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.