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.