26th June 2010 – The Prophecy

By 6 o’clock the following morning I had crept past the anonymous Canadian and two Japanese girls. They had appeared during the night in what I had taken to be a dream, which turned out not to have been a dream after all. I loved early summer mornings: light, cool and silent. In all of Lyon there existed the dustbin men, my rucksack, and me, tiptoeing between the sleeping concrete business towers. 

As ever, I was at the station in good time. I hated to be late for things that didn’t matter, so given that it was imperative that I caught that particular train for the bus connection later that morning, I was a little on edge. But I loved railway stations, so armed with a freshly-baked croissant I installed myself happily in front of the departures board, losing myself to memories of stations all over Europe: the coolness of Budapest station, where a catchy jingle played before every announcement as the Hungarian sun blistered the pavements; my pride at having managed to order 2 singles to Krakow in Polish at Warsaw’s ticket office, when all I could fluently say was dwa pączki, proszę: two doughnuts, please; celebrating language assistant Joe’s birthday at a pizza restaurant in Leipzig station because we were worn out and excitable and it was late and raining and the food there was cheap. 

5 minutes of delay. 10 minutes of delay. Come on, train. There was a woman standing near me with a tiny fluff-pot white poodle, and I thought she was probably waiting for the same train as me; she was scowling slightly at the board. 30 minutes of delay and I started to panic. Another 10 minutes and I’d miss the bus. The hapless information desk informed me that they couldn’t tell me when the train was expected and told me to go back to the board, where a pre-school blonde was trying to pet the poodle with her free hand. Her father was calling her back to him and the woman’s scowl was growing to contort her whole face, but Thumb-sucker was away with the fairies and the fairy dog and took no notice of either of them.

 Not a moment too soon, but thankfully not a moment too late either, the announcement for the delayed 07:25 train played, and a mass migration of moans commenced in the direction of platform H. I helped a struggling, baby-wielding lady with her luggage onto the back carriage of the greasy-windowed, mucky-floored regional train, and settled down to read my book, stopping after a few minutes in favour of watching the fields go by. 

Despite the panic of the late train, the bus hadn’t yet arrived when I reached Valence station, so I sat in the shade, leaning against my traveller’s rucksack. It was dark green and black and beginning to show the signs of age. Four years of expeditions in the Yorkshire Dales, two tours of Central and Western Europe, countless trips to and from university and weekends traipsing across Germany had taken their toll. Lovingly sewn on were fabric badges from countries and cities that I’d ticked off the list. Christiania was the most exciting place I had collected.

In the middle of Copenhagen Catherine and I came across a church with a twisted black and gold spire. Next to it, covering less than half a squared kilometre and surrounded by high wooden walls, was Christiania, a tiny community flaunting their independence from the European Union. In Christiania taking cannabis was legal and taking photographs was forbidden, and the locals could be identified by their hippy clothes and stoned dazes. Replaying my visit to this surreal place against the cloudless sky, I failed to notice the old lady sit down beside me until she began to talk. I clearly stood out as not being a local. Where was I going? What was I doing? Good questions. In stilted French, I explained my purpose as well as I could.

WWOOFing was difficult for me to describe, not least because I was unsure myself about what my immediate future held. An hour and a half on the other side of this bus journey, if the bus were ever going to come, would be Lamastre, where I would be spending my first two weeks as a WWOOFer on a farm making cheese and aperitif wines with a couple called Anne-Marie and Pierre. I would be living with them, and hopefully talking to them, and doing whatever tasks they set me around the farm. I had learned their names and profession from the list of participating farms that I had purchased online, and the dates of my stay had been arranged by email. I had contacted eleven farms in total, five of whom replied to offer me work. Two of them I turned down, but the dates that Anne-Marie and Pierre offered me fitted in with my plans, and so it was decided. Apart from the fact that I was to meet the farmers at market in Lamastre that day, I knew nothing else about the days ahead. I told this to my wrinkled companion.

Ah, she said. Ça vous changera: that will change you. At that moment, she seemed like a prophetic crone from a modern fairytale. I mulled over her words. Yes, it was bound to change me. The question was, how? Would I finally meet my Prince Charmant, and would I encounter wicked witches, malevolent wolves, enchanted animals and poisoned fruits? Would there be a moral to my story?

The bus turned out to be a coach, although not one made of pumpkin, which wound its way around hillsides and hairpin bends, the valleys becoming ever more pronounced and the villages becoming ever smaller. Although there had never been any question of going back, I truly realised it then. I was trundling along into the unknown with literally no way of turning back, hoping against hope that Anne-Marie and Pierre would be easy to find. My instructions were to look for the wines and a big cheese. Any French market worth their snails that I had been to previously had boasted multiple wines and cheeses. I wasn’t filled with great confidence.

I jumped down from the coach steps and stumbled under the weight of the bag on my back. The old woman asked me if someone was coming to pick me up, and as a somewhat vague response which reflected the only thing on my mind, I told her that I had to find the market. She laughed kindly and motioned around her; we were in the middle of it. How could it be that I had not already noticed the sounds of shopping-basket gossip and goats’ cheese smells? I was maybe more nervous than I gave myself credit for. Wishing me luck, she hobbled off into the crowd, shoulders not quite level and one knee slightly stiffer than the other.

Abandoning my usual systematic method of searching, I began to wander up the street, which was flanked with market stalls. I wasn’t taking it in. My heart was beating at a nervous pace; an imaginary piece of twine was twisted around my stomach, seemingly forcing its contents upwards into the depth of my throat and downwards to swill uncomfortably in my gut. There were too many stalls. There were too many people. There were too many colours flying past my eyes as I scanned the street, too many voices assaulting me as I stood anonymously in their midst. I took a steadying breath. Big cheese, big cheese. I wondered how big big was. As big as my hand? My foot? My entire head? Size, being relative, didn’t seem to be a particularly helpful description. But then I saw it. Big was an understatement. This cheese was bigger than my head, both feet and hands put together and took pride of place on a stylish varnished wooden display board under a deep green parasol. Beside it was a small rectangular cheese which looked a little sad by comparison and which I later discovered to be not cheese at all but butter, and beside that a neat display of different colours of wine. There was only one thing for it.

Um, bonjour. Je m’appelle Becky. Je suis WWOOFeuse.

Anne-Marie kissed me three times – right, left, right – and introduced herself and her husband – right, left, right – and Pierre told me that I could put my bag down in the shade by the white van. I did exactly that, and hovered. What next? Anne-Marie had gone back to the stall, which was small, and it didn’t seem like a place where I could be of use. People were sauntering past in market mode, and four young children were playing around the bench behind me, so sitting there wasn’t really an option either. The street had ceased to spin, my fear having subsided, but my head had swung to the other extreme, incapable of processing anything at all. I crouched on a soft part of my bag where there were no shoes to dig into me, and decided that I belonged two stalls down with the market gardeners, where all the other limp lettuces were. I was out of place.

I was told that I could go for a walk if I liked, to see the market, that I didn’t have to stay there at the stall and that my bag would be safe, and that Anne-Marie would be leaving at midday with the kids. She waved her hand in the vague direction of the children, who were now climbing over the bench, giggling. Were they all hers? I decided probably not. They all looked about the same age, so unless she had quadruplets, which seemed fairly unlikely, then no. Even my fogged brain was capable of working that much out. 

Leaving my rucksack in a way I would never have dared to have done in a street in Britain, off I went. It turned out that the market was fairly small. Disappointingly small. Nerves had clearly made it appear bigger when I had alighted from the coach half an hour earlier. There was just one long row of stalls selling various kinds of food, with a flower stall and a woven basket stall thrown in for good measure. But perhaps markets demonstrated a good use of the maxim quality, not quantity: bright, fresh bouquets of perfect flowers here, shiny vegetables there; hams and sausages and pâté; a little glass- fronted stall where a jovial young man appeared to be selling fresh pasta; enormous, aged, buttermilk- coloured cheeses to one side, tangerine-sized pats of creamy white to the other; jarred snails here, jams there. As I made my way down the line I tasted at every opportunity, and with every new taste, I felt less like a misplaced lettuce. There were plenty of jams to sample -- apricot, strawberry, rhubarb and almond, vine peach… 

That‘s when I saw the names on the yellowy labels of the jam jars, written in small print. Xavier and Michelle. It couldn’t be, could it? Then again, how could it not be them? Surely there couldn’t be two jam-making couples in the Ardèche called Xavier and Michelle. A more forward person than me might have asked the tall, graceful woman behind the jars if she was expecting a new WWOOFer in two weeks’ time. Forwardness, however, was something that I lacked. What if it wasn’t Michelle? I’d look such an idiot. And what if she was? What would I have said? And so I backed away from the stall as if the jam were poisonous, my heart pumping a little harder than it should have been, and I continued my wanderings. 

Lamastre, I decided, was probably quite a pretty place when market stalls didn’t mask its elephant-grey stone buildings, fountain, cafés with roadside seating, and purple and yellow bunting. The concrete block of a tourist information office left quite a lot to be desired though; it came straight out of communist Russia, an austere architectural anomaly taking pride of place. The construction on top of it was strange too. I couldn’t for the life of me work out what it was for. It was a wide staircase of about twenty steps into the sky, made out of the same uninspired concrete as the office itself.  At the base of it a couple of equally uninspired teenagers were sitting smoking. I decided that it was probably some kind of open air auditorium, although I couldn’t imagine that it was used very often. 

Between the tourist office and midday I sat and observed Anne-Marie and Pierre and the woman who was probably Michelle from under the brim of my new sunhat. I was about to become part of their lives. How odd. And they were about to become part of mine. They could have been anyone. They could have done anything in their lives up until now. The day before I would have passed them in the street without a thought, and they would have done the same to me. We could all have peacefully passed our lives without ever meeting and yet now here we were, about to plunge ourselves into a remarkable degree of intimacy. I was struck by the enormity of the world, and the infinitesimalness – although not insignificance – of each individual, and of myself. Intuitively I knew already that I had made the right decision in taking the risk to WWOOF. I could never know every person on the planet, but the more people I did meet, the more I would learn, and the more I could become. Adrenaline pounded near my tonsils at the sheer marvel of life.

Anne-Marie smiled and waved me over. It was midday already. I followed her to a largish, oldish, white box-shaped car and placed my rucksack carefully in the boot amongst a couple of crinkly carrier bags. I took my place in the front passenger seat, as all four children from the bench were clambering onto the three back seats. Being a passenger on the right hand side was something that I had failed to get used to in the nine months that I had already spent out of the UK, and my feet still searched for imaginary pedals, though I felt no compulsion to try my hand at driving on the wrong side of the road. 

As we wound our way out of Lamastre past boulangeries and bicycles, over an old stone bridge, taking a left-turn in front of a red-painted restaurant and up, up, up out of the town and into the trees, Anne-Marie and I talked. Why did I want to WWOOF? Mostly to improve my French, I told her. I was about to become a final-year languages student, and I needed to spend some time abroad, and in all truthfulness, I hadn’t properly considered any other potential benefits of the experience when I had first decided to do it; it was only now that they were becoming apparent to me, and I was sure that they would continue to do so throughout my WWOOFing stint. It had been a fairly whimsical decision after having had job applications turned down by several different French campsites. I had been on the point of submitting an application to work as an au pair when my travelling companion Catherine had mentioned this farming scheme that she had heard of. It sounded quirky. Once the decision had been made, I enjoyed being able to tell people that yes, I was doing something exciting in the summer. I was going to be a farmer in deepest darkest France. I enjoyed watching their reactions. 

It was my turn to quiz Anne-Marie. What would I be doing on the farm? Were there any other WWOOFers there? I’d be helping in the garden mostly, and with the production of aperitif wines. I could do some cheese-making if I was interested, and I would be expected to help out with the household tasks. Yes, there was another WWOOFer, an American called Caleb – which she pronounced Car-lep – but he was a bit lazy and he was leaving on Tuesday, and then I would be alone.

Before I left for France I had spent many moments considering the worst case scenario and I had formulated a back-up plan for when nobody picked me up from the market. Control freak to a fault, I had printed out a map of how to get from Lamastre to Fontchouette, which was the name of the farm. I was glad that I hadn’t had to use it. On paper the journey looked fairly short, perhaps an hour’s walk. But the road was peppered with tiny twists and turns and went up and up relentlessly. I guessed that it would have taken me a good three hours to climb with a fully packed rucksack in the scorching midday sun. I counted my blessings, and nervously twisted my earring around and around, surprised at how yellow the ground looked. I had expected thick, lush greenness of forests. There were patches of forests over the hills, yes, but there were also fields and dusty roadsides which were more in line with my perceptions of Southern Spain or cowboy films than they were with not-quite-Southern France.

To enter the driveway of Ferme de Côtes de Fontchouette, Anne-Marie had to execute a three-point-turn in the road. I thought maybe she had overshot the driveway by mistake; it would be so inconvenient to perform that manoeuvre every day. When the car rolled forward I could see down into the garden, tens of metres below. I decided not to look; the wheels were far too close to the drop, and my fear of edges was none too happy to find itself being challenged. I later learned that three-point-turns were the norm, and my acrophobia learned to concentrate very hard on the fact that, despite years of driving the car in such proximity to the steep descent, Anne-Marie and Pierre were still very much alive, and that I was therefore unlikely to be in danger.

The driveway itself was not the best maintained road that I had ever come across. Bumpy bumpy bumpity bump. I realised I was gripping the seat rather harder than was necessary, knuckles white. It was probably safe to relax. My new home jolted into view, and my new life as a farmer was about to begin. 

Ferme de Côtes de Fontchouette – Fontchouette for short – seemed enormous to me. The car had pulled up against an orangey-brown wooden wall which stretched skywards for perhaps three storeys and opened out to reveal an airy, cavernous barn  where hay bales were piled and odd parts of confusing machinery were stored and evidence of a recent children’s war was scattered. Towards the far end, a staircase descended into the ground. Perhaps that was where I was going to sleep. Perhaps it was a subterranean store-cupboard for all things farm-related. Perhaps it was a dark, dingy dungeon with walls covered in blue cheese mould where the bodies of previous WWOOFers lay undiscovered in staggered states of decay, corpses impregnated by the stench of cheese. Perhaps I was daydreaming, but the odour was undeniable; the whole place reeked of enormous wheels of holey cheese. Did they get used to it, Pierre and Anne-Marie and the quadruplets whose names I had been told and immediately forgotten? Or were they always aware of it, like someone waving at the edge of their field of vision? Might I get used to it? I doubted it.

Anne-Marie told me to take my bag and follow her, and so I did. To my relief we walked past the descending steps, past a scrambled shoe mountain and what I assumed must be the front door – wooden with wrought iron handle and hinges –and up a glorified ladder onto an open-air mezzanine, oddly ochre-coloured with the bright daylight bouncing off the wood. On the floor was a jumble sale of sleeping bags, pillows and blankets on top of two mattresses, and a hammock hanging over the side. Was I not even going to get a proper room? Yes, of course I was. The messy area at the top of the steps was where the kids preferred to sleep on those warm summer nights, open to the gentle breezes and the enveloping midnight sounds of nature.

My room was small and stiflingly hot, but the smell of warm wood won favourably over the smell of the cheese. The one single bed that I could see was occupied by tangled blankets, topped with a couple of men’s socks. Leaning against a little table was a red rucksack not unlike my own. I realised I was going to be sharing a room with Caleb. I hoped he wasn’t a snorer.  I was shown a rickety ladder leading up towards the ceiling. At the top, about sixty centimetres from the ceiling, was a ledge on which there was a thin double mattress. Anne-Marie threw a few blankets up to me and told me to settle in and come down to the house when I was ready. 

There wasn’t much settling in to be done. I noticed a spider near to my head and took a deep breath. It was a spider of reasonably large proportions. I wasn’t the kind of girl to run screaming from any old spider, but I wasn’t exactly enamoured of the beasts, and didn’t relish the thought of closing my eyes with quite such little distance between me and a sizeable arachnid, however benevolent it might have been. It could have been worse, though. At least it was the small-bodied, spindle-legged variety rather than the tarantula-style hairy kind. Then I saw another one. I knew in that moment that I was going to have to get used to them. Hoping that they didn’t crawl into my sleeping bag, I unpacked it along with my pyjamas, alarm clock and book, and made my way down to the rest of the house. 

From the outside, the layout and construction of Ferme de Côtes de Fontchouette was fascinating. It was obviously a reasonably new build. As I stood at the bottom of the ladder from my room, facing the front door, I looked around. Almost everything that I could see was built using the same orangey wood, which even in the bright high sun of midday cast a warm early evening atmosphere over the place. To my left was where I had arrived in the car: a covered courtyard of miscellaneous farm paraphernalia with that ominous descending staircase. Further left again was wilderness and a suspiciously portaloo-shaped wooden cabin. The staircase turned out to lead down to a cowshed off to the left, and the cheese and wine cellars off to the right. Unbeknownst to me I was standing directly above the wine cellar, and the oddly wide door to the right of the front door concealed a self-built lift down to it for ease of transporting the goods.

Behind me and to my left, underneath the platform where the boy’s tangled bedsheets lay, was a large, rough and weathered wooden table with two benches attached to it. To one side of this was a door, which must have led to underneath my sleeping quarters. I poked my nose inside and pulled it quickly out again. It was the laundry room, but it smelled far from sweet. Hanging from the airers were lengths of cheesecloth of various sizes, along with items of clothing. The smell of cheese was overpowering. Behind the bench was another wooden wall with a glassless window through it. Peeking through the window, I looked out onto a building site. Clearly there was expansion in progress. I later learned that this was Pierre’ spring and autumn project; the building work was too intense for the heat of the summer. Large stones were strewn everywhere within the three half-walls, and a rusty cement mixer took pride of place. Curiosity satiated for the moment, I entered the house. 

Inside I was introduced to Caleb, lounging on the threadbare settee. There wasn’t much time for talking though. I was told that today was the last day of school for the four children who were running in and out of the front door, and that it was their school fair. I didn’t have to go, of course, but the opportunity was there. As soon as Pierre had arrived back from market, we bundled into the same car that Anne-Marie had driven me to the farm in. It should have accommodated a driver and – at a push – four passengers, so I had difficulty hiding my incredulity at even attempting to fit four grown adults and four sizeable children into it. And yet, somehow, with children on laps and definitely no seat belts to be contemplated, elbows in faces and bony bottoms wiggling to find comfortable positions upon cramping knees, we set off along the winding roads into the hills. I didn’t dare to open my eyes for the entire journey. I felt sickly as if I were on a roller-coaster which had failed its safety checks, but had been allowed to run regardless. 

Nozière’s primary school boasted two teachers and twenty-four children aged between six and twelve, all taught together in one classroom. I had seen documentaries about rural schools like this before, but I had never experienced one. I could imagine neither being a pupil there nor trying to teach to so many levels at once. 

Feeling a little out of place amongst the chattering parents who clearly all knew each other well, Caleb and I perched awkwardly on the village hall’s plastic chairs, waiting for the spectacle to begin. It was standard junior school concert fare really: little sketches, and songs sung with sweet enthusiasm if not with complete musicality. I wasn’t yet fully tuned into the language. It was only my first day, after all, and I had always found the rapid delivery of high-pitched children’s words to be difficult to follow; I forgave myself a little for not immediately realising that the children’s finale was being performed in my mother tongue. Soon, though, a recognisable tune permeated through to the audience, and there was no escaping it: I was listening to Yellow Submarine! It made me laugh. I was pretty sure that most Anglophones had trouble understanding the lyrics to that song, if indeed there was anything to understand in the first place. There was no way that those kids had a clue what they were singing about.

Walking outside, I was greeted by a view over the valley from the two-tiered garden that served as a playground. Between me and the undulating skyline was a marquee of mothers slicing up one-euro-sized morsels of homemade gateaux, tortes and other treats. I plumped for a light, moist sponge which was quietly flavoured with orange zest and soft vanilla and pocked with the silken flesh of baked apples and apricots. Caleb inhaled his slice of tarte au chocolat and eyed up the rest of the stall hungrily from our vantage point, seated as we were on the grass of the upper garden. He complained that he wasn’t fed enough at Fontchouette, and went on to talk about the farm where he had WWOOFed before, where the elderly shepherd had needed company more than labour, and where a constant supply of food had been available. I began to wonder whether I was going to spend a fortnight slowly starving, and gave a grateful thought to the cereal bars stowed away in my rucksack. I decided that I’d better ration them out to make them last.

We didn’t belong at the school fair with the parents and teachers and pupils, so we wandered off to explore the village. It turned out that there wasn’t much to explore. Nozières was home to around 250 inhabitants which included families like my host family, living in the hills surrounding the village. It was more of a hamlet, really. We came across a war memorial for the children of Nozières who died for France and stared out across the vista. The nearby foliage gave way to rolling hills of hazy green, dotted with trees and the occasional farmhouse and snaked with the pale beige of roads. The world seemed to be holding its breath: there wasn’t a sound. It was hard to believe, standing there, that there was such a thing as conflict. Nevertheless, if I had died in a war and had a plaque to show for it, I would have been be happy to have it in such a peaceful place. 

Ten minutes later we were back at the school. A large square pen of wire mesh had been erected in the middle of the lower garden, into which a small rabbit was being placed. After the rabbit, four cardboard boxes were deposited in the run, each bearing a child’s name and each with a rabbit-sized hole cut into the side. A bizarre game of what could only be described as rabbit lottery ensued. Excited children crowded around the pen and shouted instructions to the terrified bunny, who clearly wasn’t listening. I soon learned that when the rabbit jumped into a box, the child whose name was on the box was entitled to keep the rabbit. This farce was repeated four times. And so it was that we returned home with two rabbits more and two children fewer than we had arrived with. Pierre and Anne-Marie only had two boys after all, Juan and Malo, though I couldn’t tell them apart.  Nobody except for me batted an eyelid. 

 Two rabbits, it transpired, weren’t going to add much work to the farm; they would just add to the menagerie that already existed. The animal contingent of the family was made up of two rabbits, three cats, a dog, four hens, four chicks, two ducks and a cockerel. That was without giving any consideration to a herd of thirty-eight cows and calves who sometimes lived in a cowshed under the house, but who were usually left to graze in a pasture in the valley below.  

The rabbits – one jet black and the other a speckled stone grey and beige – were kept in a wire cage on the ground which was found for them upon their homecoming. The three cats were all very different from each other. One was old and a little mangy from illness, with scabby ears that she liked to scratch frequently and white-and-ginger fur which moulted wherever she moved her slow body. The next was a private cat who kept herself out of sight to such an extent that it took me days to realise that there were three cats on the farm rather than two. The last was younger with fine feline features and a sense of mischief. It was he who could often be found amongst the saucepans, and was constantly being chased out of the house. I never learned their names. They were all referred to as minou, the French word for kitty. There was no need to use their names, assuming that they had at some point been christened, because they all responded to that call. 

Pieski was the dog’s name, coined by a Polish girl who had been WWOOFing when he had arrived; pies was Polish for dog, and pieski meant canine, although it also translated as horrid. Generally the second description didn’t apply. Pieski was a large shaggy mongrel who might at some point have been white, but too many dog years of marauding through farmland had rendered him a browny cream. He spent most of his life slumped sleepily in front of the front door like a giant dirty sheepskin rug, just waiting for someone to tread on him.  His one aptly horrid characteristic was a penchant for eating faeces. He wasn’t fussy about it, snacking both on his own excrement or whatever he found lying around on his farmyard forays. It wasn’t a habit which was glaringly obvious, and I probably would never have known had I not been told about it over lunch one day, but it did give him more than usually disgusting bad breath. And, in my experience, dogs weren’t exactly famed for chewing after-dinner mints in the first place. 

The birds and the cows didn’t really enter into my sphere of consciousness to start with; the birds tended to stay up near their coop at the top of the drive, and the cows didn’t usually roam freely around the garden. There was just one time when one of the heifers escaped and stood mooing at the front door to be let in, frightened and tense. It took Pierre a good half an hour to coax her back towards the cowshed. 

The human contingent was easier to get to know. Juan and Malo were ten and eight years old; I was never sure which one was the elder, although I did manage to put the correct name to the corresponding face after a day or two. I didn’t spend very much time with them around the farm, but we ate together three times each day. Juan was slight and healthily delicate with a pretty elfin face; I predicted that he would break hearts as he grew into his teenage years. Although Malo was bigger, I thought he was the younger of the two.  He certainly came across as less mature, and his face was enchantingly cheeky. Both had tanned skin that glowed with childhood excitement, fresh air and sun, complemented by their identically soft dark brown hair and sparkling chocolate eyes. 

Their parents too were a good-looking couple. Anne-Marie had long chestnut brown hair which fell down her back in the gentlest of waves, tendrils of which had a habit of fluttering in the slightest breeze. I imagined that it had been quite a while since it had last been cut. Her skin was paler than that of her sons, with a beautiful spattering of light freckles across her nose and cheekbones. She was around my height, but she was slightly built like her eldest son, and never looked prettier than when she was barefoot in a floating sky-blue sundress. There was a delightful ethereal quality about her which I couldn’t put my finger on. 

Pierre had jet black hair and seemed to maintain four days’ worth of stubbled beard. He was tanned like his sons, but not at all swarthy, and his eyes were beetle-like and twinkling. He wasn’t a tall man, and neither was he broad, but he filled his small frame with a body well conditioned by a livelihood that relied on manual labour. He dressed in light coloured fisherman’s smock style tops made of thin fabrics and long shorts or thin trousers to save his skin from the glare of the sun. He was quiet and composed; at first he was more difficult to get to know than his more talkative wife, but he was a gentleman in the truest of senses.