Deep France (21 page)

Outside our classroom, everyone was deeply bored by this routine exercise in democracy, and expected Jospin and Chirac to emerge as the front runners. On the eve of election day, photo posters
of the candidates suddenly appeared on the notice board outside the
mairie
, with the key points of each manifesto printed below. On the day itself the country­side was utterly calm and
still, with only the constant drone of the tractors breaking the silence, until the dead of night, when the first news of the disaster was broadcast. Suddenly, taking advantage of the darkness, a
handful of Le Pen
supporters took to the lanes and drove around for a couple of hours, jubilantly sounding their car horns.

The next morning I got a flurry of emails from England headed
Achtung Baby
and
Seig Heil
, which I didn’t find too funny. The Béarn had awoken to find itself part
of a country that was halfway to fascism, and the region went into shock. For the first time, people asked me what I thought, and how people in England had responded to the result.
‘We’re worried,’ I said. ‘We have our own fascists and they are bound to be encouraged by this.’ It seemed an acceptable answer, allowing for some shared headshaking
and expressions of gloom.

Jospin had polled only 16.1 per cent of the votes, and so the final race for the Presidency was between Chirac, with 19.8 per cent and Le Pen with 16.9 per cent. On the television, sobbing
students, clutching handfuls of their pre-Raphaelite hair in despair, were interviewed outside the Socialist Party HQ. Le Pen was filmed at a rally of his supporters, unwisely leaping around a
thrust stage decorated with mock flambeaux, which made him look like an elderly demon capering arthritically in the mouth of hell.

Overnight, Le Pen posters appeared on a hoarding around a municipal building site in Saliès. The mayor immediately directed a workman to scrape them off, a task he performed with great
ceremony before the approving eyes of the whole town. A single graffito for the Front Nationale appeared on the bridge carrying the slip road to the motorway, and was officially painted out the
same day.

Jospin had carried only eight departments, seven of them in the South-West, so Gascony as a whole could hold its head up. The maps which quickly appeared in the local papers showed that the
Landes and the Gers were solid Jospin country. Our department, 64, had voted Chirac but
that, it was generally agreed, was only the fault of the Basques, who were notorious
diehard conservatives.

By the weekend, over two thousand students were on the streets in Pau, demonstrating against ‘hatred and racism’ with hastily hand-drawn placards and red-and-yellow Béarnais
flags. Naturally, a complement of Béarnais singers and musicians were among them, with an African drumming club to underline the mood of the meeting. Those who had voted for the minority
candidates openly blamed themselves for the disaster.

They soon had their own slogan: ‘first, second, or third generation – we are all the children of immigrants’. ‘That’s the end of the
bof
generation,’
said a more mature onlooker, meaning that none of the demonstrators would ever let themselves sink into apathy again. However, they went home in an orderly fashion, unlike the mob in Paris who had
to be dispersed by riot police with tear gas. The cops shouted, ‘
Ça suffit
’ before they fired, an exclamation normally heard from kindergarten teachers at the end of
their tether.

A Night on the Town

It was Gordon’s birthday, so a party of us convened at a local restaurant. It has an atmospheric little garden, a playroom with a TV for children, a reasonable menu and
an owner, Laurent, who makes up for all the rest of the miserable sods running restaurants in Gascony by his gentle, witty character. He’s gentle with the gypsies and the migrant workers as
well. As every other bar, cafe and eatery in the region had banned them, they were in there every night, which means that the only other customers were foreigners, tourists and people from out of
town.

‘Why does everyone hate the gypsies?’ asked Fiona.

‘People think they cause trouble,’ said her French friend, Françoise.

Elegant, cosmopolitan and an exemplary mother, Françoise was nevertheless as marginalized in her village. ‘I’m going crazy,’ she said bluntly. ‘I can’t wait
to leave.’ Her crime was to be temporarily without a husband. He is a world-famous maker of violin bows, and he had been head­hunted by an American orchestra. He was in a state capital in
the Midwest, setting up a bow-making school, and Françoise was waiting out the school year before the whole family went out to join him.

Perhaps Françoise’s neighbours didn’t believe this story. Or perhaps it never occurred to them that Françoise, on her own with two children under five, could stand a
little company from time to time.

Françoise therefore had no friends and neither did her children, except for Fiona, Cam and Margot. They met through the village school. Fiona was struggling to master French, but
Françoise was almost bilingual, and could explain the expectations of the French school system.

Whatever her age, a single woman hereabouts, whether divorced, widowed or simply never married, was expected to be content to devote all her time to her family, no matter how far away they might
be living. Women did not have friends, they had sisters-in-law and cousins. Women were not expected to have lunch or dinner together, they cooked for their families, and entertained women friends
for elegant little teas only. Women were not expected to have interests, except those passed down to them by their husbands. Even a discreet affair wasn’t likely; single Frenchmen over the
age of thirty were as rare as hen’s teeth and husbands preferred the safety of other men’s wives. The only men who took up with these dangerous creatures were the foreigners. Thus
Roger had not been lonely for long.

I soon appreciated the enormous leap of understanding which Robert and Marie had made in realizing the importance of the procession of friends who arrived at Willow and Tony’s house. The
idea of friendship, let alone of an urban family, was completely alien in this community, where life was conducted at home, behind closed shutters, the way it had always been, and no deviation was
accepted.

The other guests were two young English ex-pats, second generation now since they arrived here as children and went to the local schools. They too were both bilingual but they spent most of
their time with the English-speaking community, which was just big enough to keep them in work.

The evening did not start well. There were a bunch of men by the bar who were so pissed that they were acting like Charlie Chaplin playing drunk in a silent movie. Even Laurent was eventually
provoked to the point of asking one of them to leave. In the garden, the drunk turned and started to argue. Laurent, who had just taken our order, patiently stood his ground. Eventually Gordon and
his English friend, a huge young man of around 6ft 5in, went to see if he needed help.

The drunk then reeled out of the gate. Laurent came over to our table, not to thank his two supporters, but to tell them that their intervention really wasn’t necessary and they should
have let him sort the affair out by himself.

An hour or so later, when our food finally arrived, the men at the bar were getting noisier and more animated. One of them had rolled a gigantic spliff and sat smoking it, defiantly waving it in
the air between each puff. The rest were arguing among themselves.

The argument began to move, up the bar, down the bar, up the bar again. People began to wave fists. Suddenly, a big
man at the far end of the bar pulled out a pair of
pruning shears and slashed at the air.

The rest backed away, and the fight – it was definitely a fight now – spilled into the playroom. Fiona and Françoise, as one woman, screamed and leaped up to grab their
children.

The fight surged back up the bar, and now the man facing the hulk with the shears had a knife in his hand. When they saw it, all the rest of the women in the restaurant screamed, and their
menfolk, seeing a fine excuse to run out on their bills, began to get up and leave. Within sixty seconds we were out on the street, with the young Englishman carrying Margot and Gordon still in the
bar, standing beside the patron like a good Aussie mate.

After a while, the drunks spilled out into the street and staggered away, two of them to the camper van which seemed to be permanently parked outside the restaurant.

We collected up enough money to cover the bill. When Gordon finally joined us, we stuffed it into his hands to give to the owner, who then appeared, carrying a gigantic bottle of Ricard. With a
wan smile, he apologized for the ruined birthday, pressed the bottle into Gordon’s arms and refused to take the money.

Gardening News

I had artichoke plants. Three artichoke plants. I bought them as seedlings in the market in Orthez. They were only a few centimetres high, but growing so fast you could almost
see them bulking up by the minute. The wisdom of Monty Don warned me that I couldn’t expect an artichoke big enough to be worth eating in the first year, but, I reasoned, the climate round
here was much kinder than his
in Herefordshire and I might just be lucky.

I also had infant beans, peas, courgettes and tomatoes. The sweet peas had got their tendrils around their wigwam. I thought my vegetable garden was looking good, but my guests disagreed.

‘You’re letting the weeds take over. You’re not out there every day, are you?’ Penny C said, at 2 a.m., after dinner with Roger, who had been so entertaining that our
faces were stiff from laughing. In the morning, she went out and started hoeing. Within half an hour she was back, looking sheepish, having hoed the top off one of my artichokes. One down, two to
go.

To make amends, Penny put her skills as a wicker sculp­tor to good use and built me a bamboo screen to hide the compost heap. By now, this was a teeming hillock of bio-degradation, alive
with insects of every possible kind. The screen was much appreciated by the birds, who sat on it in dozens, taking their time in picking out the fattest beetles and the tastiest ants before
fluttering down to start feasting.

By the end of the month, the cicadas had started, churring away around the clock. Their sound, bringing memories of hot summer holidays, suddenly made Orriule seem glamorous and exotic. Soon
afterwards, the first bats appeared at twilight, swooping around the garden as soon as the sun started to set behind the acacia trees.

It was asparagus time. Was it ever asparagus time. Andrew and Geoff found that there was so much asparagus in their garden that they had to give it away, which, since it was
the green colour which the French despise and the British prefer, made them extremely popular even with people who startled visibly upon meeting a gay couple.

In the markets, the stalls were suddenly heaped with bunches of white asparagus, while the green was often just sold by weight from a great heap of stems. It was surprising to see the despised
green asparagus on sale at all – maybe people were only growing it because they’d always grown it, ever since the days of Eleanor of Aquitaine.

To the taste of the rest of Europe, the green asparagus which the English like has an overpowering flavour, makes your breath smell and has a nasty diuretic effect. The white asparagus, which
the English consider insipid, is achieved by blanching the stems, rendering them succulent and delicate.

It’s possible that class also creeps into the question because only the smallholders in the markets were selling green asparagus, while it was almost impossible to find in smart
greengrocers or in the supermarkets. It was, clearly, a peasant taste. And happily available at a peasant price.

To my mind, it is better to roast green asparagus than do anything else with it if you intend to eat the spears whole as a starter. The flavour is more intense, the texture just as
toothsome and the likelihood of getting the tips to the table intact is much higher with roasted asparagus than with the traditional poaching or steaming.

To roast your asparagus, line a roasting tin with foil and oil it liberally with a light olive oil. Rinse the raw aspara­gus, drain it and cut off the dried-out ends of the stems, evening up
the length of the spears in the process. Pile the asparagus into the roasting tin, sprinkling with coarse salt and more oil as you do so, cover loosely with another piece of foil and roast in a
medium oven for about 10 minutes. Serve hot or cold, probably with the aid of barbecue tongs, so useful for picking up unmanageable food.

The Belle Auberge in Castagnède served an exquisite starter made with asparagus in both colours, accompanied by herb-flecked spoonfuls of
greuil
. The name for this white, light,
very slightly sour dairy product is pronounced almost like the English ‘gruel’.
Greuil
is another peasant taste. It’s sloppier than
fromage frais
, thicker than
yoghurt and tarter than curd cheese, and much enjoyed in the Béarn and Basque Country, as is
caillé
, curdled sheep’s milk which is sweetened to make a satiny junket. In
this recipe, low-fat
fromage frais
, sharpened with a squeeze of lemon, would be a good substitute for
greuil
.