How Blue Is My Valley Read online

  I didn’t blame us for the murder but I did wonder about my part in the theft. When I visited a local pottery for the third time and tried once more to get someone’s attention for service, it was only to eavesdrop on a phone call to the gendarmerie and a panicky reconstruction of how the takings could have disappeared. ‘Anyone can look around the showroom,’ the Manager told me, ‘like you now’. I agreed, having spent the previous two visits wandering around, totally unable to get any service and unwilling to knock on the back door where I could see women hand-painting olives or lavender sprigs onto plates.

  ‘It might have been that ‘type’ who hung around last week,’ was the view of the ‘décoratrice’. Neither she nor her boss seemed to consider me as a suspect – in fact they were perfectly happy to share their whole security arrangements with me and we were all saddened by the thought that they might have to lock away their takings box in future.

  Despite this downward trend, the shocked reactions locally to petty theft indicate that we are once again living where you can forget to lock up and – usually – get away with it. Local graffiti still proclaims political idealism, ‘Liberté pour José Bové’ and ‘le Pen – danger’ rather than the usual town obscenities. A teacher-friend once said he knew he’d made it when he saw his own name up on the wall of the local toilet – perhaps le Pen feels the same.

  The French media attitude to crime is familiar to us but the attitude to criminals, or rather to suspects, is completely different from the British. It’s not so much a case of ‘guilty until proven innocent’ as hung, drawn and media quartered long before trial.

  Full details of cases appear in the papers, with none of the ‘no comments’ from the gendarmerie – no, indeed. They provide helpful background information and make it clear who done it – in their opinion.

  One such case which aroused strong feelings in the whole département was of an ex-Maquis (Resistance) leader whose garden shed was deliberately burnt down and, in it, three thousand copies of his books about the war days. On his garden fence was painted a black swastika and, as the story unfolded, the sense of community outrage was fully expressed in letters of support and sympathy from everyone, from the Prefect down to the-Monsieur-in-the-Rue.

  Until the police tracked down the victim’s ex-wife, and her current partner, at which stage the police, the Editor and we, the readers, clearly understood that this was a crime of petty spite. The only decision left for the courts is what sentence to give – everything else has been sorted (the good old ‘triage’ at work again).

  I don’t know if the fact that this crime of passion took place between a newly-divorced couple in their eighties is heartening or depressing; I do know that my oldest friend is eighty-five, my youngest five, and that their passions run deeper and wilder than I would have believed when I was twenty.

  If it had been a crime sparked by the Maquis past, it would not have been hard to imagine here, where the walkers’ grand footpaths along mountain ridges follow the communications routes of the second world war, here between the high Alps and the mountains of the Vercors, where every peak is a natural fortress and where the clear springs were once poisoned weapons. The official version of local history does not duck the enthusiasm with which La Drôme welcomed the compromise with the Germans that enabled it, as part of Vichy France, to maintain the illusion of autonomy.

  The girls in a local primary school sang ‘Hommage au Maréchal’, praising Petain as a hero who had preserved France and it is recorded that, on a fête day, the crowd was chanting ‘English murderers’, ‘Long live Jeanne d’Arc’ and ‘The English are butchers’. There was no shortage of official support in la Drôme for ‘the peace’ but public face seems to have been one thing, private action another.

  Dieulefit seems to offer its own political, as well as meteorogical, microclimate; even during the Revolution, the only death recorded was that of one man who refused to shout ‘Vive la République’ and had his head cut off’. In lines with the Republic’s edict against God, Dieulefit was re-christened Mont-Jabrou – and naturally regained its name when it was safe to do so.

  What today is a source of great pride in la Drôme is Dieulefit’s ancient reputation as a safe haven, continued in the Second World War by the many individuals who sheltered Jews, dissidents and war fugitives of all kinds.

  There are hundreds of stories, especially of Jewish children hidden in the community; Marguerite Soubeyron and Catherine Krafft (‘Mamie’ and ‘Athie’) who hid Jewish children in their school in Dieulefit; Suzanne Vallette-Viallard, a Red Cross nurse who hid fugitives in her house - even taking wounded men off a train bound for Germany - then obtained false papers for them and smuggled them to safety; the Mayor’s Secretary in Dieulefit, who specialised in false papers (plus ça change...).

  Then there was the Mexican nun, Soeur Thérèse d‘Avila, who was trapped in Italy when war was declared and who hid in a convent to escape the internment inevitable for someone from an enemy country. She then headed for France via the mountain pass at Gap and ended up at a hospital in Buis les Baronnies, just south of us, where she became known as ‘the Maquis Sister’ for her work tending the wounded.

  Even the Bishop who published each Vichy statement in the diocesan newsletter opened his doors to everyone persecuted by the Nazi regime. There was also the open defiance shown by the small gesture, raising the Tricolore on your haybarn for a fête day, and the grand, such as the stylish desertion of young lieutenant Narcisse Geyer, who asked his men, the eleventh cuirassiers, to follow him – and the regimental standard – into the mountains; they became the first knot of armed resistance in the département, founding the eleventh ‘leatherjackets’.

  Increasing in numbers, organisation and contact with London, the Maquis conducted raids and bombed ... trains. Does it really only depend on who wins as to who were the good guys when you look back?

  So which refugees came to Dieulefit in particular? You might have guessed ... it was the intellectuals, especially the dissident writers, musicians and artists, fleeing German-occupied parts of France. The Gestapo labelled Dieulefit ‘that nest of Jews and terrorists’ and the village put on more concerts and conferences than ever before, thanks to its new stock of glittering names. The composer Barlowe, a refugee himself, said, ‘You get more events here than in the big towns.’

  The current newsletter to us Dieulefitois residents reinforces the village’s self-image; our Mayor tells us that we are a diverse lot and that we must make everyone welcome. There is an apology for the briefness of a report because our local councillors have been ‘talking about rubbish’ – more plans for recycling. We are not doing well in the local league of villages and we must do better.

  Since we moved here, John and I, the very epitome of cultural diversity, have personally increased Dieulefit’s recycling by one thousand per cent (rough estimate based on volume of Gill/Pilborough recycled waste compared with size and weekly fullness of village recycling bins). Like good immigrants, we are perfect citizens, contributing in every way to our community.

  I am smug, preparing the roast pork, roast potatoes and ceremonial roast parsnip. I sniff it and the first doubt creeps in; it does not smell anything like a parsnip. It looks like a parsnip, it cooks like a parsnip – I am prepared for disappointment and I am prepared for it to be an oddly shaped turnip.

  What I am not prepared for is a mouthful of wormwood-bitter juices, with a worse aftertaste. John leaves his on the plate, as instructed. He thinks that, as it looks so like a cooked parsnip, perhaps it’s just an eighteen-year-old reverted-to-the-wild parsnip. It is not, it is a poisonous root of the kind medieval monks used to murder each other with, and I am going to die, horribly poisoned. What sort of sign is this?

  13.

  Sleeping rough at Cardiff Airport

  I could be the only person to have ever dossed down overnight at Cardiff Airport. I should have known when the taxi-driver said, ‘Ah’ in a very ominous way, that reaching the airport at 10pm t
o check in at 5am was not a good idea but what’s the point of buying bucket-cheap flights if you blow the difference on three hours sleep in a hotel? And if you’ve lain on the floorboards of the overnight ferry from Crete to Piraeus, then surely Cardiff Airport is luxurious? Even if you were twenty-three then and now you’re not.

  Perhaps it was the invitation to actually stay in student accommodation on my First Visit Back that sparked a sense of adventure. More likely it was the same sort of thoughtlessness which has led me to hospital A & Es now and again. Thank God student son gave me The Bed, although, as I couldn’t help getting up early, we came up with a neat arrangement where I went out to explore early morning Bristol and he finished his sleep in The Bed.

  When you have moved ‘abroad’ you are always being asked what you miss – according to a recent poll the top three items on the miss list for Brits if they were to do something so foolish would be 1) roast dinners 2) a curry out 3) fish and chips. Do these people not cook? And what would they be glad to leave behind? Reality TV shows. Believe me, there is no escape from reality television, nor from les idols pop. I put the big question to Bristol – what can you offer me that I can’t get at home in France? It’s not the shops – I lose interest quickly; it’s not the newspapers – I feel I’ve had more European and international news from the French media; and it’s certainly not my understanding of the language around me (I find Bristolian harder to pick up than provençale French). No, what I treasure are certain moments ...

  Unable to find anything resembling breakfast, I leave the students sleeping and hit the streets. At the bottom of Park Street I find a café which spills out onto the pavement and tempts me with bacon sandwiches. Be-suited customers fend off human contact with laptops or a café newspaper, cramming into understair seats or the dark oak corner pews of a traditional English tea-room. This is what we do before work, we city-Brits, and however wicker the chairs outside, this will never be the pavement café outside Dieulefit’s le Pub and I love the difference – almost as much as the bacon sandwich, freshly made, layers of meaty morning in granary bread, with a caffeine wake-up.

  It’s as if we have to pretend that this is practical, our working routine, and hide the sheer sensuous pleasure of this little haven. Not one face shows that the bread is warm, crumbly-fresh nor that every order takes the time of making it and is brought to your table with a smile, and yet these customers come back for more. I know because I am there, solitary and contented, every morning. Does anyone ever tell the cook how wonderful her bacon sandwich is? I do, sounding like a patronising git or a rich American, but I see she is pleased all the same. It is part of my mission in life, to tell someone when something is good, but I suspect it is a vaguely embarrassing trait in Britain. Oh well, since when has that stopped me?

  I phone home, confident that nothing much can happen in three days, my first three days away from home in seven months. I am wrong. The first call is entertaining; I have missed the arrival on a truck of a fully constructed staircase, which inevitably stuck in the doorway. After the removal of the shutters and the door, the stairway progressed to approximately the position in which it would be useful – in fact, indispensable – and was then abandoned, not quite finished. John’s French was not quite good enough to know whether the joiner had given a detailed explanation of why and what next but we suspect not.

  The second phone call is not entertaining. Apparently there was a visit from five bosses in charge of the ongoing roadworks and we are stuffed. I was expecting this; I knew from the start that someone would build a motorway through our house but I thought they would wait until all the renovation was finished before giving us the bad news. But no, it isn’t a motorway.

  It is the news that our brand new kitchen sink and brand new washing machine are emptying illegally onto the main road, not into the septic tank at all. Some pretty green dyes were used to demonstrate to John exactly where in the ditch our washing-up water was contributing negatively to the environment.

  We need to get the waste round the entire house into the septic tank, probably requiring a pump and the destruction of the entire garden. And we need to add a filtration tank to the septic tank and that will have to be built on Monsieur Dubois’ land as there isn’t room on ours. It sounds bad but it is always possible that it is ‘merde’ and ‘putain’ and solvable rather than us being totally stuffed. We won’t know until we’ve spoken to the plumber. And anything is better than a motorway. And anyway I can’t do anything about it in Bristol.

  Son and I visit the cathedral, scuffing our brains a bit at having seen better, but then we read between the stones. It is the women who surprise me, so many of them (great and good) named in their own right, from traders to translators, as well as the wives and daughters. Reminders of Bristol’s trading, slaving past are everywhere; Jamaica and Barbados are a commonplace of birth and death. One effigy takes my fancy, a knight who will not lie down but must be up and doing, as if he’s saying, ‘So I’m dead, so what’s next?’

  Then my culture hunger is fed with a portrait exhibition that challenges us to compare Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe with a Rembrandt. We know when we should be impressed but we are not. It is instead an old-fashioned portrait of three sisters that makes me smile; the artist has captured so well how they are like and not-alike.

  Best of all is the beer but I know this vicariously these days. I watch and smell the drinking of beer while assaulted by the aural tricks of the whispering gallery in a Bristol Weatherspoon, which suddenly plays a conversation in your ear – no sooner have you attached the speech to the beautiful Chinese girl sitting in a circle of twelve than she laughs, leans forward and fades. ‘Can they hear me?’ I ask, too loud and, for once, am silenced by paranoia.

  As we juggle goodbyes with a suitcase at a Bristol bus-stop, I know exactly what I miss the most and it has nothing to do with place.

  My return from Bristol to Rhws, involves a bus, a train and a taxi, as the out-of-town setting of Cardiff Airport is not easily accessible at night. Perhaps there is a good reason for this. I like Cardiff Airport – like Goldilocks in the three bears’ house, I judge that it is just the right size. You can’t get the terminal wrong. You can find your car in the car park – you can even walk from the terminal to the car park.

  The Cardiff sniffer dog is a cute golden retriever that reminds you of your grand-puppy in New Zealand. There are bilingual signs and, when I arrived here, just reading the Welsh made me feel queasy at not having a car in the car park, at not having a house in the Gwendraeth Valley and at getting on a bus going the wrong way, to Cardiff Station.

  I felt better when two old men talked at each other all the way, capping the bombs in Swansea during the war with the closure of the mines, to the evident amusement of a Dutch lady, fresh from my plane and probably ticking her ‘real Welsh’ list with each topic.

  I was waiting for them to harmonise on ‘Bread of Heaven’ but that seemed to be all they missed out. The ‘excellent transport links from the airport’ consist of one bus which picks up market-shoppers all the way through the rural Vale of Glamorgan before trundling into the central station forty minutes later. You can travel the twenty miles from Charles de Gaulle Airport to central Paris more quickly.

  On the other hand, you could also spend your entire life lost on free shuttle buses going around the airport complex at Charles de Gaulle; or die of a heart attack lugging your suitcase towards exit signs that turn out to be barricaded off and as you’re on the third floor anyway what you need is a lift; or be so bemused by the shopping arcades that you think you’ll go just a bit further before you buy some water and it’s too late – you’ve gone through the gate and there are no shops left. Rhws Airport tells it to you straight; ‘No food after this’ says the sign on the closed café.

  ‘Who won the football?’ I pass the time with the taxi-driver en route.

  ‘Wales,’ is the reply, in a middle eastern accent, and I smile at the back of the driver’s neck. Only this sid
e of the border would that be the answer, the right answer on two counts.

  ‘Good. Do you know how England did?’ I ask.

  ‘Drew I think,’ is the dismissive response. I carry this little bit of Welshness with me into the deserted airport. I find that there is a good reason for there being no public transport to the airport at night; it is because the airport closes down.

  The doors might stay open but the only people there between 11pm and 4am are security guards who walk around, shining torches into dark corners, and, on this one occasion, there is also a middle-aged woman curled up on two seats in one such dark corner with a red woolen scarf for a pillow. The security guards pretend she is invisible and she pretends it is the most normal thing in the world to try and get a few hours sleep, alone amongst chairs upturned on tables.

  I find it very difficult to choose somewhere to sleep, spoilt for choice amongst the entire departure lounge, bar and café seating – at least those not turned upside down on top of tables or each other. I expected to be with other adventurous overnighters curled up on their rucksacks and I have planned to loop one bag through my suitcase and to hide my handbag under my red scarf just in case there is an attempt at theft while I am asleep.

  I take these precautions but I have to say that I think they are a bit unnecessary. My first choice of bed is a very comfortable double padded bench in a well-lit area; somehow I feel safer there. It is well-lit because the only facilities available all night in Cardiff Airport are the slot machines, which play snippets of inane pop lyrics at random but frequent intervals. After ten bursts of ‘At the car wash’ in as many minutes I would confess, if asked, to having murdered the Queen, and I move to a dark corner of the bar. The hell with theft, mugging or rape – I can now only hear the canned music, which allows me to drift in and out of sleep for whole minutes at a time.