Reflections of Sunflowers

‘Gentle, wry, sometimes sad, it has all the pleasures of an authentic love affair’
The Times

‘Both romantic and funny…the book lovingly portrays the people, history, food and traditions of this beautiful French region’
Summer Break Magazine

‘Exubertantly detailed…the author’s great merit is that she makes us accept it on such enchanting terms’
The Observer

‘Fine attention to detail and a full sense of the Frenchness of life. Readers…should enjoy this book with its real taste of Aquitaine’
Oxford Times

Our past twenty-four summers have been spent at Bel-Air, our second home in south-west France, with a brief, gardening visit in early spring. ‘Well, that’s a first!’ I remember a bright young woman completing a survey at Gatwick saying, when we gave ‘To cut the grass’ as our reason for flying that April. This year however, a year in which we had expected to celebrate our quarter of a century in this lovely corner of France, brought unforeseen challenges.

In January my husband Mike was diagnosed with colon cancer. Fortunately, an operation was swiftly organised but our usual spring visit was, of course, impossible. The grass did not get cut. Would we even see our garden that summer? It seemed unlikely. In the frightening realities of a crowded hospital even our London home became, for me, just a place in which
to sleep between long, anxious hours by his bedside. Our other home in France seemed a far-away fantasy. Bel-Air stayed shuttered and silent.

At long last, the news was better. A summer visit became a possibility. We both longed to go. For me the waiting was especially hard as I spent two days in June recording my first book,
A House in the Sunflowers
, for Isis Talking Books, and the memories of all our early adventures were re-awakened. By July, Mike’s next hospital appointment was not for six months. We finally booked our tickets and kind friends opened and cleaned the house for our late arrival in mid-July. And there in the sunshine, the quiet and the sweet, clean air, we began the road to recovery.

Driving all the way not being an option, we put the car on the train to Brive, by far the easiest way to do the journey – providing you do not get lost in Calais between the tunnel exit and the motor-rail terminal. After having done just that, I realised on checking the map with the written instructions that they did not agree.
Nul point le navigateur
, stick to the map next time. After an inevitable, tedious wait for the cars to be loaded we found our minute but comfortable cabin and while other travellers unpacked champagne and prepared to celebrate, we thankfully settled ourselves on the firm beds and slept for eight hours. Ingenious manoeuvres were necessary to wash and dress, but there was good coffee and fresh bread waiting in the
station buffet before the sheer exhilaration of heading south.

It is a heavenly drive through the valley of the Dordogne in the very early morning. At Beynac we stopped for a drink. Not yet nine o’clock, the first day-trippers were just arriving. In the nearby hotel, guests lingered contentedly over
petit déjeuner
. Like a cohort of black-clad space warriors, intrepid elderly cyclists in trendy helmets descended, red-faced, from the steep road to the chateau. They huddled briefly to check their maps before speeding away. The Dordogne, ageless and indolent, willows reflected in her dark water, advertised boat trips to see ‘
Les Quatre châteaux
’ and I enjoyed my first
jus d’abricot
, a drink inexplicably absent in bars in England.

We were reluctant to leave without at least going to see the magnificent chateau of Beynac a little closer, but it turned out to be even further up the steep road than we thought. When we turned the last curve and reached the top, the ancient
bourg
was silent and the castle towered above it, enormous and imposing. How powerful those medieval lords must have felt surveying their terrain from such a viewpoint. We postponed a real visit for another year and slowly wound our way home through the Dordogne and into Lot-et-Garonne.

We always call first at the large farmhouse on the edge of the village, where
les Bertrands
, Raymond and
Claudette, our farmer friends live. We bought our house from them originally, they farm all the land around us and, over the years, have become like family. Claudette was picking strawberries. She stood up, waved and came to greet us with the bowl, almost full, under her arm. Raymond appeared from the barn and he and Mike wept as they embraced. We had made it after all.

As we drank outside in their flowered courtyard I noticed my large hydrangea, which normally stands in its pot by my porch, now here, sheltered by an overhanging shrub and covered in blooms. It had never looked so beautiful.

‘It was easier to bring it down,
en pension
with the others than go up to Bel-Air to water it,’ explained Claudette. My geraniums, my elephant’s ear and my great hibiscus, which my cousin David bought me as a small plant years ago, always descend to the shelter of farm when we leave at the end of September. Claudette has a specially constructed shelter where she overwinters her wonderful collection of plants. Chilean begonias, tibouchina, plumbago, bougainvillaea, and a huge lemon tree, all wait there for the last frosts to pass. It is prudent to wait. Not for nothing are Saint Mammert, Saint Pancrace and Saint Servais, all unfamiliar to me, called les
Saints de glace
, the ice saints. Their feast days fall in late May, and frosts as late as this are not unknown and can be disastrous in this region of plum orchards. These days safely past,
and the sun grown stronger, all Claudette’s tender shrubs are moved out into the courtyard to join the clematis, the oleanders and whatever new plants she has chosen for that season.

‘I’ve already taken up some of the small pots and put you in a few petunias,’ she said. ‘The key is in the door. It all looks very spick and span. She’s certainly worked hard, Susan.
Même pas une toile d’araignée!
’ she giggled. ‘There’s not even a cobweb.’ The spiders round here are the fastest workers I know.

When, so long ago, we first set eyes on Bel-Air, our quaint little house, it had been empty for many years. The rough, stone walls were almost invisible behind tall, straggling, box trees and long neglected vines and creepers. Inside the air was thick with dust, one wall stained with a trail of green lichen and the well worn, old furniture shrouded in cobwebs so thick that one was sure that Sleeping Beauty herself must be nearby. A bat skimmed out from under rotting floor-boards, and looking up through the broken tiles one could see the sky. It certainly bore no resemblance to the kind of properties one now sees on those endless TV programmes where hopefuls search for their dream home in the sun. No designer kitchen here, no luxurious bathroom, no lavatory or even running water; just a well with a broken pump – and yet we were so sure that it had been waiting just for us.

Now, the morning sunlight glinted on the long slope of the repaired roof. The pots of petunias that Claudette had planted flashed their bold colours from the low walls we had built in front of the porch. Even the brass door-knocker that I had bought in a junk market had been polished, a rare event. The windows gleamed. Inside it was just as Claudette had said, and, as usual, she had put flowers on the long table and a bottle of wine. But it was so extra especially clean. We marvelled as we went from room to room. We knew how much hard work had gone into this transformation by Susan, encouraged by her mother, our old friend Ursula. Ursula, grandmother of thirteen and great grandmother of twenty-three at the last count, had arrived to see us many years ago on her horse because she’d read the first book about Bel-Air. Susan can turn her hand to anything and has her mother’s style and energy. She had left our house sparkling.

But even if the spiders had not had time to draw breath, other creatures had already invaded. As I switched on the light in the pristine bathroom I saw two baby mice asleep in the bath, curled round each other. Woken by the light they made frantic but useless attempts to climb out. Tiny round bodies, large ears and long snouts, it was unthinkable to kill them, especially in the bath. With difficulty we scooped them with the back brush into a carrier bag and transported them a long way away down the track, urging them
not to return. Where they came from and how they got into the bath remains a mystery. They certainly were not there when Susan left barely an hour before we arrived.

If you live in a house as ancient as ours with small gaps between old window-frames and under old doors you get accustomed to visitors from the rolling countryside which surrounds us. We take for granted the praying mantis on the draining board, the sight of the pale underbelly of a tree frog, its fingers splayed on the window-pane, the lizard basking on the sill, the toad in the dustpan. Mice are a nuisance, but usually leave when we turn up. Other creatures sometimes pose more of a problem.

One year we arrived to inspect our newly tiled porch. We had in fact waited a long time for it to be completed. The previous year we had chosen the terracotta tiles. They matched the interior, but were specially fired to withstand frost. Daniel, the tiler, the son-in-law of the ex-Mayor, was young and enthusiastic.

‘I will just continue the line from inside the door,’ he said. ‘It will be
impeccable
.’ The boxes of tiles stood ready. He dumped a load of sand in front of the porch, stuck his shovel in the top and whizzed off again to get the cement. When he did not re-appear that day or even the day after, we shrugged, disappointed but imagining that, like many busy workmen, he was doing two jobs at the same time. It was Raymond who
told us that on his way back to us Daniel had collided with an out of control Mercedes and his injuries were so severe that he would probably never work again. Worrying about our porch seemed inappropriate, the pile of sand and the shovel at its jaunty angle a painful reminder.

The following spring we contacted the tiler from Villereal, about ten kilometres away. M. Carnejac had, in fact, done the floor in our main living room many years before and, much later, our bathroom. He quite understood why this time we had engaged the tiler from our own commune.

‘
C’est normal
,’ he said when he came up to see us. Yes, he would have it ready by the summer.
Pas de problème
.

The old porch had once been cemented and cut with grooves, presumably to resemble large tiles, but it still looked just like cement and the dust and rubbish, which collected in the grooves, was maddeningly difficult to clean.

Now, our newly tiled porch was as splendid as we had hoped and only needed sloshing down with a bucket of water. But we had, it seemed, a mystery visitor. Each morning we would notice a small puddle on the outside edge of the porch. What could it be? Jean-Michel, Raymond’s son-in-law, up to look at the cows, gave us his opinion. ‘Oh,
ce n’est qu’une chatte sauvage
,’ he said. ‘She is marking her territory.’

We had often had wild cats in the barn, and many spitting little offspring. This marking of territory was new. I was not convinced. Mike, who is not a cat lover, constructed a fragile device with sticks and a battered old tin on top. ‘That will give her a fright,’ he muttered.

When the sticks were still in place the next morning but splattered with liquid we were both perplexed.

The following day I was reading in a chair facing the porch when I suddenly heard the sound of splashing. Down from the roof came a stream, falling in exactly the same spot. Now I knew the reason for the occasional scrabbling we had thought we might have imagined in the rafters. It was not mice, or even a rat. It was the dreaded
fouine
, the stone marten. They have been known to chew through all the electric wiring and roof insulation in the houses of friends and they are devilishly difficult to trap. And she had the cheek to have chosen to site her latrine right over our new porch!

As usual it was to Raymond that we turned for advice. He unearthed a cage, which he sometimes used to set to catch coypu, the scourge of nearby ponds and lakes. It was both large and heavy, not a problem when one slides it along a bank through the tunnels of grass which the coypu, known locally as
le ragondin
, makes; much more difficult, however, to hoist it up a ladder to the attic. Raymond wore gloves as he carefully
unwrapped an egg for bait from his handkerchief.

‘She has a formidable nose,’ he whispered, ‘but she can’t resist an egg.’

He set the egg in the centre of the trap, carefully avoiding moving the base, which pivots, sending both ends crashing down to trap the animal without wounding it.

‘What will you do with it if we catch it?’ I asked.

‘
Il faut la tuer
,’ he answered. I must kill it.

Two nights later, just as the sun slid down, I saw
la fouine
silhouetted against the darkening sky, racing along the whole length of the ridge of the roof. She didn’t take the egg but she took the hint and moved house. So far she has not returned.

After the removal of the mice and the inspection of our unusually impeccable house, we backed the car up to the porch and began, slowly, to unload, first the contents of the cold box into the fridge. As our journey had been unusually rapid, we had brought a large piece of smoked gammon, which Raymond and Claudette had first tasted and pronounced delicious when they had once come to stay with us in London. We normally take three or even four days driving down through France, exploring as we go, and any gifts we bring them must inevitably be well-preserved. This would be a treat. It is so difficult to begin to repay the delicious surprises that Claudette has over the years prepared for us; the
écrevisses
flambéed in Armagnac,
her own guinea fowl cooked with tiny
champignons
, the rich
civet de lièvre
, and all her improvised miracles, savoury rice pudding with courgettes, chicory wrapped in
crêpes
in béchamel, not forgetting the famous
tourtière
, the gigantic
baba au rhum
…She is a splendid cook.

At last the car was cleared, we moved it out of sight round the corner and, our final task, we made the bed. Sitting outside again, we spent a long time just gazing at the view. There was nothing to do now until eight o’clock when, as always on our first evening, we would go down to the farm to eat and catch up on the news. We drifted about in the garden, wading through the long grass, bright with wild flowers. What was that we’d planted over there? We couldn’t even remember. We had had so many other things to worry about. It seemed an age since we had last come. How long would it take us to get all this wilderness into some shape? Had we even the energy? What did it matter? We were here.