A Summer In Gascony Read online

  Marie-Jeanne did the introductions.

  ‘Anja… Martin,’ she said, gesturing with her hands.

  ‘Enchanté!’

  ‘Moi aussi!’ Me too.

  She was absolutely gorgeous. Coup de foudre. My summer at the Auberge suddenly looked very different.

  ‘Anja’s a student at Heidelberg,’ said Marie-Jeanne, quite impressed.

  ‘What do you study there?’ I asked her.

  ‘Languages.’

  ‘Me too!’

  Anja spoke good English and even better French. We were destined always to speak to one another in French. We’d both come to the Auberge for a real Gallic experience, as we put it to live in French, and it was natural for us to use that as our lingua franca. In truth, I think Anja’s French was better than mine.

  Marie-Jeanne went into the kitchen to start making coffee for Anja. Nicolas straightened some chairs. I heard Paul out in the courtyard calling me; he needed a second pair of hands to carry the stepladder upstairs.

  ‘À plus,’ I said to Anja. See you later.

  ‘À plus,’ she replied.

  And I went outside to help Paul with the stepladder.

  The arrival of Florence and Anja meant that I would be doing less work around the kitchen and more outdoors at the farm. Florence was a natural in the kitchen, although some of the cooking here in the southwest was different to what she knew in Touraine. Anja was very personable and she would work mainly front of house, waiting on the tables in the restaurant. Marie-Jeanne showed her the order of laying the covers. It was not clear what sort of work David would be suitable for.

  MORE GEESE THAN PEOPLE

  FLORENCE, DAVID AND ANJA WERE EACH GIVEN A SMALL ROOM below the gîtes to the rear of the Auberge. So far I’d been enjoying the privilege of staying in one of the main upstairs rooms in the Auberge, but this special treatment was not to last. With four stagiaires in place and more guests arriving to fill up the accommodation, I was moved off to the farm.

  My life with the Cazagnacs entered a new phase. I was given the annex at the back of the farmhouse, a converted outbuilding adjacent to the house. It was a large, simple room, with a tiled floor and a small window looking out on the woods. A small room off to the side had basic washing facilities.

  On my first morning at the annex, very early, I stepped outside and breathed in the fresh, sappy smell of the woods. The dew glistened in the morning sunlight shining through the trees. All around me, I could hear the cheerful sounds of a summer day beginning. I felt as though I’d come to a land where time had stood still.

  The farm was so isolated the Cazagnacs never bothered to lock the doors to the farmhouse during the day, although often no one was there for hours at a time. The farmhouse and the area around it had an air of neglect, as the family’s energies were being channelled into making a success of the Auberge. The farm was their home, and although the whole family still slept there, it was little used. During the summer season the farmhouse’s main rooms were hardly ever used. The wooden shutters on the windows looked shabby and were nearly always closed. A few pots by the front door bearing flowers were overgrown, and the dusty edges of the drive were merging with the tufty grass. Long grass was growing through a rusty old plough next to the front door. I think Marie-Jeanne would have liked to do something about this neglect, but neither she nor the rest of the family had the time.

  Although the farmhouse may have been neglected, the farmland was well cared for. There was a well-kept kitchen garden behind the main buildings, providing vegetables and herbs. Farther down the slope stood an orchard of plum trees. The farm was surrounded by several hundred acres of wheatfields, a broad field of sunflowers, and open rolling pasture for sheep and cattle. The earth around the farm was a light grey-brown crumbly clay, a blond soil, with a hint of gold, reflecting the rays of the sun. Dense woods covered the slopes beyond the fields, and a small lake, which drained into the river Arjo, lay hidden in the valley to the south.

  Standing in front of the farmhouse scanning the landscape, I could not see another house in any direction. The nearest neighbours lived in the farm on the northern side of the valley, tucked in a fold of the land, out of sight behind a copse. The first time I saw the neighbours was from a distance; they were driving cows along the track leading to their farm. The farmer was at the wheel of a blue van behind the cows, hooting his horn repeatedly, while various other members of the family ran around waving sticks and shouting ‘Allez! Allez!’ The bewildered cows bellowed angrily in return, creating a cacophony of noise that resounded back and forth across the valley.

  ‘The whole family is completely mad,’ Jacques-Henri told me dismissively, as if they were not worth talking about. He waved his forefinger in a circular motion at his temple.

  The Auberge and the farm were two separate spheres, each with its own atmosphere and tempo. The pace at the Auberge was sometimes frenetic, driven by the constant demands of catering for the guests. The slower rhythm of life at the farm was set by the routines of looking after the animals and growing the crops.

  One day, driving to the farm with Jacques-Henri in the 2CV, I smelled an acrid stench coming from a barn near the road.

  ‘What’s that smell?’ I asked.

  ‘Caca d’oie,’ he replied. Goose shit.

  We were downwind of the goose farm just outside the village. A handmade sign beside the track leading to the goose farm advertised FOIE GRAS – VENTE DIRECTE, with a picture of a happy, smiling goose raising a welcoming wing. Poor deluded creature!

  We passed a long, low barn, behind a hedge. I saw geese inside and I heard some squawking.

  ‘Did you know that here in Gascony,’ Jacques-Henri asked me, ‘there are more geese than people? And we Gascons are very independent,’ he added. ‘Scratch a Gascon and just below the surface you’ll find someone who is very proud to be different from the rest of the French. We have our own language, le parler Gascon. My mother’s first language was Gascon, although I don’t remember much now.’

  Jacques-Henri referred to the old tongue not so much as a language, but rather as the Gascon way of speaking. There were once so many local dialects, so many pronunciations, that the people from one village often had difficulty understanding those from the next.

  We drew up outside the farmhouse and got out of the van.

  ‘Do you know what is the real symbol of being a Gascon?’ Jacques-Henri asked me.

  ‘Er, no,’ I replied.

  ‘The beret!’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘Wait there,’ he said, and disappeared inside the farmhouse, returning a couple of minutes later twirling a beret on his forefinger, which he then flicked onto his head.

  ‘Gascony is the true home of the beret,’ Jacques-Henri explained. ‘A beret is a shepherd’s hat. No one knows exactly where berets were first worn, in the Béarn, in the Basque Country or in the Landes. What is for sure is that the beret is a symbol of our independence here in the southwest. The rest of the French, they copied us.’

  Wearing his beret, he looked like a caricature of a rugged Gascon farmer.

  His Gascon beret was wider and flatter than a normal beret. Plonked on top of his head, it looked floppy around the edges. The floppiness was what made it so distinctive.

  Jacques-Henri leant forward and pointed at the top of his beret. ‘The little finger of felt sticking up on top is called a cabilhou, which means wooden peg,’ he told me. ‘It’s there to ward off bad luck.’

  Jacques-Henri loved his farm. He preferred being there to being at the Auberge, because however entertaining he was in the role of the aubergiste, the farm was the place he felt he really belonged.

  I sometimes accompanied him on his evening tour around various outlying parts of the farm. He told me things about the land and how it was managed. He liked to watch the close of the day, he said, because no two were ever the same. He breathed in the warm evening air, looked around him, admiring the countryside, and said, ‘Ah, la campagne! Tout est
à sa place.’ Everything is in its place.

  Jacques-Henri believed that living off the land was not just something you did, but a privilege. He said it was about putting back in what you took out. He spoke of the land as a living being. He made it clear in no uncertain terms that he objected to paying taxes to the government in Paris. The ministres, he said, did not represent him at all.

  ‘They think we’re just ploucs down here.’

  ‘Ploucs?’ I enquired.

  ‘Yes, simple people who live in the country,’ he explained.

  ‘Oh, I see.’ Bumpkins.

  He looked at me sternly, to make sure I did not agree.

  One evening, we stomped down towards the fresh, tall grass at the bottom of the dry valley. Jacques-Henri told me a lot of vipers had their nests here. The warm evening air whispered through the long grass. I imagined the snakes slithering silently along, listening to our footsteps with their bodies flattened against the earth, their tiny forked tongues darting in and out, testing the air.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Jacques-Henri said, ‘they’re only active in the heat of the day, they shouldn’t bite you.’

  ‘Well, just so long as they know that,’ I said.

  Standing there in my baggy canvas shorts and flimsy espadrilles, I looked around, hoping the vipers would not be out late that evening.

  Through Jacques-Henri, I was beginning to see the sense of obligation that tied a Gascon farmer to his land. Being a true farmer was about understanding the balance between owning the land and belonging to it in turn, taking the time to read the barely noticeable messages the land and the animals were giving out, and knowing how to respond.

  MELON-SEED NECKLACE

  NOW THAT I WAS SLEEPING AT THE FARM, ALONG WITH THE family I had to make the journey to the Auberge each morning for breakfast. Marie-Jeanne would often go ahead in the Renault, sometimes Jacques-Henri went with her, and the rest of us – too many for comfort – crammed ourselves into the 2CV van.

  On the daily early-morning drive from the farm to the Auberge, the sun would be climbing in the sky above faraway hills, and I would be starting to think about breakfast. I was getting used to the idea that every day would be fine and sunny. Each morning as we turned up the road into Péguilhan, I heard a cockerel crowing somewhere in the village, making everyone aware of his presence, announcing the start of a new day, sometimes quite persistently. I heard the strident call so many times, but from the sound alone I couldn’t locate him. One morning I tracked him down to a farmyard on the far side of the village, strutting his stuff in front of the henhouse.

  On weekday mornings when Nicolas was going to school, he rode his mobylette in front of us, weaving his way through an imaginary slalom course, his head thrust forward, pretending he was a superbike racer.

  Monday was the one day a week when we took things relatively easy. The restaurant was closed on Monday lunchtimes, and so on those mornings, although some work had to go on at the farm, the Auberge was quiet. On the first Monday we were all together, after breakfast all the younger members of the team – me, Anja, Florence, David, the brothers Paul and Bruno; Nicolas was at school – sat around the stone table on the terrace in the sunlit courtyard for a long-drawn-out coffee.

  We were just getting to know each other. David was reading a serious-looking book with a plain black cover. Anja was reading a novel by George Sand. I was flicking through a farming magazine. Bruno brought out a stack of wooden vegetable storage trays and set about repairing the broken ones. Paul was in the kitchen making coffee.

  Florence was doing something curious. Since she’d arrived, she’d scooped out, washed and saved the seeds from all the melons we’d eaten. Now, she spread them out on the table, took a long piece of black twine, threaded it on a needle and began to poke the needle through the flat side of the seeds one after another, sliding them down the twine like beads. She was concentrating very hard, following the movements of the needle with her tongue around the corners of her mouth.

  When she’d finished, she pushed the seeds tightly together, straightened them, tied up the ends of the cotton, and held up her melon-seed necklace. It was about fifty or sixty centimetres long. Halfway along she tied a small loop, which hung in the shape of a teardrop. She looked pleased with her work and put the handmade jewellery round her neck. The necklace looked primitive, and I thought it made her look like a cave-girl. I guessed this sort of simple craft was something she’d learned to do as a child on a farm.

  As Florence put on her creation, Paul came out of the kitchen with a fresh saucepan of coffee for everyone. He said that the necklace made her look very pretty. Florence blushed. Paul went round refilling our bowls with fresh coffee.

  David came to an interesting part of his book. ‘Hum,’ he said to himself, meaningfully, and stroked his chin.

  Anja smiled at this, and bit her lip as she tried not to giggle.

  Bruno got a splinter stuck in his hand from a broken tray. He whispered an unrepeatable French expletive, then looked up at everyone and apologised.

  I was losing interest in the farming magazine. Enough about combine harvesters, hay baling and the problems facing goatherds at this time of year.

  I turned to Anja. ‘Why are you studying languages?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m curious about the world,’ she explained. ‘I like meeting people from different cultures.’

  ‘What do you think you’ll do with your languages?’

  ‘I don’t know, I’m only just 20!’

  Paul and Florence were talking about what it had been like for each of them growing up on their respective farms.

  ‘Chez nous…’ I just caught Florence saying.

  ‘…et moi aussi,’ Paul answered.

  Bruno interrupted us all. ‘Il faut aller bosser maintenant,’ he announced. Back to the grind; some work would have to be done before lunch.

  Bruno cleared away the coffee bowls and we all went to our tasks. We knew our roles by now – except David, who stood around, looking aloof.

  I don’t know whether David was really unable, or just unwilling, to join in with the work. It was clear that he had no practical sense at all. Jacques-Henri thought he’d better give him something simple to do, so he asked him to sweep the staircase leading up to the gallery. He handed David the broom and left him to it.

  A few minutes later, while I was working in the ground-floor gîte, Bruno came to speak to me. ‘Come quickly and see what David’s doing,’ he whispered conspiratorially.

  I followed Bruno out to the courtyard, where Jacques-Henri and Paul were watching David sweep the gallery staircase.

  Instead of using his common sense, starting at the top and sweeping the dust down from step to step, David had begun at the bottom and worked his way up, until all the dirt on the steps had simply been shifted down to the step below. Only the top step was clean!

  Jacques-Henri, Paul, Bruno and I stood behind him and watched with amazement. David, in a world of his own, had no idea we were there.

  ‘What’s he doing?’ whispered Bruno.

  ‘Anyone’s guess!’ said Jacques-Henri.

  When David had finished shifting the dirt down the steps, he moved on to the gallery landing and began to sweep dust backwards onto the steps, continuing on his way like an automaton.

  ‘It’s best to let him get on with it,’ said Jacques-Henri.

  And we did. Bruno brushed the steps properly later.

  David hadn’t been at the Auberge for a week when he decided to leave, unable to cope. Unfortunately, even his return journey went wrong. This was his grand finale. He made it as far as Toulouse, then phoned to say he didn’t have enough money with him to buy a train ticket home. Jacques-Henri had to drive all the way to Toulouse to lend him some. When he got back, about three hours later, he was more relieved David had gone than angry about the trouble he’d caused. Jacques-Henri just raised his arms, as if to say well, that was a right one there!

  HERE COME THE VASCONES!

 
I HAD COME TO GASCONY KNOWING A LITTLE ABOUT THE ANCIENT province, and here I was in the deepest countryside learning about it from the inside. To appreciate what makes Gascony so distinctive and separates it from the rest of France, I had to piece together some of its long and fragmented history, which needs to be understood in order to see the land in its true light.

  Jacques-Henri showed me an old map of La Gascogne. It is bounded by three natural borders. To the north is the sweeping arc of the mighty river Garonne, which follows the shape of a protecting arm, cradling the land in its embrace. To the south are the valleys of the high, forbidding Pyrenees, where Gascony borders the French Basque Country. To the west is the Atlantic coast, the silver shore, from the Bassin d’Arcachon to the mouth of the river Adour. The sea we know in English as the Bay of Biscay is called in French le Golfe de Gascogne.

  The man-made borders of Gascony have moved backwards and forwards over the natural frontiers. Bordeaux and its vineyards were part of Gascony in the Middle Ages, but are no longer thought of as such. The Béarn, in the central Pyrenees, although associated with Gascony, has a long independent history. Toulouse belongs to the Languedoc, yet is the gateway to Gascony from the east. There is no capital city of Gascony, as the major historical towns – Bordeaux, Bayonne, Toulouse – are all on its frontiers and look to the outside. Gascony is composed of a patchwork of old counties, with strange, hard-to-pronounce names. In the north the Agenais and the Condomois. In the centre Armagnac, Astarac and Fézensaguet. In the west Albret, Chalosse and the Landes. In the south Bigorre, the Couserans and – Jacques-Henri proudly pointed out, the area where we were – the Comminges. Some of these old names cannot be found on modern maps. The administrative départements of modern France bear no correlation to the historic Duchy of Gascony.