversely uninformative website revealed that the population, at last count (the 2007 census) numbered 954. It was 65 meters above sea level and two hours’ drive east-north-east from Paris, most of that along the A1 autoroute that terminates at Calais, the port for vehicle ferry traffic to England and also the point where the Channel Tunnel resurfaces.
There was nothing about roasting oxen.
“Isn’t that a bit odd?” Marie-Dominique said. “An event like that, you’d think they would at least mention it.”
I could see her point of view. Had Boris been a jokester, he could well have sent us on a wild goose chase. And the more I assured her of his peerless seriousness, the less convincing I sounded.
Just on the off-chance, we rang the Bugnicourt town hall. There was no answer. There wasn’t even an answering machine.
“You know small towns,” I said. “Everything is word of mouth.”
“Why don’t we wait until the morning . . . ?”
“It’ll all be over in the morning!”
We got away almost exactly at midnight. But even then, Marie-Dominique wasn’t convinced.
“Explain again why they’re doing this,” she said as we drove along empty streets toward the périphérique.
“Roasting an ox? Well, Boris says it’s part of a Fête de Boeuf. Apparently it’s an annual event. A celebration of . . . well, meat.”
“The French need to celebrate meat? Don’t they do that with every meal?”
“Not enough, apparently. Somebody seems to think they need encouraging.”
“Hmmm.”
I could see how urgent, even panicky, my voice sounded. And I knew I hadn’t convinced her. But she kept driving. I suppose that’s what love means.
Nighttime on a freeway is just as ghostly in France as anywhere else, with the added sense that, even far from cities, the national passions—for order, for the history and riches of France—remain in force. Lightly but insistently, their hand rested on our shoulder.
Periodically our GPS unit emitted a beep, warning us we were being scanned by radar. More frequently, roadside panels warned us to keep our tires inflated, to drive carefully on wet or icy roads, and to rest if we felt tired. To encourage this, the highways of France, though privately owned, are lined with scenic turnoffs called aires, picnic spots and rest stops by day, havens at night for truckers to pull in and sleep. We glimpsed them as we passed, tractor trailers from Poland and Hungary, dark blobs within the groves of trees, like sleeping elephants.
Unlike Britain’s nationalized highways, where you can drive a hundred miles without a gas pump, toilet, or café, autoroutes, in return for your
tolls, offer fuel, sandwiches, fruit, yogurt, water, coffee, tea, chocolate, clean toilets, even, sometimes, a shower. A few stops have children’s playgrounds and exercise areas. There’s none of the rowdiness of American truck stops of legend: no bar, no jukebox, no pool tables, no whores. In France, and particularly this close to the Channel, truckers behave like the small businessmen they are, and sleep at night, alone. Either they’ve just got off the ferry and need a nap before pressing on, or they’re saving their energy for the dawn drive to Calais and the day’s first boat to Dover.
“Deviation imminent,” the GPS voice announced in her school-mistressy tone. “Prepare to turn right.”
Marie-Dominique steered into the right lane.
“This Boris,” she said. “What do you really know about him?”
Where to begin? “I promise you. He would not send us halfway across France without good reason.”
But the question rose unbidden at the back of my mind. Would he?
Just off the autoroute, we drifted into the zone of light around an automated tollbooth. Marie-Dominique rolled down a window and fed a credit card into a slot. The cool night air smelled of grass and earth.
As the bar lifted, we glided under it, back into the dark, but now on a different sort of road, no longer a long arm of the order that was Paris. The route narrowed; banks closed in on either side. We were in the country.
In November 1917 this ground saw history’s first tank attack as the British flung 476 of its new invention against the German line and overwhelmed it. To the men in their trenches, the turret-less machines grinding across the fields toward them, apparently under no human control, would have looked like ponderous armored slugs, malevolent and alien. Adding to their oddity, each carried a bundle of brush in front, ready to be dropped into a ditch as an improvised bridge.
My own grandfather had been in the Australian Expeditionary Force. He might have been among the infantrymen massed behind the wave of armor, ready to bayonet the German artillerymen in their emplacements and seize their guns. Actions like this left him harmed, a misfit, unable to hold down a job or adjust to life in a country town. It was one of many ways in which I felt connected to France and this ground.
Within half an hour we were entering the outskirts of a town. Dark houses lined the unlit street. Our headlights glinted on a bicycle lying on its side next to an open gate. A cat’s eyes flashed as it looked up, startled.
“Well, this is it,” said Marie-Dominique. “Bugnicourt. Paris of the Pas-de-Calais.”
For a panicky moment, I wondered if Boris really had been playing a practical joke.
But then there were lights, and a barrier, and people.
If we’d arrived from any other direction, closer to Lille or Cambrai, we’d have seen the small vans and cars pulling trailers that signify a brocante. As we pulled up at the tubular steel barrier, two vans drove up on the opposite side, swung off the road into the village, and headed uphill toward the church.
A man in a down jacket and flat cap, cigarette smoking at the corner of his mouth, manned the barricade.
I powered down the window.
“La Fête du Bœuf?”
“Le bœuf en broche?” The bull on a spit? That sounded near enough.
“Exact!”
“Past the church,” he said. “At the football field, on the other side of the hill. You can’t miss it.” He looked at his watch. “They should be starting anytime.”
He pulled the barrier aside
On either side of the main street, numbered pitches were squared off in whitewash on the asphalt. Though it was only 3:00 a.m., half were already occupied by people setting up tables and unloading stock: nineteenth-century armchairs, GameBoys, pots and pans, glassware, figurines, hub caps, cooking pots, books, dolls . . . I’d spent uncountable dawn hours in such markets, all over the world, rummaging by the blue-white light of a hissing pressure lamp, alert for the shimmer of antique glass or the dull gleam of silver in the nests of crumpled newsprint.
I felt at home.
Closer to the church, locals had staked out their spots early. Mostly they sold produce. A woman hung skeins of garlic and onions on a rack. Another wrestled a pumpkin from the baby’s pushchair in which she’d hauled it from home.
We nosed through a loose crowd of wandering vendors aimless as fish, none in a hurry to get out of the way. From the corner of my eye, I glimpsed men clustered around what looked like a life-size bull, its hide bright blue. A long skirt covered its legs, and a large round hole gaped in the middle of its back.
“Did you see that!?”
“What?”
“Nothing.” Who would believe it? I wasn’t sure I did myself.
On the other side of the hill, there were fewer people. The silence closed in again, broken by the rising howl of a chainsaw biting into wood. Ahead, a glow lit the sky, and we smelled wood smoke.
The football field was alive with light and activity. Tents, striped blue and white, were being raised. The largest filled the lower third of the field, with two smaller ones behind. Others were pitched along the sidelines—mostly stalls, open at the front, for selling things or for games.
Nearest the road, an area was fenced off with permanent wooden rails. Within it, sparks fountained into the air and chainsaws whined. We parked in the shadows and walked across to the rails.
At one end, trees were piled, trunks and branches jumbled together, leafless, the wood weathered, long dead, felled the previous summer and left to season. As two men with chainsaws methodically severed short logs, others with barrows carried them to where flames rose from a slit trench the length of a cricket pitch, its sides lined with steel plates. Directed by two others who patrolled the pit, silently watching the flames, they tossed in the logs, retreating quickly from the heat. Even this far away, it was fierce.
A man leaning on the rail a few meters away said something to me I didn’t hear. When I said, “Comment?,” he moved closer.
“English?”
“Australian.”
“Australia! Have been there! Sydney Bridge. Bière Fosters.” He mimed grabbing a ball under his arm and running. “Rugby”—pronounced “Roog-bee.”
He seemed to have summed up my home country pretty well. I nodded toward the flames. “When do they start?”
“Is already one hour burning,” he said, pointing to the men cutting and hauling wood. “They fill—then . . .” He made a pressing-down motion with his hands. “Become . . . cendres.”
Coals. “And after that, how long?”
“Then?” He held up three fingers. Three hours, before the fire was ready.
He nodded toward a smaller tent behind the large one. That must be where they were preparing the animal.
“At six, he come.” He grinned. “Une autre crevette sur la barbecue, huh?” Even this far from Australia, Paul Hogan and Crocodile Dundee had reached their long arm.
Someone called from among the men around the fire pit, and our friend disappeared into the dark.
“What was that about a shrimp on a barbecue?” Marie-Dominique asked.
“Before your time.”
We prowled the field, peering into the tents, skirting the steel barriers that cordoned off the small tents where the butchers were at work. For a couple of hours, we dozed in the car, not quite asleep, kept awake by the unrelenting chatter and the chainsaws’ howl. When we climbed out again, stiff and disheveled, a crimson sun, fat as a pumpkin, was rising over fallow fields where cows moved uneasily in a white mist.
Chilled, we drifted toward the heat that rippled the air above the fire pit. Of the firewood, only a few branches remained. The rest had fed the bed of coals glowing at near-white heat in the pit. Overnight, supports had been dragged into place at either end: square-section uprights of green-enameled steel, braced from four sides, bolted to wide metal bases, ready to assume the weight. Slots at the top showed where the horizontal beam of the spit would rest.
The big tent was up, sides pulled
back as teams of men carried trestle tables inside. It was spacious enough to house a circus, elephants and all. How many people did it take to eat an ox?
There was an atmosphere of the timeless. In another century, people like these—like us—had come here to watch a joust between armored knights, or a hanging, or the burning of a heretic at the stake, or to attend a Mass of celebration and thanks for a great victory, or a carnival, with beer and games and mimed plays, and dancing.
Just then, men turned and looked over their shoulders, laughing.
Marie-Dominique grinned. “Look at this.”
It was the blue cow I’d seen in the night. But now the upper torso of a man stuck out of its back, his feet hidden under the skirt. He wore a crimson tunic and waved a wooden sword as he capered awkwardly around the field, defying the solemnity of the moment, playing the fool. If you followed the design of the costume back a few centuries, you’d find the same figure in the world of medieval buffoonery, the Lord of Misrule. A rider in a similar outfit, known as a “hobbyhorse,” is part of the team in the English Morris, or Morrish, dances. Further back again and the man would be a real Moor, a North African like those who ruled Spain, and might, but for a few kinks of history, have conquered all of Europe. The farther you left the city behind, the nearer the past became.
Beyond the tents, a tractor engine coughed, then caught and roared in a throaty snarl.
Gushing a plume of exhaust into the cold air, the tractor crawled around the corner of the tent. On two cranked metal arms, lifted high in front of the cab—just as British tanks carried bundles of brush in the battles of 1917—rested the reason for our presence a thousand pounds of flesh and bone.
The metal barriers were pushed back. Nobody spoke as the tractor moved out into the open and jolted toward us over the uneven ground. We who leaned on the railings around the pit, enjoying the heat, stepped back and, in unison, turned toward the approaching machine and its load. There was awe in the air, an awkward reverence. The blue bull ceased his dance and lowered his sword. If he had come to mock the animal at the heart of the event, to brag of our power in vanquishing him, this was not the time.