A Short Walk from Harrods (10 page)

I assured her that I had not, but I had seen the goats, huddled together in a far corner of the field. She looked a little concerned, wiped her nose with the back of her hand.

‘You did not see my man? Doing the fence?'

‘No. Just the goats. In the corner. Watching me. There was
a sticker with a little yellow triangle, with a red zig-zag on it.'

She nodded happily. ‘
Ah! Bon! Exact.
He has done it. That is to show the fence is now electric! To keep the goats from my roses and from wandering into the road. Madame de Beauvallon drives like a maniac. If you are worried about my goats and the cheese I make, ask Dr Santori … he is the vet from town. He inoculates my goats. He knows them well, they are a pedigree herd. You mustn't be afraid of tuberculosis! No one gets it now, from goat cheese. You should speak with Dr Santori. You have your dogs, and one day soon you will have sheep' – a decision not a suggestion – ‘Your land
always
carried sheep. Three hundred. You have to have sheep to keep the land clean, in case of fire.'

I turned again by the pink and white cosmos to try and get on home. ‘I have two dogs, Madame, therefore sheep are out of the question.'

She came after me, tying the strings of her black pinafore round her waist. ‘Why? Two dogs? So?'

‘Ticks,' I said.

‘
Ah si.
Now Monsieur Labiche is a good friend of ours. He needs the grazing; he has a strong flock, three hundred head and some goats. I'll tell him that you don't need your grazing because you have dogs and because of ticks. He will be happy to oblige you, to save you the trouble of mowing and cleaning your land … and he needs the grazing so badly. He is a good man, from Feyance … I will have a word with my man when he comes in. Labiche is a good man, it is a fine herd. He will be very happy: and so will we. The risk of fire will be less if your land is grazed clean.'

‘
Ticks,
Madame. Three hundred head of sheep and some goats! How many ticks?'

‘Ah! You must lock your dogs up in a kennel while the sheep are here. We can arrange the time exactly when he brings them to you.' French logic.

‘I don't want them! We are cleaning the land very well with our German machines.'

She looked sad. She murmured something about Labiche and how honest he was and he would pay a reasonable amount, but I just went on up the path and closed myself out of her little garden. I waved.

Then, ‘Honey!' she called. ‘I have good, pure honey? It is from the broom and acacias! It is better for you than sugar. Take it in your coffee … for cooking … Tomorrow, when you come with the bag, I will give you a comb. My man has it every winter, with lemon, in hot water. He never has
la grippe.
Never.'

I called my thanks and picked my way – I was barefoot often in the summer – across the lane and up into my land, turned, waved a farewell.

‘Your garden is very pretty from here,' I called. ‘The olives are beautiful, they are laden …'

‘
Ah, si
… but tomorrow they go. Commençon is coming from Nice to take the wood.' She stood shading her eyes from the westering sun.

I stood frozen. To take the wood? ‘Why will they do that?
Take
the trees?'

‘My man has sold them. For the wood. Tomorrow you will hear the saws. It will be a lot of work but a lot of money …' She moved away, flapping at the dogs, calling, ‘
A demain!'

And the next morning the roar and whine of the saws filled the valley and the two giant trees which had
overshadowed her house for centuries were brutally felled. For the wood. Probably to make disgusting little pepper mills, bread boards, or mustard spoons and salad bowls. For tourists. Hundreds of years were destroyed in moments. For peasant gain.

The valley never looked quite the same again. And when I went down with the bag the next evening I walked, barefoot, through deep drifts of fragrant, moist, pink sawdust, past the two agonized stumps sticking out of the high bank. Country life.

However much one may desire to be quite self-sufficient, it really is not possible if you are running a smallholding, abandoned for years, and especially if you are a learner, which I most certainly was. By the time the terraces were cut, raked and stacked, the trees pruned (four hundred took rather a long time, and it is a specialist's job – which set me back financially at £10 a tree), logs split, dogs fed, fires laid, brambles hacked, invasive bamboo uprooted, a pond excavated and clay dug for ‘puddling', there was not much time left for cooking. One had to eat.

Forwood was good at cauliflower cheese and scrambled eggs. And that was his limit. I couldn't boil water but did manage to cut up kilos of cow's cheek to feed the dogs. This was easy. Mix with biscuits and a bit of boiled cauliflower stalk and they were contented. Which was more than I was after about six months of cauliflower cheese with an apple now and again. This was not thrift, you must know, exhaustion merely: there simply wasn't enough energy left to deal with cooking. Help was essential, and was sought from Florette Ranchett, who as usual knew just ‘the couple you
seek. Charming, in service for years,
select
and very discreet. They worked for the King of Sweden for many years, and latterly for Lady Brancraig down on Cap Ferrat.'

‘They are people you know, Madame Ranchett?'

‘No.
Pas du tout.
They were in here yesterday, asking for directions to a house beyond Le Foux … they were being interviewed for a situation.'

‘But …?'

‘Ah. The people are Belgian!
Quite
impossible! They are almost as bad as the Arabs. They are frugal and mean. It was unsuitable for them. I told them. I
know
the family at that house.' She shuddered. ‘They owe me three months' money … Why do I give credit! Why! For the village, of course. For rich Belgians, madness …'

Henri and Marie arrived for an interview with me three days later and stayed for five years. After which they retired but were still available to ‘house-sit' in an emergency.

They were, it must be confessed, a great deal older than they had claimed to be. Marie must have been in her early seventies but hacked off ten years, and wore a geranium-red lipstick and thick white powder to hide her wrinkles, making her look rather like a dried fig. Henri was probably older, and had dyed his hair a sort of sherbert yellow. I suppose, at one time, it had been fair.

However, they were clearly all that Madame Ranchett had said, and we all liked each other right away. Marie cooked extremely well but would do nothing else, except buttons and darning. Henri, on the other hand, was the house-man and would drive the car to get the marketing, and polish the floors and make the beds. Except that after a short, agonizing trial run with Forwood in the Simca Brake he was never
allowed near any machine again unless it was connected to a plug. Like the floor-polisher. He was quite incapable of driving anything. Except a hard bargain when it came to his ‘leave' every year.

But we all managed very well, and when, eventually, the time came for them to retire to their small flat down below in the valley, I went to Madame Ranchett again and sought her help. The only problem, and it honestly was not a real problem, was that with Henri and Marie we lost any chance of guest accommodation. Which didn't matter right at the start, but got a bit irritating as the years went on, and we had to farm chums out in the village in one of the not very attractive little hotels.

So this time it was decided that a daily lady was all we needed. Two hours a day, and we would cope with the rest.

Well, we got her. She was discovered by Florette Ranchett wandering round the shop one day, a small child on one hip, looking bewildered. She was Spanish, could speak scraps of French, but with signs and a certain amount of shrieking at each other it was established that she had just moved into the area (a small, neglected house by a junk yard) with a husband who had got a job at the local golf course, mowing the greens. She had no money, or very little, and that day wanted some broken biscuits or stale bread. She could, and did, pay for some milk.

Madame Ranchett called me to alert me and a few days later Soleidad arrived up the track on a sputtering mobilette, with her awful child strapped into a chair on the back, head lolling, dummy sprouting from dribbly lips. She came round the house with me doing a full tour. I showed her the fridge, the sink, the baths, the beds, the linen cupboard, the china
and all the rest. She was silent, feeling a piece of linen between thumb and forefinger here, weighing a glass there, studying a saucepan intently, opening and closing the fridge door time and again, apparently delighting in the light which sprang up each time she did so. I thought her to be one of nature's originals.

And she was. A gypsy from Granada with exceptionally bandy legs and a voice that could splinter granite. She nodded agreeably at everything I said in complete and total incomprehension, but when I said, ‘Okay?', she shrugged and nodded casually, and I wrote down the figure 9 and then 12, meaning the hours she might work. And she, taking my pencil in filthy fingers, laboriously wrote 8½ and 11½ and then made a sign by rubbing her finger and thumb together. I counted out what I felt I could afford in franc notes (Madame Ranchett had advised me), which she accepted with a cackle and a nod. Then she hitched the child on to her hip and wandered down the stairs singing lightly. At the front door she called out in her rasping voice: ‘
Mañana! Eh!'
And the deal was made.

She stayed with me faithfully and devotedly, for fifteen years, until the time came for me to leave. By then she spoke fairly reasonable French with a disastrous accent, and ran the house with a rod of iron, washed and cleaned and polished, kicked the dogs, and screamed and laughed and worked like a fiend. And grew, deservedly, rich. Her husband, Manolo, came up at weekends, a pleasant man with a hideous scarred face (carved up in a bar room brawl by broken glass) and a fearful squint so that one spoke to the good eye only, the one on the right. He was a good, kind fellow, useful at the olive harvest, changing plugs, pruning the cypress trees every season, and making himself generally useful. She was always
called just ‘Lady'. Le Pigeonnier functioned smoothly from their arrival onwards.

However, Lady did not cook. And on one occasion when she brought a dish of some wretched famished chicken smothered in rice and saffron as a gift, one was rather relieved. Everything she did was fine – except the cooking.

So, back to square one. An agreement was made: I would be the scullion, that is to say I would wash up, scour saucepans, lay tables, prepare vegetables, empty dustbins and so on, and leave Forwood to do the cooking. In time he moved uneasily, but successfully, far from cauliflower cheese and deep into pilaffs, risottos, soupe au pistou, ratatouille and all manner of other Provençal delights. Pots and pans were bought, knives of astonishing sharpness, mixing-machines, mincing-machines – an entire
batterie de cuisine
formed and I did the washing-up. It took me a very considerable time for the simple reason, as he patiently explained, that cooking was not easy, and that he was what is called a ‘messy cook'. That was true. After a simple gigot, flageolet, salad and cheese, it seemed to me that I had to wash up an ironmonger's. I could never understand really, why? If I made a mild protest it was quietly suggested that I take over. So I shut up … and we managed. But I know, I have always known, that I got the worst part of the bargain. And I had to trail off to the market every morning, sharp at seven, winter and summer, to be sure that only the best was bought for this Escoffier of the hillside. I also had to feed the dogs, but as I have said, this was not difficult, and they got better fed now that there was more variety in the green vegetables, not just bits of old cauliflower bunged in with the biscuits. In time, sadly, cheek became prohibitively expensive, and tinned muck came on the
market. Easier, cheaper, and somehow the dogs seemed less aggressive to strangers now that they were no longer fed raw flesh. Like bromide in the soldiers' tea, it seemed that tinned food rather took the fizz out of things.

Emigrating to France does not mean that one hurls about the place looking for a suitable house, buys it, moves in, and lives there happily ever after. There is rather more to it than that. You have to get permission to stay there. At least, you did in my time. France is not just ‘any old place', it's not somewhere that you can just dump your belongings and say, ‘Here I am.' To begin with, they are not all that anxious to have you. Unless, that is, you intend to return to the land you occupy something from which you have taken, like love, care and attention. I was prepared to offer all that, and more.

But I had chosen to live in a particularly sensitive area, the Alpes Maritimes, bordered with Italy, not far from Switzerland, close to Spain, too close to North Africa. Security was tight. The great hoards of unemployed Arabs from Tunisia and Morocco, the abject poor from Calabria, the drug-pushers, the smugglers of every kind of commodity you can name, would easily swamp the A.M. if not severely curtailed. The ritzy-glitzy crowd who swarmed to Nice and Cannes, played the tables in Monte Carlo, and rented, or bought, hideous villas in the hills were watched carefully, but they never stayed very long and fled at the first signs of inclement weather. Meteorological or political. The people who came to live, that is to live for good, were considered with caution and suspicion.

So, first of all, you had to get your
carte grise,
which permitted you to live in the area for three months. It was a
form of identification – your ID card, if you like – and as such, at an accident, a bank or any monetary transaction, always proved extremely useful. At least you knew who you were, so did they, and that in itself was a comfort. In Britain it would be, and it is, considered a breach of privacy. I can't think why. All you have to state is name, birth date, address and, I seem to remember, your mother's name and date of birth. Since
she
was always uncertain and, I feel sure, fibbed about that anyway, it was nothing I took very seriously. But I was pleased to be ‘on record'. There was a feeling of security. Don't ask me why.