A House in the Sunflowers (4 page)

C
HAPTER
F
OUR

We spent the next few months collecting things to take to Bel-Air at Easter. As far as possible we wanted everything to match the feel of the house. I scoured street markets and jumble sales for odd pieces of Victorian china and unstripped pine furniture which, at the time, one could still buy cheaply. As our only running water would be an outside tap we also needed buckets and washing-up bowls and, most important, a camping lavatory and tent.

We could, of course, cook in our van but I was delighted to find in a government surplus shop a large,
ex-army dixie. ‘Don’t get much call for these,’ said the assistant climbing up to reach it, ‘apart from the odd gypsy that is.’ I remembered that there was a hook and chain for just such a pot in my wide black chimney. We bought enamel water pitchers and flowered jugs and basins to wash in, reminding me of my country childhood. ‘Don’t forget to put the cold water in first or you’ll crack the basin’, I could hear my mother saying. We were excited at the thought of the primitive few weeks ahead and impatient for Easter to arrive.

‘Can I take Durrell?’ begged Matthew. We decided that the extra and precious space taken up by Matthew’s friend Durrell would be more than compensated for by his unfailingly cheerful company. The night before we left we packed our camper to the roof, packing and repacking it several times, each time squeezing in yet one more thing. We took two wooden armchairs, a small cupboard, rush matting, a step ladder and white paint, mattresses and bedding and, a last minute bargain at auction, a pine seaman’s chest with G. GUNN painted on the lid. How many journeys had that already made we wondered. The only spaces were two slits into which, letter-like, the boys were to be posted.

‘Crikey,’ they said. ‘Do we have to lie down all the way?’ We reminded them that we were to drive through the night but we promised to stop every two hours once it got light.

It was another wet journey. At Dieppe the customs men took one amused look at our crammed vehicle and waved us through. By three in the morning we had reached a deserted Chartres where we clambered out to stretch our legs, drank coffee in the lee of the great cathedral and gazed in wonder at the magnificent doorway with its serene, elongated figures. On we drove into the rain, joking about buying our house to enjoy more sun, but nothing could dampen our spirits as the wet slates of northern France gave way eventually to the red Roman tiles of the south.

In bar after bar – which sold, to the giggling delight of the boys, a fizzy drink called
pschitt
– we played innumerable games of
le foot
, a table football, which kept them happy. By late afternoon, weary but triumphant, we drove into M. Bertrand’s courtyard. Still it rained.

‘I see you’ve brought some English weather with you!’ he joked, emerging in waterproof cape and hat to hand us our key. As we drove slowly up the long track to the house, the mud spattering the white sides of the van, we leaned out, filling our lungs with the fresh, damp air, straining for our first glimpse of Bel-Air. As we climbed up to the last bend the wheels spun helplessly before finally getting a grip on the stones beneath the soft mud.

‘If this rain doesn’t stop soon this track will be impassable,’ warned Mike, but I was not listening.
There it was. Our house, but looking so sad and wet. The bun-faced builder was there with three workmen. I suspect that M. Bertrand must have warned them of our imminent arrival for they had just finished cementing the bedroom floors. The porch was piled high with all the old, rotten floorboards and joists. We looked slowly round the gloomy main room, so very different from our first view on that baking August day, while the rain dripped incessantly from the roof behind us in a cold wet curtain.

‘We’d better try lighting the fire,’ said Mike. ‘If the chimney’s not working it looks as though we’ll have to find an hotel.’ The boys protested and we all helped to lay a fire on the iron plate in the hearth. We broke up some of the old rabbit hutches in the earth-floored corridor and carried in the most worm-eaten of the floorboards. This was the moment of truth. Did the chimney work? The builders came to watch. There were a few splutters, a crackle and then a bright tongue of flame licked confidently upward and within minutes we had a blaze so glorious that we were backing away from the heat. We cheered, opened a bottle and felt ready for anything.

Once we had unloaded the van we could make up our bed but the boys insisted on sleeping in the house. They chose the smallest south-facing room with the garden door – at least it had no holes in the ceiling, other than those made by legions of woodworm. We
carried in their mattresses after putting down plastic sheets. They were cautioned about the candles, but they refused torches as not being right for the house. And so we spent our first night at Bel-Air – and still it rained. In the next few days, squelching across to the lavatory which was in six inches of water began to lose its novelty; but there was worse to come.

The moment I awoke on Easter Sunday morning I was aware of a change in the light. Sitting up to wipe a space in the steamed up window of the van I cursed as I clumsily overturned a glass of water. I need not have worried for the contents were frozen solid. Bewildered I looked out on a landscape covered in snow. We could only laugh as, clutching our Easter gifts, we later trudged across the slushy fields down to the farm where we had been invited to lunch.

How wonderful it was to be welcomed into that warm kitchen filled with the smell of good things to eat. They told us that snow was rare at any time and completely unheard of at Easter. ‘
Jamais! Jamais de ma vie
,’ cried M. Meligny, returning from his Sunday morning card game at the café where no one could remember such an event.

M. Bertrand, his children and his mother-in-law (
ma belle-mère
as he called her – how much more gallant a name) had all been to Mass and wore their Sunday clothes. Véronique handed round peanuts shyly as we drank our aperitifs – Pernod for the men, and
for the women, my first taste of the
Vin de Noix
, the home-made fortified wine flavoured with walnuts. In the inner kitchen Mme Bertrand and her mother, now wrapped in her usual flowered overall, scurried back and forth, cutting, stirring and sprinkling. Finally came the call. ‘
Allez! Allez à la soupe!
’ and a great tureen was carried in. Grandpa took the head of the table with M. Bertrand on his right. Mike was invited to sit on his left and I beside him. The children sat opposite each other wriggling in anticipation and Madame and her mother sat at the far end.

‘
Servez vous! Servez vous!
’ insisted Mme Bertrand.

‘Come on Mum!’ implored Matthew, and thus began the tradition that I serve the soup whenever I am there. In vain we warned the boys against taking second helpings. One bowl of the tasty chicken broth with noodles was swiftly followed by another. After the soup came an hors d’oeuvre of tuna fish, hard boiled eggs, potatoes and thinly sliced sweet onions in a creamy mayonnaise. The mounds of fresh bread at each end of the table were already gone and Mme Bertrand went to cut more before bringing in a dish of asparagus which she had bottled herself the previous season. ‘I’m afraid it is nothing like as good as when it is fresh,’ apologised M. Bertrand, dipping it in the vinaigrette, and eating three helpings.

Next came a shallow tureen with a delicate aroma. ‘What is it?’ the boys wanted to know.

‘
C’est ris de veau
,’ answered Madame proudly, ‘
avec olives et petit champignons de Paris
.’ She smiled as she watched them taste it and we wondered how they would get on with sweetbreads, but one trial mouthful of the succulent pieces in their rich sauce was all that they needed. Neither were conservative eaters; later that holiday they even tried roasted sparrow which Philippe shot, and they caught fish in our pond which they cooked on sticks over a camp fire. The French family watched with approval as they ate their way through plates of roast duck and
pommes forestières
. These were potatoes sautéed with garlic and
cèpes
– the highly prized toadstool found in the woods behind Bel-Air – and sprinkled with fresh parsley. After salad we were offered cheese. We had brought some English cheeses for them to try. Grandpa enjoyed the mature cheddar but the rest of the family clearly found it too strong, preferring the Wensleydale and the Double Gloucester.

With the first few courses we had drunk a dry white wine from Alsace but with the duck M. Bertrand produced a dusty bottle very much like the one that we had so enjoyed in November. Sure enough it was a vintage Cahors, and had been bottled by Grandpa some twenty years before. We sipped and savoured it with due reverence. For dessert Madame presented a large home-made rhum baba which she cut purposefully into ten slices, and while we were eating these I was
disconcerted to see the substantial Dundee cake which I had brought for them given the same brisk treatment. I felt that I would have to wait until I knew her a little better before I could explain the keeping qualities of a Scottish fruit cake. I had not thought of rhum baba as a French dish and I learned later that it was first introduced into France in the middle of the eighteenth century by Stanislas who, besides being the colourful king of Poland, was the father-in-law of Louis XV. It has remained popular ever since.

While Grandma poured the coffee Grandpa left the table to return with two bottles from which he offered us a choice of
eau-de-vie
made from plum or pear. This spirit was made on the farm by fermenting the fruit in wooden barrels. It was then distilled by the travelling still or
alambic
and it was so strong that I was glad that the glasses into which he carefully poured it were the smallest that I had ever seen. I noticed that neither of the women drank it and Mike finished most of mine. More to my taste was a delicious prune marinated in
eau-de-vie
which had been sweetened with sugar, and which had to be served into our still warm coffee cups.

This wonderful meal at last finished – it was by now past three-thirty – the children hunted for the Easter eggs which Madame had hidden. Philippe and his sister were intrigued with the English eggs filled with chocolate drops. I helped Madame and her mother to
wash up while the men sat talking – not a situation encouraged in my family but when in Rome…We were given a lift back up to our cold little ruin before it got too dark and loaded into the car with us were eggs, potatoes, onions, jars of jam and gherkins, wine and a lethal-looking scythe to tackle the waist-high brambles. It had been a marvellous Easter day in spite of the snow.

Mercifully the cold weather did not last and as the skies cleared the brilliance of the spring sunlight made us screw up our eyes each time we came out of doors. With the warmth came the wild flowers and the fields around Bel-Air were splashed with the sharp green and yellow of wild daffodils. White narcissi and vivid grape hyacinths glowed in the long grass. A cuckoo called confidently in the nearby wood, frogs in the now full-to-the-brim pond croaked in chorus night and morning and we could even hear the plaintive call of the peacocks in the garden of the château which, we were told, was just a few kilometres across the fields. We were simply too busy to go and look.

The wheat in the field at the back of the house (it was not to be maize this year) grew incredibly fast. The leaves on the ash trees began to uncurl. All this energy and activity exactly suited our mood and each time we came out of the house, on whichever side, we found ourselves saying ‘Just look at that view!’ It
became a joke, but after London the sense of space was like a miracle. On cloudless days the sun was already hot enough to sit in without a coat. This was what we had come for. Our only problem was that we could not afford the time to enjoy just being lazy, there was so much that we wanted to do indoors.

The children from the farm often came up to help us. We seemed to be an attraction. With Véronique’s assistance I cleared all the rubbish from the wide earth-floored corridor. In order to see we threw open the big oak door on the west side of the house and the strong breeze swung the thick cobwebs and the tattered shreds of linen bags of dried herbs, long since crumbled to dust. Véronique swept expertly with a besom, pressing the flat bristles into each corner like a rosy-cheeked Cinderella. Underneath yet more boxes and coils of rusty wire we found, set in the wall, the original, hand-hewn, granite sink and I determined to scrub it out thoroughly the next time we came.

As neither of the stoves in the main room worked we reluctantly moved them, chimney pipes and all, in order to clean the filthy wall behind them. There were only two lights in the house, both in the main room. One hung in the centre of the ceiling where, alas, the handsome original lamp had been and was no longer, and the other was a grimy bulb on the inside wall of the chimney which illuminated the fireplace. I cooked most meals on the open fire, burning up every single
floor board from the great pile in the porch. I sat on Anaïs’s special cooking chair with its cut down legs peering through the steam as I stirred my iron pot, my hair filling with wood smoke. My father’s ancestors were gypsies and perhaps the contentment I felt had something atavistic about it, even though I was indoors – just. If I glanced up the wide chimney I could see the sky!