Deep France (5 page)

I decided that I would also buy a French national paper,
Le Monde
if I was feeling strong enough for the tiny grey type and advanced vocabulary or
Le Figaro
if I was feeling
weak. Then there were the three local papers:
Le Sud-Ouest
(Béarn edition),
La République
(Béarn-et-Soule edition) and
Le Pyrénéen
. And
I had ordered from the UK the weekly Guardian, which proved to be a caricature of the bad old Guardian written exclusively for social workers in Africa, and the inestimable news digest
The
Week
, an absolute must-read, even in London.

These packages intrigued the post lady. She was also besotted with the Duchess. Homage is this cat’s favourite conversation, and she took to waiting by the door in the morning to receive
her daily fix. I apologized to the post lady for the extra work I was making for her, explaining that I was
a writer and I needed my newspapers. The is proved to be my
introduction to my neighbours.

The White Van Men

There are a lot of white vans about. They are parked in odd places, nosed with intent into field gateways and little patches of woodland. They seem to be empty most of the
time. Occasionally, the soft pop of guns somewhere in the hills tells you where the action is.

In London, a white van is traditionally driven by a skin­head with a bad case of road rage. Around Orriule, the white vans belong to the hunters. A beat-up old van is perfect for setting out
before dawn with your dogs and transporting your kill to the railway station in the late morning, in time to be loaded onto the train for Paris for the wholesale meat market in the wee small hours.
The vans then rattle back to the shelter on the edge of Orion, a barnlike building at the crossroads. Here at weekends the hunters gathered from noon, and set up long tables for their lunch, which
lasted until well into the afternoon.

I once dropped in on some French friends to find one of their hunting neighbours already in the parlour, dipping his long nose into his aperitif, well satisfied with the dead deer lolling from
the rear doors of his elderly Renault. He wore an old green anorak and well-worn boots. Unlike the Italians, for whom hunting is an excuse to pose around in brand-new camouflage jackets festooned
with bandoliers, the Béarnais enjoy their sport without making a fashion statement.

The hunters are gifted, skilled and experienced men, and at this time of year they are after the big game, the deer and the wild boar. There is no dispute that the main motive is the pleasure of
the chase, but also acknowledgement, formal and
informal, that controlling these species is necessary for the ecological balance of the farmland. Though the argument gets a
little strained sometimes.

‘Deer are swarming all over the region!’ warned the Orthez edition of
La République
, reporting at least two hundred and fifty animals causing crop damage, breaking
down the hedges and alarming passing motorists. One driver counted seventeen animals in a field next to the Route Nationale 117. ‘Only the panel beaters are going to be happy if people stop
hunt­ing,’ he predicted grimly.

Hunting is, of course, licensed and controlled. The local clubs are called the ACCA, Association Communale de Chasse Agréée. On the notice board outside the
mairie
, a memo
from the Fédération de Chasse and the Direction Départmental de l’Agriculture confirms that the village’s annual quota for deer has been raised to eight.

The regulation is that no more than 30 per cent of the estimated local population may be shot in a year. This is enough to keep the ACCA Gaston Febus, around Orthez, busy with a shoot every
fortnight, beginning in late October after the final maize harvest and ending in late March with a hunting supper to which everyone is invited, and three different venison dishes are served. The
ACCA Gaston Febus was also authorized for three fox-shoots a year, but foxes are thought of as low-status vermin.

Since the boar and the deer have no predators other than man, plus a benign climate and an abundance of food, they breed fast – some does giving birth every six months. It is forbidden,
the notice sternly reminds the hunters, to transport a dead animal any distance at all, even from the ground where it has fallen to the white van which awaits it, without first attaching a bracelet
provided by the Federation confirming that it is part of the quota.

The hunt club in Orthez was named Gaston Fébus after
one of the romantic personalities from the Béarn’s history, whose presence is still so vivid you half
expect them to come riding into the market square any day. This is partly because they are remembered as much for embodying the spirit of the people as for their historical achievements.

Fébus is just a vernacular spelling of Phoebus, and the Viscount Gaston, who ruled the Bearn from 1343 to 1391, was given this nickname because of his blazing red hair. Long before the
Renaissance, he was a perfect Renaissance man, writing poetry, playing music, addicted to hunting and the creator of a brilliant court to which troubadours flocked from all over the Pays
d’Oc, the pleasure-loving, sun-kissed southern provinces.

The manuscripts kept in the Bibliotheque de France witness that Gaston Fébus wrote very well, particularly when he was writing about one of his favourite subjects, hunting. ‘War,
love and hunting are enough to fill a man’s life’, he believed. ‘In the field, the hunter lives joyously, because he is in communion with Nature. He gets up early and sees the
blush of the dawn on the branches, and learns to recognize the songs of the birds, which bring great joy to the heart of the hunter. The hunt is at the same time an apprenticeship for war which is
essential to a horseman. The hunter has to understand his territory, to analyse all the possibilities of the ground which the hunt will cover, and all the tricks of the quarry. This makes him a
cunning warrior who never makes a move without thinking.’

Gaston Febus was not only a brilliant military commander but also a wily statesman. From his postage stamp of a principality he intimidated and manipulated his predatory neighbours so
successfully that his subjects enjoyed peace and prosperity for decades, protected by his majestic castles, which still dominate the skylines of Pau, Orthez and Sauveterre. Febus thus gave his
subjects the maximum
opportunities for enjoying their lives and the minimum need to involve themselves with the rest of the world, although the French and English armies were
fighting all over Aquitaine during his time.

The modern novice hunter can read a whole portfolio of hunting magazines for tips on buying a gun, choosing cartridges, training your dog and stalking, not to mention exotic hunting topics from
abroad, such as the grouse shooting in Scotland or falconry in Pakistan. My favourite magazine was entitled
Wild Boar Passion
. ‘Step One. Gently move your gun 20 to 30cm away from
you, holding it almost vertical. Step Two. In taking aim at the game, turn the weapon gently towards the horizontal. Keep the gun well clear of your jacket. Step Three. Position the sight a few
centimetres higher than the desired point of contact on the boar’s shoulder. Tips: when you raise your gun, the game will run off. You must stay calm. Hold your breath before you pull the
trigger. You will soon be able to control your emotions and, in achieving serenity, you will be more efficient.’

First Contact

One dark evening, just as I was logging off and shutting down the computer, the doorbell rang for the first time. On the doorstep outside was a woman with blonde hair and
bright eyes, looking a little nervous. ‘I’ve just come from feeding our donkeys,’ she said in English. ‘The post lady told me you were here. I think she’s told the
whole village.’

Her name was Annabel. She was my neighbour, the owner of the donkeys in the field opposite, and of the imposing house which is half hidden by the fall of the land at the brow of the hill.
Anywhere else in France a house of this stature would be called a chateau, but they are resolutely
down-to-earth in the Béarn, so it’s simply called a
manoir
, and given the dialect name for a house, La Maysou.

I made tea for us, and she sat curiously at the table, eyeing the mess of papers which had already covered it. ‘What are you working on?’ she asked.

‘Nothing major,’ I told her. ‘I finished a novel before I left England, and I’ll have to do some revisions on it at some point. I’ve proposed a new novel back in
July. Now I’m just fiddling about with odd book reviews and an entry on another writer for the
Dictionary of National Biography
.’

I showed her the pages I’d printed out and the proofs from the DNB. An expression of alarm crossed her face. At this point, I had not realized that many of the English abroad are living
complete fantasy lives. Even if an ex-pat is not trying to pass him- or herself off as a former SAS hero, a millionaire, a brain surgeon, an aristocrat, a high-class call-girl or an international
sustainable agriculture consultant, the neighbours may still prefer to think of them as a far more glamorous character than they really are. With this Walter Mitty spirit abroad, it is unusual for
someone to produce concrete proof of their profession.

Annabel is an interior designer and lives with her husband, who is retired from a colourful career as a marketing entrepreneur. They’ve been in France for fourteen years, first in a big
house in the Gers and for the last four years in the Béarn. She keeps the donkeys, she tells me, because her family have always kept horses and they are good therapy for the children who
come to visit them in the summer, the pupils at the leading London prep school where her daughter teaches French. ‘These poor children,’ she says, ‘are so deprived that some of
them have never actually touched an animal before.’

The idea of feeling sorry for a young Belgravia trustafarian was touching. She seemed like a nice person. I was invited over for a drink the next evening. Her husband, Gerald, is
a veteran of World War II, in which he flew Spitfires, and of major surgery the previous year, in which the triple bypass was just for starters. He immediately revealed himself as one
of the most charming men I’ve ever met, even if he began our relationship with the words a writer never wants to hear: ‘I’m going to write a novel,’ he said.
‘I’ve got a great idea. Why don’t you write it for me and we can make lots of money?’

I told him how this works. ‘You have to write your own book,’ I said. ‘And there are no lots of money.’ He didn’t believe it. Nobody ever believes it.

Poulet Basquaise

This is our family favourite, and the first dish mentioned in that rugby song. Any dish called ‘Basquaise’ will feature peppers and be distinctly spicy. The
richness of
Poulet Basquaise
is achieved by slow-cooking the chicken and peppers together, rather than just making a pepper sauce. The classic combination is red and green bell peppers and
espelette
, the hot pepper which is the number-one keynote of Basque cooking.

There are more species of pepper grown in the Basque Country than there are variations on pelota, because Basques were great sailors and navigators. Most of Christopher Columbus’s sailors
were Basques. As they got to America early, they had a head start in growing exotic New World vegetables in their own country. They brought back maize, tomatoes and chocolate, not to mention the
peppers.

Espelette
is the favourite pepper in the Basque Country. It has a warm, generous heat, said to be somewhere between paprika and chilli, and the peppers are very dark red and of medium
size. The full name is
piment d’espelette
, after the village of Espelette around which it is grown in such abundance that every building virtually disappears under a mountain of
peppers when they are threaded on strings and hung outside to dry at harvest time.

Espelette
also comes as a dry powder or a paste. Go easy with
it at first and, if you’re crumbling the whole pepper, do not on any account rub your eyes during
the process or you’ll have to put your head under a cold shower until the agony ceases. If you have to make this dish without
espelette
, you can use a combination of warm paprika and
a dash of chilli.

Elizabeth David suggests adding about 6 of the spicy Basque sausages called
loukenkas
as well. I’ve never tried this, but it seems like an excellent idea,
particularly if you have to stretch the dish at the last moment for unexpected guests.