As uncomplicated as wine infusing
turned out to be, life soon took an interesting and unforeseen turn for the
decidedly more complex. It was more than a week after the cherry fair, and Anne-Marie’s
leg was still giving her grief; every day she was losing mobility, hobbling around
on makeshift crutches. I didn’t know what had finally made her crack, but on
that Monday when Valentin and I came down for breakfast, we knew that something
was amiss. We were given a list of tasks to do that day: harvesting the
sugarsnaps, picking blackcurrants, and tidying the cellar storeroom. We were
told that Anne-Marie and Pierre were going to Lyon
hospital – three hours away – to get Anne-Marie’s knee seen to, and that the
boys were going to spend the day with a friend. We were in charge. Valentin had
already arranged to go to stay with a friend that evening so he could watch the
German football world cup match, but the farmers clearly expected to be back
before nightfall.
They set off, and Valentin and I
dutifully set out to the lower garden where the sugarsnap peas lived. Given as
the pea harvest had been one of my tasks from the beginning, I was in charge. I
would spend hours squatting amongst them, wondering why they hadn’t been staked
up like all the other creeping plants in the garden. I never found out why, but
it would have been a lot easier on my back if they had been! As it
was, they formed a raised, tangled carpet over the soil, the pea pods merging
into leaves and stems and tendrils. It was like playing Where’s Wally – you got an eye for them eventually – except you
really had to watch your step or you would destroy half the crop. I typically
picked two bulging baskets of them each day. Valentin wasn’t impressed. He
pulled his earphones out of his pocket and plugged himself in, his large,
teenaged feet causing the plants underneath to emit squeaky, crispy death
cries.
I found it rather rude that he
chose to listen to music when we had a choice of three languages to talk in,
and I’m sure we could have found some common ground. I suppose he jumped to the
conclusion that we would have nothing to say to each other. But he was missing
out, not particularly on my conversation, scintillating as it may have been, but
on the whole pea-picking experience. The sun was just beginning to warm the
slope where we were working, and from far down in the valley came the soft
sound of cowbells. I let the sound wash over me; Valentin never heard them.
After half an hour Valentin
admitted to being bored and asked my permission to leave. It wasn’t for me to
keep him there, so, despite his paltry third of a basket, I agreed. By the time
I had got up to the house an hour later, his bags were packed and he was
leaving for the evening. There was no chance of him playing with big, dangerous
machinery that day, so there was equally no chance of him sticking around to do
the ’girly` work. He had a friend to visit. That was the last I saw of him for
three days.
I rather enjoyed that day of
farmyard solitude. From sugarsnaps I moved onto blackcurrants. To start with I
had picked each individual blackcurrant by hand with painstaking attention,
making sure not to crush a single one. A brief lesson later from an amazed Anne-Marie
– amazed at how long it had taken me to pick so few berries – and I was
stripping the bushes at an impressive rate. The trick was to bend a branch of
berries over the basket. Around the base of the branch you pinched your thumb
and index finger, and quickly pulled your hand upwards towards the basket,
causing the berries to rain down into it. One time I ran out of basket space,
so I improvised and used my sunhat. I never did manage to get the stains out,
but it was worth it.
My morning’s work done, I raided
the cheese supplies, and headed out to the family hammock to enjoy the midday
sun. This was a practice frowned upon by the farmers, and probably by the
medical profession too, but I wanted to make the most of the sun and the valley
views. I decided that I would have plenty of time to cool off in the cellar
later. I was right. There was a lot of tidying up to be done. Boxes were
scattered with gay abandon, empty bottles were strewn amongst unwashed sleeping
bags, pieces of paper littered the floors and work surfaces, and half-empty flagons
of spirits lay on their sides. My leisurely spring clean would have been
cathartic if catharticism had been necessary, but as it was I was already
wonderfully calm. This would not have
been the case had I known what was waiting for me that evening.
I had been asked to put the birds
to bed – by locking them up in their coop rather than by tucking them in under
duck feather duvets – if the family wasn’t back by 8pm, and so I duly walked
the half kilometre up the pebbled drive to the coop on the hill. Four hens,
four chicks, two ducks and a cockerel. On my approach, the two ducks hopped obediently
into the coop as good as gold. The hens with their chicks took a little more
coaxing, but they too were quite content to settle down for the night.
Not so with the cockerel. Whenever
I approached him he would jump up in the air at me, talons in my face and
powerful wings flapping ferociously. I quickly realised both that he could do
me some serious damage, and that he clearly intended to if I got too close. He
was in charge; there was no way that I was going to be able to shoo him into
his little hut. To make things worse, one of the hens kept coming back out to
watch the fun; even if the cockerel had by some magic gone into the coop, I wouldn’t
have been able to shut the door. I was terrified, and I didn’t know what to do.
I couldn’t just leave the birds out, or I knew they’d be corpses in the
morning. And so I sang lullabies to a cockerel. I stood there and sang for
twenty minutes. I didn’t sing any recognisable song, making up both tunes and
lyrics as I went along, modulating from English to French: it’s time to sleep, yes it’s time for bed, come on my cockerel, good
cockerel, wise cockerel, it’s time to sleep, the sun’s going down.
Eventually, possibly out of boredom, or just to shut me up, the cockerel
decided to play the game, whereupon I leapt into the run and slammed the door. When I got back to the house I sank into a
chair, emotionally and physically exhausted.
John-from-the-yurt came down with
the news about an hour later, as it was beginning to get dark. Pierre had
phoned him – it would have been pointless to phone me, as I’d been told not to
answer the phone – to let him know that Anne-Marie’s knee was in a worse state
than expected, would need operating on, and that they now did not expect to be
back home until midday on Wednesday at the earliest. And so it was that I found
myself in charge of a farm. Thankfully, John told me not to worry about the
cows, which would be taken care of by a friend in the valley. He asked if there
was anything I needed, and I quizzed him about how to deal with the cockerel.
He advised me to arm myself with a piece of piping. I went to bed that night
confused and not at all sure what to make of the situation. I would never have WWOOFed if I had known this would
happen. Yet I’d coped alone with the farm that day; surely I could keep it
running for two days more. I didn’t have much choice.
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