Notes from the cevennes, p.1
Notes from the Cévennes, page 1
NOTES FROM
THE CÉVENNES
In memory of my parents, who granted me a love of two countries
ALSO BY ADAM THORPE
FICTION
Ulverton
Still
Pieces of Light
Shifts
Nineteen Twenty-One
No Telling
The Rules of Perspective
Is This The Way You Said?
Between Each Breath
The Standing Pool
Hodd
Flight
Missing Fay
POETRY
Mornings in the Baltic
Meeting Montaigne
From the Neanderthal
Nine Lessons from the Dark
Birds with a Broken Wing
Voluntary
TRANSLATION
Madame Bovary
Thérèse Raquin
NON-FICTION
On Silbury Hill
CONTENTS
1Gossamer Threads
2The Poppet
3Coming Into Shot
4Wartime Shrines
5Our Baker Is Missing
6Reprisal in the Oxbow
7The Psychological Castle
8Taking the Postman Hostage
9Resident Tombs
10A Flat Above the Café
11All that Rough Music
12Erudition
13A Local Custom
14Disaster Area
15Martens in the Roof
16A Visit from the City Police
17Arches and Bulls
18Defending Wolves
19A Catastrophe
20Floodwaters
21The Ballot
22Paws, Fingers and Thighs
23Taking our Tread
24Epilogue
‘Footprints’
Acknowledgements
A Note on the Author
The urge to know was with me, and the ache. The smell of the soil, the gleam of the wet roads, the faded paint of shutters masking windows through which I should never look, the grey faces of houses whose doors I should never enter, were to me an ever-lasting reproach, a reminder of distance, of nationality . . . I should never be a Frenchman, never be one of them.
Daphne du Maurier, The Scapegoat (1959)
1
Gossamer Threads
We had been renting full-time in France for three years when we bought our house on the lower slopes of the Cévennes mountains: the last thrust of the Massif Central before the southern plain and the sea. An author’s limited budget (one of the reasons for moving to France in the first place) meant that our reverie of an isolated mas or farmhouse with land around it soon dwindled to a rambling village house set against a hill, with a modest, unattached garden behind, sloping up in a series of terraces. At least the kids can walk to school, we told ourselves. Their route was a few minutes down a couple of rocky paths between drystone walls: we had read somewhere, in an article on human evolution, that unevenness underfoot stimulates the synapses, and with the lower path being particularly bouldery, we joked that this would turn them into geniuses.
‘Your great-grandmother,’ I told them, ‘walked four miles a day to and from school in cold and rainy Derbyshire.’ This was warm and relatively dry Languedoc. When it stormed, however, water from the sloping vineyard gushed furiously through a wall on the last stretch, adding to the challenge. Twenty-five years on, the way has recently been paved with shallow steps and cemented flat slabs, doing nothing for the neurones.
Our house is above the village proper. A cluster of largely medieval buildings on the side of a great dome-shaped hill thick with wild boars, our quartier feels like a separate hamlet, with its own name, threaded by rough-cobbled, sloping paths – calades, from the Occitan calada (Occitan being la langue d’Oc, giving rise to the region’s name, Languedoc). The main calade passes right by our back door on its way up to the hamlet’s green or placette – the beguiling suffix indicating its size, as a cigarette is a little cigare. This was dominated until a few years ago by the ruin of a medieval building, known as l’Hôpital. Not a hospital, but a refuge for the poorest or the insane. The lower village was destroyed in 1703 (‘exterminated’, in the no-nonsense words of the official command) by Louis XIV’s dreaded dragoons of the green tunics, long black boots and five-foot sabres during the guerres des religions, as locals call them. Those that did the burning and demolishing were lodged in our sector, which is why it feels, in parts, like a medieval relic. There’s still a warren of passageways where the old common well can be found, the bucket squeaking into a far-down splash.
Up until some 40 or 50 years ago, the wild limestone hill behind would have resembled the stepped tea or rice plantations of India or Vietnam, rising amphitheatrically with cultivated terraces called bancèls in Occitan, put to vegetables like onions, potatoes or leeks, planted with rows of vines, mulberries or olive trees (we are at the very limit of the latter’s zone). The drystone support walls had to be continually repaired or the heavy rains of autumn and spring would eventually sweep the earth to the bottom, leaving only bare rock. Many bancèls have now vanished under bushes or secondary forest. You can see the evidence in the old photographs: a corrugation of thin terraces laboured over with mattock and two-pronged fork for all that the poor soil can give, helped by sheep manure carried in shoulder-yoked baskets up innumerable steps. There is a striking absence of mature trees in these vintage glimpses. The Cévennes were stripped of their timber in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – to be happily and heavily replanted in the twentieth with government aid.
The original walls are now half-tumbled among garrigue scrub, or lingering in stretches between pines, chestnut and spruce on the granitic part of our commune a couple of kilometres further north. Where the terraces are better preserved, in areas of the region where more springs bubble up in the aridity, back-to-earthers as well as locals have made beautiful gardens of them, green diadems draped on countless steep shelves. An old Berkshire saying, ‘Ne’er come home wi’out stick or stone’, has its Cévenol version in an enormous clapàs – a heap of collected stones – stretched among the slope’s trees 50 yards above us. A bent-backed veteran warned me soon after our arrival that ‘stones are all that grows in our soil’. And grow they do.
Dwarf holm oaks, patched with lichen, may thicken gloomily on the hill (I have grown fonder of them, of their plucky disdain of beauty as well as of cold or heat), but all of a sudden, in late April, the grey-green slopes turn psychedelic for a few weeks, splashed with brilliant orchids, wild garlic, flowering gorse, saxifrage, sage-leaved cistus, wild lavender and trailing honeysuckle, thyme, rosemary and countless other species that include my favourite, aphyllanthes, its tufts of pale electric-blue petals on frail grass-like stalks, blooming only in the day, appearing to wither to invisibility at dusk, then reviving in the morning. Their intense colour is fugitive, impossible to capture in a photograph: they come out a dull white. Small blue and yellow butterflies and grander ones like the scarce swallowtail flicker here and there as you step through the bristle of vegetation, breathing in the warm aromas that herald the imminent heat of cicada season.
At the top of our unprepossessing mount, lonely among the great boulders and sleeve-plucking junipers and thistly undergrowth, you can see the far-off Alps on a clear day, small and sharp as a shrew’s lower teeth; Mont Ventoux fooling you with its snow-white summit of limestone; the great shadowy key-notes of Mont Aigoual and Mont Lozère to the north; the metallic gleam of the Mediterranean to the south. This peak is where I have stood when lacking inspiration, when my imagination feels valley-consigned, chained down, in need of re-urging.
The end house – part of a solid old mas – was occupied (and still is) by a family of Seventh Day Adventists, with numerous cousins living elsewhere in the area. The old pastor had just died when we arrived: Grégoire was his son. A bachelor in his thirties, he dressed in black trousers and jacket, sporting a pudding-basin haircut and carrying around with him a battered pocket Bible from which he would quote liberally and fervently when he passed us by the back door, sermonising on the Last Days and how Satan and his angels will rule over a desolate earth until burnt to ashes by God. A relative living in the nearest market town, possibly his aunt (it was never quite clear to me) and of an indefinable age, who dyed her loose hair a corresponding jet black and always wore the same long patterned dress, would trundle an old pram around in Stanley Spencer fashion: it held her shopping, mostly. She had an extraordinarily lugubrious way of speaking, almost a chant, a threnody of complaints with no punctuation. Her partner was a vague, beaming, round-faced presence whose own threaded suit, when he wasn’t in a soiled vest, was pale brown and a size too large.
Very occasionally Grégoire would let rip with rock ’n’ roll or New Orleans jazz at full blast from his bedroom’s open windows: it would sound up and down the valley at odd times for a couple of hours. Locals would shrug and say, ‘That’s Grégoire for you. Letting it all out.’ Eventually his married sister, born and bred in the mas and rarely leaving our hamlet even now (‘Why should I? I don’t like noise and I love my flowers and books!’), packed him off to a psychiatric hospital in town. He was like the ghost of old battles, of a lost fervour. An illuminé.
For this and for much else, despite the absence of grey skies and chalky mud, I felt that I had walked back into my recently published first novel, Ulverton, which concerns a downland village in Berkshire from the Civil War to 1988. The first chap
‘The family are still there,’ he added, nodding at the house in question, which gave nothing away behind its shutters closed against the heat.
The novel is built up in chronological layers, each bleeding into the other. A palimpsest, where time’s previous scribbles remain visible. Our house turned out to be the same, consisting of three formerly separate but now interleaved dwellings whose thick walls finally opened up to each other after yielding grudgingly to our maçon’s meaty drill. The drawings of Escher come to mind. The two parts at the rear are at the level of the back path, or what my Derbyshire father would have called a ‘gennel’; these open into the spacious attic level of the main house, from which you have to descend to the first floor to reach the front door, which opens onto a curving flight of stone steps. Descending these to the front gennel, you pass the ancient wooden door of what was once a goat-house. A large square room with pine beams and a little ivy-clad window, an older neighbour remembers it being full of flies and the stink of goat dung, until the sanitary inspector was called. Areas of bare stone or flaking crépi (rough-cast lime render) gave the house a certain scuffed look that we’ve not touched.
Overlaid levels of historical periods, from Gallo-Roman on the ground floor to eighteenth century under the roof, teased us with clues. For instance, the small entrance hall on the first floor was once the kitchen. A great oak beam, a foot across, strengthened in the middle by slightly less ancient iron straps, displays a formidable hook, sturdy enough to take a whole pig, wild or domestic. A shallow sink survives, chiselled out of stone, lacking only a water pitcher and basin. The centuries-old floor, tiled in thick terracotta, slopes down towards the outside door for easy sluicing: there is a small wooden trap set into the tiles, through which our elderly neighbour remembers, as a boy, ‘pouring the grapes trampled into a mush by my bare feet: there was this big wooden vat in the cellar below, directly below the trap’. This cellar, like its larger companion, is actually at ground level, and was reserved for farm-produce such as olives or wine, as the other was used for livestock, in the way of the traditional housebarn familiar from prehistoric times on. Both caves are still earth-floored. ‘We did it all for free,’ my neighbour continued. ‘It was only enough wine for the family itself. Their vineyard went down to the road, back then . . .’
The vines were replaced, back in the 1960s, by an uncompromising block of a house and the corrugated roof of its builder’s yard. But I say nothing, as the notoriously volatile hunter who owns it is still very much of the present. And the present slips away like a fish. A home is not only an archaeological strata of long-lost times, of course, but (in our case) a place for family, a living continuum where personal memories are triggered by dusty toys, dried-up poster-paints, a painted clay lump in the bottom of a box.
The sellers were equally typical of the region: Parisian néoruraux who had made ceramic wall-tiles in the main cave until impoverishment turned them into social workers. Not so different from ourselves: I was fashioning novels and poems instead of tiles, and Jo soon became a teacher. Their cobalt-blue efforts still grace our unimproved bathroom, set back into the hill and windowless. To reach the second floor you have a choice of staircases: one, the original spine of the house in lime mortar and oakwood, lies towards the back; the other angles up from the entrance hall, fashioned in chestnut by the village carpenter. The second floor was once the attic or magnanerie under the eaves, where silkworms munched on mulberry leaves spread over wickerwork trays rising in tiers: a profitable home industry before artificial fibres made it redundant after the war. Soon after we arrived, I was shown such an attic, the trays or ‘beds’ still intact, in a house that was for sale in the village: perhaps the last glimpse of a practice dating from the thirteenth century. The impoverished Cévennes, once notorious for their sickly and undernourished population, produced France’s favourite luxury item thanks to the white (not the black) mulberry, nicknamed l’arbre d’or or ‘tree of gold’. Fiercely pollarded to resemble a child’s pipe-cleaner sculpture, they produced large and juicy leaves. Cévenol silk was regarded as ‘perhaps the finest in the world’, even by British commentators.1 Meanwhile, right up to the last war, many paysans were so poor they went about in bare feet to avoid wearing out their clogs, which they hung on string around their necks until they reached town, donning them for market or church and slipping them off for the path home. Wasting something was unknown, money hardly seen and everything was reused, like the flattened tin colander serving as an animal flap on our back cellar’s door.
In April, our children would bring back silkworm eggs from school as part of an annual project. In the old days, these were wrapped in cloth sachets and tucked between the warm breasts or thighs of the woman of the house, despite posters warning Ne faites jamais l’incubation dans le corsage (Never use a bodice for incubation). Tiny black worms appeared and, instantly gorging on fresh mulberry leaves, grew fat and translucently white, like a resplendently helmeted maggot, the heart beating visibly in the tail. At one point, we had around 80 tiny jaws working through the daily supply from the three old mulberries that still grace our terraced garden, their forms gnarled and swollen by centuries of pollarding. The sound is like the rustle of rain in a wood. Within weeks the worms had climbed into the twig forest we had artfully arranged on the trays and begun to spin a mist of gossamer threads around them. These thickened and hardened into cocoons, within which the chrysalid brooded. In the old days, we’d have hung them like onion strings until the pesage or weighing day on the square, when the silk factory took over. Then the workers – always women – killed the pupa inside by dipping the cocoon in boiling water and releasing the loosened thread onto its bobbin; silk-workers’ fingers were red and swollen from being effectively parboiled day after day in the spinning mill. It took two thousand cocoons to make one silk dress.
The very last mill in the Cévennes, with its own orchard of mulberries, is still active at the entrance to our village, more a hopeful revival than a continuity, as the original filature lies long and hollow-windowed along the high street. We got as far as pinching loose thread from the cocoons and rolling a rougher version between our fingers.
It was exciting, anyway, to watch the moths hatch, their useless wings dusted as if with chalk, the cocoons left dangling like old skin. Finding their mate, the cycle began again. New eggs, fresh worms. What was the original point of it all, before a Chinese princess discovered the properties of silk? It seems an existential question. Nature gives point to herself. We would have kept it going for ages, this miraculous sequence, if the second year’s batch of eggs overwintering in the fridge hadn’t turned yellow following a power cut. It was a shame, a trivial echo of the various calamities – disease, hard frosts, war, anti-Huguenot oppression, competition from China – that a thriving regional industry, producing hundreds of thousands of pounds of silk at its height in the nineteenth century, barely survived each time. The house had seemed to have rediscovered its old pulse, its former pungencies of mulberry leaf and worm, but it was an educational game, not a matter of life or starvation.
A sepia postcard of our village square, entitled Scènes Cévenoles, shows the pesage officiel des cocons around the turn of the nineteenth century: bloated sacks lying on wooden tables, bullocks and carts in the background, men in droopy moustaches drawing up their sleeves or self-importantly striding about while the women – then, as now, running the business side of each household – lean on the stone parapet (identical today) and await the verdict of the scales. The private harvest ready to be sold to the silk factory. This was money, spun from a delicate, intense labour of around five weeks.
