28th July 2010 – Fat Bottomed Girls

The weather being no longer wet but still cold, none of us felt much like gardening, so we neglected the berries hanging heavy from their plants. Michelle had some gift sets of little pots of jams that she needed to be packaged, and so we set to work, sticking on the labels, rolling up the trios of jars in slippery cellophane, and tying bows in the ends with lengths of raffia. The raffia was in a basket on a chair beside us, which turned out to be a mistake. Bali, discovering the potential for wreaking havoc, proceeded to do so. Jumping in and out of the basket, raffia caught in his claws and in his fur, he dragged the strawlike strings around the room, draping them over chairs and sofas. All we could do was watch and laugh. 

I enjoyed this little bit of artistic work. It reminded me of home, working on card or brooch designs or packaging for my mum’s craft business. I knew how important presentation was to the potential customer. It could catch a disinterested eye, and make or break a sale. The dried glue on my fingers took me back further, to junior school art classes or maybe even earlier to collages of dried pasta and papier-mâché masks, peeling it slowly away from my skin, feeling the tickle of severed dead cells. I left a thin, strong, grey cocoon on the table top.

Art was important at Fontsoleil. It adorned any surface, vertical or horizontal; it was one of Michelle’s great loves. Pottery in particular. She hoped to be able to make her living from it one day. She sold mostly functional kitchen items, much like the ones I had been using during my stay. Her glazed bowls, plates, tea pots and jugs didn’t cost the earth, and so sold well, as they were of a very high quality; however, her passion was for sculpture. Her figures put me in mind of Henry Moore’s bronze women, curvaceously full-hipped, full-thighed and full-breasted. But whilst his were typically placidly reclining, hers were dancing with vitality and joy, or blissfully restive, or in deep contemplation. She built her women that way – steatopygous – she said, because she found that the heavier she built their lower halves, the more grounded they would be. And aside from the practicality that a heavy-based sculpture was less likely to topple than one which was Giacommeti-thin, she believed that it was from the ground that their vitality was derived. She sold these fat-bottomed beauties too on commission and at a price. 

Her dream – or one of them – was to teach pottery. In line with her philosophy that dreams were for living, she already gave occasional workshops, and was working on setting up a retreat with a couple of friends where she would teach pottery, one of the friends would teach fine art, and the other yoga and dance. In my second week staying with her, I found the courage to ask her if she would teach me. Of course she would.

The weather being as it was, and there being no jam to make, Kira and Josefien and I found ourselves with Michelle in her workshop. It was an Aladdin’s cave of modelled contours, all in varying shades of the dust-grey drying clay. Each one of us, terrified of moving with anything more than fairy steps in case we should accidentally shatter a masterpiece, took our places at the work stations. We kneaded the clay as if it were bread, and threw it against the bench with all of our force, and kneaded and threw and kneaded and threw, and just when we wondered how much more violence the poor earth could take, we brought it to the wheel and stroked it with gentle persuasion. Thumbs applying pressure from the inside, with the wheel rotating, we slowly teased bowls out of our abused lumps of clay. Michelle said that she would glaze and fire them in the huge kiln in the room next door and send them to us if we wished. 

The others had had their fill of clay, but my fingers were itching and so I stayed on in the creative haven, battering another lump of clay into submission. I wanted to make my own woman. Slowly I formed her curves as she lay on her side, legs drawn up foetally and head resting on half-folded arms. Her shoulders and hips rose high, dipping away to the floor as gravity stole her waist. The smooth of my nails teased out her shoulder blades, her spine, and the crease of her buttocks. She hid her face. I couldn’t sculpt noses.  

That evening there was a concert in Lamastre, and Michelle fancied going down there. Not to miss out on a trip and some music, the three of us had been quick to say that we would go too. And if Michelle was in charge I might actually get to listen to the music: it was fairly unlikely to be a repeat of the Mardi Jazzy fiasco. So instead of Mardi Jazzy, my French experience of live music turned out to be The Crippled Frogs. The way they pronounced their name, it sounded like Zee Creepled Frocks. I have no idea on earth why the band chose that particular name. I could only assume that it was taken from the lyrics of one of the country and blues songs that they sang. I wondered if they were aware of their national nickname, or if the choice had been coincidental. It was odd to hear them singing in my language. I would have preferred to have heard French songs, but the crowd were enjoying the music, and in truth so was I. We were with Michelle’s sister, who lived nearby, and the siblings talked between the songs. Disconcertingly, the two had exactly the same voice as each other, and listening to the conversation we could have been audience to a schizophrenic monologue.

We were sitting halfway up an open-air auditorium – that uninspiring concrete construction in the market square that I had identified on my first hour in Lamastre – looking down onto a temporary stage where the three men sat and sang and strummed. The youth of Lamastre had gathered in front of the seating, where they were dancing with abandon and gusto. I expressed my surprise and happiness at the fact that even the mid-teenagers were uninhibited enough to fling their arms around and clap in semi-choreographed movements, breaking at that moment into a chaotic conga. Michelle and her sister were taken aback by my reaction. Their impression of English teenagers was of total lack of inhibition. I had to explain the pressure to seem cool and disinterested at the age of the dancing French adolescents. I painted a bleak picture of the rise of binge-drinking amongst the youth to explain the restraint deficiency that our teenagers were famed for. Perhaps it was unfair. Perhaps I had always been unfair on the British youth. I hadn’t been a tearaway fourteen year old, after all, and neither had most of my friends. I had still known a fair few though.