7th August 2010 – Grammatical Pesto

The next day I sat with Nathalie, Sophie, Marta and one of Marta’s friends from the city called Evelyn, who liked to escape to the countryside every now and then. She was older and smoked even more than the others, and she looked somehow tired and haggard, but she was incredibly friendly. We were making pesto using the farm’s fresh basil and potting it up to sell as a sideline on the market stall. Francis was sitting with us too, on a mission to rid the farm of flies, as Theotim had just taught him how to kill them with an elastic band. He was fast becoming a master stealth-hunter. 

At one point when I was talking, Nathalie corrected a mistake: I had said j’y suis étée when I should have said j’y suis allée. At first I was shocked to be corrected – in all my WWOOFing time nobody had done it so blatantly – but I really appreciated it. I was well aware that, although my French was fluent, it was far from perfect, and that it was good to be corrected. I said as much, and only then did it come to light that both Nathalie and Marta had trained to teach French as a foreign language. Marta, I had discovered a few days earlier, was Columbian, and Spanish was her first language, so she would understand at first hand some of the difficulties of learning French. I couldn’t help but feel that they might be quite useful to me in my last few days. Why oh why had I not started talking earlier? I really needed to learn not to cut my nose off to spite my proverbial face.

As we sat talking, I was watching the farm’s dog. He was a pitiful old creature, a hulking mongrel with some black Labrador heritage. His fur, once ebony, lacked the lustre of health and was streaked with thick white. His eyes were dull and only seemed to half-see life as it revolved around him. His back hips had long since ceased to function, and when he wanted to move he heaved himself up on formidable shoulder muscles – if dogs had shoulders – and dragged himself along the ground, whimpering in his tremulous high pitch of discomfort. Abelard couldn’t bear to have him put down. So there was a human side to Abelard after all.

There was Reblechon in the post box! The previous day’s midday alcohol intake had addled our brains enough that we had forgotten. Sophie and Raphael took a walk up to the top of the drive, and returned forty minutes later with a plastic bag bearing a slightly smelly, rather too-warm cheese. Quite how long it had been sitting in the letterbox, which was on the top of the hill in a clearing and therefore in full sunshine for most of the day, nobody was sure; it could have been three days. We were all sure, however, that once it was cold again it tasted wonderful, and that its affinity to red wine made it even better.

6th August 2010 – First Class Cheese

It was Friday, and Hannah was going on a road-trip to see a friend of a friend who lived on a boat off the south coast. But before that was a day of work, preparing for Saturday’s market. That meant more green beans. I learned that the French phrase for that’s the final straw translated to that’s the end of the beans, and it seemed strangely apt, at least to my aching back! 

Hannah was craving an apple, so with time to kill before lunch we hopped into Marta’s cousin’s car, which was red and scratched and the passenger door was tied on with rope. Fearless Hannah elected to drive. I was quite sure that I didn’t have the guts to drive somebody else’s car on the wrong side of the road, however battered it already was. We failed to remember that all the shops shut for lunch and siesta around that area, and so our excursion was quite literally fruitless. We returned for a lunch of courgette, rice and tagine, plenty of wine, salad and bread and feta cheese, home-made by a friend. Sophie mentioned that she had ordered some Reblechon, and asked to be reminded to check the letterbox at the top of the long drive, but because of the wine we all forgot to do so. We ate gooseberries too, sugary bursts of sourness on our tongues. But gooseberries didn’t equate to apples, and Hannah was still unsatisfied, so Raphael, Hannah and I ended up once again in the car to Retournac, squeezing through impossibly narrow gaps between parked vans and stone walls. That time we managed to buy what they wanted, and on the way back to the car we bumped into Edouart and Else. Else was Edouart’s daughter, Abelard’s much younger sister. She was only eighteen, but seemed older. We took a diversion with them to a bar, which bizarrely seemed to be playing Irish music on repeat. Being already well wined, we sipped tea and chatted.

Upon our return the others had already finished their siestas and had ventured out into the fields to continue with the shallot harvest. My conscience chastised me for slacking, but the other two simply laughed, as though it were a triumph that they weren’t pulling their weight. I felt frustrated all over again.

Nevertheless, things were getting better. It had nothing to do with the fact that Hannah had set off happily on her quest for Marseille and the seaside that evening though. As with Kelsey before her – although admittedly not to such a great extent – I had been growing slowly fonder of her.

5th August 2010 – International Interactions

The afternoon was spent picking garlic and shallots and setting them out to dry. I hadn’t realised before that shallots grew in bulbs like garlic. It had also never occurred to me that they would need to be dried and that they didn’t leave the ground with such flaky, paper-like skins. The WWOOFers from the farm up the road had come down to help us. Some of them were Americans, and so Hannah was in her loud element. As for me, I met Christina, a beautiful Costa Rican who lived in Berlin. We spoke together in French about languages and agriculture. She seemed interesting and determined. We discussed how neither of us could stand people moaning. There were prickles stuck in the palms of my hands from pulling up the bulbs, but suddenly things didn’t seem quite so bad. I had found a kindred spirit.

While we were out in the fields, the farm took charge of a new breed of WWOOFer: a family. Blonde Nathalie hailed from Britanny, Joao was Brazilian although he spoke perfect French, and their son Francis was an angel-haired ten year-old. They seemed friendly, and as we sat around with wine glasses, filling the time between work and dinner, they chatted to Marta about the pros and cons of AMAPs. I wasn’t entirely sure what an AMAP was, but it sounded interesting and Abelard wasn’t there, and so I took a deep breath and dabbled my toes in conversation. AMAP stood for Associations pour le mantien de lágriculture paysanne – association for the maintenance of traditional agriculture. As far as I could tell, it was the name for a group of local farmers and producers working together to supply the pre-agreed needs of a set of customers, as well as sharing their produce between themselves to ensure the maximum possible level of self-sufficiency. It seemed like a good idea. La Range was part of an AMAP in the local area, as was the farm up the road which was run by Abelard’s parents, Edouart and Renelde, where Christina and the Americans had come from. I wondered if there were such things as AMAPs in the UK. I guessed that there probably were, and it occurred to me just how much I didn’t know about British agriculture, and how interesting it would be to learn. I didn’t really know where any of my food came from. I simply took it for granted. Perhaps things were set to get better on this farm after all. I was no longer the only smoker, I was having interesting conversations; I could easily spend another week like this.

That evening we were all invited up the road for a meal. It was a tradition between the two farms that on every WWOOFer’s last day they had to cook a meal from their country of origin for everybody working on the farms at that time. There were three WWOOFers leaving Edouart’s farm the following morning. Carla was Portuguese, Nadine was from Lebanon and Céline was French. I sat with Sophie and the new family so that I could carry on speaking French rather than with the younger WWOOFers whose conversation was in English. I liked Sophie, and I was beginning to feel very comfortable around her. But at times she was so timid and unsure that I felt the same age as her, not fourteen years her junior. 

On the menu that night was hoummus and salad and the freshly-baked bread which was a speciality of Edouart’s farm, followed by a Portuguese kale and chorizo soup, heavy on the paprika. The main course was a Lebanese stew of lamb, tomato and peas served with rice, probably from the never-ending bag of Hannah’s road-trip stock. 

As the plates were being cleared away, there was an amusing diversion. An old man traipsed past, followed by a troupe of young teenagers. Apparently the farm included a gite, which was frequently rented out to groups of troubled teens. The old man, who was called Eric, was straggly-haired and clearly inebriated. He announced that he was taking the kids to the campfire. Amazingly – given both that it was dark and that this drunkard was about to take sole charge of a fire and a group of minors – nobody batted an eyelid. Apparently Eric was perfectly safe. A particularly small boy then loped past with two enormous planks of wood. We all laughed at him, gently, and he grinned and explained his cargo as something for the ladies, at which we laughed even more. None of us was quite sure what the ladies – who were at most fourteen years old – were going to do with two planks of wood. Dessert was a crème caramel and an almondy Portuguese cake, and fruit. We returned well fed and cheerful.

Hannah and I lay in bed in the dark that evening, unusually still buzzing with the life of the evening rather than flagging with exhaustion, and we began to chat. We laughed about how different our experiences of WWOOFing had been from our expectations. We quickly discovered that although our overall expectations had been somewhat dissimilar – I had anticipated having to work harder than I had been made to, whilst she had expected the opposite – we had both romanticised the venture in our minds before we had set out, hoping for fields full of good-looking and eligible young farmers straight from the set of a pastoral costume drama, ready to whisk us off our feet and into the hay bales. 

I had never had much luck with men. At school I had been largely disinterested, believing that I had no time for boys in that way. Over my seven years of senior school I had three offers. The first hounded me and caused me great irritation for four years before finally deciding that he was gay, at which point he left me alone. I stopped trying to kick him and we became good friends. The second wrote intense and not particularly flattering poetry about me on the internet, assassinating the friendship that we had shared. I missed his company, but we never spoke again. 

The third was an interesting case. We had years of close friendship between us. Aged 11 he asked me out, and I turned him down by passing him a note on the back of a strawberry Chewit wrapper I

found in my pencil case. It didn’t make a difference to our friendship. Three years on we were as close as ever we had been. One evening before a show that we were both performing in, I was sure it was going to happen. We were walking silently hand in hand together in the dark behind the Art Department building, out of bounds and sure of privacy. We stopped halfway down the building and he turned and hugged me, leaning me gently against the crumbly sandstone wall. I hoped he couldn’t feel my heart beating. We broke apart and he looked me in the eyes, his mouth just centimetres from my own, so close that I could feel his breath. He told me he had liver cancer. Wow. Not exactly the romance that I’d been building myself up for. We never did kiss, but he did go into remission. Three years later he told my friends and I that he was dying of a brain tumour, and after three months of charades it turned out that it was all one big lie. Amazingly, our friendship survived, and we continued to speak occasionally once we had left school. He married a couple of years later. Perhaps I had a lucky escape that night behind the art block.

There was one boy who I liked very much, and perhaps should have done something about. He was blonde with kind eyes. He wasn’t my most academic friend, but that didn’t matter; he made me laugh, and I was never happier than when he was sprawled across the squished chairs in my study, or listening to The Pogues and playing cards with me when we should have been revising, or elbow-wrestling over slices of the freshly-baked bread that inevitably appeared in the study-block kitchen at 11:10 each day. For a few years after leaving school, we contacted each other every Valentine’s Day with a chatty email: an unspoken acknowledgement that there could once have been something more. One springtime we met up for a meal. In my dateless existence I enjoyed the build-up to the event. I enjoyed the meal and his company, too, but it seemed that whatever spark there had been at school was not to be re-struck. 

My first two years at university were equally dull. There was my Tony infatuation, of course, but that was like having a crush on a celebrity. He was out of my league. Then there was a questionable flirtation – based almost entirely on Jaffa Cakes and pirates – with another member of the theatre society, which might have gone somewhere had the guy not already had a girlfriend.

Germany spiced things up a bit. One strange evening at a house party I ended up with Edouard’s phone number. Edouard was an admittedly fairly attractive French transvestite who wanted someone to watch Eddie Izzard with. On the underground one day I was made the utterly resistible offer by a leery stranger, would you like to get to know me better in the corner? And then there was the even more questionable flirtation with one of my students. I enjoyed our conversation classes, and I think he did too. They were innocent enough: we sat in cafés and he bought me hot chocolates in exchange for my conversation. But maybe they weren’t so innocent when we ended up a little too close together on a sofa, sharing a chocolate, banana and cheese toastie – which turned out to be a winning combination, despite my reservations – and discussing life. He was a flatterer. I let myself enjoy being flattered. It went no further. As for Edouard, I never did phone him to arrange an evening of transvestite comedy-viewing, and the weirdo on the train was put in his place when my friends and I laughed openly at him and got off at the next stop. 

So it was that I had reached my third farm and 21^st birthday without as much as a kiss to my name. I decided I was allowed to fantasize about rugged farmers, and wheat fields bathed in orange sunsets. It was just a shame that the fantasies hadn’t come to fruition.

4th August 2010 – She Waits

I slept badly, perhaps knowing that I would have to wake up early to go to market. Wrapping up warm, I went down to the kitchen where I found Abelard and Marta already installed with their coffee and fags. I didn’t feel like bread and jam at such an early hour, but I took a couple of apricots and snaffled a biscuit from Theotim. We bundled into the front of the van, Abelard in the driver’s seat, with me on the far passenger side and Theotim squashed on the little seat in between. The window on my side was broken and refused to be closed, so the drive was fresh and cold, blowing away any residual cigarette smell. Cloud had settled in the valley overnight, and as we drove up, away from the farm and into the hills, and the sun was beginning to burn through. It was an eerie sight, and I wished I had had my camera to capture its momentary beauty. Not that I would have dared to use a camera if I had had one; I feared Abelard’s derision.

The journey though the sleeping Haute Loire villages was almost silent, except for the sounds of the engine and the radio. I smiled as a song came on that I recognised. I had been brought up listening to the French singer in question, and it reminded me of home. The song was called Elle Attend: she waits. I thought about the lyrics. They translated to she’s waiting for the world to change, she’s waiting for a change of weather, she’s waiting for this mad world to lose itself, and for the winds to turn, relentlessly she waits. I felt at that moment that was what I was doing at this farm: waiting for things to get better. Soon after this brief soulful moment, Theotim discovered the pocket in the front of my hoody. I didn’t mind him prodding his hands into the depths, where he could warm his freezing little fingers, but Abelard chastised him for being a pain. I wondered if the poor boy ever managed to have fun without being caught. 

I was surprised by how small the market was when we arrived in Le Puy en Velay. We parked up in a tiny square lined with shops and cafes. Even once the market was in full swing, we were one of only three fruit and vegetable sellers. Before setting up, Abelard needed his second coffee fix of the morning. He offered me one, and although I declined, I accepted a hot chocolate. Imagine my

surprise when my beverage arrived in an espresso cup! It was the tiniest hot chocolate I had ever drunk. Abelard downed his strong coffee like a shot of tequilla, and we began to set up. He did, anyway. I hovered. I offered to help, but there was nothing for me to do: Abelard knew how he wanted things to be, and so it was quickest if he did it. He built himself a fortress of three tables, flung out wicker baskets and plastic crates with brusque carelessness, and laid out his produce. I set the carrots out gently on one of the crates, and set to putting price labels by the different foods.

The first few customers came and went. I watched their transactions idly, and stared at the buildings surrounding us. Each was painted a different shade of orange or pink or cream or white, and the shutters were every colour under the sun. Abelard said nothing to me. It came as a shock, then, that he left me in charge of the stall while he moved his van. Two customers came and went and I fumbled my way through the sale of two bunches of carrots and 700g of green beans, craning over the stall to read the upside-down price labels, conscious of my ungrammatical French and blushes. I only hoped that they were faithful customers and that they were used to being served by incompetent WWOOFers. Disaster struck with the demands of a slightly overweight lady, greying in streaks of her straggling hair, huffing and hassled and a little out of breath. All she wanted was two lettuces, but it meant that I had to use the scales and the till, and I didn’t know how because I hadn’t been shown, and her stress was rubbing off on me, and half of the numbers on the till had been similarly rubbed off through years of use, and there was a 0 button and a 00 button but I only saw the latter which looked like a 0, and my brain wasn’t working and I charged her €16.70 for the salad. She was clearly exasperated by my difficulties, sighing and making a scene and threatening to take her custom elsewhere. But then, for some unknown reason, empathy made an appeal to her better nature and she mellowed. She came around the back of the stall and together we sorted out my problems. She even saw the funny side, although I was still mortified. 

Abelard returned and told me that I could go. There was no friendly preamble, asking me how my stall-holding experience had gone, nor were there words of thanks. I wandered the streets, crunching into a still-warm swirl of slightly sugared puff pastry, golden brown flakes falling to rest undignified on my chest. I savoured in particular the caramelised raisins cooked on the top of the pain aux raisins, slightly bitter from spending too long in the oven. My feet took me up steep, narrow, cobbled streets between tall cream buildings giving way to public gardens, towards Notre Dame de France, an imposing statue of the Virgin Mary and Jesus standing on the hill above the town: France’s answer to Rio di Janero. It had been created from melted down Russian canons that had been captured during the Crimean war. The views were terrific, and I stood for a while, my eyes drinking the terracotta sea of the tiled roofs below me and the gentle waves caused by the alleys between them. Swifts darted around the chimneys, and people and cars moved almost imperceptibly below them like spider-mites on a complex circuit board. I allowed my mind to wander into escapism and daydreams, out into the verdant volcanic countryside surrounding the city.

Making my way back down the path, my fingers noticed the warmth and the coolness of the metal handrail in the sun of the morning and the shade of the trees. The scent of roses caught me off-guard, and once again I dreamed myself back to the jammy idyll of the Ardèche. I couldn’t see the flowers, but I didn’t need to. Somewhere along the way I took a wrong turning and wandered aimlessly along streets that led anywhere, discovering that Le Puy was larger than its market suggested. 

I passed a shop which caught my eye, and I stood at the window, staring in. It was a children’s bookshop and its display held promises of magic and adventure, bright colours and fantastical characters. I was drawn in, hungry for fiction to take me away from where I was. Postcards with excerpts from stories for children span around lazily on wire racks that squeaked, books tumbled at the slightest draught from over-stacked shelves lining the walls, and stationery that made my fingers itch with excitement lay on cabinets in the middle of the room --  and I didn’t know where to look first. I walked around in a daze of infantile delight, and the shop worked its magic. I walked out with a book of French poetry and a notebook, deciding not to look at them again until the weekend. Sunday was my 21^st birthday, and I was trying to forget about it. I couldn’t help but think that it was going to be an awful let-down. At least with the poetry of Jaques Prévert, a notebook, and the further indulgence of a big bar of crème brûlée chocolate, I would have a present to open. 

I was just as useless when it came to packing up the stall as I had been at setting it out. On the way back, I played with Theotim again. We poked each other gently and played thumb wars and when that grew boring we just held hands through the pocket of my hoody, his hands tiny, delicate and vulnerable in mine. Predictably, his father told him off for being a nuisance. I felt like a naughty child too. It frustrated me. Theotim had been doing no harm. Besides, I felt some kind of affection from him, some real interest in me, if only as a partner-in-crime. I wanted him to play. I wanted a friend.