Authors: Celia Brayfield
Orriule did things in a more Béarnais style, with two live bands which delighted the revellers with non-stop folk songs. In England, the mere expression ‘folk song’ conjures
up pictures of sad blokes in beards and sandals wailing lewd ballads at an audience who can’t understand a word. Between urbanization, American cultural imperialism and the demands of
multiculturalism, our own native music has been almost obliterated, along with the communities which cherished it. Only a micro-minority of musical anchorites are concerned to keep this despised
heritage alive, and they get very little encouragement from sniffy civil servants, whose concern to promote ‘diversity’ has led to a suppression of our native culture. Ninety-five per
cent of the English population probably couldn’t sing one song that was known to their great-grandparents.
The Béarnais, on the other hand, have a great and living musical tradition. Not a tradition as renowned and profoundly nationalistic as that of the Basques, whose stupendous voices are
acclaimed all over the world, but a great tradition all the same. The deep, resonant Béarnais voice is also a gift of the mountains, created by generations of people calling to each other,
and to their livestock, across the steep valleys.
In recent years, Béarnais music has received firm official support, but it would have been a vital part of everyday life without that. An old man pottering around his garden or a young
man setting off for work will let rip a few verses just for the joy of living. In the churches, any member of the congregation with a good voice is welcome to get up and improvise a solo with the
choir. There are songs for every occasion, haunting or spirited, with poetic lyrics or hearty choruses. At a family celebration or a public festival a high
spot of the event is
the singing. So the citizens of Orriule were soon in full cry, with their arms around each other’s shoulders and tears in quite a few eyes.
The meal proceeded slowly, especially after the dancing began. I could see it would be my fate to pass the summer smiling over my plastered leg at other people enjoying themselves more
energetically. The men did the serving, giving the women a rare few hours of relaxation. The main dish which had been chosen, apparently after much discussion, was a Basque one:
axoa
– it sounds like a sneeze, because the ‘x’ is pronounced like a slightly forceful ‘ch’ – is a ragout of veal and peppers.
Worrying about Gerald, who had been left resting alone at the house, Annabel decided to leave at about 5 p.m. Since Maison Bergez was only a few hundred yards from the
salle
multiactivités
, it was impossible not to know that the festivities didn’t stop until 2 a.m.
An Ill Wind
By the end of the month, I had something like the beginning of a book in my computer. My injury, coupled with relentlessly sulky weather, had grounded me so effectively that I
wrote over ten thousand words in the last two weeks of July alone. I wasn’t completely happy with them; I was still struggling between the two languages and my writing seemed to have taken on
a stiff, nineteenth-century tone instead of the clean, contemporary zip on which I had been able to pride myself before now.
On the plus side, many of the elements in the story which had been fuzzy and troublesome were clearing like clouds blown away by the wind.
Wild Weekend
is about the English countryside,
and I had been casting about for
the kind of threat which the seriously misguided Minister of Agriculture might pose to the landscape in the near future. It wasn’t
difficult, since the novel’s scenario was overtaken by reality almost every day. If I wrote about an urban fox, suddenly reports of fox infestation in London were everywhere. If I created a
farm which employed illegal immigrants to pick potatoes, suddenly the media were full of stories about the very same phenomenon. My minister, I decided, as the row about building on the green belt
built up, was going to be in charge of turning Suffolk into a giant patio. The major problem with this scenario was that the way things were going, there was a real danger that it would be a
reality before the book was due to be published in May 2004. The minor problem was the language which this harpy should use to make her speeches. I was too far away from Westminster to be able to
catch the echo of the government’s hideous circumlocutions.
I took heart from John Frankenheimer, quoted in his obituary: ‘Keep putting one foot in front of the other, keep showing up, and you can turn it around.’ At least, unlike
Frankenheimer, I wasn’t a drunk. My fear of degenerating into a sozzled ex-pat faded; surely if I had the ability to take to the bottle, it would have shown itself while I was dragging myself
around on crutches for eight weeks straight.
Margaret invited me to dinner, having persuaded Roger to come too, and to drive through Orriule to collect me on his way. She and her husband lived in a gorgeous house in a village on the Gave,
a few doors away from the French friend who introduced them to the region. The main building is painted a rich, peachy pink, very like the colour of the Beverley Hills Hotel, and the LA theme is
strengthened by the giant palms in the courtyard on either side of the front door.
Peter, her husband, is a sculptor, and was an art teacher. They’ve lived in the Béarn for ten years, very successfully.
One of their barns has become his
studio. Peter gets up late, and takes their dogs for a long walk in the nearby forest, then comes home for an early supper and starts work in the evening, finishing in the small hours. Their
daughter lives in London, and their household is completed by a shifting population of dogs and cats, mostly abandoned, like the new puppies which Peter rescued while out walking. Henri Cat was
probably a survivor of the same custom.
Sometimes, Peter and Margaret take a day off to walk in the high mountains, or even drive over the Spanish border for a change of scenery. Margaret is an animation artist, and occasionally goes
home to London for a few weeks when a well-paid job comes in. They have a few close friends, which is all they want, and, apart from Margaret’s attendance at the French class, they avoid the
ex-pat community.
Peter seemed to want to talk about the creative process, something I hate doing because I never feel comfortable at the level of self-importance you need to reach to have this conversation.
Also, I feel superstitious about examining my own mind too closely, in case too much analysis kills the whole system. Plus, I lack the requisite tradition. Writers don’t often talk about
their work that way. In fact, writers, as Douglas Adams once observed, are a bit like rare birds who’re going extinct because they never meet members of the same species. Perhaps this is why
so many of my friends are visual artists, whose culture is much more sociable. As a conversational hostage, I mentioned the difficulty I was having in getting the politicians’ jargon
right.
‘Which politician do you hate most?’ Peter demanded. Spoiled for choice, I thought for a while, realizing that I didn’t actually hate the politicians, just what they were
allowing to happen to our country. Finally, I nominated Robin Cook. Loftily, Peter announced that I obviously didn’t know enough about New Labour to write about
them. Ten
seconds later, he revealed that he’d never heard of Alistair Darling, which was ironic since he bore him a slight resemblance.
Later, Peter brought down his work in progress. He works in found metal, making animals out of oil drums, sardine tins, paint cans, typewriter spares and old tractor panels. They’re
strong, witty pieces, and sell steadily through a couple of galleries in America. He was working on a stork with a blue body and red wings, another piece full of energy and humour. It had been
devised so that it could be disassembled, by separating the long neck and head from the body, and fitted into the largest standard box which the French post office would accept. Thus packed, it
would be posted to San Antonio. Margaret would write instructions, complete with Ikea-style diagrams, to help the gallery reassemble the sculpture when it arrived.
More Visitors
Since I wasn’t fully mobile, I had to accept some animal company. Henri Cat was in the kitchen every day, so in the end I gave him his own dinner dish on the window sill.
Taking my cue from the Birdman of Alcatraz, I became the Catwoman of Orriule. First I got him to take a titbit from my hand. Then I threw a little caress in with the titbit. Then I persuaded him to
walk cautiously onto my lap. Finally, he allowed me to pick him up. It took about three weeks.
At dusk the garden was still alive with crickets, and Piglet delighted in bringing them in to chase them all over the sitting room in the evening, which meant that when I hopped sleepily towards
the coffee in the morning, a large grasshopper would often leap out from under the sofa and cling to one of my legs. This was fine when they grabbed the
plaster cast, but on
the good leg, their grip could be as painful as a scratch from the cat’s claws.
One evening a bat flew into the house, got confused in the narrow hallway and couldn’t find its way out. Normally, my plan for bats involves catching them with a fishing net or a
swimming-pool skimmer and ejecting them gently, but with only one leg to stand on that was impossible.
Hopefully, I left the front door open until midnight, and thought I saw the bat fly out. Wrong. Next morning, I noticed something hanging from a beam in the hall. It looked like a seed pod or a
giant beetle, but when I examined it more closely I saw that it was the bat, hanging upside down with the claws on its wings neatly hooked on a groove in the wood. It was sound asleep. The
leathery wings enfolded its head and body completely. Later in the day, it woke up and had a wash, grooming its little furry front like a very tiny inverted cat. Amandine said she had never seen a
bat at such close quarters. The housework went to hell for half an hour while we watched it.
The bat stayed for two days, by which time somebody had told me that it was a young one looking for a place to found a new colony. I was getting worried I would soon find twenty of its friends
hanging from the beams in the hall. However, when Roger dropped me home after dinner with Margaret and Peter, it was zooming around the hall and up and down the stairs so indignantly that it seemed
as if it had only just realized its mistake. After a couple of false starts it managed to fly over my head and out into the night.
High Culture
By the end of the month, la Maysou was empty again, having given almost a hundred London school children the
chance to have extra French tuition not just
in France, but in their teacher’s family home. They had had lessons in the morning, then spent the afternoon enjoying themselves on the river, on the beach or in the mountains. The donkeys
had been pampered and the village had rung with curious young English voices.
Zoe has a new boyfriend. He is a young banker, the nephew of Babi who stages concerts at her house in the hills. The announcement threw Annabel into a quandary. She was ecstatic that her
daughter seemed to be serious, not just about a Frenchman, but about a Béarnais, but anxious that the seriousness might lead to a wedding, and the wedding to a reception and a wedding
reception to a party of such proportions it would bankrupt the bride’s family.
Matthieu, Zoe’s new boyfriend, is tall, brown-haired and fair-skinned; he looks more English than Zoe herself, who is as dark, slim and Mediterranean in looks as her mother is fair,
rounded and an English rose. Matthieu’s mother is one of twelve brothers and sisters, and his grandmother, who lives in an imposing chateau overlooking the Gave, is also one of twelve. When
all the cousins are counted, it could be a big wedding. If a wedding is on the cards. Zoe is giving nothing away, but she seems to have a plan. I pretended I knew nothing and tried to think of
soothing things to say.
With the wheelchair in the back of Annabel’s car, we went to see a Russian folk ensemble perform at Babi’s rustic concert hall, which is at a place called Tilh, high in the hills to
the east. It was here that Zoe and Matthieu met. Babi is a tall, elegant woman, the only person I saw all year wearing kitten heels. Until recently she was a music agent in Paris. Now, with her
husband and the help of their six children, she runs an arts and music society from Tilh, putting on concerts several times a year. ‘The happiest and most daring of initiatives,’
according to a local writer.
The concert hall is a huge former barn, attached to the house in which Babi and her family live. The situation is stunning, almost at the edge of an escarpment which
projects south from the main mass of hills. One of the local people described it to me as a ‘
grande bastide
’. Strictly speaking, a
bastide
is something fortified,
usually a town, so perhaps there was once a military building here, and soldiers patrolled the level ground in front of the house, now a neat lawn, bordered with roses, with a breathtaking
view.
The concert hall is like something in a glossy magazine, with its exposed beams, whitewashed walls and eccentric stone staircases. An audience of about three hundred can fit in there, and after
the performance the children and their cousins run in to set up trestle tables. Everyone turns around their chairs and a supper is served. That night, Babi had booked a group of Russian performers
who were on their way home from the annual music festival at Oloron-Ste-Marie.
The stage in the bar wasn’t big enough for the dancers, so a bigger stage was built on the lawn, the chairs were brought outside and everyone prayed for the rain to hold off. It was more
than a little bizarre to watch the standard export package of Russian culture, the dancers leaping into their
gopak
and
trepak
, the singers with their scarlet lipstick and false
plaits, the musicians strumming their balalaikas, all with a background of grey clouds swirling over the distant Pyrenees. The swallows were flying so low their wings almost brushed the grass.
Annabel was nervous, knowing that half the audience were probably Matthieu’s relatives, and were assessing us critically, wondering what sort of people were threatening to join their
family.