Deep France (37 page)

La Fête du Sel – and the
bandas
play on

Back to Normality

My leg was free at last. Dr Suleiman took off the splint and told me I could walk, drive and do whatever I liked. ‘Naughty little injury, isn’t
it?’ he said, looking at me diagonally through his half-glasses. He also ordered a new visitor to Maison Bergez, the physiotherapist, M. Duclos, who arrived with a jar of some wonderful gel
that smelled of lavender which he ordered from a herbal pharmacy in Paris, and started to massage my foot back into action. It took a while. All the bones, from ankle to toe, seemed to be
com­pletely fused and the blood vessels had not appreciated two months of inactivity. To walk, I still needed the help of one of the crutches.

I had been prescribed twenty-five physiotherapy sessions. Later I discovered that in the UK the NHS would have allowed me only six. ‘
Petit à petit
,’ warned M. Duclos.
‘This will take six months for you to walk normally and it will be a year before you can forget you ever did it.’ He was exactly right.

Suddenly I wished that I hadn’t taken quite such a satiri­cal view of one of the characters in
Heartswap
, the New Age con artist who hypocritically lectures the main character
about her lack of spirituality while all the time trying to seduce her fiance. M. Duclos, spotting one of the French editions of the book about the house, asked if he could borrow
it, read it in two days, but then accused me, with a pained look in his eye, of being a sceptic about alternative therapies. But at least he was interested to read the book. Even some
of my long-standing friends in England had never felt it necessary to read a book just because they knew the author.

Chloe was due back for a final three weeks of fun and revi­sion before the university term started. She still preferred the TGV to flying, even if the journey from Edinburgh by train took
nearly eighteen hours. I found a train that would take her as close as Orthez, and was able to drive over and collect her from the station. She was shocked to see me hobbling along with a crutch,
but a month of working flat out as a front-of-house theatre manager at the Edinburgh Festival had left her in much better shape than her end-of-year exams, and she was ready to enjoy herself.

A few days later, one of our cousins also arrived. Nicola comes from Toronto and went to university in Quebec, so she speaks Canadian French. I felt slightly validated in front of my neighbours,
being able to produce more than one member of my family. Since moving to London, Nicola had become an enthusiastically urban creature, favouring all-black minimal everything. She looked wonderingly
out of the car window at the medieval landscape around us.

The Béarn had suddenly returned to its normal, smiling, sun-kissed, sleepy self. The rain stopped and the rich, golden sun of early autumn blazed down every day. We had misty mornings
full of birdsong and glorious sunsets with churring crickets and whooping toads. The mountains reappeared as if some perverse magician had hidden them on purpose for the holiday season.

The garden was bursting with food. Finally, the vegetable world was winning, and producing fruit faster than the birds could eat it. On the three big fig trees overhanging the front hedge,
dozens of figs ripened every day, to the utter
delight of thousands of tiny birds who twittered ecstatically in the treetops as they stuffed their tiny beaks. They also left
copious purple droppings on my car. Henri Cat, now almost perfectly tame, had taken to sleeping on the car bonnet in the sun, and did not approve of this development, which forced him to pick his
spot with care before settling down for his morning nap.

The walnut tree, from which the hammock hung, started to blanket-bomb us with nuts. They were huge, some of them as big as small apples, with a blackened soft skin over the hard shells, so they
really hurt when they fell on your head from a great height – the tree, neglected for decades, had soared away to something like ten metres. The squirrel couldn’t keep up with the
bounty; not that I saw him, but I found dozens of scrapes in the lawn where he had frantically tried to bury some of the nuts before getting distracted by a fresh fall.

At the back of the house, the hazel bushes sprinkled the lawn with cobnuts and the apple tree, a puny, wizened, little thing of which I had had no hope of fruit at all, suddenly began to blush
with delicious red-skinned apples. We didn’t get to these fast enough, however. As with the cherries, the tree was stripped by canny birds, or maybe by my neighbours, the instant the fruit
was ripe.

Only my potager was less than the picture of abundance. The last tomatoes had rotted from the rain and fallen prey to the giant brown slugs. The courgettes were still flowering, but their leaves
were mildewed. Within a few days of the sun’s return, however, the mildew disappeared, and the plants began to set courgettes again.

The sweet peas were shrivelled and at the end of their tether, but my old-fashioned orange-pot marigolds were unstoppable and the dahlias were still luxuriant, though M. Lavie’s were
better. The last artichoke plant was finally
bearing flowers. Should I ever be lucky enough to grow artichokes again, I will remember to pinch off some plants to prolong the
flowering season. As a tribute, I decided to leave them to grow purple on their stems. The real triumph, however, were the Jerusalem artichokes, now huge green plants that were taller than I was,
bearing starry yellow flowers.

In Saliès, most of the tourists, with their terrible shorts and even uglier insistence on immediate pleasure, had gone, leaving a handful of steadfast walkers strolling curiously around
the town centre. These are the kind of visitors that Saliès seems to like. The crass invaders of high summer had simply filled everyone with irritation, and now they were gone half the town
slumped gratefully back into its enchanted slumber.

The underwear shop, which in June had suddenly pulled up its embroidered linen blinds and taken down the faded notice promising that it would reopen in April, decided to have an end-of-season
sale, and hung handwritten signs in its window proclaiming 50 per cent reductions on what remained of its stock. Where this stock came from, I could never imagine. The pink net bra with the
sequinned lotus blossoms on the cups, the green Tactel string bikini with the matching skirt, the orange lace boxers . . . no threat of a leading brand, no decorous lace from Lejaby, no neat little
bras from Cacharel, no workaday knickers from Dim. Obviously, the women of Saliès had a far more exotic intimate life than outsiders imagined. The sale was over in forty-eight hours and the
modest linen blinds came down again.

Most of the commercial enterprises now focused on ‘la Rentrée’, the start of the new school year. They took the souvenir mugs and bad-taste postcards out of their windows and
filled them instead with notebooks and geometry sets.

In the garden centres and the outdoor shops, however, the main event was the start of the hunting season on
1 September. Geraniums and grass seed were swept off the shelves
and their places taken by camouflage-print gun sheaths and thorn-proof jackets. Behind the till in Saliès’ favourite garden shop appeared a locked, glass-fronted cabinet selling
cartridges, flanked by a shiny new notice warning that ammunition could be sold only to adults over the age of eighteen and possessing an up-to-date hunting permit.

Everyone seemed to be obsessed either with hunting or with mushrooms. Benoit, the potter’s son, leaned out of his office doorway and promised to bring me some ceps. M. Duclos, the physio,
while he was massaging my ankle, told me about his trips into the mountains at the weekends, looking for mushrooms in all the secret places only he knew about. Since the weather was now glorious,
the mushroom hunters set off early every Saturday and Sunday, just as the skiers would as soon as the first snow was announced.

Catching the mushrooming spirit, I limped around my garden to see what might be springing up there, and found four or five inedible species and a group of white death-caps. This, the most deadly
mushroom in Europe, is a pretty little thing that looks like a fairy parasol, and I’d given it a cameo role in one of my earlier novels,
Harvest
, which has a long and lovingly
researched mushrooming chapter and a villain in need of a good death scene. Annabel was the only person in the department not suddenly fascinated by fungi. Having once left a cep in a plastic bag
too long, she was afraid of finding worms in them.

September 11

Andrew and I felt we would like to do something to mark the first anniversary of 9/11. We decided to go to the
pilgrim church of St André in
Sauveterre. There we found only a man and a woman washing the floor beneath the twelfth-century portal, which is carved with figures of Christ and the evangelists. There was no sign of any special
ceremony planned for later. Geoff, meanwhile, walked slowly with Otto towards the cafe with the yellow chairs, where we joined him after a few minutes. It was a very beautiful day, with brilliant
sunshine and clear blue sky reflected in the surging Gave. ‘I can’t believe I’m allowed to live anywhere so gorgeous,’ said Andrew.

Chloe and Nicola had gone to Bayonne, and reported that no special observances seemed to be planned there. The television showed us the ceremonies in New York, and the
Figaro
carried
the story as its second lead. It was good to be far away from the sanctimonious empathy that seemed to be the official line in London, but also ominous. Even here, the aftershocks of 9/11 touched
our lives in all kinds of ways. Most of us were quite literally poorer for it.

So much, perhaps, was to be expected. What made us sad were the signs that the integrity of our host community in France, that quality whose loss we mourned in England and which, more than any
pleasure, made us feel happy to live here, would soon be threatened by international political correctness. The Béarn had been a diverse society for centuries, but not in the flashy,
shallow, global manner that governments were now trying to impose. The Béarnais had no guilt to bear for the racial tensions of other regions of France. The community was kind to foreigners,
even if there were far fewer of them here than in the big cities.

Except for the two Moroccan women in Orthez and perhaps Dr Suleiman (I never asked), there probably wasn’t a Muslim within miles of Sauveterre. When the
Sud-Ouest
interviewed the
conductor of the departmental orchestra in Pau they asked him about music, not how he felt as an
African Frenchman. Nevertheless there were straws in the wind, small signs that
official thinking would soon be trying to cow this innocent community into feeling guilty just for being white and Christian.

We looked on these developments with alarm, because by now we’d worked out that the sense that life in our corner of France was somehow more real and authentic than our lives in London
derived partly from the elements of shared European heritage that had been preserved here. It felt almost as if we were living in the gene bank of our ancestors’ culture, a Noah’s Ark
of our own vernacular traditions.

The landscape, created over centuries of harmony between people and nature, allowed us to feel both the power of the elements and the reassurance that man could harness them. The architecture,
from the ruined castles to the tumbledown cottages, evoked the fairy stories that were part of our identity. The cycle of the year, marked by ancient festivals and by the Christian calendar, left
us feeling more comfortable with life than the undifferentiated days of toil in the city. The songs, the dances, the legends and the mythology which we enjoyed were all continuing traditions,
forces which connected people to each other, to their past and to their environment.

We had discovered in ourselves a buried nostalgia for this culture, which our own country had once shared but had long ago destroyed. I remembered, sadly, a conversation with a gifted arts
administrator working in the West Country, who bemoaned the ‘monocultural’ nature of her region and saw no benefit in supporting anything rural. Andrew identified a real sense of envy
for the traditions and pastimes of the Béarnais. ‘I don’t care about hunting,’ he said once, when the debate was hotting up in Westminster again. ‘I don’t care
about foxes or toffs in red coats or any of it. But I do care that people want to ban it, because it’s part
of my heritage and my past and I don’t like people
thinking they can just take that away.’

La Heste de la Sau

The season of
fêtes
continued without a break. The big one came in the middle of September, le Fête du Sel, or, in Béarnais, la Heste de la Sau, the
salt festival in Saliès, the Béarn’s event of the season. It was to last four days.

From the Thursday, the cafes on the market square began to put up extra bars on the street. Workmen appeared with pick-up trucks loaded with small acacia trunks; it’s a very hard and dense
wood that burns badly but the branches grow very straight and an acacia sapling or six make the perfect framework for a temporary bar. In a few hours, the bars had been roofed with pine and
plastic, then decorated with palm leaves or green bamboo, ready for the first gathering, a low-key soirée in one of the public rooms, followed by a concert of Béarnais songs. The
transformation reminded me of my home town of Hammersmith getting ready for the Boat Race. Suddenly this decorous, sleepy little place was turning into a major party venue.

Every householder had apparently been gardening by stealth in his or her back yard, because suddenly every balcony and window sill was gaudy with begonias and busy lizzies as the residents
brought their brightest blooms out to the public side of their houses. The shops and cafes were hung with medieval banners and paper flowers. Small groups of young people sat around the ancient
bridge and the municipal fountain and practised strange musical instruments, a mandolin, a hurdy-gurdy and a set of bagpipes.

On the first big day, the Saturday, a market of regional
produce took place and stallholders from all over the department arrived at dawn, set up their tables and their
canopies and laid out their wares. You could buy anything from a hand-loomed, hand-dyed, pure mohair stole to a damn fine sausage. The cafes lowered the steel shutters which we’d never seen
before and had probably been installed during World War II, and transferred their service to the temporary bars outside.