How Blue Is My Valley Read online

  The gendarmes on fête duty lean on the barriers that close off the road and they chat. A sunny day, overtime, a little traffic and crowd control ... I’m not surprised they’re smiling. The regulation police pullover strikes me as quite flattering ...what is it about sex and uniforms? If I were twenty years younger... and a foot taller ... but navy is not really my colour.

  The confrérie of oleaculteurs is here in full green velvet and tricorne hats, also green, joined by some of their Picodon brothers – and, yes, their cloaks are cream (but not mouldy). The centre of the old market square, a cloistered area surrounded by archways and shops on all four sides, has a raised platform for speechmaking, prizegiving and traditional entertainment.

  The village loudspeakers broadcast the speeches like diktats from ‘The Prisoner’; you will hear that our fine tradition of olive-growing has had an exceptional season, despite last year’s drought, and you will hear who was awarded the prize for the best-behaved olive in show.

  I love rural shows; I’m just not very good at being in them. At fifteen, I led a sheep (breed – Derbyshire grit) around the Yorkshire Show ring and then bemused the staff in the Barclays Bank tent by assuming it was a tea-room and ordering coffee and biscuits – they gave us some, too. How was I supposed to know that the trays were supposed to be for clients?

  I then had several fallow, sophisticated city years before moving to rural Wales, where my initial signing-on at the Unemployment Office (no Job Centre in those days) required me to spend three days preparing salads for the Three Counties’ Show. If you need an expert in lettuce-washing, call me.

  I have admired the biggest vegetables in Bancffosfelen, I have breast-fed my baby in the back of the beer tent in Carmarthen, and I have endured endless comparisons of the pea-pod with the elderflower (wines, that is, and these were the real vins de pays. If smelly socks could have been converted to alcohol, we’d have done it. What is even more embarrassing is that we then saved the best wines for showing and drank the ‘not so good’. Can you imagine ‘not so good’ beetroot wine?).

  Then there were my doomed attempts at showing my cats. We were disqualified the first time at the vetting table, for having fleas; my mother was so ashamed that she told her friends that the cat had been ‘unwell’.

  On the second attempt, we received plenty of helpful advice, such as ‘Keep the water dish to the back of the cage in case someone poisons him,’ and ‘If you cut his whiskers, it will make his face look broader’. We won a rosette but my very stressed cat took to the woods on returning home and it took us two days to coax him down from his tree. We promised him no more shows and we kept our word.

  All of this means that I know a good local show when I see one. Nyons’ oil producers have turned out in force and they are bouncing. The harvest usually starts at the end of November but the autumn was mild and sunny, the crops continued to grow and the flavours develop, and the harvesting continued late into the season.

  This has been a fantastic year for the tanche olive growers. We often passed the harvesters in December, their ladders against the trees, old wicker baskets piled high and now the olive oil nouveau has arrived. I buy a bottle of liquid gold, and am told it can be used straight away but will keep at its best for a year. It should be kept out of the light, in glass or stainless steel, like perfume.

  Every olive product you can imagine is on show, for sale and, where edible, for tasting; black and green tapenades, the standard olive pâté; a purer cream of olives; olive oils, straight or flavoured with basil, garlic, peppers or truffle; soap, cleansers and moisturisers based on olive oil; even olive oil chocolate (odd, in being green, but very shiny and hard and ... well, oily).

  Then, of course, there are the olives themselves; the tanche, king of the show, medium in size, brownish-black and slightly wrinkled, rather than the glossy raven of Nice or the large Greek olives, and much milder than either; olives in every kind of herb, stuffed, spiced and piqués (a quick method of preparing green olives involving salt and resulting in young, fruity olives, still with bite, rather than soft) .

  Although the first Sunday in February, the event is a big attraction, and I fight my way through the Sunday tourists to reach the stalls, determined to try and buy. The weekly market is well worth the drive (and well known, as, on a slack news day, the Nyons correspondent for le Dauphiné describes every market stall, with the names of the traders and the prices of their produce). Fête days are even better.

  The traditional flamenco dancers are clacking castanets on the platform to the Spanish guitars. Traditional? Perhaps the olives here aren’t imported from Spain but ... The inevitable cute goat with even cuter kid munch and bleat in the shed that demarcates the children’s farm, where small boys chase chickens and small girls stroke rabbits’ ears. If only I was accompanied by a small child, I could go into the enclosure, cuddle the chickens and chase the rabbits.

  We wear overcoats but the Nyons palm trees stretch up and up into blue, blue skies. By lunchtime, people are stripping to T-shirts and sitting outside in the cafés, a foretaste of spring. Nyons’ microclimate protects exotic plants in winter and maximises sunshine, quadrupling its population to forty thousand inhabitants in the summer.

  I browse amongst the stalls, the Picodons, saucissons, country breads (time bombs that turn into rocks within eight hours), the bottled fruits, jams and savoury spreads, all straight from the producers, but I cannot find any truffles. The olives might have had a good year but it has been dire for truffles.

  This should be the peak of the season. Although demand for the black diamonds is highest at Christmas, the cropping is best from January onwards in the coldest months. It is easy, although expensive, to find canned truffles and truffle oil, even in our local Super-U, but fresh truffles stay in the world of the dealers, a certain café in Tricastin on Tuesdays and car boots in Richerenches on Saturday mornings.

  I know that the current price is six hundred euro a kilo and I am not expecting to buy one if I do see them. I have given up looking and am enjoying a display of Picodon posters, especially the one based on a fable, so that the fox running off with a cheese carries a Picodon in its mouth, when I spot the real thing, fresh truffles.

  The stall carries an odd mix of flowers and fruit, presented in cellophane and ribbons, and at its proud centre are two jars containing eggs and the unmistakable balls of edible horse dung worth six hundred euro a kilo. There must be five truffles in the taller jar. I do a quick calculation - black diamonds indeed.

  Someone pushes past me to the stall and all is explained. These are the prizes in the fête raffle, the truffle jars being 1st and 2nd prize. Why the eggs? Because, according to Carluccio, my mushroom expert, truffles have ‘an affinity’ with eggs and when stored together, they add truffle-flavour to the eggs through the thin shells and hey presto! you have truffle omelette without adding any precious truffle.

  I resolve once again to take our truffle hounds around Monsieur Dubois’ oak plantation, just in case, but I don’t buy a raffle ticket. You never know what tenth prize might be and it was only last week that John was tempted by a local raffle in which the first prize was a (live) pig and the second a (live) goat.

  A stallholder hears my accent and asks me where I’m from. I take the easy option and say I’m ‘Anglaise’ but this is not enough.

  ‘Anglaise d’où?’ he asks. ‘D’Etats Unis? D’Ecosse? D’Irlande?’

  ‘From Wales,’ I tell him, ‘but we live in Dieulefit now’. ‘

  ‘Ah,’ he responds, ‘Anglaise Provençale,’ and his smile is in acknowledgement not mockery. I like the sound of this and I roll my new identity around my tongue. It dawns on me that ‘Anglaise’ does not mean English and that my Welsh children don’t need to get so incensed at being considered ‘Anglais’. Once you realise that it often means ‘English speaking’, the oddness of being ‘English from Wales’ is explained.

  This does not excuse Welsh rarebit being described on le Pub’s menu as a typical dish ‘A
nglais’ and it is difficult to explain the French film title ‘l’Anglaise’ with a ‘young Scotswoman’ as heroine, but it does soften the impression that the French only acknowledge England as a country. In the sporting context, les Gallois are treated with great respect by French commentators, and carefully distinct from les Anglais.

  Am I an Anglaise Provençale? Perhaps I need to adopt the German habit of creating a monster noun, like ‘bustenhalter’, ‘bosom-holder’ for ‘bra’. I shall be an Anglaise-Galloise-Provençale-de-provenance-Ecossaise. (I am proud of the ‘de provenance’; it is an amazingly long way of saying ‘from’ which confused me completely when I first saw it on the station announcement board. I thought ‘le train de provenance Lille’ was at least being manufactured there to deserve such a long word).

  I am still having my usual identity crisis. In the 60’s ‘finding yourself’ was a recognised pastime but nowadays the census forms offer us more boxes. We are supposed to think outside the box but always know which ones to tick.

  In Galloise mode, I note that Bonnie Tyler is number one in the French charts, co-singing her old hit ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ with French singer Karine. I remember visiting a Swansea valley primary school and a little one telling me, ‘Bonnie Tyler’s my auntie you know’. When I say I live in Dieulefit, no-one says, ‘Well then you must know Montand the baker, ten years he’s lived in that house which used to be a post office...’

  I miss the Welsh need to connect people and places, and lived there long enough that there was every chance I would have known Jones or whoever, and if not, I knew to carry it on with ‘Now was he related to the Jones who sold out for the wind farm’ and the conversation could meander on for hours.

  The closest I’ve got to that here is vicarious; everyone knows Monsieur Dubois, and so everyone knows where I mean if I say I live in his house. When the tiler told me he lived next door, in the house with blue shutters, when he was a little boy, I was already filing it away for a future Welsh-style conversation (You’ve had the builder in? Nice boy. His parents used to live ... and that was before ...’) I also store away the directions given by the tiler to a lost delivery man; he should turn right by the old Cavet cheese factory... I know where the current Cavet is but to know places, as to know people, you need to know where they came from.

  I support Wales in the rugby internationals, which I never watched when I lived in Wales. I check the Welsh news online and I know the behind-the-scene politics that makes me delighted to see an ex-Director of Education standing for local government. I am fuming to see the latest embarrassment from the Assembly; international aspirations but brains in their backsides.

  A detailed motion as to exactly where in the chamber those backsides should be placed once wasted assembly time until even the Speaker had to express a view (scathing) – not on the proposal but on its very existence.

  In short, I am behaving like an exile – not to the extent of joining some ex-patriots’ group, and not with any notion of going back – but nevertheless, there is something irradicably Welsh in me. I used to accuse my parents of belonging to a racist group, the St Andrews Society, with its (to me) bizarre membership requirements and I am wary of ‘clubs’ with closed membership of any kinds, but I understand better now how they come about at all.

  Then I find out about Michael Jones. I have come to recognise some key faces on the French pop scene and noticed that Jean-Jacques Goldman appeared on interviews with his co-singer and co-writer, a tall, lean man with red-tinted glasses. I should perhaps have guessed from the name Michael Jones that this person was not a French native but he shares the lead with Jean-Jacques in singing the anthemic ‘Envole-moi’, ‘Rescue me’ and I don’t believe there is anyone who listens to modern French music who doesn’t know his name, so the penny didn’t drop until I heard his bilingual lyrics for ‘Je te donne’

  ‘I can give you a heart, bred with rhythm and soul,

  From the heart of a Welsh boy who’s lost his home.’

  Michael Jones was born in Welshpool, like his father, who took part in the Normandy landings and, while winning a war, somehow managed to fall in love with a local girl, marry and then return to Welshpool with his French wife. It is possible that there was a time lapse there but who knows? Michael Jones was born and grew up in Welshpool but on one of his holidays with relatives in Caen, when he was nineteen, he saw an advert for a guitarist who could sing in English to join a French rock band. It was Goldman, arguably the most famous name on the current French music scene, who placed the advert and the musical partnership has lasted thirty years. Michael Jones is a superstar here and an unknown in Wales.

  ‘Je te donne, je te donne

  Tout ce que je vaux, ce que je suis, mes dons, mes défauts

  Mes plus belles chances, mes différences.’

  (I give you, I give you

  all I am worth, all that I am, my talent, my faults

  my luckiest moments, my difference).

  11.

  Seeking Jean le Blanc in the Magical Forest of Saou

  In the mists, through leaf mulch wet with melted snow, I am seeking Jean le Blanc in the magical forest of Saou. Amongst the first violets, wild hellebores are fern silhouettes just about to shake open the pink ‘Lent roses’ which I once planted by my pond in Wales.

  We first saw Saou golden with April, the village nestling against rock before the high cleft which guards the forest. We walked the tourist trails, waymarked by labelled trees, and we opened the wooden flaps to test our French on the quiz questions for children. The river was a mere bubble in which to cool your feet or scoop a thirst-quenching mouthful. A red squirrel crossed John’s path but I missed it, sulky at being left out.

  A lost world, the forest stretches between stone cliffs on all sides with narrow entries through gorges north and south. Until November 2003 it was in private ownership, although open to the competing interest of hunters, walkers and families day-outing, and the champagne was cracked officially when Saou at last became a Departmental Park, owned by us, les Drômoises. To the hunters, walkers and families day-outing - no change – but the future should be interesting if the neighboring Vercors National Park is anything to go by. In the February mists I imagine wolf-howls.

  It cannot be the same place we visited again in August, to find a full carpark and crowds carrying their picnics to the clearing at the start of the forest. It didn’t matter that the ready-made tables were all fully occupied as the later-comers all brought full French picnic paraphernalia. We saw car boots expanding like Dr Who’s tardis to provide tables, chairs, hampers, cases of wine and of course full, spotless table linen, including napkins. Lunch, especially outdoors, is a serious matter.

  Babies and dogs competed on the grass for crumbs under tables and no-one seemed to mind the overcrowding as long as there was enough shade to go round. Even then, with new arrivals by the bootload for the best part of two hours, it took only two minutes walking to lose the noise – and the people - amongst the trees.

  No-one else is here on this February day and the trees wrap all sounds into quick, muffled silence, our voices too bright and loud for this place. The river, still shallow, is cold enough to kill – and has done so at least once this winter. The footpath follows its stony route, even where the river disappears underground for some ten minutes’ walk, whether by natural or artificial intervention we cannot tell. The bare roots of an immense fallen tree block a side path – another reminder of the worlds beneath our feet, below the surface, where water dives deeper than any whale.

  It is from the car that I glimpse Jean le Blanc – two of them. I am sure of it, I can see a flash of white on the backs, the distinctive shape of birds of prey, smaller than buzzards. From the moment I read that Jean le Blanc, a short-toed eagle, can be found in the forest, I hoped to spot him.

  Somehow the name makes him a personality, a shy woodland inhabitant with whom I want to be on nodding terms. ‘Saw Jean le Blanc today,’ I want to say. ‘How was he?’ I�
��ll be asked. ‘Doing fine,’ I’ll reply. I don’t tell my visiting Welsh friends why Saou is so popular with Jean le Blanc, the snake-eater, nor do I mention the seven varieties of snakes (three very rare) that are to be found there. There are some aspects to my sorties into the forest that I keep to myself.

  More dangerous than snakes, is the ‘ambroisie’ of which my local paper has warned me, ranting about recent sightings with a hysteria never reached before, even in accounts of the wolves of the Vercors. I am confused and the dictionary increases my puzzlement. It does mean ‘ambrosia’ so how exactly is the food of the gods ‘an infestation’ against which articles 1382 and 1383 of the Civil Code, as well as 220-221 of the Environmental Code, oblige all property-owners to do combat? It turns out that ‘ambroisie’ is also ‘a plant dangerous for your health’, ‘ragweed’ in the States and ‘ragwort’ in Britain. All I know about ragwort, the leggy weed with yellow flowers, is that it poisons horses, and we automatically destroyed the odd specimen which appeared in our field in Wales. I had no idea of the havoc it causes in the States nor the very real threat it is to the forest of Saou.

  I don’t notice any of these triffids (a relief - what am I supposed to do if I do see any?) as we follow the 800 metres detour to see ‘remarkable trees’. I feel sorry for the unlabelled forest. ‘You’re all remarkable,’ I tell them, remembering a school where class sets were named after trees (and some trees were far more popular to teach than others), but I still crick my neck looking up at the officially remarkable Scots pines, up ... and up. John photographs their swaying tops ... and their bases ... and has no chance whatsoever of getting both in the same shot unless he lies on his back in the mud. He settles for poor photos.