Celestine (37 page)

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In the eighty-odd years that separate Georgette's birth from Célestine's, the village ostensibly changed out of all recognition. It would be tempting to accept the view of all those inclined to say that after the Great War, with the tarmacking of the roads and the rumours of electric light, modernity and rural decline set in – were it not for all the evidence that in the 1920s and '30s village life continued to flourish and even expand, benefiting rather than otherwise from the technical and social advances. There were more shops than ever in Chassignolles: two bakers; five grocers, including one in Vallet and Jeanne Aussourd's old house with the tower; several dressmakers, three tailors, and three blacksmiths. No garage as yet, though the war had advanced the petrol engine. The first open-topped country motor buses began to trundle around the Lower Berry; when Chassignolles held another spring
fête
in 1920, eight years after the famous, rain-drenched Cavalcade, a special shuttle service was laid on between there and La Châtre.

Yet much of the work in the fields was still deeply traditional and, in the nostalgic words of a man now old, ‘the horse was always with you for company'. Although the reaper-and-binder and the mechanical thresher were now in general use, farming remained a labour-intensive occupation. Indeed, even the most up-to-date threshing machine, powered by a traction engine, required a team of at least fifteen men, sweating from sun-up to sun-down in the noise and the flying chaff. At the other end of the cycle, fields were still regularly sown by a trudging man who scattered seed rhythmically to either side from a pouch at his waist. Indeed I have seen such a Biblical figure myself in the Chassignolles fields, surviving into the 1970s. Between the wars three mills in the Commune were still in regular use, grinding locally produced flour and animal fodder. And domestic life in the farmhouse ran, as ever, on wood chopped by hand for fires or stoves that had to be lit at dawn before any coffee or soup could be heated. All water was still laboriously drawn from wells; piped water did not come to Chassignolles till the 1960s, amazing as that seems today even to the younger generation of rural French. A domestic electricity supply had arrived in La Châtre in 1921; by the end of the decade it had made its way to Chassignolles, hampered by the usual deliberation on the part of the municipal council who wondered at length if ‘the sacrifice' – financial – ‘would be commensurate with the advantages'. Many of the farms, in any case, scorned ‘the line', continuing to use the paraffin lamps that had seemed in their turn such a modern and luxurious amenity at the end of the previous century. Madame Démeure, growing up in the village shop that she was to inherit, remembers that fifty-litre vats of paraffin were kept in an adjacent store house, a focus for constant anxiety about fire, and that, ‘especially in winter, people would come in for their five
sous
of the stuff, making all sorts of excuses, just as we were trying to shut up shop. And each time you gave some out you had to wash your hands again in case the smell of it got on to the sugar or the flour.'

When a lighting circuit did eventually creep round most of the farmhouses, people who had grown up with lamps tended to use electricity sparingly, as if it were an unnecessary indulgence. Still today many of the elderly have this view; they are apt to sit, chat, cook and even eat in near-darkness, or by the fire's glow, and only turn on a weak bulb if impelled to by the need to sew, read the paper – or by the arrival of a visitor. People such as the Bernardets and the Bonnins have lived out lives in which the assumptions and expectations of their forebears have remained largely intact, adjusted a little to accommodate modern inventions but not fundamentally changed. The farmhouse kitchens in which they live are still furnished with the oak tables, benches, carved cupboards and cane-seated chairs of their grandparents. No question of a padded armchair, or even a rug. Only the white china-clay sink in a corner, the wood-burning stove lodged in the one-time open hearth and the prominent fly-paper indicate that we are in the twentieth century; only the large fridge and deep-freeze rumbling to themselves in an adjacent lean-to speak of the present day.

Nothing has been taken for granted, and the loss of older comforts – the self-contained and all-providing life of the village in the days before cars – is not readily accepted either. Georgette Bonnin is not one to complain of her lot, but she has been known to remark that the day's work has seemed particularly long and hard when she and her brother have had to turn out in the middle of the preceding night to help with a calving cow in difficulties elsewhere in the Commune.

‘It was him over at Les Girauds. There used to be five different people keeping cows there and at Le Flets once, and now there's only him. He had to call us out because he hasn't a neighbour there who'd have known how to help. As I said to René, at least we had the car to get over there … And what would the poor man have done without the telephone?'

‘Well, but Georgette, I think it's partly
because
of cars and telephones and all the rest of modern life that everyone doesn't keep cows now.'

But Georgette was not convinced. She couldn't see how people could be happy to drink nothing but shop-bought milk: it didn't taste right. It was like the water in the tap, with goodness knows what in it, not being as good for gardens as the water in the well. She mourned all those other people, keeping cows, pasturing goats by the roadside, tending scraps of vineyard, filling every house in the Commune, running tiny subsistence businesses in sheds and stables: people who just, mysteriously, weren't there any longer. Equipped from her earliest years with the sophisticated skills needed in a restricted society to get on with everyone without encroaching on their individuality or letting them encroach on hers, she now finds these skills discounted. Their value is lessened in a society fragmented by population decline, extended education, commuting to Châteauroux, television, washing machines, consumerism, package holidays and the questionable belief that individual happiness is a human right and progress is the natural order of things.

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The smithy was the traditional gathering place for the men of a village, which is no doubt why a café was so often kept by the wife of the smith. The women got together at the stream where the washing was done. You could be safe there from male interruption, and the fact of literally washing dirty linen in public furthered confidences. It was where the yearnings of the childless were expressed and also the forebodings of others about inopportune pregnancies. Some women in every village specialized in solving such problems and, as an elderly woman has put it to me with nervous succinctness, ‘recipes were passed round'. It seems all of a piece that in the myths of the Berry the spirits of women who had destroyed their children, born and unborn, were to be seen at night by the streams frantically trying to wash away the evidence.

By the 1920s the streams had usually been embellished or superseded by a
lavoir,
a purpose-built, roofed shelter with stone or concrete slabs for beating linen, a cistern and drainage runnels. Now the relics of these Lavoirs are solitary places, choked with nettles and brambles, turned into duck ponds or pigsties. They seem in themselves memorials to inconvenience, to unremitting female drudgery, but when they were installed around the end of the last century or the early part of this one they were regarded as a substantial modern improvement. As late as 1922, Louis Pissavy-Yvernault was offering a new one to the village – a generosity that may have been partly influenced by the fact that he already had one on his own land which was supposed to be for the use of his staff and the home farm, but which was used unofficially by half the village.

It is this Lavoir at the Domaine that figures in Adolphine's school drawing book of the early 1900s. A tank drawn square, as if seen from above, shows more clearly than a perspective drawing could a row of stone slabs, each with a scrubbing board and a couple of miniature women at work. By their sides are microscopic bags tied with string. Other women, reverting to horizontal representation, hang on lines between trees rows of long pants, stockings and linen monogrammed ‘B-C' – the combined initials of Adolphine's parents. In the foreground, other linen displays more elaborate embroidery based on the same initials, all drawn with mouselike Tailor-of-Gloucester precision.

Madame Démeure remembers the Lavoirs well, but her image of them is less refined. The little muslin bags, she said, held either blue dye to ‘bring up' the whites, or the wood ash in which the linen was previously boiled. This was simply collected from the family hearth – ‘When we were children, we were always told, “Don't put anything but wood on the fire.” No food scraps, because that spoilt the nice clean ash for the washing. For a long time after I began to stock packets of soap powder in the shop, old people would go on calling what was in the packets “wood ash”.' The linen was boiled at home, then taken to the Lavoir for copious rinsing. The Dédolin-Démeure family, living in the centre of the village, took to using the newly built Lavoir that straddled a small brook some two hundred yards down the road, but it seems to have been less of a modern improvement than had been hoped.

‘It was all right in spring and autumn, but in summer when the brook got low the water in the tank was stagnant. Sometimes you had to rinse the cloths all over again at home in well water to get rid of the smell. And in winter the tank used to freeze over – you had to break the ice on it. The river never froze and it always smelt sweet, so I really preferred taking the clothes there.'

The ‘river' was the tributary of the Vauvre whose bridging, on the road to Crozon, had caused the Council lengthy deliberations some fifty years earlier. It was over half a mile from the village. ‘Two or three of us used to get our bundles together and take a cart to trundle it down. The donkey we used to have was afraid of water, so we always had to stop a hundred metres short and hump it the rest of the way – you can't force a donkey, it just doesn't work! But bringing the stuff back was the hardest work, because your hands were very cold by then and sore with it.' Madame Démeure laughed gaily, not so much at the memory as at the impossibility of encompassing within one frame of reference that girl with bare hands in the icy river and the old woman in a kitchen full of white machines that she had become.

The Lavoirs were the site of other dramas beyond ice-breaking, chilblains and discussions on the female uses of slippery elm bark. Georgette Bonnin recounted a poignant memory, from her childhood in the 1930s, of a woman at the Lavoir. Bernardette N (as I will call her) had a kind husband and two small children, ‘but used to talk a lot about death. One day, as she stood at her scrubbing board, she gave a big sigh and said: “I don't like to think of anyone washing me when I'm gone. I'll do it myself beforehand.”

‘“Tch, tch,” said the women on either side of her. “You mustn't think like that, a young woman like you.” But she went home and killed herself.'

‘… Well, I couldn't swear, to be honest, that it was that very day she killed herself, or even the next, but it was soon after: that's why everyone remembered so clearly what she'd said. And
I
remember it too, because she did it with mole poison. Well, what you gave someone who'd swallowed that poison was goat's milk, to stop it burning up their inside. So when he discovered her and knew what she'd done, Pierre N came running down here for milk. Of course we gave him all we had. But it was no use, she died anyway.'

Monsieur N, another of those survivors of the Great War like Georgette's father, brought up his children and never remarried. (‘It hit him very hard, what she did. He'd done his best.') When we first bought our own house in Chassignolles he was a neighbour; he took a benign interest in our first attempts to build a porch, encouraging us with cuttings of wistaria from his own garden, which would not for some reason grow in ours, and with Virginia creeper which grew all too well. He used to address my husband, then about forty, as
‘jeune homme',
so my husband politely adopted the same mode of address to him. After that, he seemed to visit us mainly for the pleasure and amusement of being called ‘young'. His wife lies in the cemetery, where he followed her some fifty years later. There is no mention on the memorial slab of the nature of her death and I expect that the Curé avoided all reference to it.

In the same way, on the not infrequent occasions when the Lavoirs themselves served for death by drowning, local newspapers were at pains to report that it could have been accidental. An unmarried female servant of fifty-one, who died in the new Lavoir in January 1923, shortly after it was opened, comes into this category. So does the man who was found in the same Lavoir only four months later. In his case the paper particularly stressed that he had been engaged in pasturing his cows in that field at the time and that ‘any idea of crime or suicide has been ruled out. The death of Monsieur S was accidental.'

Monsieur S. It was not till some time after I first noted this that I realized that Bernardette N's maiden name had been S. Her remark at the same Lavoir a dozen years later appears in a clearer light. A suggestion of a family pattern emerges, a fatal predisposition transcending individual circumstances in a world where all lived at the same rhythm, subject to the same hardships, but in which the occasional person was unaccountably ‘not like other people'. Today, as yesterday and a hundred years ago, an apparent suicide does not happen on average every year or even every five years, but it still occurs often enough to form part of the accepted nature of the human condition. ‘Traditionally,' as one local friend laconically put it to me, ‘they hang themselves, hereabouts.' But the country-healer and fortune-teller who bought the house by the cemetery in the 1970s died with his shotgun in his mouth, on the well-appointed day he himself had long identified – a circularity of destiny which disquieted the village and seemed to defy the usual analyses.