Authors: Celia Brayfield
Their property was made up of three small buildings crushed together on a back street. Between them, they had quite a few walls, a couple of roofs and a bit of a ceiling. They hadn’t got
water, electricity or drains. Until Gordon’s British friend came round with his digger to flatten the land at the back, they had a lot of brambles and stinging nettles. The garden ends in a
steep cliff, at the bottom of which the Gave de Pau runs shallow and swift. They had visions of
running a scenic B&B, maybe, if they could get planning permission, even a
little cafe, with tables overlooking the sparkling river.
The day they moved in, various members of the foreign community descended to wish them well. The rain held off for a few hours, and the children ran about, playing with their new neighbours and
bringing us sprays of cream-coloured acacia blossom.
Sandy-and-Annie arrived with the camping toilet they’d used when they began restoring their own house. Andrew and Geoff arrived with a platter of barbecued chicken. I brought a
pastis
landais
, a dessert cake which is an extra-rich variation on the
brioche
, from the famous baker near Amou. An elderly English couple who’d set up a B&B close by came
empty-handed, perhaps to reassure themselves that they would have no competition.
Gordon had decided to start burning the old, infested timbers and we sat about in the smoke, wishing them well and trying not to look as horrified as we felt. Being British, we considered
renovating a house a normal rite of passage. All of us had gone through a time of plaster dust and negative plumbing. We remembered the meals eaten off tables made from old doors and breeze blocks,
the loos flushed with buckets and the showers begged from friends.
We were itching to sort the site out with plastic canopies, duckboards and camping gas, but Gordon and Fiona seemed too exhausted and traumatized to move. Most of the tiny tree-ferns were
sprouting green now, but it would be another year at least before they were ready to sell. Gordon was confident that their partner would pay them back their investment, but there was no contract.
‘They shook hands,’ said Fiona gravely. ‘In New Zealand, if you shake hands on something, that makes it square and legal.’
It was still raining a few days later, when Fiona, Margot
and I left the boys to be boys and went to the festival at Laàs. Laàs is a village in the valley
below Orriule, on the edge of the Gave d’Oloron. It’s a fine example of what a mayor with ambition can do for a rural backwater. While the surrounding hamlets snooze in contented decay,
with crumbling buildings and muddy cart tracks, Laàs is tarted up to the eaves, with fresh paint and blooming window boxes. This titivation works for everyone, and Laàs is a popular
place for a family stroll on Sunday afternoon.
The war memorial and the tiny bridges over the little River Laa are in perfect repair. Every house has a former function which is proclaimed by an artistically engraved slate plaque on the wall
– ‘The Skittle-Maker’s House’, or ‘The Pottery’. Another plaque records the history of the tiny old church. There is also a new church, on the main square, and a
hostel for the Compostela pilgrims equipped with the essential pelota court. Across the road is an ambitious but erratic restaurant devoted to Béarnais specialities, the Auberge de la
Fontaine.
The square itself is called the Place Brigitte Bardot, because, as a plaque with very tiny print explains, Brigitte Bardot could perfectly well have been born there. As the whole of France
knows, BB was actually born in a Paris suburb and now lives near St Tropez, but these facts have not been allowed to stand in the way of the village’s pride in its attractions.
The grandest of these is the Château, a small but pretty mansion of seventeenth-century origins, built in the classic style rather than the Béarnais, with a slate roof and three
rows of tall, white-shuttered windows. Its position, on a wooded cliff overlooking the Gave, is spectacular and its gardens exquisite – when, of course, it’s not raining like a pissing
cow.
The Château’s last owners were some art collectors from
Normandy, who died childless and left the building, with some good paintings, a lot of curiosities and
some magnificent Aubusson tapestries, to the departmental government. To amuse visiting children, the home field is planted with a maze of maize every year, while the grounds are the site of
festivities all summer long, beginning with what was billed as ‘Transhumances Musicales’.
At this time of year, the farmers in the mountain villages move their sheep and cattle up to the summer pastures, where, after the cleansing of the ground through
écobuage
, the
new grass is already long and sweet. The process is called
transhumance
; it’s the excuse for another festival. The Basque shepherds used to decorate their cows with wreaths of
flowers and their sheep with stripes of paint and pompoms of wool in bright primary colours, originally so that they would know whose was whose after all the animals were herded up into the
mountains together.
The animals are still decorated, and there is still much consumption of aperitifs and exhibition of old photographs to make everyone pleasantly damp-eyed and nostalgic. The
transhumance
, however, is nowadays accomplished by cattle truck and horsebox, which means that flocks of the long-fleeced Pyrénéen sheep could spend the winter in pastures as
far north as Orriule. On days when it was too misty to watch the mountains on my way into Sauveterre I would stop and watch the sheep instead, bustling around their field in twos and threes, their
long dreadlocks swinging down to the grass as they cantered around.
The sheep are a nimble mountain breed and are allowed to keep their horns, which are as long, twisted and curved as an antelope’s. The first time I ever saw a sheep with a full-grown pair
I was driving up on the road to Pamplona with a friend, another novelist, called Mavis, an inherently ladylike character who did not take to the bucolic charms of
deep
France at all. We were crawling along in thick fog, which suddenly cleared to reveal an extremely startled ram, poised on the tips of his hooves in the centre of the road, his horns quivering with
alarm.
Behind the ram emerged first one, then several, then a whole herd of massive Pyrénéen cattle, all with big iron bells clanking around their neck. The road was well and truly
blocked; visibility was about ten metres.
Mavis suddenly found some
African Queen
spirit, and stepped regally out of our rented Renault. She approached the mixed herd at a dignified pace, clapping her hands like a school
teacher and calling out, ‘Come along, now. Come along.’ The ram freaked completely, leaped vertically in the air off all four hooves at once, then bounded up a crag and away into the
wall of mist. The cattle followed him serenely, and we were able to drive on.
The ‘Transhumance Musicales’ turned out to be five days of music and dancing in a large marquee, observed from a distance by the lyre-horned cows, who stood patiently in their muddy
enclosure, munching the wilting remains of their garlands.
The inside of the tent was divided into three sections: an auditorium, with a stage, curtains and seating for at least three hundred; a changing and backstage area; and the bar, which remained
open throughout all performances, selling softs, half-litres of beer and generous plastic beakers of Rose de Béarn.
We decided to see a spectacle called
La Flabuta de Pyréne
, starting at 2 p.m. In this relaxed part of the world, there is a tradition called the Béarnais quarter of an
hour, which is usually around three-quarters of an hour, and is the minimum permitted period which may elapse after the official starting time of any event before things really get under way. The
custom of the Béarnais quarter of an hour
allows for two vital regional pastimes, chatting and consuming aperitifs.
Even in these grand surroundings, it was exactly 2.45 p.m. when the master of ceremonies took to the stage. He looked familiar; I had last seen him with a violin, leading the dancers at the
carnival in Pau. Keeping time with crisp beats of his bow, he reminded me powerfully of Pete Postlethwaite in
Brassed Off
.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘the Béarnais quarter of an hour is up so let’s get started.’ The audience laughed. As the spectacle was to have two hundred performers, it
was likely that all the spectators, except us, would be their relatives. They were completely mixed in age and social status, from immaculate middle-class children to elderly men in workers’
overalls.
The dancers and singers too were of all ages, shapes and sizes. There were some sturdy teenage girls in orange chiffon, but most of the rest wore variations on the Béarnais national
costume. For the women, this meant a long skirt with a printed apron, a white blouse, a fringed shawl and a headscarf, with white espadrilles tied with red ribbons. The men appeared in white shirts
with black waistcoats, dark, striped breeches and knitted leggings of natural wool pulled over black espadrilles. They all wore berets, and in one dance the most acrobatic boys held the beret in
both their hands and jumped over it.
The master of ceremonies helped us out by narrating the legend of the creation of the Pyrenees. ‘Hercules, coming back from the edge of the known world, stopped here and thought how nice
it would be to live the life of a simple shepherd.’ The audience sighed in agreement.
‘He fell in love with Pyrene, a shepherdess, but the gods were angry when he said he wanted to marry her and sent a pack of wolves to tear her to pieces. In his rage and grief, Hercules
picked up the biggest rocks he could find
and hurled them at the gods. Where they fell to earth, the Pyrenees were born.’ The audience sighed again, this time with what
sounded like the sheer contentment of living within sight of such a magnificent geographical event.
The local edition of the
Sud-Ouest
reported that the spectacle was full of
joie de vivre
, and said that the two hours rolled by
sans lassitude
, which in Margot’s
case was not exactly true. She perked up considerably when we took the guided tour of the Château and were invited to admire the impressive bourgeois dining room, with its built-in china
cupboard stuffed with Baccarat crystal and fine porcelain.
Fiona talked about how she could see Cam and Margot learning the Béarnais songs or maybe playing recorders in a school orchestra. She adored the Château, and said she was longing
for the house to be habitable so she could invite her mother over to see it. But as soon as she stopped talking, Fiona’s eyes filled with tears.
At the caravan in Bellocq, it took a month to get the electricity connected, largely because Gordon didn’t understand the man from the electricity board when he explained that the
meter needed to be in a waterproof cupboard. People dropped by with casseroles. After a couple of weeks, in which the rain never let up, Gordon got some sheets of industrial plastic and fixed up a
canopy over the camping toilet, and another outside the caravan door to keep the immediate area dry. The children stayed in school until 6 p.m. to do their homework, because there was nowhere they
could work in their new home.
One day when the rain stopped for a few hours I called in and found Fiona alone with a smouldering fire of termite-eaten Béarns. She was wandering about the garden with her eyes
unfocused, clutching a small tortoiseshell buckle set with diamanté which she’d found in the mud, the picture of a gutsy girl in the process of losing it.
May Day, May Day
Until the second round of the presidential election on 5 May, the Béarn suffered agonies of anxiety. The normal favourite topic of conversation, the weather, certainly
provided enough incidents for people to talk about, but all they wanted to discuss was politics. In a nearby village, Burgaronne, one man had voted for Le Pen; everyone knew who he was and nobody
was speaking to him.
In Bordeaux on May Day, the Western Revolutionary Communist League and a dozen less grandly named organizations staged a demonstration that got at least forty thousand people out on the streets.
In Paris, four hundred thousand people hit the boulevards to urge their fellow-citizens to vote against Le Pen.
The Club Internationale de Saliès-de-Béarn was in ferment, and no member was more tortured than Annabel. One of their French members was said to have stood up at a Socialist Party
meeting and made racist remarks about Muslims. The report came from a woman, who was no longer a paid-up member, but was determined to get an apology out of the guilty one before the name of the
club was besmirched, and wrote a letter to the whole committee about the alleged outrage.
As vice-president, Annabel found herself in the hot seat, pressurized by the accuser to do something but having no idea of what to do and a great fear of doing anything. Her telephone rang
all day, with committee members eager to chew over the issue. The club’s treasurer, a Hungarian businessman whose English wife’s family had owned a holiday home near Castagnède
for thirty-five years, felt so hassled by this pack of warring women that he resigned.
Nobody, however, had said anything to the alleged
offender, who whizzed obliviously about the town on her bicycle with her lips fixed in the habitual half smile. She seemed
to be living in a world of her own, unaware of the conversations that ceased abruptly as she approached and the speculation that erupted as soon as she was gone. In a few days later, she announced
that she would give a little party, on a Moroccan theme, and warmly invited us all. A few days after that, she called the party off, saying that not enough people could come.
‘You don’t actually know what she said,’ I pointed out to Annabel. ‘It might not be true. Why don’t you just ring up the Chairman of the Socialist Party and ask him
what happened?’ She squeaked in sheer distress.
Annabel was also afraid that if Gracienne, the club president, got embroiled in the drama, she too might resign. Annabel would then be under pressure to take the role of president. The
position carried responsibilities. There are rules governing clubs and societies in France, even one whose members’ main activity is sitting in a cafe having coffee and practising their
languages every Tuesday.