A Short Walk from Harrods (11 page)

So, every three months I made the climb up my cliff and through the oakwood at the back of the house to Saint-Cyprien to see the deputy mayor. This had to be done between the hours of five and eight in the evenings. On a fixed date. If you missed it for some reason, you could always try to catch him in the bar he ran in Le Pré. But by that time he really couldn't have signed his name with an X.

So one got to the
mairie
early, sat on a rush-bottomed chair with the other emigrants, the ‘legal' Arabs, the Spanish, the Italians. The anteroom was small, whitewashed, red-tiled, spartan, a poster on one wall with a map of France indicating, by a big black dot, the latest advance of rabies, on the other a notice saying when the blood donor caravan would be arriving in the village for the monthly blood donation.

The next stage, after your
carte grise,
literally a bit of grey paper covered with a riot of violet stamps and the deputy's incomprehensible signature, was your
carte de séjour.
This was orange, a proper card, and was a permit to live in, work in and inhabit the Alpes Maritimes. It was a heady moment when that was put in one's wallet. It took for ever to get, and
countless journeys, queues and passionate discussions in a vast building in the heart of Nice, where it was always impossible to park a car. However, getting the beastly thing was worth the misery.

Finally – and it took longer than the others, because one's request had to go to Paris, then through officialdom in Nice, and then back to the
mairie
– and finally, one amazing day, you got your blue
carte de résidence.
Not only were you permitted to live in your house, but you had become, apart from voting and joining the army, a French resident.
Taxes compris.
This lasted you for ten years and there were four pages already for the stamp ahead. It felt really very good indeed. Because the land had been cared for, because the olives were harvested, the hay cut and sold, because, at first anyway, the sheep grazed, I was classified as an agricultural property and an agricultural proprietor. Which made an enormous difference to my taxes and in the grants made available for the house and restoration. It felt very secure. Objective gained. With no loss of passport.

Vaguely, at one time, I had thought about taking out French nationality: it was a perplexing idea, but it got pretty swiftly set aside when one realized that it was not impossible that one day, perhaps - perhaps - one could be called upon to fight one's true countrymen. And that, however remote it might have been, was
quite
unthinkable. So one quickly smothered the little spark that had glimmered and concentrated, very hard indeed, on being a good resident.

As the years progressed, the yearly return to England, to see my parents or the family, became slightly depressing. I was starting to feel more and more foreign, I did not quite behave as an Englishman – shaking hands with everyone,
calling people ‘Madame' or ‘Monsieur' (which always caused embarrassment) – generally feeling out of place. Familiar places faded rather. I even forgot the English words for things, and the changes, between 1966 and 1976, for example, became bewildering to me: the behaviour of people; the clothes they wore; the rubbish and filth everywhere; the lack of cafés and brasseries, of reliable trains, mail or general transport to which I had so easily become accustomed – really quite trivial things, I know. But there were other, more alarming things, like the growing envy and spite of the cheap press, hitting at standards which we once had held dear. Perhaps I was out of touch stuck up on my hill in the sun of Provence? Was I spoiled? Had I got it wrong? But I did feel that the quality of life itself was altering, an apathy was growing, with a resentment against anything ‘foreign' and therefore unacceptable, cheap, cheating and incomprehensible. I felt, with great reluctance, that we had started to fall back from the race, while on the continent the race was roaring ahead and ready to be won. We seemed to be jellied quite comfortably in aspic. Dunkirk, Vera Lynn, our finest hour and the Blitz! Tourist heaven – but not for today. Surely that was fifty years ago? We were marking time on one spot. Sinking slowly. It was a terribly sad, dusty, uneasy feeling. Driving out to the airport after one of those yearly trips, to catch the early flight home, I drove through the bunting and glory of a full October in the Park: the tumbling leaves, beds of scarlet dahlias, sparkle of the Household Cavalry exercising in the Row, swans on the Serpentine, two youths jogging, their breath drifting like veils in the sharp morning, just-off-frost. Familiar, cherished, but suddenly strange, distant. A complex feeling. Like looking at a sepia photograph of time
past, bleached of colour and fine detail, leaving only outline. And then I knew, in one regretful moment, that I now no longer belonged. I was just a visitor in a foreign land.

The ‘home stretch' is always the best part of a return. The crunch and scatter of gravel in the lane, rasp and crack of twig, bramble and broom against the bodywork of the car. The spiralling leaves of the big fig, yellow leaflets to announce the end of the season. The overgrown lane winds and dips down past the Meils' farm, she in straw hat, looking up, waving, Emile doffing his beret, leaning on his goat-crook. And then, right ahead, the big stone column built from jagged boulders long since by Fraj, decorated with bits of red glass from a forgotten accident on the corner, the bent chrome letters ‘FIAT' crowning its top. His statement.

Winding then slowly up through the still olives, the tended terraces, late sun throwing orange flares from the windows, dogs squealing, barking, racing ahead to the top to greet one. Past the pond, yellowing rushes bending in a late
souffle
of wind, pattering on the water. Henri carrying logs in his arms, waving, his yellow hair spiked and flustered by the breeze, apron flapping, laughing at the dogs. Outside the kitchen, Marie leaning over the balcony rail, vegetable knife in one hand, a head of celery in the other, geranium-red lips bared in a gleaming porcelain smile. Skittering, fighting, snarling from the dogs. Marie laughing, scolding, waving the celery. ‘
Arrête! Arrête! Tais-toi!'

‘All well, Marie?'

‘All well, Monsieur: a perfect week. So warm. And London?'

We unpacked luggage. Plastic bags: Harrods, Marks and
Spencer, Goode's. Henri bustling up, wiping his hands on his apron, laughing: ‘Welcome! Welcome, messieurs.' Lugging suitcases and hand-grips from the boot. Marie calling down, ‘
Oh la!
So much! Did you remember my tea?' Carrying the stuff up the steps on to the balcony, into the kitchen, the smell of simmering lentil soup. ‘I remembered your tea.
And
the Cooper's Oxford. Have they been good? The dogs?' And bending towards the Roman ruin, sitting upright with amber eyes: ‘Have
you
behaved? I have brought you a big yellow ball! From Kensington!' A furiously thumping tail, a scream of jealousy from the other dog who might have been forgotten. Marie crying, ‘Poor Daisy! Nothing for Daisy?' Balls were chucked scudding, rumps went bouncing, and belting, into the dusk. Marie, picking up the beech chopping-block left to sweeten in the afternoon sun.

‘No one telephoned, not a soul. As the grave here. The mail is in the Long Room.'

‘I bought you a present.'

‘
Tiens
…'

‘Bendicks Bitter Mints!'

‘
Mon Dieu!
My figure … my teeth!
Oh là!'

Forwood, setting the kettle on the chopping-block, plugging it in, looking for a cup and saucer. We were home.

I have the vegetable knife. Still have the chopping-board. I use them both every day, wondering, sometimes, if all the scratches, cuts and scores, the cross-hatching, the random criss-crossing of long-forgotten knives, this kitchen trigonometry, is all that is tangible now of a lost lifetime? A worn peeling-knife, a beech chopping-block? Tangible perhaps, yes. Ephemeral, no: there is much more to it all than that.

Titty-Brown Hill was the highest point on my land. A flat-topped, grassy knoll, scarred with clumps of alien corn, it was an easy walk up from the terrace along what was, many, many years before, a cart and cattle track to Saint-Sulpice. On the top it was all absolutely secluded, no one could possibly see a thing; so female guests got into the habit of wandering off up through the sapling oaks and tumbled walls (this area had been rather more neglected than anywhere else) to strip off, happy in their security. The only possible observers of their behaviour would have been the little owl, a chatter of magpies or perhaps an ambling tortoise.

It wasn't very long before the grassy knoll was baptized, and became Titty-Brown Hill. I seemed to have a wish to name parts of the land, or the trees on the land: something to do with knowing, in shorthand language, exactly where one was working, or where work had to be done. For example, if one said, ‘I've done all the scything among the five sisters,' it was understood that the two lower terraces beside the path down through the five cypress trees had been cleared. The density of the trees prevented the mowers from raging about, thus causing me to break my back with the scythe but saving the lives of countless lizards, praying mantises, grasshoppers and crickets. Tragically the super-efficient German giants chumbled up the slow-moving insects in vast quantities. A slender stick-insect, even a dashing mantis, simply hadn't a hope in hell of escaping the roaring red machines which whirled them into chaff in a split second.

All the trees which I bought from the nursery in the plain to give my domain instant ‘timelessness' were given names so that one would know exactly where one was. ‘Charlie' was the tallest, and oldest, and stood hard by the front door, towering over the corrugated pink-tiled roof; ‘Rosie' stood like an exclamation mark at the top of the drive; ‘Brock' (a nephew) and ‘Kimbo' (his wife) shaded the pond. ‘Antonia and Eduardo', called after my faithful Spanish staff who had come from England with me to help me get settled down in France, stood beyond the hangar garage and under the kitchen windows. To remind me, if I ever needed reminding, of their loyalty and the sense of loss which they engendered when they, in time, left to go back to Valencia and start up a family, something we had agreed when I left England for abroad. Out of the dozen or so vastly costly trees, only one, called ‘Bella', actually slowly died off. Her roots struck a giant rock buried deep under the earth and that settled that.

Thus there were Titty-Brown Hill, Fig Meadow, Long Walk, Pond Lawn, Bamboo Fields, Crescent Lawn, Bonfire Field and so on. They were instantly identifiable if one spoke of them after work in the evenings. ‘I've done all round Charlie, and raked up round Brock and Kimbo' meant that the front of the house and the flowerbeds by the terrace had been weeded and the Pond Lawn had been cleared. Simple. And equally it brought into use the names of much-loved friends or members of the family.

Some of the trees, latterly, were named for the people who had given them as gifts – much more useful and enduring than anything else – and if I was ever asked by some generous guest what to offer as a token of thanks it was always a rose bush, a plant or a sapling tree which proved the most acceptable.

From Titty-Brown you could look out over a giant patchwork of vines, carnations, jasmine, roses, and acres and acres of olive trees. Olive groves, I should perhaps say. Our area was known to produce a particularly excellent fruit, and my land, L'Aire Pigeonnier, was noted for the best olives of all. For years, well, ever since the war, the trees had been neglected badly. The land had flooded from time to time, the trees were saturated and had grown lavishly, producing no fruit. Within about three years (olives fruit only every two years or so) I had once again a good harvest.

At first there were only two of us, Forwood and myself, to do the picking. Crawling about on hands and knees in an anorak and boots, with fingers blue from cold, sodden knees and an aching back, collecting the fallen berries in the frosted grass and wide-spread nets was not at all what I had imagined the olive harvest to be. Fortunately, in time, Monsieur Rémy and Madame Bruna, plus their children, came into the act: they took what they could pick and kept the oil, which provided them with enough virgin-pressing from the mill for a year at least. Our crops were prodigious, and the trip down to the mill in Saint-Sulpice was always one of the splendours of the endeavour.

At dusk, about four o'clock (the harvest started in mid-December and lasted until mid-March), we carted the sacks and buckets down to the village, queued up to get them weighed, took the
fiche
which stated the quantity (to the last gram) we were due, and then tipped the sacks into the great churning mess being crushed and pulped by the giant granite wheel. The scent of the virgin oil, the heavy sweet odour of the brown pulp, with a thread of paraffin wafting from the lamps hung high on the rough stone walls and, above all, the
smoke of rough Gitane cigarettes drifting through it, a binding scent for the others, were pungent and immensely comforting. The physical result of hours of back-breaking labour, it was altogether most satisfying.

But quite apart from the vineyards, the roses, carnations, jasmine fields and dense olive groves below Titty-Brown, by far the most exciting, and to some extent worrying, thing was the glorious view over all this land far down to the sea and Africa beyond. Sometimes (fortunately rarely) the great bank of clouds on the distant horizon of the sea would lift for half an hour and the jagged peaks of Corsica, soft pink in the early morning sun, would thrust shimmering high into the pale aching winter sky. I use the words ‘worrying' and ‘fortunately' here because I had been told often enough by Monsieur Danté that if you could see the mountains on Corsica, then a terrible mistral would shortly arrive. It was time to batten down the hatches, secure the doors and shutters, and huddle in the depths of the huge fireplace under the chimney. Safest place in a really bad mistral or forest fire. Should this occur, then Monsieur Rémy, Danté and Plum-Bum called to each other in concern like chickens, and with a deal of head shaking they would rattle off in the battered truck before the end of the working-day to get their own places ready. You used mostly to see the mountains in the very early morning for some reason. And seldom in summer. When you caught the awesome sight, the mountains were washed by the rising sun glinting on the snows. Corsica has pretty high mountains. Anyway, to see them was not good news, and it always proved to be the case.