25th July 2010 – Kira and Josefien

It was a time of change at Fontsoleil. I was two thirds of my way through my stay, but Kelsey and Goedele were leaving. We vowed to stay in touch, and I felt that we probably would. We had formed a strong bond over that short period of time. I wanted to know what they would make of their lives, or what their lives would make of them. Straight into their beds came Kira and Josefien.

Kira – full name Kiralyn – was just a couple of months older than me and also studying languages at university. She had spent the rest of her year abroad on the tiny French island of La Réunion, and was full of tales to tell about her time there. She had also spent a few summers working at Yosemite National Park, her stories of which were fascinating. I could listen to her talking of mountains and tigers for hours. Like Kelsey she was American – this time from Oregon – but she was quieter and more mellow. Although Kira and I were more alike and had more in common, I found that I missed Kelsey’s bounce and vigour. Josefien was older and at first a little more reserved. Coming from the Netherlands, the level of her English induced jealousy in my inner linguist, although still we spoke in French. She had WWOOFed several times before, mostly in New Zealand, where I learned that the WWOOFing community was one of the most active in the world. All three of us being fairly similar in our comparative reticence, it was a more awkward first few days than I had had previously, but we would turn out to be a good trio: talkative, with a shared sense of humour and never short of an anecdote to tell.

The weather did nothing to help the initial awkwardness. The storm that had been predicted by Xavier and the biting flies came upon us. Or perhaps it was a different storm, it was hard to tell. There had been others down the valley, but these were the first droplets to quench the parched throats of the plants at Fontsoleil since the day of the flies. In any case, the water came down in a torrent, the sound amplified by the drops bouncing off the broad-leaved foliage surrounding the house. Feeling quite at home, I ran outside barefoot and danced in the cool deluge, allowing the rain to drench my clothes. I was sure Michelle would have approved, and besides, I hadn’t realised before how much I would miss the British rain when faced with drought. Rivulets ran from my shoulders down my back and droplets obscured the vision through my glasses and rested like silver beads on my eyelashes.

The rain pattered on, slowing from a tango to a steaming lovers’ dance as the sun tried to creep out. There was no work to be done outside, and no jam to be made. We found a stack of DVDs and got to know each other as we watched them, laughing together and talking over the parts we couldn’t follow, alternately stroking Bali and chasing him away when his capriciousness got the better of us.

24th July 2010 – Toast?

I soon came to learn that the process of making jam was much the same for any of the fruits which I had the good fortune of working with that summer, namely berries and currants. Even with my limited experience, however, I was aware that something special was happening when we arrived at the Jammery that morning. An awareness that was brought on by walking into the Jammery and being absolutely convinced that I could smell toast. In actual fact, what I could smell were the fleurs de châtaigner which Goedele and I had harvested the previous day and which had been steeped in water overnight. They smelled absolutely nothing like toast, but having spent two weeks at Fontchouette eating nothing but fleurs de châtaigner honey on toast for breakfast every morning, that was what the smell reminded me of. I had a moment of being in awe of the body’s senses and how easily confused they could be. 

Having been steeped overnight and then drained to remove most of the pollen, the liquid was set to boil on the gas rings with approximately the same ratio of sugar to water weight, and a little added lemon juice for acidity. We weren’t going to be making jam this time. We were going to be making jelly; not the children’s birthday party kind, but the translucent, bit-free-jam of the redcurrant jelly ilk that we Brits traditionally ate with roast lamb. After boiling the liquid for five minutes, we added the magical ingredient, agar-agar. Crushed into a powder from a certain type of seaweed, agar-agar looked like bicarbonate of soda. It worked a little like gelatine, somehow immobilizing the mixture when heating it in a liquid and forcing it to set into a jelly. All that was needed was the smallest sprinkling per basin. Had we not added it, as indeed Xavier almost forgot to in the first batch, we would have ended up with jars full of syrup. I couldn’t imagine that fleurs de châtaigner jelly had a very wide appeal, so it came as no surprise that only two basins later we had just 65 pots ready for labelling. 

Xavier was a funny man. He was tall and very thin, even more so than his wife. I thought that he was 59, but I was never quite sure; he looked older. His skin was tanned deeply from a weather-beaten life, and his longish hair fell in gentle grey waves belonging to decades past. He didn’t often smile, but when he did it transformed his face and furrowed wrinkles into a wide grin. He made me think of Roald Dahl’s BFG. Goedele claimed that he had a nervous tic when he was stressed that made him look as if he was about to burst out laughing. She was right, but the  laughter never came. At dinner he ate little, pushing the food instead towards the WWOOFers, although he had a love of bread which must have bordered on unhealthy. He wore baggy, threadbare trousers of maroon or grubby cream with thin, long-sleeved cotton tops, which were often stained with jam or torn by brambles. I never saw him wear anything colourful.

He had a very dry sense of humour, and usually a great deal of patience. He explained things thoroughly. At times he could be slightly patronising but that was understandable: he was entrusting his livelihood to the hands of unskilled WWOOFers after all. If he decided that he wanted to know something he became obsessive, and often ended up asking the same question more than once. Thus it was that I ended up having multiple conversations about forced rhubarb; he learned that I came from the Rhubarb Triangle, where 90% of the world’s forced rhubarb was historically grown, and he had to know everything about it, several times over. His voice was quiet and he mumbled a lot when he spoke, which under normal circumstances was rarely. He was talkative only around people he knew well, or when he felt strongly about something, and he avoided big groups of people. Kelsey and Goedele couldn’t imagine having him as a father, and the next two WWOOFers would confide to me that they found him very awkward to approach, but I didn’t agree with any of them. Perhaps I saw him in a different way given as I first got to know him surrounded by his family. I felt quite an attachment to him.

Awkward or not, he was a gentleman, and always thanked us for our hard work after a morning at the Jammery. He also made it quite clear that we were there on holiday, and that we were only to work as much as we wanted to or until we tired of it.

23rd July 2010 – A donkey called Accidental

I felt even more ridiculous the next day when by chance I was sent up that path again to look for a particular flower. About ten metres past the place where I had played at taking part in a pagan ritual, I was given a fright by the loud braying of an invisible donkey. Another metre around the corner and we came face to face with each other. He was a fairly standard, nondescript kind of donkey of mottledy greys and browns. But he did have a loud voice. The thought that he might have interrupted me like that mid-spin the night before made me laugh out loud. It would possibly have been the only thing that could have made that evening even more preposterous. Back at the house I asked about the donkey. Apparently his name was Accidental.

22nd July 2010 – Naked in the Moonlight

I would never have called myself prudish per se. Amongst my friends I had always been open enough about the more squirm-inducing subjects. Fontsoleil took me down a few notches further on the prude-scale, to a point which I wouldn’t have believed of myself a month earlier. The evolution began with some magazines and a pack of cards.

The magazines in question were part of a series called Rêve de Femmes – Women’s Dream. They covered all aspects of being a woman from a spiritual point of view, everything from being a child to being a mother to growing old, menstruation to menopause, sexuality to sensuality, emotion to intelligence. Despite slight leanings towards all things hippy, I would probably have overlooked these magazines were it not for the illustrations on the covers. Some were recognisably of women, united by their radiance, some were figurative, and some so symbolic that at first glance they had little to do with the contents of the edition. They were all paintings, and they were all beautiful. The colours were deep and rich and sumptuous, the images swirling and soft in composition. 

I looked inside in search of more art. I found it, but I also found some articles which drew me in: Does your appearance reflect your interior, and should it?; Growing old with grace and wise with humility; Celebrating periods rather than cursing them; Embracing the emotional side of being a woman. I didn’t agree with many things the authors had written; the articles seemed too contrived to me, almost artificially tree-hugger-esque. But they were thought-provoking nonetheless. Did my appearance reflect my interior? Probably not. But then it was inevitable that I should choose to dress in a way which was uniquely me, was it not, given as I was the one who wanted to wear the clothes? Or did I only think my style was unique? To some extent I knew that it was prescribed by society: by the fashion industry, by the media and by expectations. And did it matter? I supposed that, if I was going to be judged for my appearance as inevitably I would be, then it did bear some importance. I wouldn’t want to give off the wrong impressions. And I wanted to grow old and wise – no, grow up – with grace and humility. And I saw the sense in choosing to celebrate the emotions and the blood rather than regretting them; I was a woman sans règles, which could be translated equally as without rules or without periods. Having lived in this lawless state for the best part of a year, I had some understanding of how integral they were to my own sense of identity as a woman. 

Seeing that I was enjoying the magazines, Michelle came to find me one afternoon-nap-time. In her hands was a small cardboard box which displayed the name Feminitude. It was a set of tarot cards especially for women. Michelle told me that she liked to use them when she was feeling unsure, and asked if I would like to look at them. Although unplagued by pressing uncertainty, I had nothing else to be doing in those hours of quiet, and besides, I was curious. Leafing though them I found yet more art, and more ideas that I couldn’t quite bring myself to believe in fully. I played, and pulled out two cards: mystery and the tree of life. I put them back and flicked through the pack again. One of the pictures caught my eye; it was the moon card, and the picture was of a beautiful woman, naked in the moonlight. I thought how wonderfully liberating it would be to be like that, just once. I wondered if I was comfortable enough with the shape of my body to share it with nobody but the moon. I wondered at the coincidence that it would be a full moon that night. I hatched a plan.

By 22:30 the sky was black as pitch. By 23:00 the house was silent and dead with sleep. Wearing just my dressing gown and blushing despite my secretive solitude, I slipped out of the door of my bedroom, across the landing and out of the upstairs door to the outside, which was possible because of the gradient of the hill that the house was built into. I padded up through the jungle of weeds, past the toilet and up onto a higher path, waiting for a spot where the trees overhead cleared, leaving a wide moonlit vista of the valley and the sky. The greens and golds and yellows and browns of the gay had been replaced by silvers, greys, blues and purples. Feeling absurd, and hoping fervently that nobody in the house had woken at my footsteps, I let my gown glide down to rest at my feet. 

Thankfully it wasn’t a cold night, and so I stood there for a while, letting the moonlight shine balmily over me. My skin, by day bronzed with Indian heritage, by night was as pale as edelweiss and almost iridescent. I felt like I ought to do something. As absurd as I had felt before I was naked, the feeling was now tenfold. And so I turned on the spot and began to spin around, faster and faster. My hair caught in the lightest of breezes and flew out around my face like black silk, my arms outstretched, and I felt ludicrously and joyfully free. I was caught in a cliché of liberation - even in the midst of it I was well aware of the fact – and yet the cliché held true. I did feel liberated. 

The moment passed. Shivering slightly, I dressed myself once more. I was a ridiculous specimen of humanity; there was no doubt about it. And yet how perfect to feel at ease enough to be so ridiculous. 

21st July 2010 – Squatty Bogs

Despite the exhaustion, and doubtlessly because of the excitement, and possibly because of the frogs singing in the valley, I slept badly that night, tossing and turning and bruising my hips at each twist. Eventually I resorted to stuffing my well-travelled cushion down to buttock level, meaning that my pelvis was thrust into the air with a peculiar tilt. It did at least mean that my bones couldn’t feel the floorboards, even if it was ungainly. That cushion had seen as many places as I had, from South Africa to Slovenia. I didn’t like to sleep without it hugged to my chest. I was growing to regret having chosen the room without a proper bed. My hips were so sore that it hurt to squat. And squatting was fairly necessary at Fontsoleil.

After the civilised outside toilet at Fontchouette, I had been in for a shock at Fontsoleil. Water was just as much in shortage as it had been up the road, and so it followed that a regular toilet wouldn’t be used all the time. As Michelle explained to Goedele and me at the beginning, we could use the inside toilet only at night. Otherwise we were to use the dry toilet outside: in fact, if it was just a pipi then we should just do as she did and use the garden if that was more convenient! To my knowledge neither of us ever did that. Even though the raspberry canes would have provided adequate privacy, the prospect of it seemed somehow perverse.  

The toilet was up a jungle tangle of a path, past the washing line and up through nettles and thorns that snagged at skin and trouser legs and onto a flat stretch looking out over the house and garden and surrounding trees. It was a closed cabin of chipboard, painted white on the inside although the paint was flaking off. A bucket of sawdust balanced precariously at the back of the cabin replaced the need for a flush. That was where the largest spider lived. If I were a spider, I would have found a more freshly-perfumed abode. Once I even walked in to find a butterfly there, which I liberated to cleaner air. Hanging at the front was a rather sweet toilet roll holder, fashioned from an empty four-litre plastic bottle of something which protected the tissue from any rain that might seep in. The roof slanted downwards away from the door, meaning that even before you entered you had to be backing in, stooped over. At any clumsy movement more paint would peel away from the walls. 

Clumsiness was a dangerous pursuit in that dry toilet. The floor comprised two uneven and disconcertingly wobbly planks of wood, one for each foot. One step in the wrong direction would mean a shoeful of sawdust and excrement. Balancing whilst removing a trouser leg and trying not to drop it into the pit whilst squatting, holding onto the door and concentrating on doing whatever you went up there to do in the first place was nothing short of an art. It was also necessary to listen out for other potential toilet users. There was no lock and no way of knowing if anyone was in there until reaching the little waist-high window in the door. Waist-high was, of course, head-high to a squatter. The trick was to dangle a hand out of the window, alerting any prospective squatters to the cabin’s current occupancy. It saved many a moment of embarrassment.

Needless to say, none of us WWOOFers relished our toilet trips. There was no chance of going for a long session with a good book. We were all guilty of illicit inside toilet trips when Xavier was in the garden and Michelle was in her pottery shed. We all tried to hold on in the evenings until it got dark, at which point using the real toilet was considered acceptable. Although even that toilet was a mite strange: it had no door, just a thin brown curtain. It wasn’t a house for prudes.