Sunday 31 March 2013

20th July 2010 – All That Jazz




Tuesday came around again, and with it came the excitement of our planned evening outing to Mardi Jazzy. We had been talking to Anaïs about it over a bowl of tea after our stint of redcurrant picking, and she had seemed very keen to come with us. Xavier took me to one side as we were pulling on our shoes and polishing off our stop thumbs. He asked me to keep an eye on her, and particularly how much she drank at the bar, and to try to distract her from drinking too much alcohol if at all possible; it wouldn’t be good for her given how much medication she was on. But he also made it clear that ultimately she was responsible for her own actions.

We had arranged to meet Anaïs at the bottom of the road because we had to walk past Vivien’s farm on the way to Lamastre anyway, and the chance of meeting a car between the two smallholdings was infinitesimal. We stood at the bend in the road waiting for her for ten minutes before giving up. If she wanted to come, she knew how to get to Lamastre, but we suspected that, as with so many other things in her life, her good intentions just hadn’t reached fruition. And so we walked and talked, passing a field to our right which was home to two enormous horses. They were awesome in the truest sense of the word. I had never been a horsey girl, and I didn’t find them beautiful animals. It was their raw power that made me stop and stare in admiration, their hulking musculature barely covered by a hide of short brown velvet. I wanted to draw them, to harness their vigour on paper, but I knew that I couldn’t do them justice. The road took us through a densely- wooded patch of hill, and brought us out on the other side where we joined the main road to Lamastre and began our quest to hitch a lift downhill. 

It was a quiet late afternoon on the roads. The sun was beginning to sink over the hills behind us, and so we cast a trinity of dark, impish shadows as we skipped and twirled our summer dresses and high spirits along the roadside. We still had an hour until the music was set to start, so we weren’t concerned by the lack of cars. We were singing silly songs and enjoying the freedom of being three girls alone in all of the residual warmth of the French day. 

We did keep on hallucinating the sound of approaching traffic, though. One false alarm, two, three, and finally a car. Which drove resolutely on past us. Not to be deterred, we walked and walked and kept on walking. Another car went past with no acknowledgement of our extended digits. We slowly began to wonder whether we would make it down to the town on time. But we worked out that even if we had to walk all the way, we should still hear half an hour of music, and we suspected that there would be somebody at the concert, whether local or tourist, who would be willing to give us a lift back. But at that moment the indisputable splutter of a local set of wheels reached our ears, and once more we stretched out our arms. The car ground to a halt, and a smiling old lady welcomed us in, scolding us gently for hitchhiking. Two of us shared the back seats with three crates of raspberries, and she encouraged us to help ourselves. As we had spent the day harvesting the raspberries in the garden, however, they were beginning to lose their appeal, and so we declined with a laugh and an explanation. One thing was certain: as an international trio of young, female WWOOFers, we were a conversation-starter in ourselves.  

In the centre of Lamastre we started our search for the bar. We had quarter of an hour to find it before the music kicked off, and given the size of Lamastre, we were confident of success. Just in case, though, we asked a likely-looking woman if she could point us to where Mardi Jazzy was taking place. She pointed us down a street, but as an afterthought she shouted after us that it had finished half an hour ago. 

Our faces didn’t fall, they plummeted. There was to be no funk, and no soul, and no saxophone. We were full of righteous outrage that the poster we had seen had given us the wrong time, until we walked past the very same poster and saw that it really did say 18h. Where our joint conviction that it started at eight came from, none of us could fathom. In our disappointment we could find only one solace: crêpes and ice cream. 

Conversation turned to religion. I tended to avoid the subject of religion, especially over food. I didn’t know what I believed, but I knew it to be a truth that food was both necessary and enjoyable. This, however, was an open, deep and all-encompassing conversation. Kelsey was a Christian, loud and proud, with an unshakable faith in God. Her job in Aix-en-Provence was with an international church, working with children and teenagers. Goedele and I weren’t sure what we thought. Goedele had been leaning towards a belief in God until her brother had been lost to spinal cancer the previous year, and she struggled to reconcile an all-loving, all-protecting God with her family’s experience. I talked about my conversation with Michelle about believing in love, and I think that both of them were struck by it, in their way. I supposed that love spoke to everyone. It transcended religion. It even transcended ice cream.

The night had crept silently into the valley as we were talking, and we were faced with the question of how on earth we were going to get back to Fontsoleil. Our plan of asking a fellow jazz aficionado was scuppered, lying at the bottom of a sea of blues notes. We wandered towards the road, and made the fortuitous decision to stop by the fountain in the town square to fool around taking pictures. Parked cars lined the square. An older couple walked past us, tourists contentedly full of good ardèchois food and a little wine. They offered to take a photograph of all three of us, which we accepted, and we began to explain why three foreign girls were alone together in a little place like Lamastre. 

I had a brainwave. Maybe, just maybe, it might work. The couple seemed as if they probably had a conscience between them, after all. After Goedele gave our spiel on being WWOOFers, I chipped in. We were staying on a farm in the hills, I told them, and we were getting worried because we had been planning to faire du stop but now it was dark and we didn’t know what to do. I would normally have cringed at playing the damsel in distress, but needs must. I knew I had won when I saw the woman’s eyes. She clearly disliked the idea of us hitchhiking in the dark, turning to her partner and impeaching him to drive us to where we needed to go. He wasn’t so easy to convince – and fairly so, given as they were staying on the opposite side of the valley – but his wife was determined. Eventually we agreed that they would drive us halfway, to the turning off the main Lamastre road. 

Shutting the car doors with as many words of thanks as we could muster, we stood and laughed in pure relief at having made it so far up the hill with so little difficulty. We were skittish and high on adrenaline, thoughts and words revolving at the speed of light around our dizzy feet. We didn’t notice the forest until we were in it, and once there it was only noticeable by its obscurity. We couldn’t see our hands in front of our faces, much less each other or the path. It was frightening. It was like being a child again, but not in the magical way of the Jammery. This was childhood’s more sinister aspect: the velociraptors under the bed and the sharp-toothed bearwolves in the branches, and the groaning, creaking whisperings of threatened vulnerability, and the naked, trembling fear of the terrible terrible unknown. There was only one thing for it. We held hands and we sang and we skipped our way forward and we hoped that, like the innocent fairytale children we had become, we would make it through this fairytale forest unharmed. 

We were exhausted by the time we arrived back at the house, and flopped onto the settee. Michelle put a pan of water on to boil and brewed us up a batch of chai tea, and we laughed hysterically as we unfolded our tale of the evening.

Saturday 30 March 2013

19th July 2010 – A Little Love Song




The next morning I arose early, awoken by Vivien’s now familiar véla cries through my open window. My stomach pleading to be fed, I made my way downstairs, notebook and pen at the ready,
and found Michelle sitting alone on the balcony. Breakfasts tended to be spent in companionable silence. Michelle would sit as though contemplating the sun and the view and all the world had to offer, eating as though she revelled in the taste of every grain in her bowl; it was just like when she put rosewater on her face; she felt it with her entire body. I assembled my breakfast in one of Michelle’s tiny spherical hand-smoothed bowls which sat perfectly in cupped hands: a vegan dream of quinoa flakes, pumpkin seeds, tahini, raisins and soya milk. Michelle looked beautiful in the sun, her eyes closed in enjoyment and delicate fingertips lightly interlaced in her lap. 

Michelle was a tall, thin woman, and a little sunken; her cheekbones were pronounced under gentle wrinkles, and her mousy curls were greying. She had no curves on her, but she made up for it with the voluptuousness of her sculptures. She wore deep reds and yellows and oranges and browns, alive with the mature colours of autumn. Her quiet, soft-spoken calmness didn’t stop her from being good at making conversation and putting people at ease. She had originally trained as a sports teacher but had stopped because it didn’t fit with her ideals. It was all competition-based, whereas Michelle preferred a more holistic approach to sport, believing it to be a matter of personal development and enjoyment. Besides, the headteacher didn’t like her methods of using dance and music within the sports lessons. Since then she had taught dance and yoga before dedicating herself full- time to the farm. 

She met a slightly older man at a yoga retreat. He was called Xavier, and they fell in love. They had three children together. She believed in hugging her children tight, showering them with kisses whenever they met, but in such a way that it never appeared contrived or artificial. Her vitality was derived from a mixture of contact with other people – physical as well as social – and quiet reflection. She admitted to finding life hard  on the farm sometimes; it was too lonely in winter, and she would rather live somewhere a little less remote. But Xavier was happy there, and Michelle believed in finding a midway in any kind of conflict: cooperation without loss of integrity. Her compromise was found in getting away from the farm occasionally. She had also accumulated a group of like-minded friends from across the region who met once a month to give massages, paint, sing and dance and celebrate being female. She was peaceful and wise. I wanted to be like her. 

I set my book on the table for later, and looked out across the sky. Early in the morning, before the sun rose too high, the left-hand side of the balcony was the best for sunbathing, and that was where I sat. Once the heat of the day set in, the tarpaulin suspended above bestowed shade upon us as we dined. In the direction of the rising sun I looked out over the garden, the wooden house lower in the valley that was Xavier’s current project for autumn and spring, the goat farm beside it with bin bags strapped over its haybales and a corrugated tin roof that looked white in the sun. In the foreground of the horizon there were little hills with meadows and thumbnail-sized trees, brightly-coloured, and taller hills stretched behind them, dull with haze. The dark silhouettes of the foothills of the Alps sat behind that, and on clear days like that one, even faint suggestions of the Alps themselves, and Mont Blanc.
Lost in my enjoyment of the tahini against the roof of my mouth, unctuous and grainy, nutty and sweetly bitter, it was Michelle’s turn to observe me. It was she who broke the silence first. Almost as if reading my thoughts from the redcurrant bush she asked if I wanted to write a book. I had never considered it. A book. A whole book? What would I write about? I wasn’t sure I would have enough ideas to fill a book with. But why not? Thousands of others had done it before me, so why not me? And so I told her that perhaps I would, in the future, but that it was just a dream. She smiled: for her, dreams were to be lived.

It seemed like an opportune moment. I wanted to know the secret to her and  Xavier. I wanted to know what made them so calm, so collected, so ‘present` and yet so relaxed. What did she believe? And so she told me. She believed quite simply in love. She had been to India several times and been influenced strongly by the religions there, but by their way of living and accepting rather than by their gods. The couple had come to believe that there was love in everyone and that it should be searched for and harnessed and celebrated and encouraged to blossom. They also believed that the love of an individual should not be restricted; it should be expressed, whether towards a partner, or a friend, an acquaintance, a stranger, an animal. And they believed in the importance of extending that same love to oneself and to one’s own living of life, to do whatever one did with passion and to experience every moment. It made sense. They became my role models: that was how I wanted to live my life.

The first task I undertook in my new, loving frame of mind was bee-keeping. We were all offered the opportunity, although Goedele’s apiphobia made the offer seem less than appealing to her. As for Kelsey and I, we were raring to go. Xavier found us two bee-keeping suits from the back of the store room. We didn’t half look ridiculous; we probably would have looked ridiculous even if the suits had fitted us, but they were made for tall men. We were the very picture of deflated astronauts, all in white with big, round, heavy helmets on our heads, material bagging around our wrists, ankles, crotches,
necks, and pretty much everywhere else except the chests. I was given a can of smouldering sticks, and Kelsey a small set of bellows. It was hard to grip properly through the thick material of the too-large white gloves, and I was afraid that I might drop my tin of fire. 

Xavier told us that we were to proceed slowly and quietly. The bees needed to be treated with respect, otherwise they would swarm at us, and then they would be scared away from the hive and would search for another home. Kelsey and I were to approach the hive from the back, and slowly introduce the smoke. This would both calm and confuse the bees, making it possible for Xavier to enter the hive from above, pulling out the sheets of honeycomb to inspect them for honey. I had been hoping for home-cultivated honey to go with my forthcoming breakfasts, but sadly there wasn’t enough to harvest; Xavier would check again in two weeks. Still, all was not lost.  I had had my first experience as an apiculturalist!

Later that day, conversation turned to yurts. There were rumblings in the community that the local government was cracking down on yurt owners, claiming that they were illegal because they didn’t have to pay the French equivalent of council tax. Marie was worried. Her partner did have a house in Lyon, so she thought that she would probably be exempt, but she still cared passionately about the rights of yurt owners and had many friends who could still have suffered as a result of more stringent legislation. I couldn’t imagine living in a yurt, and said so. I asked if it didn’t get too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter. Michelle smiled, and took us up to Marie’s yurt. She was out, but we went in anyway. The round tent was more spacious inside than I had anticipated. There was a double bed and a wood-burning stove, and Taom’s toys were all over the floor. It was more homely than I had imagined, but it still wasn’t for me. The only running water was in a cabin outside where there was a shower and a toilet. I couldn’t have done it.

Friday 29 March 2013

18th July 2010 – Anaïs




In the days between our trips to Lamastre I met Anaïs. One day when Goedele, Kelsey, Xavier and I were down at the lake, Michelle brought her down to meet us. My first impressions of the 25-year old French girl were of a shaven-headed girl in a black bikini whose torso could have been a model for one of Michelle’s voluptuous sculptures. She wasn’t overly chatty, but she was open enough, and after all, next to Kelsey most people would have seemed quiet.  To look at Anaïs and to talk to her, it would have been hard to guess her story.

She was spending that summer working with Vivien, the neighbour who kept the goats which were so irresistible to the flies. I never met him, but I heard him every morning without fail, shouting Véla! Véla! Véla! as he rounded up his troupau of goats to the sound of the bells around their necks. The two years previous to that she had WWOOFed at Fontsoleil and in many ways had become part of the furniture. Xavier and Michelle were very fond of her, and as there wasn’t much work for her at Vivien’s farm, she came over now and again for a session of jam-making, or fruit harvesting, or just for the company. 

Xavier and Michelle also worried about her. She had never been to university, or at least she had, but she had never seen anything through to the end. She had training in all sorts of disciplines. She had taken a course in felt millinery and one in dress-making, she had farming experience aplenty, and she had danced. By all accounts she was a brilliant and captivating dancer, if a little out-of-shape and practice. But the young woman struggled. On a high dose of anti-depressants and roll-ups, to the naked eye she appeared to be coping. But under the surface simmered an impulsive – although loving – personality who didn’t think things through, or maybe couldn’t think things through. Her parents had given up on her years ago, leaving her prey to her problems. The December before I met her she talked herself into marrying a man whom she didn’t love so that he could obtain French citizenship. Meanwhile, in another city, there was a man whom she really did like. The tale would be enough to make the head of the most grounded of individuals spin, were they living with it. As she was, she couldn’t cope. A week or so after I met her she was to take off again, on a whim and against everybody’s advice. She was going to the city, she said, to get a place at a dance school. She hadn’t contacted the school, and to the best of anyone’s knowledge she had nowhere to stay. All we could do was cross our fingers and hope. I never found out what happened to her. I hoped she was dancing.
As for me, I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. I had always considered teaching, and had thought that a nine-month stint as a teaching assistant in Germany would leave me with a definite ja or nein. Instead it left me thinking that it was something that I enjoyed doing and was good at, but that I wanted to do something else first. I was growing tired of education, and needed a break from it. This realisation wasn’t immensely helpful to my immediate plans. I only had one year of university left to decide, after all. I knew that I was the happiest that I had ever been on the farms, but farming really wasn’t an option to my mind. A languages degree could be a key to many industries, but I strongly doubted that berry-picking was one of them.

One moist and misty morning when the weather was still cloudy before the heat of the sun burned through, I was sitting in the redcurrant patch. I was milking the berries from the stems and letting

them patter like droplets of bright blood into the grey plastic crate below. Goedele, Kelsey and Anaïs were all elsewhere in the garden, similarly absorbed in the task and their thoughts. And suddenly it came to me. It seemed so obvious. I loved writing. Throughout my time as a WWOOFer I had been writing weekly missives home to friends and family, taking reams of notes and character studies in a little green book so that I never forgot the experience. It made me appreciate the tiniest details. I was living through my pen so why shouldn’t I make my living from words? And that was when it was decided. I was going to be a journalist.  

Thursday 28 March 2013

17th July 2010 – Stop




Kelsey wanted to get out and about. I might have been happy to spend my free time outside in the garden, or wandering, or simply sitting and drawing, reading, writing, talking or strumming the guitar or listening to music, but she wasn’t. She hatched a plan to walk to Lamastre, have a drink, and to walk back. I smiled: she clearly didn’t have a clue quite how long it would take to get to Lamastre on foot. My guess was at least three hours, given the hills. Add in a meagre hour for a drink, and we were looking at a seven hour long trip. I wasn’t too keen. We were debating this –in French, because we always spoke in French – when Michelle floated in and overheard us. She told us that if we didn’t want to walk all the way, we could always faire du stop. This – which I translated literally as to do the stop – turned out to be the very literal French way of saying to hitch-hike

As un-keen as I had been to walk all the way to Lamastre, I was even less keen to hitch-hike there. Hitch-hiking was dangerous. Hitch-hiking meant kidnap and rape and maybe death. But Kelsey was taken with the idea. It turned out that she had done it before in America and in France, and Michelle assured us that, because of the lack of public transport around those parts, it was quite common there.

So it was that a confident and experienced American set off down the drive with two nervous followers, six thumbs at the ready. It was only five minutes until Car Number One passed us. It pulled over a couple of metres further on, and its owners agreed to take us halfway to Lamastre. They were a middle-aged Parisian couple on holiday in Desaignes. They were wonderfully, emboldeningly normal, and when Goedele and I stepped down once more onto the road to Lamastre, it was with a much increased sense of our own chances of survival. We took to our thumbs once again. Car Number Two and Car Number Three drove past us as if we were ghosts, but Car Number Four stopped. A young couple bearing dreadlocks welcomed us into their back seats. They were in the region for a relaxing, tree-filled weekend away from office work, and while we jigsawed ourselves in between their luggage and a very old beige television set we set off once more towards our destination, discussing WWOOFing and jam with our new companions. 

Once in Lamastre, Kelsey realised why we hadn’t considered a six hour round journey worth our while. We wandered a little and sat down for a drink, as we had said we would. Goedele bought a sunhat from a nearby shop and we fooled around for a while, posing as cowboys on the steps of the town hall and reading the notices on the public noticeboard there. An orange flyer bore the bold title MARDI JAZZY. From that moment, Kelsey wanted to go. And I have to say that, despite wanting not to want to go on principal because she did, I really did want to go. An evening of funk and soul and saxophones? It sounded right up my street. Maybe Kelsey and I had more in common than I had thought after all. 

We had a few days to wait though, and we couldn’t very well stay in Lamastre town square until then. We began to debate how to hitchhike back to the farm in the middle of nowhere. It suddenly seemed a lot harder to get back than it had been to get to where we were. Anyone around here would know the way to Lamastre from the hills, but who would know where Fontsoleil was? As it happened it was easy, if a little hair-raising, because Car Number Five was driven by a local. Locals generally drove beat-up old cars, because in the hills with all the hairpin bends it was pointless to drive new ones. Besides, the old cars were easier to fix than the newfangled ones, and I doubted that the AA would have been happy to come that far out from civilisation. Locals also knew their ways around the myriad little hamlets and farms. Locals also drove far too fast, especially the men. Our local drove us off at the speed of light around rollercoaster bends, nearly writing off his stale-smoke-infused motor in the process. The prospect of near- certain death completely overrode the fear of kidnap. But in the end we arrived safely, if slightly kippered, at our destination. Not my transport of choice, perhaps, but I was to use it again. After all, we had a jazz concert to attend!