16th July 2010 - Kelsey

A third of my way through my time at Fontsoleil I was feeling perfectly settled, and thought that nothing could topple me from my zen-like balance. Enter Kelsey, my polar opposite in terms of personality. She was 22, with the features of her Chinese mother and the build of her German father and the stereotypical brashness of her native America. She hailed from California via three years in Aix-en-Provence. And my goodness did she liven things up around the farm! She was one big, garrulous bounce of go-go-go and had difficulty with sitting still and being calm, although no problem at all with sleeping, even in the battered caravan that served as her bedroom. Goedele and I had both turned it down in favour of a proper roof, leaving poor Kelsey with no choice. But, eternally optimistic, it didn’t phase her one iota. She named it –affectionately – the crappy RV. Apparently RV meant caravan in American English. You live and you learn.  

My happy, peaceful rhythm of life that I had fallen into so easily was disturbed. I felt threatened by Kelsey’s need for excitement and by her exuberance, and I automatically began to pick out things that I didn’t like about her. Natural perhaps, but unfair. As it turned out she had a lot to offer both me and the world, and the traits that I picked out weren’t problematic; they just weren’t me. She was eternally optimistic, energetic, full of laughs, and stubbornly determined to improve her French, which wasn’t as fluent as mine or Goedele’s. She was to be the source of many interesting conversations, as well as some rather enlightening jaunts. I learned a lot about myself from Kelsey. I also learned not to judge a book by its cover, even if the cover didn’t immediately appeal. Had I dismissed Kelsey immediately as not my kind of person, I would have missed out on an interesting read, and a host of strange experiences.

On the subject of reading, and also of being talkative, my French was improving in leaps and bounds. I didn’t have to think about it. And yet I wanted to think about it! WWOOFing was providing me with so many ways of learning the language. Speaking was perhaps a given; after all, I had always known that I would have to talk to get by when I was working. And yet, no. There was a difference between speaking with kids like Juan and Malo – who were less understanding of a foreigner’s difficulties with unusual words or fast and colloquial speech – and speaking with adults. Amongst adults there were further differences between conversations with those for whom French was their mother tongue and for those who were like me, learning, still making mistakes and struggling to find words. I aspired to the fluency of the French and learned a whole gamut of new words from them, as well as consolidating my grammatical forms through copying, but their very fluency  could itself be a hindrance at times, both disconcerting to my lack of confidence and flowing too fast for my mind to keep up with. When I talked to Goedele and Kelsey we could slow down for each other and help each other around unknown words, learning from the others’ knowledge, as well as from shared linguistic discoveries.

Reading was an equally obvious way of learning a language, although there was no pressing need to do it in the wilderness of the Ardèche. But what to read? I didn’t doubt that it was important on a cultural level to read Voltaire, to be acquainted with the characters of Molière and to have an appreciation of the talent of Flaubert. But it struck me that even the €2 flea market unknowns had their merits from a cultural point of view; modern life in the UK bore little resemblance to the worlds described in Dickens or Shakespeare, after all, and was much more usefully depicted in trashy airport fict  I would have argued a case, too, for modern novels translated into French from English, which were often full of conversation, containing the French equivalents of common English phrases. Magazines too I found to be useful, their short articles not too hard to concentrate on and often quite simply written, and covering any topic under the sun. 

ion.

With Goedele and Kelsey came two novel ways of improving our French. The first was doing crosswords. It was a brilliant way of learning new vocabulary that I had picked up earlier that year whilst filling in time on long train journeys across Germany with my fellow teaching assistants, and I saw no reason why I shouldn’t transfer the fun to France. During market one morning I nipped into a newsagent’s and picked up a compendium that, coupled with a dictionary, would keep us happily occupied for hours. The second was that we developed a love of playing the game Taboo, which we found gathering dust in a towering stack of board games in the spare room upstairs. It improved our vocabulary because we often didn’t know to start with the words that we were given, or the words being described to us, and it improved our fluency because we had to keep talking, and we had to use all the limited words at our disposition to get around the description of whatever word was taboo. And, of course, inevitably, it made us laugh.

15th July 2010 – The Jammery

The following day brought with it my first experience of the Jammery. Extensive surveys of the tasting pots at the front of the market stall had introduced me to the myriad flavours of Xavier’s jam-making exploits: raspberry, strawberry, blackcurrant, blackberry, red fruits, apricot, rhubarb and ginger, vine peach, redcurrant, pear, chestnut, as well as jellies made out of sage flowers, mint, fleurs de châtaigner and, yes, the ubiquitous rose. My favourite had been the vine peach, which was a startlingly deep wine red and had such contrasting notes of sweetness and sharpness that I had kept on returning for more until long after my desire to do so surreptitiously had been quashed.

It being the soft fruit season, it came as no surprise that for me and Goedele our first jam experience was raspberry-based. We climbed into the two passenger seats of the big white van. Looking over our shoulders and behind us into the back, it was strangely empty without the market stall paraphernalia; instead of the tatty cardboard boxes were grey plastic crates full of plump crimson raspberries. They made me salivate, which wasn’t the best start to a day of staring at them, although it presaged what was to follow! Xavier drove us a kilometre or so down the dusty road to a squat white building which lay just off it. Apparently it had once been a goat-shed, but now it was shared between Xavier and a wood-turner and they were searching for another to make up the rent. Inside wasn’t exactly plush, decorated with stained white-wash and furnished with rickety wooden shelving, and toilets were conspicuous by their absence, but then luxury was hardly to be expected from an ex-goat-shed; goats had never been famed for their ability to use a flush.

We donned fetching, shower-cap-like hats to stop our hair from falling into the jam – Xavier assured us that they suited us well – and we were off. There were around 50 kilograms of raspberries to convert into jam, so we had our work cut out for us, lying in plastic crates stacked on the floor. There were three gas burners in a row along a work surface, the butane canisters hiding underneath, and hanging from nails along the wall were various vats of either copper or stainless steel, some of which Xavier unhooked with expert swiftness and laid on the table. We portioned the berries out into the vats, and three-quarters of their weight was added again in cane sugar, which was sourced, of course, from an organic provider, plus a splash of water to start the sugar dissolving. 

One at a time, the vats were set over a flame. Once one vat had come to the boil, a timer was set for four minutes and the mixture was stirred with a long-handled wooden spoon over a slightly lower heat. The sugar level had to be tested to decide whether more sugar was needed. To do this we were given a little black plastic cylinder the size of my palm. At one end it was tapered and the plastic was clear, and here a little of the jam was to be smeared. The other end resembled a telescope, and if held to the eye and up to the light, an internal display showed the percentage of sugar content on a thermometer-like scale. It was a fascinating piece of equipment, and although I could not fathom how it worked, I knew that 57% was the optimum percentage. 

At the alarm of the timer, the grinding began. I loved using the moulinette, which looked like a massive, hand-powered coffee grinder. We poured the liquid jam in the top and twisted the wooden handle around and around until all the jam had been squeezed through the metal gauze and all the seeds – as well as any extraneous stalks, leaves or bits of twig – were trapped above. To begin with the weight of the jam created resistance, necessitating full arm force, body leaning slightly over the contraption, hips forming involuntary circles as the handle span around and around, but as the liquid seeped away the task became ever easier. Personally I preferred my jam to have seeds in, and I said so, but Xavier assured me that the general public disagreed with me. So, seedless, the jam was set to boil for a few minutes more. 

When the timer went off for the second time, Xavier decanted the mixture from the vat into a large plastic jug, and, while one of us set the next vat up over the flame, he went up and down the table in the middle of the room where we had placed empty jars around the edges, filling them up with jam. The other of us followed behind him, rubber glove on one hand to protect us from the heat, and lid in the other, closing the jars behind him and checking each one for splashes. An innocent splotch on the rim of the jar at that point would have meant potential mould growth at some point in the future. Customers didn’t tend to react kindly to mould. They certainly didn’t come back clamouring for more. And so we wielded a pathetic-looking rag of gauze soaked in turpentine to ensure customer loyalty. Three hours later, we had just fewer than 300 pots ready for the labelling, and slight headaches from the heat, the sugar, and the solvent fumes. 

Being in the Jammery was a magical experience, and it didn’t once cease to be magical over the three weeks that I stayed at Fontsoleil. Everything was just too big, so it was as if I was a child again, elbows at awkward angles as I stirred the jam with a spoon made for a being larger than me, in a cauldron which took all my strength to lift and whose contents I could only just see fully as I stood at the gas ring, although I was standing as straight and tall as I could. I was sorely tempted to stand on tiptoes, but it wouldn’t have been sensible; a wobbly base plus litres of hot liquid jam would have been a recipe for disaster. And, of course, I was as eminently sensible as any curious child.

All that was needed were a few childish habits to complete the picture. As if in compliance with this unspoken need, splashes of jam were soon polka-dotting delightfully messily over my clothes in infantile abandon. And I couldn’t help it. I knew it would be hot. But I had to dip my finger in and yelp in shock and let the jam burn and then set on my tongue in a tingle of numbing sweetness. I had to do it several times. Several times per batch and per flavour. I tested the jams to make sure they were perfect so that my teeth, long stripped of enamel from a childhood of acidic fruit juice, were usually stained red or purple or blue by the end of a session. By the end of my time there I had developed a doigt de dégustation, or a tasting finger, which took a good week of jamlessness to return to a healthy colour.  

The magic was offset by an incongruous soundtrack, chosen mostly by Xavier, of obscure female British singer-songwriters, latino jazz, Hari Krishna chants and – once – a frankly surreal trilingual Disney sing along in Dutch, English and French. Xavier would always sing along sotto voce to Hari Krishnas and Katie Melua’s Closest Thing to Crazy, although he didn’t understand the words of either, mimicking the sounds from the artists’ mouths.

Walking back that afternoon – Xavier went on ahead in the van, but Goedele and I took to our feet – we passed through a neighbouring hamlet called Le Fraysse, which was the same dusty stone colour as the road and whose buildings had little wooden doors with matching wooden lintels and faded terracotta-tiled roofs. One of the buildings looked to be a former school, and another seemed to be a storehouse for all manner of farming equipment, new and old. A rusty yet still functioning tractor sat at the side of the road, and outside one of the buildings there was a large group of people sitting around a large wooden table. From inside emanated the unlikely music of an organ. Some of the people around the table were singing absent-mindedly. We smiled and waved and walked on by. Later we asked about the strange gathering that we had seen. We were told that Le Fraysse hosted music summer schools. It seemed fitting; I couldn’t think of a more idyllic place to go to spend time immersed in music than that remote, sun-drenched spot.

14th July 2010 – A Distinct Lack of Onion Soup

Sitting back on the settee that evening and sliding slowly forward, I considered flies. Really, flies should have known better than to go near Fontsoleil. After all, there was a bead curtain across the door to deter them and a kitten who liked to torment them. They should have got the message. There was even a sticky thread hanging across the ceiling to trap them on a suspended death row, from where we could periodically hear the feeble buzz of airborne death. But still they came, and still they came. It was mostly thanks to the neighbour’s goats, which seemed to cultivate them as if they were planning to make fly jam to complement their cheese, but then never got around to it, leaving an airborne surplus of fat-winged annoyance. That day, though, we were suffering from a veritable invasion. The weather was hot and a little muggy, and whilst eating lunch outside earlier we had been enveloped in a black pointillist cloud. They were crawling all over the cheese and the melon and the bread, although they appeared not to like the olives at all, so olives suddenly became unusually popular amongst the humans around the table. Eventually we put a sieve over the cheese board, but still they managed to find their way in. How did they do it? Sumo wrestler flies, lifting up the sieve while we focussed on the olives? Bizarrely, too, it felt that day as if the innocuous fruit flies had turned vampiric. Goedele and I learned the lore that biting flies – as well as cats washing behind their ears – meant that a storm was on the way. It would be a few days before that would be proved accurate.

My fly deliberations had been provoked, however, by my amazement at how libidinous they all seemed to be. I was sitting there with a book, minding my own business, and they kept landing on me in pairs and going for it without a scrap of shame. I had never been aware of the procreation of flies before; perhaps there was just something in the air that day, but I couldn’t avoid being aware of it as I sat there. Each act of fly sex lasted all of a second. They mounted each other like dogs and their buzzing intensified, and if they happened to be standing on my bare skin at the time I was subjected to a very odd vibrating sensation. The fly underneath – which I presumed to be the female, but knowing nothing of the anatomy of flies I could well have been mistaken – spread their wings to allow the one on top a more comfortable experience. Afterwards the man – or at least the one on top – rubbed his front legs together as if to say that was good, what’s next? I decided that flies had commitment issues. 

My ridiculous thoughts were distracted by an equally ridiculous kitten jumping onto my head. At Fontsoleil there was a four month-old kitten called Bali, and I was in love with him. I thought that he was probably a Russian Blue shorthair. I went through a phase of seven-year old obsession when I learned all the common breeds of cats, and some of the more obscure ones, too. It came just before the bird obsession, and just after the dinosaur one, and had left me with pub-quiz cat knowledge and a collection of feline figurines. 

 Bali was a joyful little cat, happy chasing flies, or his own tail, or trying to attack whatever pen anybody might be writing with. In the mornings he mewed for affection after a long night on his own, and was generally happy to curl up and be stroked, and he purred as if he’d swallowed a miniature motorbike engine. His fur was baby-soft and his paws were warm and leathery – though his claws and teeth could already do some serious damage to both soft furnishings and skin – and his tiny tongue was like gently heated sandpaper when he illicitly licked my fingers clean after I had eaten. I decided to give up on men. I would grow old gracefully and independently with a graceful and independent cat as my companion.

While I was staying, Bali was going through the great feline right of passage: learning to chase mice. I witnessed his first catch alive (and dead) from my usual cross-legged vantage point on the settee, cat and mouse skittering across the floor, backwards and forwards in a mammalian dual of size versus speed.  I unexpectedly found his second catch one morning, regurgitated at the bottom of the stairs and seeping through the sole of my left sock. It was mildly disgusting, but he was so endearing while he chased that I soon forgave him his vomit. Whilst preparing to pounce he was as still as stone, except for wiggling his bottom coyly in the air. I couldn’t help but laugh.

On the other hand, perhaps I wasn’t really in love with him. He had an irritating habit of nipping toes when nobody was watching, and hiding under Goedele’s bed until she turned the light out and then jumping out at her, making her scream. One night he kept trying to go to bed with me. I took him out of the room once, and returned to my mattress only to discover that he had somehow sneaked back in there before me. We repeated this nocturnal charade twice, by which time I was finding it less than amusing, although I’m sure to him it was a brilliant wheeze. Close to irate, I took him out of my room and threw him down the stairs. I heard him land with a thump at the bottom. My heart stopped, and I felt so guilty that I knew I would never sleep, and had to go downstairs to make sure he wasn’t injured from his flight. He had disappeared, and wasn’t in my room when I returned, so I presumed that even juvenile cats were capable of taking a hint once they had only eight lives remaining. 

At mealtimes and in the twilit evenings it was another story again. At mealtimes he liked to pounce up onto the table, even though it was strictly forbidden; he would send cutlery catapulting all around and, all dangerous implements disposed of, he would indulge in his penchant for licking the goats’ cheese. In the evenings he was like a tired child, hyperactive and irritable at times, sleepy at others. In short, he was an impossible cat, and a fickle free spirit.

It hadn’t occurred to me until the day was upon me, but that summer I would be in France for 14^th July: the French Day of Independence, more commonly known as Bastille Day, when the entire population took a holiday to commemorate the storming of the Bastille. Ever since reading When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit at the age of 11 or 12, I had wanted to experience Bastille Day celebrations at first hand, and here was my opportunity! In retrospect, basing my expectations on a semi-fictional account of celebrations in wartime Paris when I was to be attending the celebrations of 21^st century ardèchois town Lamastre, population circa 2000, was setting myself up for disappointment. Where was the bustling atmosphere? Where was the singing? And where was my bowl of onion soup? I had to bring myself back to reality; after all, I was far from Montmartre! 

Given the size of Lamastre, the firework display that was on offer was a delight. Michelle had dressed up for the occasion and adorned her beautiful eyes with dark smudges of kohl, to the surprise of Goedele and me; we quickly retired upstairs to change into more festive clothing. Inhabitants and tourists alike lined the bridge and the riverbanks where the display was being held. The acrid but enticing smell of cordite mingled with gasps and oohs and applause and the muffled mewls of frightened toddlers, their faces buried in their mothers’ legs. The finale was nothing if not incredible, larger than any I had seen at home, although, if I had been designing it, I would have made some subtle changes. I would have made the final flashes form a French flag in the sky with red, white and blue explosions in a glorious fiesta of nationalistic nostalgia. And the music made me laugh in spite of myself. It was 26 years off, and in the wrong country. The Bastille was stormed in 1789, so why on earth had the decision been made to play Waterloo, when that battle was half a century later in 1815 Belgium? I couldn’t fathom it: ABBA just wasn’t right!

13th July 2010 – Saucisson and Silk

As well as on Saturdays, every Tuesday in Lamastre there was a market. When I had been staying with Anne-Marie and Pierre I had always been working on Tuesday mornings and so hadn’t been able to go, but Michelle and Xavier encouraged us to go with them.

Saturday’s market – the one that I had been to twice already – was a small but profitable affair, just a line of stalls selling fresh, home-made or home-grown produce. It was a friendly and highly personal market where all the stall-holders knew each other and would frequently leave their stall in the hands of their neighbour whilst they went off to chat with friends. 

I blithely assumed that the Tuesday market would be much the same. How wrong I was; it turned out to be a different kettle of line-caught fish entirely. Whereas the weekend market was about the size that might be expected of a town of so few inhabitants, the weekday market was enormous. Stalls lined the entire town square as well as the lengths of the four streets leading off from it, colourful tarpaulins shading the traders’ varied wares and eagle-eyed customers of all ages and stages of suntan. 

I adored French markets. I was in my element: the sights, smells, sounds, tastes, the hustle and bustle and amicable anonymity, the buzz of happy chatter, the sales banter, the wholesome innocence of people working for their livelihoods and for the enjoyment of others. At Lamastre on Tuesdays there was everything from pizza to halva, saucisson to squid, cheese to chutney to chard, pestle and mortars to pantaloons, Swiss knives to Indian frippery, second-hand tat to hand-thrown pottery, reds, yellows, greens, purples, blacks and silvers. As cheap as my WWOOFing expenditure had so far proved to be, I felt that I could indulge myself a little here; after nine months of teaching in Germany I couldn’t be classed as a completely penniless student. My job had furnished me with a healthy packet of euros, and whilst most had been spent in situ, subsidising the German rail network with explorations into unknown territory and indulging in good food and frivolous quantities of exciting teabags, I still had enough to treat myself with. A billowing pair of stone grey cotton-silk trousers was purchased, not once to be regretted, and very much enjoyed.

I also treated myself to a small salami of cured wild boar meat. Michelle and Xavier were vegetarian, but allowed their WWOOFers to eat meat if they so wished. Normally meat held little allure for me, but unusually that day I did so wish. Saucisson du sanglier reminded me of family holidays on the Ile de Ré: drinking out of empty mustard jars, eating sea-salted butter on fluffy fresh baguette, pickled seaweed, a delicious green pâté – farci charentais – of meat and spinach, and torteau, a round, charred-topped and pastry-bottomed yoghurt cake which squeaked if a slice was held up in silence and squeezed ever so gently.

Michelle wasn’t just selling at the market stall. Her pottery was also on display in a local cultural arts centre. Goedele and I  walked through the doors and stood still for a moment, enjoying the blast of air conditioning. Michelle’s stall was near the entrance, easily visible, and it lured us in. Blue-green pottery bowls, plates, saucers, teapots, spoon-rests and soap dishes were arranged before us, lights carefully angled to show the creations off to the best effect. Curvaceous statues dominated the two ends of the stall, smiling down in frozen tribal dance over the robust dishes. It was a work of art in its own right.