A House in the Sunflowers (7 page)

The list of things for Easter ’78 grew ever longer. In exchange for the original furniture in Bel-Air we had agreed to bring out, the next time we came, anoraks and sweaters for the children and a Black and Decker drill, all much cheaper in England. We planned and measured. Where could we put a bathroom when we could afford it? What about the kitchen? Washing up in a plastic bowl on a sloping camping table had lost its appeal. Should we make the small south-facing room off the main room into a kitchen? We could not decide.

‘Think about it,’ said M. Albert, the plumber, ‘and let me know when you come again next Easter.’ At that
moment Easter seemed an awfully long way ahead.

We closed the rickety shutters, just another thing that needed repairing, and we locked the door. Bumping down the track for the last time we hung out of the windows to get our last glimpse. Strange, we never did this when we left London.

‘
À la prochaine fois!
’

C
HAPTER
S
IX

Easter the following year was early and cold but there was no snow. We spent many hours collecting firewood, there being, alas, no floorboards left to burn. Now we understood the neat woodstacks adjoining local houses. Fortunately Matthew and Durrell enjoyed dragging dead trees from the wood and sawing them up. They whittled sticks to make individual, decorated toasting forks. These normally centrally-heated youths were endlessly fascinated by the great open fire.

The house was full of vases of wild daffodils and Grandma had planted the yellow washing-up bowls
with great purple pansies. We cleared the straggly hazel hedge which obscured our view up the meadow from the front door and I began to dream about a terrace on the opposite, south-facing side of the house. This became my special project but, due to sheer incompetence, it took me several years to finish. The preliminary clearing of the ground was made difficult by stubborn lengths of old chicken wire embedded in the soil. It seemed probable that this was where Anaïs’s poultry had once scratched and squawked and each time I thought that I had removed the last tenacious piece, another buried end taunted me. The clean sweet air and the view which greeted me each time I straightened up kept me going.

The debate continued about where to put the kitchen. Now that the other two bedrooms were habitable, should we make use of the small, low-ceilinged room which adjoined the main room? We might, perhaps, knock through a hatch, or even remove the upper half of the wall completely. We simply could not decide and eventually we did nothing. Just inside the front door where, after scraping the green lichen from the wall to paint it, we had first installed the cooker, became the kitchen’s permanent place. The ever-open door provided an extractor and all we needed now was a worktop and a sink.

We consulted M. Albert the plumber. Yes, it was possible. The long runaway out to the septic tank
which we had thought might be a problem did not seem to bother him. As he pointed out, the floor of the corridor was still earth. We chose a large, plain white china sink and M. Albert recommended a carpenter to build us a pine surround. A kitchen corner began to take shape. I felt that in a holiday home where all were encouraged to help, a separate kitchen was not a good idea and I had noticed that most of the simple local homes into which we had been invited were so arranged.

M. Brut, the local
menuisier
or carpenter was clearly impressed by Mike’s rough designs for two wall cupboards and a worktop. ‘
Pardi!
’ he exclaimed, switching off his saw and brushing the mountain of wood-shavings off his desk to clear a space.
Pardi
, an archaic corruption of
Par Dieu
– By God – is one of M. Brut’s favourite expressions. He also undertook to replace those of our shutters which were beyond repair and when we returned that summer we were delighted to find all the work completed.

What joy to wash up under hot running water! One of the bonuses of having lived so primitively in the beginning was the enormous pleasure at each improvement. The pine cupboards and surround were, like M. Brut himself, handsome and solid, the long ornamental hinges were very French and, most important of all, the cupboards were totally
mouse-proof
.
Et voilà
, a kitchen corner. In fact most of the
preparation of food is done out-of-doors, sitting on the porch or in the sun. The only thing we had not bargained for was M. Albert’s unfortunate positioning of the water heater. With about eighteen feet of wall to choose from he had fixed it right beside the original hand-hewn granite sink that we had uncovered. Its handsome edging stones were now partially obscured by a modern multipoint that would clearly at some time have to be re-sited, but I consoled myself with hot soap suds.

As it was now not needed for a kitchen we thought again about the small, low-ceilinged room which faced south. One hot morning after breakfast we stood looking up at the badly worm-eaten false ceiling of tongued and grooved pine. Were the worms still active? Was it worth treating? We wandered out into the wide earth corridor behind it and looked up. There, at least two feet higher, were the original oak boards and massive beams which must surely run across above the worm-eaten pine. We looked at each other and, as with most jobs that we have done ourselves at Bel-Air, the decision was mutual and, once voiced, instantly begun.

Down came the dusty slats. Leaves, cobwebs, mouse and bat droppings filled our hair and eyes but, as we had hoped, we uncovered the original boards and beams. Gleefully we worked all morning, carrying out the worm-eaten slats to form a welcome stack of
firewood. The plaster on the exterior wall of the room was loose and crumbled away as we brushed against it. We realised that it was simply a crude earth mixture that would have to come down at some time and we were in a demolition mood. We had a ten minute break for food (how un-French!) and then began, gently at first, to knock away the earth.

What excitement! The floor was soon covered with dry clods and through the choking dust we could see the wonderful stones emerging. They were far too handsome to be plastered. We could have them cleaned and leave this wall in
pierres apparentes
as it is called. The joins between the stones we would fill with a light-coloured cement and leave the stones proud. Once begun it was compulsive. All afternoon we worked, dragging the rickety ladder from the barn to supplement our small stepladder. There were far more urgent tasks waiting but we did not care. When the wall was almost finished we heard Raymond chugging up the track. He switched off the engine and wiping the sweat from his eyes climbed down from the tractor. ‘
Viens, viens!
’ we shouted. His face made me laugh aloud. His mouth dropped open as he gazed alternately up at the ceiling and down to the chaos on the floor.

‘
Mais…qu’est-ce que vous faites
?’ he cried, his dark eyes round as marbles. It was plain that he considered us quite mad but did not like to say as much.

By now we had seen that the pattern of the stones continued on the other side of the newer, thin wall which divided this room from the bottom of the staircase, and would extend to the original window with the iron-studded door above it. We explained that we thought of moving the interior wall back to include this window with its hand-cut stone opening and transom. Raymond nodded gravely. ‘
Oui, la fenêtre est jolie. Elle est tellement ancienne
.’ He looked suddenly relieved. Perhaps these English were not entirely crazy.

Needing something with which to clear the floor I looked up the word for wheelbarrow. I followed him to the barn where he unearthed for me the oldest wooden barrow I’d ever seen. He smiled as I tugged at the handles. ‘
C’etait avec celle-là que Anaïs faisait ses commissions au village
’, he said. It takes me fifteen minutes at least to walk to the village shop and it is downhill all the way. I imagined having to pull this barrow, loaded with shopping, back up the bumpy track and I was once more humbled by the hard life of my predecessor. I longed to know more about her.

I felt her presence strongly, there were so many of her things still in the house. In the drawer of the sideboard which she had polished I found her rusted needles in a wooden case, dusty spools of thread, worn wooden spindles and dozens of rolled up strips of material torn from shirt tails. The boys, imagining
they might contain treasures, unrolled a few but they were simply scraps for patching, a sign of her poverty and thrift.

As she had promised, Grandma had brought me the photograph. Anaïs must have been in her early thirties when it was taken. A strong, handsome woman in a dark dress and white cap she stands protectively behind a sturdy boy of about twelve years, who is holding a hoop. Was this taken before he caught polio or was it just a thoughtlessly cruel photographer’s prop? They look confidently enough into the camera, unaware of the tragedies to befall them; a sad contrast with Raymond’s description of the last days of a frail and bed-ridden, ninety-two-year-old Anaïs and her semi-paralysed, reclusive and elderly son. I had the photograph copied and now they hang beside the sideboard where I feel they belong. After all, Anaïs lived at Bel-Air for over fifty years.

As I now turned on my tap for unlimited hot water I thought about the tiny water compartment in Anaïs’s stove that we had removed. I imagined her chopping the sticks to light it, as my own Mother had done on those far off Monday wash-days of my childhood. (I remembered too the mad scrambles to unpeg everything when the first shout of ‘raining’ was heard across the back gardens.) Here the washing dries so quickly. I stretched a line from Raymond’s barn to the ash tree and nothing smells sweeter than clothes dried in a hot
sun and a strong wind blowing across flower-filled meadows.

Of course, it does rain here. On such a day when I had been finally driven from the garden by heavy squalls at twenty minute intervals, I remembered Anaïs’s battered cardboard hat box which we had found in the attic. It seemed a good moment to take a closer look at the contents. My French was improving for I had found a course at Morley College and had gone right back to the beginning with a very young and equally fierce Mme Rousseau whose teaching methods were, to me, a revelation. Simple but amusing texts, the dramatising of scenes transposed from one tense to another, extracts from current magazines and newspapers, poems by Prévert and songs by Brassens, and the severity with which she corrected us in the language laboratory kept me enthralled. It is due to her hard work and the later inspiration of Madeleine Enright and Georgette Butler, also at Morley, that I have at last progressed to the joys of Flaubert and Victor Hugo, Molière and Anouilh. But I still make idiotic mistakes and would dearly love to be truly bilingual.

Almost the first thing I opened, after I had dusted everything in the box and shaken out the mouse droppings and dehydrated spiders, was Anaïs’s school reader. A ‘new’ edition of
La Petite Jeanne
published in 1876 with her maiden name ‘Anaïs Mauriac’
laboriously written inside. Although tattered it had not actually been chewed by mice as had so many of the letters beneath it. Blessed and approved by no less than a cardinal, an archbishop and three bishops it is, as one might expect, the most moral of tales and yet has a simplicity that reminded me of Flaubert’s
Un Coeur Simple
. It is Jeanne’s story from early childhood to the grave and the four sections into which it is divided, childhood, in service, wife and mother, and widowhood, prophetically chart the life of Anaïs herself and, I imagine a great many other girls of that time.

It is illustrated with charming engravings, and Anaïs had clearly read and re-read it, absorbing its moral and practical precepts. She had glued a strip of flannelette down the spine to hold the fragile, muchfingered pages together. As I began to read I was amazed by the scores of household hints woven into the story and the tips on animal husbandry and crop rotation. There is a passage describing the astonishment of the village women at the way Jeanne looks after her children; ‘
Comme s’ils étaient les enfants de bourgeois!
’ Because they are peasants should they be dirty? is her reply, explaining that each night she folds their clothes before laying them in a chest and at mealtimes ties a napkin round their necks. Growing flax she spins cloth which, in hard times, keeps her out of debt. On the last page of the wife and mother section, are the words with which the Curé tries to comfort Jeanne
on the sudden death of her husband. ‘
Ma fille, comme c’est la volonté de Dieu que vous soyez séparés, il faut bien s’y soumettre
.’ There was something written in the margin in faint pencil and I moved to the window to try to decipher it. I felt her presence very close at that moment as I read what Anaïs, a widow at fortyseven, had written in her school reader which had clearly served her for so many years. ‘
Mort de Justin
’ was the simple statement.

The following week M. René, the
maçon
, came up to advise us on enlarging the small room with its bare stone wall and newly exposed beams. Yes, it was certainly possible to move the modern, interior wall, in fact he would recommend it as it was none too stable. He became quite excited at the thought of including the ancient window and suggested that we might also move the other wall back some three feet into the corridor, thus making a splendid main bedroom. The narrow space remaining beyond the window was now taken up solely by the crumbling staircase which would, in any case, need replacing. But did we really need a staircase? With three large bedrooms on the ground floor and the possibility, at some stage, of converting the
chai
, the attic would seem to be of more use as storage space. In that case a loft ladder would do and the staircase area could be used for a bathroom.

A bathroom. What a wonderful thought. The pleasures of a long, hot soak after hours of
back-breaking
work came nearer when we discussed our plans with M. Albert. He also suggested that while he and M. René were at it, they might build an indoor lavatory in the space at the far end of the corridor. Two lavatories. Heaven. But we still prefer the one with the view, as does our first friend to arrive that summer, the poet, Anthony Saville White. A firm friend since student days, king of puns, word-spinner and enthusiast, he was moved to write a series of verses while gazing, seated, admiring the sweep of meadow up to the woods beyond.