A Summer In Gascony Read online

  Paul and I were picking the daily list of vegetables for Marie-Jeanne. We picked the onions first. Paul brandished a two-pronged fork with a short wooden handle, called a binette. He set to work along the row, loosening the soil with the fork, while I collected the onions in a wooden tray.

  ‘Do you see the yellow colour of the onions?’ he asked me. ‘They’re called jaune paille.’ Straw yellow.

  We moved on to the garlic. This time it was my turn to swing the fork and Paul’s turn to pick up the garlic.

  ‘This type of pink garlic is called violet de Cadours,’ Paul told me. ‘C’est typique de la région.’ He broke open a bulb to show me.

  Having finished with the alliums, we picked a couple of lettuces and a handful of herbs. Finally, it was Paul’s turn again with the binette, working his way along the ridge while I gathered handfuls of small new potatoes and put them in another wooden tray.

  We put the trays in the back of the van, clambered through the passenger door into the front and set off for the Auberge. Paul flung the 2CV over the crest of the hill and down into the dip. The engine made a spluttering noise, then died.

  ‘Aïeeeeeee! What’s happening?’ he exclaimed, almost loosing control of the vehicle. It slewed from side to side with no power.

  The van slowed down as it went up the slope on the other side of the dip. We veered to the left and coasted onto the grass verge. The old crate bumped over the uneven ground, until we came to a stop on the bank. We looked at each other, surprised.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked.

  ‘Sais pas,’ said Paul. Dunno.

  We got out and looked under the bonnet, but we couldn’t see anything wrong. There was nothing we could do. We decided to sit on the bank and wait until someone passed who would give us a lift the rest of the way back to Péguilhan.

  Paul asked if I wanted a cigarette. Sure. He fetched his packet of Drum tobacco and OCB papers from the van, and we each rolled a cigarette and smoked, contemplatively, in the sunshine.

  ‘This reminds me of my service militaire,’ said Paul.

  ‘Why’s that?’ I asked, not seeing the connection.

  ‘Sitting around, doing nothing, killing time,’ he told me. Paul had completed his compulsory ten-month military service only a few weeks earlier.

  ‘We had to stand around on sentry duty for hours, marking time until the end of the watch. Or else we had to do some pointless task, like polishing our boots, or unpacking and repacking our kit, or painting things white, over and over again. It was stupid. A complete waste of time.’

  ‘So the army wasn’t for you, then?’ I asked.

  ‘You must be joking!’ Paul replied. ‘And I didn’t even get to see the world, most of the time I was stationed just down the road in the barracks at Tarbes.’

  ‘Do you know what you want to do in life?’ I asked.

  ‘No, I don’t. I would like to see more of the world, I’ve always lived here in Péguilhan, but I think it’s inevitable that I’ll take over the farm one day. Imagine if I told my father that I didn’t want to go into farming. He’d be so disappointed.’

  Paul shrugged his shoulders. ‘What about you, do you know what you want to do?’ he asked me.

  ‘No idea either.’

  We stubbed out our cigarette ends in the soil, carefully, making sure not to set fire to the dry grass.

  ‘We’ve been waiting here for ages, haven’t we?’ I said. ‘Not one car has come by. Do you think we should walk?’

  ‘Perhaps that’s not a bad idea,’ agreed Paul.

  Just when we were on the point of setting off on foot for Péguilhan, Jacques-Henri drew up in the Renault. He stopped the car, leant out of the window, laughed at us and asked what was up. ‘Alors quoi, what are you doing there?’

  ‘The 2CV broke down.’

  ‘And you’re just sitting there?’

  ‘What else could we do?’

  He thought we looked ridicule. ‘Marie-Jeanne wants to know where the vegetables are.’

  Jacques-Henri soon discovered that the 2CV had run out of petrol. We insisted it wasn’t our fault, the fuel gauge was broken, but he wasn’t impressed.

  DOGS AND SHEEP

  I WAS DAUNTED AT FIRST BY THE RESPONSIBILITY OF GUARDING the flock of sheep. I could only guess at what might be involved. Being a shepherd had romantic connotations for me, but these were soon dispelled.

  Jacques-Henri took me through the drill. The sheep were put into their barn, la bergerie, every night to keep them safe from the wolves that roamed the woods. They were let out in the morning to graze in the open pasture, brought back to the bergerie in the middle of the day to protect them from the heat, and taken out again for a few hours in the afternoon.

  In the morning, the sheep were packed tightly in the bergerie. A warm fug filled the air. Pfwah! The barn’s wood-clad inner walls were treacle-brown, the colour of years of sheep fug. The animals stood docilely, waiting to be let out. We opened the gate and they started spilling out into the farmyard, jumping over each other in excitement, bleating with joy, their heads bobbing up and down. The two sheepdogs ran around with an excess of energy. If a sheep left the flock, one of the dogs gave it a nip on the back leg to remind it who was in charge, and it plunged headlong back among the others. Jacques-Henri told me to look out for the lead sheep – la meneuse – whom the others would follow. It was easy to spot her at the front of the flock, with her head held high.

  We left the farmyard and made our way down the hill towards the open pasture. The sheep formed a living mass that wheeled around and changed shape. When they reached the pasture, they spread out and started grazing. Eating focused their minds and they calmed down.

  The flock consisted of about a hundred and fifty ewes, les brebis, two active rams, les béliers, and two castrated rams, les moutons. The sheep were Berrichons, a breed originating in central France, good all-rounders, physically well suited to the pastures around Péguilhan and with an easy temperament. Jacques-Henri assured me that Berrichon sheep produce excellent meat, their gigots – a subject close to his heart – being particularly well developed.

  ‘Ce Berrichon, il n’est pas maigrichon!’ he said, happily. It’s not skinny.

  The sheepdogs were named Labrit and Mizou. They had a son called Rôti, meaning roast.

  Labrit was the boss. He was named simply after his breed, the typical sheepdog of southwest France. Labrits are small dogs, about the size of a terrier, not at all like the sheepdogs we use in the British Isles. Their coat is rough, brown over the body, grey on the face and down the legs, shaggy, curling at the ends. They have quite long legs for their size and are very agile. Labrit exemplified the qualities of his breed: perky, curious, cheeky and very reliable.

  His girlfriend Mizou was smaller, of mixed and indeterminate breed. She had a short, dense, light brown coat, speckled dark brown. She was sturdy but fast.

  Rôti was a tiny, wiry, yellow-haired hooligan, with no sense of what being a sheepdog was about. His name seemed fitting: he looked like a small chicken roasted before it had been plucked properly. He would charge into the middle of the flock, sending the sheep off in every direction, then run around in circles yapping for no apparent reason. Labrit and Mizou preferred to keep their distance, clearly embarrassed by their delinquent offspring. Rôti was more of a hindrance than a help, and after his unsuccessful trials at the farm he was moved to the Auberge. There was even talk of finding him a new home. I felt sorry for the reject.

  The dogs were bilingual in French and Gascon. Of course, they didn’t understand English. Labrit and Mizou were clever and a lot could be conveyed with the intonation of the voice, but I had to learn the proper commands.

  If I didn’t give the correct command, Labrit would look at me impatiently.

  I had to keep my wits about me. The fields were unfenced. The flock had to be steered away from the edge of the woods, where the stragglers and the independent minded would sometimes disappear. I moved the sheep around different
parts of each field and from one field to another, in order to even out the rate at which they ate the grass, as it dried out through the summer. Their favourite food was the lush grass in the bottom of the dry valley to the west of the farm. It was an ongoing job to keep them from wandering wherever they pleased and eating just whatever they wanted.

  One of the active rams clearly didn’t want me there. He had the most enormous testicles. They hung down between his hind legs like a pair of skittles in a woolly bag, almost reaching the ground. I wondered how he didn’t hurt himself as he walked: they swung from side to side, banging against his legs.

  A showdown between me and the ram with the giant gonads was inevitable. He thought he had me cornered against a tree. His head was down, as if he was going to butt me. He started moving forward slightly. This didn’t look good. He charged, I jumped out of the way and he rammed the tree. Ouch! That had to hurt. Big balls, no brains, it seemed.

  I improvised a shepherd’s crook from a stick I found in the woods, then chose a tree stump where I could sit and watch the flock. Labrit and Mizou hunkered down in the long grass, keeping an eye on the sheep who grazed happily, creating a gentle background noise of ripping grass. There was harmony in the way they slowly moved across the pasture. Now and again a frisson ran through the flock, then they settled down again. As for Billy Big Balls, he was trying to reassert his potency by mounting a few ewes, who weren’t too interested in his attentions.

  A shepherd’s job was a solitary occupation. Sitting in the sunny meadow, carefree and content, tending the flock with a pair of sheepdogs, I thought to myself – this was worth coming to Gascony for!

  I remember Jacques-Henri coming to look for me once. I’d been out with the sheep for a couple of hours and he needed me to work at the Auberge. He saw me standing on the tree stump, my crook over my shoulder, my hand shielding my eyes from the sun, as I watched the sheep in the field.

  ‘Comme Robinson Crusoë sur son île,’ he said, as he approached. Like Robinson Crusoe on his island. Afterwards, I thought about what he’d said: he was right, it was like living on an island.

  ‘Is it really true that sheep are stupid?’ I asked Jacques-Henri.

  ‘They can sense things,’ he told me, ‘in the atmosphere and in the earth, which you and I are not aware of.’

  ‘They act stupid sometimes,’ I said.

  ‘They’re nervous, not stupid,’ he said, bluntly.

  Jacques-Henri had respect for his sheep. He firmly believed that animals gave better meat when they had lived free and happy lives au grand air, eating naturally, exposed to the elements and the changes of the seasons.

  We picked out two sheep at a time to be slaughtered. We chose animals that were a little bigger than lambs, but still not fully grown. Jacques-Henri grabbed at their hind legs to select the good ones. While the flock was in the bergerie, we dragged the two chosen sheep into a small side pen. They sensed something was wrong; their worried, glassy, yellow eyes looked around with a mixture of fear and accusation. We led one to a covered area behind the farmhouse – just outside the annex where I slept, I might add – where the concrete floor sloped towards a drain in the centre.

  The sheep bowed its head, bleated and shuffled backwards. I pulled it forwards and held it still so that Jacques-Henri could thwack it squarely on the back of the skull with a hammer. I held my breath. Crack! The sheep fell to the floor, apparently stunned but with its eyes wide open and spasms running through its muscles. I cringed. Jacques-Henri explained that there was a particular spot to hit just where the skull joined the neck, so that the hammer blow would paralyse and numb the animal. I don’t know if this really spared the sheep from feeling any pain; in the circumstances I had to believe him.

  We fitted a hinged iron ring to the end of a long chain, then closed it around the sheep’s hind legs. A pulley was attached to a beam in the roof directly above the drain. We looped the chain over the pulley and I hauled on the other end to raise the sheep up, so that it hung by its back legs. Jacques-Henri took a long knife and stabbed the sheep through the throat. It twitched slightly as he twisted the knife to open a hole wide enough to let the blood gush out. The blood drenched the animal’s head and gurgled, thick and red, down into the drain below. After about a minute the flow abated, just a few gooey drops fell, the twitching stopped, the life of the sheep was ebbing away. It was startling for me to see an animal die like this for the first time.

  I rolled a wheelbarrow under the sheep and held the body steady, while Jacques-Henri slit it open along its belly. Working fast he disembowelled it, letting the intestinal sack fall, with a plop and a squelch, into the wheelbarrow. He took care not to let the intestines touch the flesh of the sheep, which would have caused contamination. The intestines gave off a putrid stench that made me retch; they were disposed of immediately, buried in a hole in the ground.

  We lowered the sheep onto a table. Jacques-Henri hacked off the lower sections of its legs with a saw. He skinned the animal by expertly pushing his fists between its skin and its body. With the lower legs removed, the hide came off in one piece. He looked at his work with quiet satisfaction: to him it was just another job on the farm that had to be done. Jacques-Henri cared for his animals while they were alive. When the time came for them to be killed, he did it with speed, skill and the minimum of fuss.

  We put the carcass in a big plastic bag, placed it in the freezer, and went back to the bergerie to get the second sheep.

  Then I had to take a more active part. Jacques-Henri struck the animal on the back of the skull. Together we chained its hind legs and hung it up.

  ‘Vas-y,’ said Jacques-Henri, passing me the knife.

  I stabbed it through the throat and twisted the knife. The razor-sharp butcher’s blade moved surprisingly easily as I turned it. Jacques-Henri gave me a cloth to wipe the blood off my hands.

  The farm brought me into contact with a natural order: I understood that killing had its place. Killing the sheep was a rite of passage. I had cut my teeth, as it were, and truly earned Jacques-Henri’s respect.

  Some sheep were sold for slaughter. We took them in the back of the old 2CV van to the abattoir at Boulogne-sur-Gesse. I’m sure they had an inkling of where they were going: they were restless and agitated, with an air of foreboding. The back of the van was like the condemned cell. We had to push them into the van at the farm and drag them out when we got to the abattoir.

  ‘Do you know the old nursery rhyme about the sheep on its way to the butcher’s?’ Jacques-Henri asked me, as he slammed the back door of the van on the two sheep inside.

  ‘No, I don’t,’ I replied. But I felt sure he was going to tell me.

  Mouton, bê, où vas-tu?

  À la boucherie, perdre la vie.

  Mouton, bê, quand reviendras-tu?

  Jamais.

  Sheep, baa, where are you going?

  To the butcher’s where I shall lose my life.

  Sheep, baa, when will you return?

  Never.

  Jacques-Henri told me that by guarding the sheep I was joining a long tradition of shepherdry in Gascony. ‘You see those hills over there?’ he said, pointing to the south. ‘They are the winter grazing pastures for sheep brought down from the Pyrenees in the transhumance.’

  ‘The transhumance?’

  ‘Yes, the twice-yearly migration of mountain sheep,’ Jacques-Henri explained. ‘The sheep spend the summer on high pastures, the estives, eating fresh mountain grass. When the weather begins to turn bad, the shepherds lead them down to more sheltered lower hills, where they spend the winter, until the first mild days of spring give the signal to move the sheep back up to the mountains. The transhumance used to be a wonderful sight: hundreds of sheep moved in long lines, like rivers of grey wool flowing over the green, grassy slopes. The lead sheep stood out from the rest of the flock by the bells clanging around its neck and the brightly coloured pompoms bobbing on its head.

  ‘Nowadays, the transhumance mostly takes pl
ace in lorries by road,’ he added nostalgically. ‘You rarely see such sights any more.’

  MADAME PARLE-BEAUCOUP

  ‘Martin, Bruno and I are going to the café. Want to come?’ Paul asked, one Saturday.

  ‘I didn’t know there was one.’

  ‘Of course there is. We’ll show you.’

  The three of us set off on foot into the village.

  ‘We buy our tobacco at the café,’ Paul said. ‘The woman who runs the place is very nice, but she talks so much, we call her Madame Parle-Beaucoup.’ Mrs Talk-a-Lot.

  A big black-and-white dog barked at us excitedly from behind a wire fence in a garden. We were nearing the centre of the village.

  ‘Here’s the café,’ said Paul, as we approached one of the houses on the main road. It had a rusty-red-painted iron porch overhanging the step and a large welcome mat outside. Otherwise there was no indication that this was a drinking establishment.

  The café was in reality little more than someone’s front room, with a bar along one side and a collection of tables, where the local men gathered to drink pastis and rough red wine. On this Saturday afternoon there were just a few regulars. Paul and Bruno shook hands with everyone and introduced me. The only decoration in the café was a rather dusty-looking boar’s head mounted on the wall.

  Two old regulars propped up the end of the bar. I was introduced to the shorter one in front first.

  ‘Ah! Monsieur is English. Are you a ’ooligan?’

  ‘No, I’m not a hooligan.’

  His taller friend pushed him on the back of the shoulder. ‘Does he look like it?’