11th August 2010 – Not for the Vegetarians

I found out what a méchoui was the next morning when I looked out of the bathroom window. I had a mouthful of toothpaste froth which I choked on in shocked disbelief, running back to the basin to spit it out ungracefully before I suffered total asphyxiation. In front of the barn where Theotim had shown me the newborn calf was a yellow, digger-like piece of farm machinery. From the tallest part of it was hanging a sheep. Around the sheep´s neck was a rough necklace of bright red, visibly dripping onto the ground below and collecting in a deathly puddle. A méchoui was a festival dish of North African origin: a full sheep, skewered and cooked on a spit over a fire. It wasn´t clear to me why they had a méchoui at La Range, but nevertheless it appeared to be a family tradition. And I was going to miss it! This was my last day, and the méchoui wasn´t until Sunday. For the first time, I felt regret at the thought of leaving; it would have been interesting to experience that particular celebration.

10th August 2010 – The Stuffed Date

We must have looked a funny sight the next day. Near to the house there was a long polythene tunnel which served as a greenhouse where the tomatoes were grown. We trooped in there armed with watering cans every morning before the sun was too powerful. If the task was left any later, the

heat became intolerable. Alongside this tunnel, and stretching off into the distance, were rows of leeks. They were still young, and looked more like vulnerable spring onions planted at intervals along the strip of land. We were working at weeding this strip. We sat in a long line, each about ten metres from the next, heads bowed to the ground, too far from each other to talk yet too close not to acknowledge the others’ presence. The leeks were half-dead from lack of water, brittle as spun-sugar, and yet the weeds were thriving. As I pulled them out, I heard the satisfying sound of ripping roots. They lay in my hands, soft and newly lifeless and covered in fine hairs to which small clumps of damp soil clung. The mud around me was dry beyond belief, and felt more like crumble-topping between my fingers than anything else. And yet beneath the surface there clearly was still some water that hadn’t yet evaporated: a vestige of hope for the survival of the leeks through this heat wave. That was why it was so important that we culled the weeds, which sapped this moisture for their own inedible needs.

I was sitting there happily, dreaming of the café that I was going to set up when I had enough money. It was going to be called The Stuffed Date. It was going to be furnished with second-hand furniture, each piece with its own story to tell, and I was going to try to trace the stories back so that my customers could know what lives the tables and chairs had led. The walls would be plain, and on them would either be photographs that I had taken, or pictures that I had drawn, or perhaps both. The food was going to be vegetarian, inventive and wholesome; there was going to be a salad bar with about five different salads each day, a daily quiche, a choice of soups, and home-baked breads and cakes. I was going to cater for coeliacs and vegans without it even being an issue. I was going to support local farmers, sourcing seasonal produce from them. There was going to be a wide range of teas on offer, and a few good quality coffees. There was going to be a window box of herbs for pick-your-own infusions. There was going to be a cabinet of board games, magazines and books that customers could help themselves to. In the evenings I was going to host poetry nights, readings of plays, jamming sessions, book clubs and English language support sessions and foreign language speaking groups. 

Raphael came up behind me and surprised me out of my fantasy. He told me that it didn’t pay to be too much of a perfectionist. He told me that the weeds would grow back however hard I tried to eliminate them. I took his point. But I was sure that in a month, my patch would still have fewer weeds than his. I couldn’t accept that sometimes hard work was just futile.

It was harvest time, and Edouart and Abelard were hard at work in their respective fields, trying to harvest the majority of their wheat by the end of the week. The middle weekend of August was traditionally when they celebrated the end of the harvest with a méchoui. I didn´t have a clue what a méchoui was, but it was clear that the men were working to a deadline. They were always out in the combine harvester, driving up and down. They stayed out until long after the sun went down and forgot about mealtimes. Renelde even took to calling in to check that Edouart was remembering to eat, which he invariably wasn’t. Like his son, he had a one track mind. We were all offered a ride in the moissonneuse – combine harvester – and I really wanted to accept. But Abelard still scared me and it was he who was offering the ride, not Edouart, and the prospect of spending any more time alone in his presence was not one that I relished, so foolishly I declined the opportunity.

9th August 2010 – Carrot tops and baby calves

In the morning we went down to the fields to weed the baby lettuces, beans and carrots. I was worried that I was going to pull up the tiny vegetables by mistake, but I soon honed my eyes to watch out for the fine fronds of immature carrot tops and the little green waves of salad. I was working with Sophie and the family, and Theotim and Francis had come along too. Usually they stayed around the house. There was too much of an age gap between them for them to get on well with each other for very long. Francis was too old to want to join in with Theotim’s games, and not old enough to have learned the patience to put up with him. They were both too young to have enough of an attention span to be useful farm labourers, but at that moment, absorbed in their tasks, they were at peace with each other. Theotim had a bad cough, and kept complaining of being ill. I was working near Nathalie during one of his spluttering outbreaks, and she made a comment under her breath about the effects of second- hand smoke on children. I smiled to myself. It was reassuring to know that I wasn’t the only one who found the fumes of the kitchen unhealthy.

The world looked different with my head between my calves, squatting as I was close to the ground and looking back up the field through my legs. An expanse of undulating brown sky spread before me with herringbone clouds of assorted greens. A large blue bucket hung nearby, and further away Joao was floating, legs planted in the muddy heavens, stretching his back, arms reaching towards the blue ground as if he were trying to grasp it. Standing up, the world righted itself again, and the Dali-esqe perspective disappeared instantaneously. My thighs were aching, my back was aching and a butterfly rested on my trowel. It seemed almost transparent, with diaphanous mother of pearl wings, delicate as a soap bubble. 

Francis and Theotim had begun to bicker and moan. Sophie was shooting them murderous glances – or at least as murderous as she could muster – and Nathalie decided that it would be best to take them back to the farm. Sophie and I remained to attempt the impossible task of ridding the entire field of weeds, and going back over the areas covered by the family, whose standards had not been quite so exacting. As we worked, we talked about the French music industry and about our favourite styles and artists. She promised to write me a list of good French singers that I could look up when I returned home. 

As soon as we arrived back at the farm I was dragged around the side of the house by a highly excitable Theotim. He took me to the outbuilding that I could see each morning from the bathroom window, but had never investigated. It turned out to be a barn full of sheep. It was warm and musty inside. Air only seemed to circulate near the roof, at the base of which thin, glassless horizontal windows were built. The sheep bolted away from us down their enclosure as Theotim ran at full pelt towards the back wall, his sticky hand in mine, and only at the last minute did he veer to one side into a stack of haybales, scrambling up and over them and leaving me bemused at the bottom. With little choice in the matter, and curious as to what was quite so exciting on the other side, I clambered after him, my weight a disadvantage on the soft, yielding hay. 

Flopping down in an ungainly fashion on the other side and stumbling unsteadily onto firm ground, I found Theotim pointing past a wooden barrier. Lying on the straw were three shaggy-haired Highland cows, and beside the nearest one was a tiny calf. Theotim told me it had been born very early that morning. I was entranced by it, delicate in its infancy and yet more robust than I would have imagined, its nose blindly snuffling towards its mother’s udders.  I asked Theotim what it was called. He looked at me as if I were an imbecile, and told me quite clearly that this baby was not going to grow up; it was going to be killed when it was still a baby and so it wasn’t allowed a name, otherwise it would be like a friend, and you can’t eat your friends. That was me told. I wondered how many days of nameless freedom this little baby would enjoy before it became a burger. 

The previous evening at my party I had met Sen. Sen was an agriculture student from Bangladesh, and was WWOOFing as part of his studies. His college required him to interview the farmers and to write a report on the farming practices of whatever farm he was on. Unfortunately for him, he couldn’t speak any French past bonjour, and neither Marta nor Abelard could speak a word of Bengali, not even the corresponding nomoskaar. He didn’t really speak much English either, but with time and a thick accent he could make himself understood to me. He was so relieved to be able to communicate with me that he asked stiltedly if I would interpret between him and Marta, allowing him to conduct his interview. He looked so lost and helpless that I couldn’t have turned him down had I wanted to. As a result I found myself sitting at a large wooden table opposite the interviewer and the interviewee, translating questions and answers that I didn’t understand about soil types and crop rotations as though it were the most normal thing to do in the world.  

Sen sat next to me that night at dinner on the other farm; apparently I had made a new friend. I lapsed into English for his benefit, relinquishing my French for a couple of hours. I might have been obstinate about not speaking English, but I wasn’t cruel. Hannah had been capable of speaking French, but Sen wasn’t. While he tried to explain to me in broken English the dangers of flooding from global warming that threatened Bangladesh, we sipped deadly- strong mojitos and deadly-sweet piña coladas. Nibbles were brought out and stared at us from huge plates placed at intervals down the table. The nibbles in question were friture – tiny little fried whitebait – their eyes still clearly visible through the translucent amber batter. The next course was a pizza with potato, an odd combination, but at least it wasn’t capable of seeing its sharp-toothed fate.

There were two groups of new faces at the table that evening. One was an older couple who were walking the Loire valley and staying in gites along the way. They had read about Edouart in a book written by a man who had done something similar and phoned the farm up out-of-the-blue to ask if they could stay. They didn’t know about WWOOFing and were bemused to find quite so many people collected around the dinner table, perched on the walls and assorted sun-chairs and stools. A guessing-game ensued: why were we all there, coming as we did from all around the world? They were even more surprised to find that it wasn’t only the youngsters who were on this mysterious programme, but that Nathalie, Joao and even Francis were too. Eventually they gave in, and were amazed that we were all there to volunteer for manual labour, whether to learn the language, or the agricultural techniques, or to escape the rat-race of the cities, or as a cheap way of travelling.

The other group was a young couple with a baby and a two year-old, who were friends of Abelard and Marta. To the right of me sat Sen, but to my left was the toddler. He had straight sandy blonde hair, and the widest eyes I had ever seen. His name was Papillon: the French word for butterfly. It struck me as an unlikely name, especially for a boy, but the parents seemed a fairly alternative couple, and until somebody else posed the question – pourquoi Papillon? -  I assumed that they had seen a butterfly at the moment of his conception and hadn’t considered how much he might be bullied in later life. Mercifully, I was spared the details of his conception. But his birth had been complicated. His heartbeat had been so weak that the doctors had given him two hours to live. And so his parents had named him Papillon because his life would be as fleeting – but as beautiful – as a butterfly’s. And then, against all the odds, he survived. He was a pale child, but not sickly. According to his parents he was a miracle. I supposed he was, toddling around with vital curiosity, but I couldn’t help but think that, with time, he might get very tired of telling the story of his birth to incredulous new acquaintances.

8th August 2010 – Happy birthday to me

I woke up on the Sunday and quietly wished myself happy birthday. Sitting cross-legged on my jiggley bed, I ceremoniously unwrapped my book of poetry and bar of chocolate from their paper bags. I had never really considered how I would spend my 21^st birthday, but I would never have imagined it would be on a farm with a group of strangers. Downstairs there was post for me; apparently my family’s birthday card had arrived bang on time and had been found with the Reblechon the previous day. It had spent the night defumigating in the kitchen. I opened it, and stared back at an image of my newborn self printed on the folded paper. There was another surprise. I had been planning to take myself off down to the river for the day; it was a Sunday, so we weren’t expected to work. But Hannah had let slip that it was my birthday and that 21 was a big one in the UK, and Nathalie and Joao had taken pity on me and decided that they would take me out for the day with Francis while they explored the area. So, unexpectedly, I was swept up in the excitement of picnic-packing and climbed into their car.

I wasn’t entirely sure where it was that we ended up, but it was somewhere along the Loire. It was a glorious day: the sun was shining through a pleasant breeze, and wispy little clouds of pure white scudded across the sky. We got out of the car to walk along the river through an old village built from stone. The village school was obviously still used as such, the modern wooden benches and plastic bins in the playground at odds with the wrought-iron gates and the signs engraved into the stone above the two front doors, designating one door for use by the girls and one for the boys. The gardens of the surrounding houses were well tended and beautiful in their planned array of colours. A rusting bicycle was leaning against a wall in a street devoid of cars. It was as if we had taken a brief step backwards in time. 

On the other side of the village we stopped and set up our picnic blanket. My birthday lunch tumbled out onto the chequered wool: ham and cucumber sandwiches with apricots to follow, and nectarines so ripe that juice dribbled down our chins despite our best attempts to be civilised. There was no way they could have known that for me, cucumber sandwiches formed an integral part of any birthday picnic. And yet there they were. A period of rest ensued as we lapsed into contented and sun-drenched silence. I brought out my pocket knife that I had taken to carrying as the farmers did, and began to whittle away at the kernel of one of the apricots. After a while, the heart of the fruit was transformed into an eye, smooth and lidded. I felt it would become a reminder of everything I had experienced on my farming journey.

A little overheated from the intense midday rays, we walked to the river. We passed tall dried teasels that I couldn’t help but reach out to feel, the delicately brittle spines soft to stroke upwards but hazardous downwards, rattling gently at my touch like autumnal leaves in a gust of wind. Our shoes were left on the pebbles of the riverbank as we dabbled our feet with the darting silver fish. We jumped from one stepping stone to the next, out into the middle of the meandering flow, our arms outstretched for balance, wobbling occasionally and dangerously waterwards.

There was a display at a nearby ruined castle that afternoon, so we drove up a dusty track to the strategically built strongholding. It had long since crumbled into indistinct beginnings of walls, from where we could see all around the region. We perched on what might once have been the window sills of a banqueting hall and settled down to the strange spectacle, which turned out to be a group of locals dressed in medieval costume, performing a series of songs and sketches. My bottom grew slowly more numb with every act. It wasn’t the best piece of theatre I had ever seen – and the most dramatic part of the afternoon was watching a car being pushed out of a ditch by audience members once the display was over – but it was undeniably very sweet. 

So, it turned out, were the farmers. Going out for the day with the family had been only part of their

birthday plans for me. They weren’t people to miss out on the opportunity for a party. I arrived home to blue balloons growing from the trees as if they were apples, hanging above the long wooden trestle tables that had been pushed together outside the house. Soon everybody from the other farm descended on us, and Marta’s homemade guacamole and tortilla chips were brought out from the kitchen along with wine which flowed as freely as the conversation. At thirteen guests, this was without a doubt the biggest party I had had since I was in junior school.

The birthday meal was a lamb curry made by Evelyn, because they knew that I liked to cook with spices and she was confident using them. As the birthday girl I was banned from going into the kitchen, but it was agreed that it was my responsibility to dish up. The meat was wonderfully tender, and had obviously been cooked long and slowly. She had been a little overzealous with the chilli and while my palette could cope with the fire, Francis found it too hot and had to run indoors, eyes streaming, to find some milk to calm the burn. My cake, once it was brought forth from the kitchen, was a chocolate banana cake, crisp on the outside and moist in its spongy centre. 21 candles burned in hedgehog formation from the top while everybody sang to me – joyeux anniversaire – and as I blew them out, I accidentally extinguished the table’s tealights at the same time, plunging my end of the table into momentary obscurity and giggles. It was a little difficult to cut the cake into thirteen equal-sized slices, so I plumped for ease and cut fourteen. It was a prudent decision, because everybody agreed that I should have the slice that was left over.

A party game followed, given to me as a present. It was a trivia game and I was elected the quiz master, and the questions were impossibly difficult. As the rest of the table struggled to name Charlemagne´s nine wives, collapsing periodically into contagious laughter, I all but forgot the difficulties of the previous days. I relaxed into the midnight happiness at the end of my birthday, feeling that perhaps these were the most welcoming people in the world.