Deep France (29 page)

Two boats were pushed out in the swirling waters of the Gave. The first was weighed down by fourteen French police cadets on holiday. Ours contained two French couples, an Irish family of two
adults and two children, Lesley, her friend Kevin, Chloe and me, plus the raft captain, tanned to a dark cinnamon, who yelled ‘Pa – dell!’ as we approached each set of rapids. He
needed the boat to get up as much speed as possible, he explained, otherwise he couldn’t steer it.

The first stretch of the trip was miserable, since the young cops assumed that we were just longing to be soaked with water, and used their baling buckets and paddles to drench us as soon as
they got within range. The weather wasn’t anywhere near hot enough for this to be fun. The French, normally so repressed and orderly, have the propensity to go clear over the top when a
window of relaxation is allowed. My dreams of drifting peacefully downriver, watching the herons and the dragonflies, were shattered. ‘What did you expect?’ sniffed Chloe. It
wasn’t until one of the young French women burst into tears that the management intervened.

By the end of June, the Gave was no longer a raging torrent, just a forceful body of dark green water swirling majestically westwards to the Atlantic. The rapids were
plentiful, just foamy enough to be fun but not fast enough to be frightening. Having negotiated some peace, we glided happily downstream between curtains of trees. The raft captain pointed to the
flotsam and driftwood high in the branches, marking the level of the river that the river had reached only a couple of weeks ago, when storms had combined with the meltwater from the Pyrenees. In a
few days, he predicted, the Gave authorities would send a cleaning party down to get rid of all the plastic bags and other rubbish brought down by the floods, restoring the river banks to a picture
of green innocence.

We did not see any of the disturbing sights about which Margaret, who lives in a riverside village nearby, had warned us. No bags of drowned puppies, no thickets of tomato plants flourishing on
the sandbanks. The tomato plants betray the presence in the river of untreated human waste. Tomato seeds pass through the gut without being digested, but like nothing better than to put down roots
on a sunny sandbank.

Medieval plumbing standards prevailed in many of the old houses in these riverside villages. Those built near the banks had only short pipes leading directly from the lavatories to Mother
Nature’s own original sewers. As an ecosystem, the Gave d’Oloron must work pretty well; the river was teeming with fish, and with fishermen, after the season opened in April. Near the
towns, it also teemed with canoeists, swimmers and rafters like us, from whom I heard no reports of vile infections.

The northern river, the Gave de Pau, is a different kettle of bacteria. This body of water is a brilliant turquoise whatever the colour of the sky; in its defence, it must be said that
the water in all the rivers gushing down from the Pyrenees was the same astonishing colour from high up in the mountains, and that the hot springs bore witness to quite enough
deposits of copper, iron and chromium to make the colour naturally possible. However, the Gave de Pau runs from Lourdes, up in the mountains, through Pau and then past the chemical works at Mourenx
and on through Orthez.

Whatever goes on at Mourenx, so many local jobs depend on it that no questions are asked. Here, a few kilometres from Pau, is the largest natural-gas deposit in Europe, which earned the region
the name of ‘le Texas Béarnais’. The lights of the vast plant which extracts and processes this precious fuel give an orange tinge to the eastern night sky which is visible from
Orriule, and when the wind was in the right direction – which it rarely was – I could smell its chemical fumes in my garden.

The gas will soon be used up, and the plant is switching to process chemical waste which will be stored in the underground chambers that once held the gas. ‘No risk to the environment is
posed by the injection of liquid industrial effluent at a depth of 4,000 metres,’ the departmental newsletter reassured us. Thus the alpine colours of the Gave de Pau were much admired, but
nobody actually swam in it.

The two Gaves meet at Peyrohrade, a small town with a huge intact medieval castle whose four towers dominate the valley. They flow on towards Bayonne as a single stream called les Gaves Reunis,
where they join the mighty, meandering Adour, which, with its tributaries, drains the entire midsection of the chain of the Pyrenees and sweeps over the plain of the Chalosse before turning south
to Bayonne. The Nive, which runs down from the mountains through Cambo-les-Bains as a chattering torrent, is the last of the lesser rivers to join what by then is a swirling grey waterway about 800
metres wide. The pleasure of sitting in the riverside
cafes in Bayonne can be seriously spoiled by the antics of the rats playing by the waterside when the tide is low.

Where we were paddling, the Gave d’Oloron was a rela­tively innocent river and we enjoyed it as much as you can when paddling for your life in a cut-off wetsuit. Between the rapids, we
cruised serenely between the green walls of wood­land, stopping occasionally to enjoy a swim or to squelch into a muddy inlet to admire a waterfall. By lunchtime, we had reached a little beach
by the wooded foreshore below the chateau at Laas. The captains made a fire and barbecued lamb chops and sausages, then offered us some gateau Basque for dessert.

I blame what followed on that
gâteau Basque
, the only classic of the local cuisine which I regard as a complete waste of space. It’s a heavy cake, like a Bakewell tart with
an extra layer of custard, sometimes cheered up with some of the semi-sweet black cherries which are unique to the Basque Country. Freshly baked with the finest ingredients, a
gâteau
Basque
can be memorable, but you rarely find one in that condition. Usually it is as it was on this occasion, leaden and boring, one up from eating a carpet tile. But we were hungry, so they
were eaten, and the boat was definitely lower in the water as we approached what seemed to me to be quite a small waterfall. I thought the smooth green cascade was only about four feet high. Chloe
says it was about eight feet high.

We paddled towards the edge of the falls like good galley slaves, the raft tipped up as it slithered over the rocks and I was thrown off its upper side into the bottom. My left foot was tangled
in a strap and twisted at an ominously unnatu­ral angle. It was also agony, agony of the precise quality I remembered from the last time I broke my leg.

My view of what happened next was from the rubbery floor of our boat. It seemed that a pile of people fell on top of me, though Chloe says they were trying to help me up.
The mother of the Irish family kindly poured arnica tablets down my throat. The raft captain called his base camp on his mobile. The most annoying of the hooligan policemen turned out
to be the first aider, and climbed over to our raft to lay my ankle tenderly over his ham-like thigh, and agree with me that there was a fracture and it should be moved as little as possible.

We sailed on for a while, until the raft put in at a spit of pebbles, where the company owner and one of the land staff were waiting in a 4x4 to take Chloe and me to the hospital in
St-Palais.

ER à la Basque

The Clinique Sokorri had a special door for casualties arriving by ambulance, but it had no ER. Nor did it have any of the things I would have expected to find in a London
A&E department: no crammed waiting area, no drunks, no nutters, no dead people lying abandoned, no frazzled and guilty nurses, no warning notices about violence to NHS staff and no medical
tourists, unless I counted as one.

A nurse appeared to assess my injury at the door as soon as I arrived. She also asked about my insurance status and accepted on trust that I had the ‘
feuille E cent-onze
’
(form El 11) confirming my entitlement to state health care in the EU. Then she found me a wheelchair, and I was wheeled straight into the waiting area for the orthopaedic consultant.

Dr Suleiman, I learned later, was Moroccan. He was a man of few words. He sent me down the corridor for an X-ray, which took about twenty minutes including the developing time, then showed me my
shattered fibula and chipped tibia, and said, ‘You could go home, but I’d prefer to keep you in hospital for a few days.’ He was expecting me
to protest. I
was expecting him to do what an NHS doctor would have been forced to do – everything possible to keep me out of hospital. The doctor, mistaking my amazement for a protest, explained that my
ankle was swollen and he considered there was a risk of thrombosis, so he wanted to keep me in hospital until the injury could be plastered safely. I burst into tears and agreed.

The main problem we had to solve was that Chloe had to go back to London the next day, to be ready for a chance-of-a-lifetime work-experience placement with a leading London casting agency.
Before she could make any generous offers, I insisted that she stick to this plan, and then called Annabel to see if she could help. It was then that I discovered just what wonderful neighbours I
had.

The room upstairs was a spotless two-bed ward in which there was already one patient, a young woman who was getting ready to go home after a minor operation. Gerald and Annabel arrived in a
couple of hours, bringing me nightclothes, my washbag and a couple of books. ‘Thank God this happened to you in France!’ they said, and whisked Chloe away, promising me that she would
catch her train without fail the next morning.

I passed a quiet weekend, except for the nurses, who, whether they were French or Basque, just pampered me. In fact, I hadn’t felt so pestered to need something since the last time I
stayed in a five-star hotel in Marrakesh. ‘How are you this morning? Did you sleep well? Because if you didn’t we can give you something. You must ask us. And have you got any pain? No,
please, you must tell us if it’s still hurting. No, really, we can give you stronger pain killers, just ring the bell. Let me show you how the bell works . . .’ They also explained
every procedure very carefully, making sure that I’d understood in spite of my flawed French.

The room lacked those tidemarks of grime that a London hospital room seems to get within months of being built. The whole building, which fairly glowed with cleanliness, was
over thirty years old, and all its equipment, some of which was far from new, seemed to be dusted and polished daily. ‘It’s so
clean
,’ marvelled Andrew when he came to
visit.

None of the staff ever seemed stressed, either, nor did they have that sad, guilty air that I’d seen so often in British hospitals, on people who knew they weren’t going to be able
to treat their patients as they wished but couldn’t do any­thing about it. The only experience of rudeness I had while I was there was from the English ‘advisers’ working for
my insurers, who clearly felt I was trying to defraud them because I didn’t want to be helicoptered to Bordeaux and repatriated by air ambulance immediately. In one unforgettable
conversation, the ‘adviser’ accused me of trying to cheat them by claiming I had a broken ankle when their records used the term ‘fracture’. She would not accept my
assurance that these words had the same meaning. Remembering the few but traumatic visits to hospital I’d had with Chloe, I realized that to be ill or injured in Britain now often means
feeling frightened, defensive and mistrustful, knowing you will have a fight on your hands just for basic necessities.

Then there was the hospital food. It was very simple, always fresh, and delicious. Four meals a day, four courses with a little plastic glass of wine at lunch and dinner. On Sunday, we had duck
à l’orange
. The portions were, by French standards, ample. One day I wrote down the menus. Breakfast was fresh bread with butter and jam. Lunch was melon or soup, followed by
chicken or hamburger with gravy, potatoes,
petits pois
and carrots with lardons, then green salad, cream cheese and bread and cassis and lemon
sorbet. At tea time,
they offered me a yoghurt or fruit. Dinner always started with alphabet soup, then it was fish pie and broccoli with two poached pears for dessert.

When I’d finished the books, I watched some television, a luxury which cost me an extra few euros a day. A contes­tant on the French version of
Who Wants to be a Millionaire?
was asked a €200 question: what is the plural form of the expression for self-service, ‘
libre-service
’?Again, something bubbled up from the sludge at the bottom of my
memory, and I got this right. The contestant did not. The right answer was ‘libres-services’ – with a compound adjective, you see, you have to add an s to both parts of it for the
plural. Such a logical language, but so exacting that even native speakers make mistakes. Once a year, a professor delivers a dictation test on national television. Renée had been
encouraging us to try it. Her own score, of which she was very proud, was only ten mistakes.

By the time it was Monday, and I was lying on a trolley feeling floaty with a pre-med injection with the operating theatre lights in my eyes, trying to summon up enough vocabulary to respond to
the nurse’s questions about allergies and earlier operations, I really didn’t feel too bad.