i The Bulwark Shore
For nearly forty years I have split my life between two homes. One home in south-east England the other in eastern France. For half my life time I have driven back and forth between these two homes eight or ten times each year an average of more than fifteen hundred miles each trip. Fifteen thousand miles a year. Close to six hundred thousand miles in total. The equivalent of driving to the moon and back.
My two homes cost very little. The English one because it was listed and in need of work the cost of which could never be recovered however much the property market heated-up. The French house was a give-away. It was half ruin and the other half was old and cold. The French, I soon found out, do not want to live in such houses.
In England I live in an area of outstanding natural beauty which, to the south, falls abruptly into the sea. This is the Bulwark Shore, the fortified line of the Cinque Ports with their sand-clogged harbours and stumpy castles and Martello Towers looking sullenly out across the Channel to France and equally disdainfully across the Thames Estuary to Essex.
In the 13th Century the burghers of the Cinque Ports were allowed to raise their own taxes and execute their own miscreants. In return they protected the English shore from foreign invaders. This arrangement continued for hundreds of years until England built it’s own navy. By then, of course, it was too late for the people of the coast who now harbour an unjustified belief in their own superiority and among whom introspection or self-doubt are as rare as French naval victories.
In France I live in another area of outstanding natural beauty, on the edge of a small village, in the middle of a great forest, on the top of a high ridge. This ridge is the European watershed. It runs from the Mediterranean Sea, close to Gibraltar, to the ice-bound coast of the Russian Arctic. The water which flows under the bridge in the middle of my village ~ population 37 ~ ends up in the English Channel or the North Sea. The rain which falls on my friends, who live in a village a couple of miles away, ends up in the Mediterranean Sea.
The forest ~ which the copywriters of the tourism marketing department claim is home to one hundred million trees ~ was already old when the mob stormed the Bastille. When I first got there it was a largely untouched Eden stuffed with wildlife and a spectacular array of plants and wild flowers. In the late 1980s when I arrived very few French people even knew that the old forest existed.
ii Pas de plages, pas de pistes
Shortly after my arrival George, the ancient and crumbling farmer who occupied a few rooms in the ancient and crumbling Chateau in the centre of the village came to introduce himself and check me out. He accepted a glass of my Duty Free whisky and asked me why on earth I had bought the house.
“For holidays” I said. He laughed in open derision.
“Vacances? Mais pas de plages, pas de pistes”.
Thirty-five years later this vast reservoir of rare plants, animals, birds and insects, though totally lacking in beaches and ski-runs as George had pointed out, was designated a National Park.
The Parc national de forêts is the largest on the French mainland. It had taken ten yeas of grumpy dissent and angry words to negotiate the inscription as a national park. In the end about a third of the population and the biggest towns and many of the larger villages refused to join. They remain today strung out along the edge of the Parc, interested but apart, benefiting from but contributing little or nothing to, the great de-populated paradise on their doorstep.
Like my neighbours in England, my French neighbours, within and without the park, are fixated on their independence and their long-cherished otherness and, like the burghers and townsfolk of the Cinque Ports, they too don’t do self-doubt. Introspection in the Châtillonnais is, it seems, as rare as haute cuisine in England .
I have come to love both these places. The people, like people everywhere, are mostly awful. The few exceptions to the awful majority are charming. Easy to love and possible to like. While I love the two places I call home, I love the road between them more. The journey is everything. Forty years and more than half a million miles have taught me that it is better to travel without hope than to arrive. Only lately has it occurred to me that having two homes is the same as having no home at all.
iii On The Road Again
From the start I avoided the national highways and the autoroutes as I drove back and forth. By accident I discovered the appeal of French “D” roads and in particular the deserted, two-lane, back roads of the Cote D’Or, Champagne and the Haute Marne. Like all addicts I was hooked before I knew it.
My original route, which I still follow from time to time, I named after the D2, the road that takes me along the valley of the Marne for fifty-two kilometres between Châlons-en-Champagne and Les Rivières-Henruel. This road passes through a village called Margerie Hancourt. The name seems to me more suited to the heroine of an Agatha Christie murder mystery than a French village built originally as a defensive pinch-point on an arrow-straight Roman road.
Thirty years ago, on my way back to England, slowing to negotiate the chicane at the centre of Margerie Hancourt, I noticed five mud-splattered cars parked in front of a roadside farmhouse. It was just before noon, Four men in working clothes were climbing out of one of the cars as I passed. I knew at once where they were going.
I turned my car around and a few minutes later I was standing outside the door of the farmhouse. The door, painted with a pale blue-grey wash, bleached and crazed by sun and wind, was as unremarkable as the building. There was no name, nor any other sign, anywhere on door or building. I went in without knocking and found, as I expected, a rectangular room laid out as a simple restaurant. It was packed with men, mostly farm workers, seated at small tables, waiting for their lunch and steaming slightly as their damp work-clothes began to dry.
The Farmer’s Wife
The farmer’s wife, who cooked and served the food, pointed me without a word or a smile, to the one remaining empty seat. She knew that I wasn’t French because thirty years ago lunch in France began at noon and only a foreigner would be stupid enough to be late for lunch.
I was served a small gallette of goat’s cheese followed by a côtelette de porc in a thin fragrant gravy with two small potatoes and a single carrot. The vegetables had been simmered in the meat juices. It was a revelation. After that first meal, whenever I drove back to England, I would time my departure so that I arrived at the Margerie Hancourt dining-room at 11.55 on the dot.
There was rarely a seat to spare but somehow they always squeezed me in. The men would shuffle their chairs to make a space, an extra chair would be found, brief greetings would be muttered and the men would resume talking quietly among themselves, leaving me to eat in peace.
On each occasion I spoke a few words in my poor French to the farmer’s wife. She never once, in the four or five years I ate there, offered a single word in return. Nor did she smile. There was, of course, no need. She knew that the food was good. I was English so obviously knew nothing about food and so my words of praise were of little value. There was no choice, no menu to choose from so there was no need to discuss what to order. The single, three course meal was always at a fixed price so there was no discussion on that score.
Towards the end of my meal the farmer’s wife would pass by my table and after she had gone, a corner of a page torn from a newspaper with the amount-owing written on it in pencil, had appeared as though by magic next to my plate.
I hardly ever heard her speak to any of the other customers. The locals, all men, had no reason to ask or be told what was for lunch or how much it was costing. I never heard any of the men address her by name and so she remained, for me, “the farmer’s wife”. I know farmers, I know them well, many of my relatives were farmers or farm workers in Cumberland and the Lake District. This farmer’s wife, however, was taciturn even by the standards of those who farm sheep on the high fells.
I have been a writer all my adult life. I am, it seems, unable to turn the writing mechanism off. When unable to write, driving alone on a long journey for example, my mind automatically fills the passing hours and miles with fictions, narratives and speculations. I cannot remember, however, speculating on why the farmer’s wife was so withdrawn. Nor can I offer any explanation now.
The Habit of a Lifetime
On one occasion, after maybe twenty visits alone to the Margerie Hancourt dining-room, I took my mother and father with me. They are the two strangers whose story provides the narrative at the heart of this memoir. The house I had bought in the Châtillonnais had given us a chance to spend time together. Miraculously, it seemed to me, we had overcome exhaustion and boredom to rebuild the bridges we had burnt decades before. A late-flowering friendship had replaced the anger and hurt of those early years.
My mother and father were both in their late seventies and so our progress from the car to the dining-room was slow. We were three or four minutes late. We paused inside the door. The room was full, every seat was taken. The farmer’s wife glanced at us and without any sign of recognition or acknowledgment, cleared the plates, the cutlery and the newspaper off the table that was her serving-station. One of the men stood up without being asked and fetched three chairs from a back room. Neither the man nor the woman spoke or indicated in any way that this was to be our table. We sat down and after a moment my mother looked around and said,
“Do you know? I’m think I’m the only woman here.”
We were served a rough Pâté de Campagne, heavy with pigs liver and garlic, with a single Cornichon and a single lettuce leaf moistened with a vinaigrette. Then a Ragoût de lapin. The stew was made, I am sure, not from the wild rabbits that ran off across the fields as my car rushed by, but from rabbits bred and fattened on the farm.
This stew had been “finished” with mustard and cream and kept ready in the oven so that where the pieces of rabbit rose like islands above the surface of the sauce, a crisp and golden skin of toasted mustard and cream coated the pieces of meat. This masterpiece was served with pommes frites and haricot vert. It was followed by a single, wonderful, aged, goat’s cheese. Something like a Crottin de Chavignol. We had a carafe of very ordinary vin ordinaire. My father and I had a coffee which wasn’t very good.
I have eaten many wonderful meals in my lifetime. I have travelled the world eating in famous restaurants. I have dined in the homes of the wealthy and, often with a great deal more pleasure, in the homes of the poor and the dispossessed. For a couple of years I had a romance with a famous food writer who fattened me up by testing recipes on me and then told me I was no longer welcome in her bed because I had become too fat. My son, though young, is a chef in a Michelin starred restaurant. I know a little about food. It is true that I have often had a meal as good as our lunch that day, but I have never had a better one.
We ate in silence. My mother said a few words, asking me questions about the place and so on. As they finished their food my parents, to my astonishment and breaking the habit of a lifetime, mopped up the creamy sauce with a piece of bread. Their childhood lessons in table-manners ~ in my father’s case enforced with blows from a stick ~ had taught them to eat everything you are given but never mop the plate with bread. Too much diligence in cleaning your plate might reveal the poverty you had suffered as a child and, furthermore, make your host feel they had not given you enough to eat.
I asked them what they thought of the food.
“Very nice” my mother said. She paused and then her eyes met mine across her clean and empty plate and she added “Very nice son, thank you for bringing us here.” My father, who could have given the farmer’s wife a master-class in enduring silences, rolled his eyes upwards in a pantomime of ecstasy which I am sure he stole from Harpo Marx
I told my parents how the auberge only served the local workers and only at lunch time. I explained how you could not book but, though it was always full, they always managed to find a seat for me. I told them how much our lunch would cost and my mother exclaimed at how inexpensive it was. I explained how the farmer’s wife kept her costs down by preparing, each day, just enough food for her 25 regular customers plus a serving for her and for her husband.
The farmer, I told them, took his lunch alone in the back kitchen. I described how he occasionally came through - carrying a chair - to sit at one of the tables and talk to his friends and neighbours. I told them how he never sat at my table. My mother looked pained in sympathy. I suggested that he probably spoke no English and that his wife had no doubt told him that my French was incomprehensible. I explained how I was welcome for the tiny additional income I brought but that I was unimportant and invisible all the same. Then I told them how I liked being invisible and observing while being unobserved and the conversation turned briefly to my childhood in India.
As we waited for the torn piece of newspaper to miraculously appear on the corner of our table, I watched my mother and father digest both the food and the information I had presented. When young they had both been strikingly good looking. Now they wore the faces life had brought them. Resting faces, waiting for the next challenge. They had seen it all and done as much. Kind faces, slow to anger, terrible in their wrath. Proud of where they came from, always moving on.
“But what about us?” My mother said, after a few minutes. “Where did she find the food to feed three extra mouths?”
I explained that what we had eaten was, almost certainly, the food intended for the farmer and the farmer’s wife.
When we stood up to go, the farmer’s wife appeared. Normally she was in the back doing things when I was leaving. She faced my mother who placed a hand upon her arm. There was a pause while this uninvited familiarity was evaluated. Then my mother, who spoke not one word of French, thanked and complimented the farmer’s wife in English. In return, the farmer’s wife smiled a small but wonderful smile. Sunrise on a spring day after a bitter winter. A winter in which a long and grievous war has been fought and won, but at a terrible cost. Then the farmer’s wife leaned in and kissed my mother on both cheeks and we went outside and got into the car without speaking.
For twenty years I tried to recreate that dish of rabbit, cream and mustard. I got close but there was always something missing. I tried adjusting the quantities of the different ingredients. I tried different ingredients, different combinations of herbs, unpasteurised cream, mustard brought from Dijon, hare instead of rabbit. I am embarrassed to admit to you, my reader, how long it took for me to work out the two essential ingredients that were missing. They are both long gone now, unaccountably breaking the habit of a lifetime which was to be quietly alive and always there when needed.