Au Revoir (19 page)

It's quite late when Chicken Gerry takes to the stage and starts to play, but the peculiar brand of French-style Irish country music, featuring electric fiddle and guitar, is terrific. Before long half our table is dancing a wild jig, with the beer and cabbage swirling around inside. After an hour or so of this frenetic bopping my stomach feels fit to explode its deadly contents and for once I am defeated, making my way home well before midnight.

One of the most popular summer activities is the circus, which spends four months travelling through the southwest, setting up in a new village square every second day. There are two or three troupes, and the one that visits our region is ominously
called ‘Albatross Circus', although it has a fine wagon train of modern trailers and caravans. The big top is impressive too, and also quite new, giving the appearance of an extremely slick and professional outfit. They arrive in Villefranche early one Sunday morning and tie their animals up in the triangle of grass that marks the entrance to the village. There are two midget horses, several goats, a donkey, a dog and a llama. The posters have been up for several days, advertising a starting time of 9 pm, which seems to me rather late to be taking small children to the circus. The tent goes up in the small square outside the post office, along with a drink and food caravan and a ticket booth. I saunter along at 8.30 and feel alarmed to see few people and little activity. A storm is threatening and I am concerned that it's going to be a flop. Eventually, at about 9.15, dozens of families with children of all ages start to arrive, and the circus members eventually begin selling tickets. It's close to ten o'clock by the time the show gets underway. The Hollywood-style circus music blasts from several loudspeakers and the performers enter the ring.

There are two men, a youngish woman and two children—a boy about fourteen and I presume his young sister who looks about nine. She is blonde, very pretty and dressed in colourful leotards. One of the small horses, with feather plumes attached to its head, opens the show. The taller of the men, in clown costume, stands in the centre of the ring and the horse, attached to a long rope, canters around the ring about twenty times. The horse prances into the centre and lifts one of his front hooves into the air, receiving wild applause. He repeats this sequence three or four times, each time ending with the cute hoof-in-air finale. More applause. A large drum is brought into the ring and
the small horse somewhat reluctantly places his two front hooves on the top of the drum. He then lifts one hoof into the air and the crowd goes wild.

Next the teenage boy performs some unsteady juggling tricks and every time he drops a ring or baton his little sister runs into the spotlight and throws her arms in the air for an audience reaction. They clap enthusiastically. The little girl then does a few acrobatic flips and handstands, the last few from the top of two tables. Act four is the clown and the young woman in a small mime act that involves him stuffing various objects down his pants; it's quite amusing, and the children appreciate the humour. The first half culminates in an act with a goat performing exactly the same routine as the small horse. The only difference is that, being a goat, he is capable of standing on a stack of three barrels before lifting his front hoof for the grand finale.

During interval the performers staff the drinks tent, selling beer, Pepsi and popcorn. The little girl works hard flogging lucky dips to every family with a child—she manages to offload at least fifty parcels. She then comes around with a hat held out for donations. Given that the door price was quite high and that most families have also had to shell out for drinks, popcorn and lucky dips, I fear for many it will be quite an expensive night out.

The second half differs little from the first, except that the shorter man, in a leotard and white singlet, performs a balancing act on a plank of wood and a cylinder placed on a table, about one metre from the ground. It is quite a simple routine, but he is playing it for all it's worth, jumping off every few minutes and inviting applause. Halfway through a stray dog enters the tent and wanders into the centre of the ring, sitting directly beneath
the table where the balancing man is performing. He then proceeds to lick his testicles enthusiastically, which sends the crowd wild. The performer naturally assumes the reaction is in appreciation of his act, and beams with delight.

The last act is the llama, which goes through exactly the same routine previously performed by the small horse and the goat. Round and round he dashes, then into the centre and up with the hoof. The music ends and the audience straggles out just as the storm starts. The whole proceedings, including the interval, have taken just under an hour and by lunchtime the next day the big top and wagon train have vanished. As if they were never there at all.

T
HERE ARE SOME THINGS
in life that are impossible to escape, and for me gardening is one of them. I was quite looking forward to a break from the responsibility and hard slog of maintaining a large garden, but so many of my new friends have gardens that I can't help but get a little enthusiastic and involved. The plants used in the average landscape are basically the same, with the exception of a dearth of Australian native species, but the techniques are a little different. In the local nurseries I see that old-fashioned roses are popular over here again, just as they are back home, and by the wide range on sale it's clear that people also love to grow herbs for cooking and productive fruiting trees and shrubs. I am told that the winters in the southwest are much harsher than those at home, and I know the summers—as I have experienced them first-hand—are very hot and dry. There is a great emphasis on summer colour, with gaily flowering begonias, pelargoniums and petunias in pots and tubs outside virtually every front door. Lots of energy is also invested in growing vegetables. It looks like a lot of fun.

When I first start chatting about gardens to the French, I realise they automatically presume I am talking about a potager, or vegetable patch. The average garden surrounding a house is seldom more than trees and lawn, and those trees are usually productive rather than ornamental. Walnut, fig and apples are all popular garden specimens because they look pretty and provide a yield for harvesting at some stage of the year. The main effort of gardening is directed into growing good things to eat, and everywhere I walk or drive I spot these potagers, small patches of earth supporting magnificent displays of tomatoes, salad vegetables, climbing beans, zucchinis and spring onions. Even in the larger towns there are potager gardens squeezed into odd sunny corners in the most unlikely places, and there are also allotments on the outskirts for people who live in apartments or townhouses. This preference for growing plants that are useful rather than decorative is surely a hangover from the days when people struggled to find food for the pot all year round. These days it looks like a land of plenty, but in times gone by the poorer farmers and woodcutters of the region did not have access to the wild game that is now so abundant, and therefore they had to ensure a steady supply of cultivated food. Growing food became a way of life, and it has remained the same ever since.

The gardens established by newcomers—the English in particular—always stand apart. The English have much more interest in developing wide beds and borders for planting collections of flowering ornamentals, and when you see gardens in this style dotted around the countryside, you know that they have not been created by farming families. Most of Jock's friends can't resist creating these English-style ornamental gardens, although
they usually also try and incorporate a small potager or at the very least a herb garden for the summer months.

When the urge strikes me to potter in a garden I start by attacking Jock's small courtyard, which is a shambles. Overgrown with weeds, the soil is impenetrable when I try and use a spade to dig over the area where he has in previous seasons grown summer vegetables. He doesn't ask for my assistance, but it's obvious he needs more than a little help knocking it into shape, and it's the least I can do to repay his ongoing kindness. Before I arrived, he had planted a few tomatoes against the stone walls, but they are struggling now because of the weed competition. The main weed is a most unpleasant stinging nettle which I quickly discover brings me out in a red, angry rash. I will need gloves and long pants and plenty of patience.

I have a bit of an obsession about compost and I can't abide wasting kitchen vegetable scraps by throwing them out with the rubbish. Jock does a fair bit of cooking and there are always plenty of peelings, so I establish a small compost heap in one corner, using the discarded weeds as a base. I first chop them up into small sections with the sharp end of the spade, then layer them with some manure that I scrounge from the roadside nearby. It feels so good being in an area where the essential ingredients of composting are so readily available. Prunings and weeds, manure and straw are all it takes to make a rich mound of fertile humus, and I take pleasure in watering the fresh heap lightly to start the decomposing process.

The ground is totally unyielding, so eventually I resort to using a crowbar to clear the area of weeds and hundreds of irritating small stones. Over a period of twenty years in my own garden, I have transformed a large sunny area into a lush
vegetable patch by consistently layering mulches and composts on top of the fragile, sandy surface. These days I can slide a spade into the soil and it's like cutting butter, so I find it frustrating to be working on ground that is so tough and unwelcoming. I stockpile the stones and later use them to create a small neat edging between the garden bed and the lawn. Jock and I trundle off to the Prayssac market to buy seedlings to fill the space when it's finally cleared and level and weed free. Unlike Australian nurseries, where seedlings are produced commercially en masse and sold in small plastic punnets that hold ten or twelve young plants, the seedlings here are on display in large wooden trays so they can be separated and bought as required. This is a great way of doing things, because you can buy just a few of each vegetable variety at a time, and plant them successively over the season. I can plant a few zucchinis now, and in four weeks another two or three so that Jock can be harvesting well into autumn and winter. The range is a bit limited, reflecting the type of vegetables that are available in the market. Apart from several young zucchini plants, we buy English spinach, dwarf beans, and a variety of herbs including broad leaf parsley and chives. Jan, who has been propagating all sorts of wonderful flowering annuals and herbs in Claude's pretty glasshouse, donates a good selection to our ‘Tarting up Jock's garden' cause. On the way back from Prayssac we stop off at the local nursery to buy a few bags of manure, then pause for a long lunch at Madame Murat's on the way home. Needless to say I don't feel much like gardening on this particular afternoon.

Being so small, Jock's garden is transformed in no time at all, and he is delighted with the results. He tells all our friends he is doing me a big favour, allowing me to garden in his courtyard.
‘She's obviously missing her garden. It's the very least I can do to let her use mine.'

The days are long and hot and the garden flourishes. The soil that I had cursed when digging over the patch is obviously highly fertile, and the vegetables grow at such a rate that keeping up with the harvest almost becomes a chore. The zucchinis in particular are rampant, and Jock makes pot after pot of zucchini soup, to the point where we start to get sick of eating it. Some of the zucchinis grow to the size of marrows, and he is always trying to foist them onto friends and neighbours. Half the time he doesn't make it down the back steps to check on the progress of the plants, and I find myself harvesting tomatoes and beans that have been left too long on the vine. Without constant attention the garden gradually becomes overgrown again, and I realise that I will need to tend it weekly if it is to remain under control. Perhaps it should have been paved over and turned into an outdoor dining room.

I also spend a happy afternoon in the garden of Jock's English actress friend Pam. Twice widowed, Pam is now living in a new house that has been cleverly recreated in the old style, overlooking the ancient hillside township of Puy-l'Evêque. Pam was well over sixty when she decided to live full time in France and she has, unlike certain retirees, made a concerted effort to study the language and culture. She zips off to various formal language and conversation classes and spends a lot of time speaking French with Lucienne who encourages her tremendously. Meeting Pam and seeing that it is possible for an older brain to absorb all the things there are to learn gives me great hope that I too will eventually get the hang of speaking the language. I had almost reached a point of thinking my mind was
too overloaded and addled for it, but Pam, quite a bit older than I am, proves you can assimilate on many levels. She joins in all the summer activities—antique sales and village meals—but also loves to spend time alone in her garden where she encourages birds by the hundreds to feel at home. Having been a professional actress in her younger days, Pam still has an air about her that is utterly disarming. Jock calls her a ‘lady, in the nicest sense of the word'. Now over seventy, Pam isn't coy about her age, but she refuses to reveal it because of the prejudice sometimes directed against older women. She believes, and she's probably right, that if people knew her age they would think about her quite differently. I wonder if when I am in my seventies I will encounter the same sort of attitudes.