3rd August 2010 – Lonely in a Crowd

The crowing of the resident cockerel woke me at daybreak, and I tossed and turned thereafter. We were to spend the day in preparation for the following day’s market. Before work though, breakfast called. I walked downstairs into the hazy fug of smoke particles suspended in invisible air currents. It was almost as if the morning mist had crept into the kitchen. 

For the French in the house, breakfast was a cigarette and a coffee. The coffee was freshly ground by an odd black plastic contraption between the deep ceramic sink and a tall window, through which the early sun shone. The machine made a hellish racket as the dried beans rattled and cracked and bounced off each other and the inner mechanisms, and everybody winced slightly at the noise, but apparently it was worth it. I couldn’t conceive how anybody – and especially anybody doing hard manual labour – could survive on just a coffee and a fag until lunchtime.

For the hungrier Brits there was green tea, bread which looked homemade, and gooseberry jam that had been made by Hannah’s mum. I was impressed that she had brought jam with her to share with the hosts; I hadn’t thought to bring anything British with me to France to share. And so Hannah’s story began to come out. She had been roadtripping with a friend down through France, using the WWOOF scheme for free accommodation as they went. But their car had broken down, and had needed to be taken to a garage and left there for a couple of weeks to be fixed, so she and her friend Nel had ended up stranded at the farm they had been headed towards – La Range. Nel had then hurt her leg and had gone home for a week or so to get it seen to in the UK. She was supposed to be coming back at the end of the following week, just before I was due to leave. Because of the nature of their trip, and also because they had a car with a capacious boot, they had packed everything but the kitchen sink. That accounted for the amount of mess in my room. It also accounted for several pots of jam, and three kilograms of rice. Apparently I was going to be eating a lot of rice over the following ten days.

The women went down to the fields to collect green beans. I was quite excited at the prospect. My childhood holiday memories were peppered with learning French and building my confidence through buying half kilos of haricots verts, passed to me either in thin white plastic bags or in crunchy paper ones by terrifying stall-holders as I handed over coins from my stress-damp palms, hoping my parents had given me enough money. It turned out that Abelard didn’t just own the fields surrounding the house, but also many around the town centre that we had passed in the car the day before. Some contained cows, some cereals, others vegetables. We drove to the furthest one and set to work, each standing alongside a separate line of legumes. Our knees were bent slightly and our backs were bowed to allow us to peer into the plants in search of beans. There was one rule: not too short. I had that drummed into me. If I picked them too short there would be nothing to crop on Friday, ready for Saturday’s market. At first it seemed easy, but after a while my back began to ache from the odd posture, and I became bean-blind, confusing beans for stalks and stalks for beans.

It had been a clear and sunny day when we had breakfasted, but cloud had sneaked up on us as our faces were turned soilwards, and suddenly the heavens opened. The other three dropped their bean-buckets and ran helter-skelter back through the courgettes towards the van. I set down my yellow plastic bucket and followed suit. It was real rain, and we were soaked by the time we got there. Sheltering in the back we stood in shivering silence, the rain drumming a strong rifle fire on the metal over our heads, waiting for the storm to pass. The bean-picking seemed even more backbreaking after the pause, and the drops of water that collected on the leaves ensured that our bare legs never warmed up. After the green beans came the broad beans in their slightly furry pods. And then there were carrots to pull up. It was almost impossible to tell if they were mature or not. I was told to rub away the soil around the base of the leaves to see the top of the carrot, but often I couldn’t gauge from the orange circumference how long the sweet roots would be. And the carrots kept on snapping as I pulled them out. No matter how softly I jiggled them around in the wet soil, they still seemed to snag and break, meaning I was wasting good crop. More than once, embarrassed, I replanted the carrots that I had broken. I knew that this would be counterproductive in the long run, but my dishonesty saved me some blushes. By the end of the row I was performing slightly better, but I still felt guilty about my wastefulness.    

Hannah was vocal after our stint in the field. Complaining about being cold, complaining about being wet, complaining about how painful her back was. I felt that she did have a point that there was probably something wrong when a person was more comfortable bent double than they were standing straight, but I wasn’t about to admit to agreeing with her.  As we waited for lunch, we talked a little. But she seemed intent on talking to me in English, and I was reticent to respond. It seemed rude of her; I had no idea how good the others were at English, but I hadn’t heard them speak it. However, I knew that Hannah could speak some French. Accent or no accent, it was French that I wanted to speak. I closed myself off to her, putting up barriers between the two of us, trying to distance myself from her and her rudeness. It was only weeks after I left France that I realised that in doing so I had been just as rude as her, if not more.

I sat and rubbed the dried mud into the lines of my palms and fingers. Lunch was a glorious salad of grated carrot, beetroot and avocado, followed by slightly gristly merguez and rice and green beans with garlic and then baguette and cheese, and then apricots and then cigarettes and coffee and siesta. From all around the table, multilingual tobacco packets proclaimed smoking kills, smoke contains particles of formaldehyde, benzine and nitrates, your doctor can help you quit smoking and smoking when pregnant can harm your baby. I couldn’t help but laugh to myself. Judging by who was sitting around the table, the warnings were clearly not doing their job. They terrified the sole non-smoker, but were ignored by the rest. 

After lunch we collected around the door of one of the smaller outhouses, which turned out to be the farm’s cold-store. Even Abelard was there. He dragged crates of onions, carrots and beetroot from the store and gave us a lesson in bunching the produce. The onions should be five or six to the bunch, a mixture of red and white, and a mixture of sizes. Their roots should be trimmed to a uniform length, as should their shoots. They should be tied off tightly enough that they would not slip from their bunch, yet not so tight that the shoots were damaged. Similarly with the carrots, except without the trimming. Taking up empty plastic crates that lay around us and turning them upside down, we gathered around our task armed with knives and string, and set to. 

I sat next to Sophie, and we began to talk. She was 34, and she harboured dreams of becoming a volcanologist. Academia was pas son truc – not her thing – and she had struggled at school, and since then she had done odd jobs and worked ten winters at a ski resort, ten summers at her sister’s restaurant. She didn’t enjoy it. Now she wanted to get training in medicinal plants in the Jura, find a man, have kids and settle down. She seemed nice enough, and had intense brown eyes which betrayed a little sadness. I wondered if she would manage to find a man and settle down and have kids and become a volcanologist and an expert in medicinal herbs. It seemed a lot of goals to have for the short-term. To add to her sadness, Marta announced that our bunches of carrots were too small. We lapsed into silence, listening to the rumbles of a distant train down the valley. Maybe it was the train that I had arrived on. Maybe it was the train that I wished I could leave on, away from the discomfort of the grey plastic crate carving red squares into my thighs. I was the worst kind of lonely: lonely in a crowd. 

The red lines on the backs of my legs stung as I stood up, and I tripped backwards into a patch of nettles surrounding a small cabin on stilts. With burning ankles now as well as thighs, I put my hand out to steady myself against it, and saw that my hand was next to a hand-painted sign: toilettes sèches. So there was an outside toilet here, too. That was where people had disappeared off to periodically during lunch, then. I thought it strange that nobody had told me about its existence, but I was fast learning that this was how things worked at La Range. Nobody told anybody anything; it was all a case of monkey-see-monkey-do, and I was the newest monkey in the troop.

The next time that I felt the need – and when the outside toilet wasn’t surrounded by carrot-bunching workers – I went on an expedition. My experience of earlier in the day forewarned me of the nettles, so I was prepared to pick my way around them and up the three steep wooden steps to the door. The walls of the cabin were built of dark horizontal wooden planks and the roof was more of the same, so I was grateful for a window to shed some light. In comparison with my other experiences of toilettes sèches, I was sitting in the lap of luxury here! There was a bench with a hole in, under which was placed a deep, extractable trough for ease of emptying. Over the hole was a conventional toilet seat, for comfort. And around the walls were more handpainted signs bearing toilet-related messages, my favourite being a rhyme which translated roughly to however moist or hard your shit, make sure you shit into the pit. It was so unexpected that as I sat there, I couldn’t help but laugh at it. Only on this farm, I thought with an enduring sense of irony, could I possibly be at my happiest sitting on an outside toilet. 

I agreed to accompany Abelard to market the following morning. I had no compulsion to spend any more time with him than was necessary, but it was something to do, and I knew I had to pull myself out of this slump somehow. I was caught between being aware that I was indulging in self-pity and that it was up to me to change my attitude, and the fact that, as with most indulgences, I was secretly taking some kind of pleasure in it and was resistant to change. I was desperate to get out and to go back to Fontsoleil. 

That evening while we sat on the corner sofa of the dark red living room, I borrowed Hannah’s laptop that she was using to play music I had never heard before. A box of Swan Vesta matches sat on the low coffee table beside the computer, and I was distracted for a moment by the design. I realised that it was the same make of match that Xavier had used to light the hob back in the hills. I looked up the train times and the coach times, and found that I wouldn’t be able to get to Lamastre without spending a night somewhere in between. The portrait on the patchily painted wall stared down at me and judged me for trying to quit. It would have done, at least, if it had had any eyes. But where the eyes should have been were plain white ovals. It was disturbing, and I couldn’t look at it. 

There was a little boy padding around the house that evening and I couldn’t work out who he was. At first I thought he was Marta and Abelard’s son. But Marta kept referring to a nameless woman with whom he had spent the previous week as sa mère, and so I assumed – correctly – that she wasn’t the mother in question. But he was Abelard’s son. I learned later that Abelard and Marta weren’t married, and that they had been together for about four years. Theotim was six, and would have been mischievous if he’d been allowed. But he was told off for making noise, and seemed subdued.