62.

Late October


The tight stand of poplars have shed every leaf and two in the centre - most of their bark, . It is now clear that those two are long dead and their trunks shine deliciously. Glistening. straight poles. A nuthatch’s strident, falling call belongs there.

The small copse of larch and beech is still copper and bronze and its floor is a pungent, medicinal smelling carpet of beige needles. Bushels of longtailed tits are echoing each other there as they clean the twigs of tiny beasties. This scented wood belongs to Robert, my least favourite and the least favoured of my neighbours. I did remark to him that the autumn colours were magnificent this year, weren`t they? and he did grunt and nod, which I take as some sort of acknowledgement.

I tried the trick of fast tapping a stick on the hardest part, a knot, of one of the trunks, wanting to see if any territorial woodpeckers noticed. Nothing.

French folk are out mushroom hunting. Cars full of eager hunters trundle about the lanes or park at odd angles in the verges. Bent with baskets they are dotted over the hillsides. They know what they are looking for but I need to learn this skill some day. Who shall I ask?

61.

Mid October.

Soft seeds float high in the warm wind. Pied wagtails chitter in groups on the roof and then take off in a loud crowd.

I cannot believe what I have seen over these last few days. At 2000 meters, in the most beautiful valley and national reserve: 5 griffon vultures, circling and circling and glinting in the harsh sunlight; a brown bear, a family of marmots and a tough walk.

Then lower here on another day a racket of magpies and crows mobbing a juvenile golden eagle, its white patches on the wings and tail quite distinct. It flapped low and then soared low and then disappeared over a wood. I had to write to every one about that.

Emile is a little more soothed. He has brought the herds down from the high pastures, the transhumance in reverse. With great clanging and lowing the grey-dun cattle trip and clatter into the two yards, head after head milling and waiting to be counted and marked.

Sylvie remarks on the potential veal and I say the calves are too handsome to die. Bertrand waves a strand of the last tomatoes at me. Do I want them? I gladly make a sauce out of them with onions, garlic, chervil and olive oil and freeze what I can’t eat today.

It rains at last.

60.

Early October

The little owl stares at me with its pale yellow eyes and nods its spotty head. I like to think it is me that it looks at. It bobs its tubby, squat body and makes short yip, yip sounds. It is in an old walnut tree and I have a clear view through binoculars. These daytime, impatient episodes happen frequently. The owl brings to mind a scolding, aproned fishwife, overcome by this heat. And it is hot; the s.easterly winds are unusually balmy for this time of year. No rain has fallen for two months and leaves are dropping listlessly, not yet in their coloured glory. The well has half a meter of precious water left in it and doesn’t want to refill. Coarse weeds elbow up through the grass which is no longer grass but a drought scorched, bleached mat. I’m not complaining; what survives, survives. The flower meadow patches have done well with the Rudbeckia the champion. I shall have to wait until next spring to see what has really persisted in the sward.

I'm sure I heard the last bee eaters high-going south.
The brambles are a picture of orange, yellow and red, yes brambles along the roadside wires are beautiful in Autumn.
Citril finches, a cloud, apple green and pale gold flashing and chaffinch tails, rising and falling into the field. Plenty of seeds for them in this drought summer. Still a few clouded yellow butterflies on the wild Doronicum . It`s a plant I try to eradicate from the meadow but perhaps I should leave it for its pretty dandelion flowers, a late food plant.

Various birds have taken up their winter quarters already. The redstart is in the eaves morning and evening, the starlings congregate like a parliament on different levels of the roofs and wires that join up the village, the prime performer in good voice as always, and the crowd of sparrows gathers in the ivy with arguments and scuffles, giving away their hideout the minute they get together!

Emile is grumpy; he complains that I haven`t used enough ‘roundup’ on the invading oxalis. True, it is a thug; it marches its bulbils through the shrubs and grass but it has very pretty little pink flowers and clover like leaves which don’t start appearing until summer. He says it throws out its seeds and he does not want it in his potager. But he has been in a poor mood for days and I’m thinking it doesn’t have much to do with the oxalis or me after all.

59.

No explanations for long silence offered.

September


The most beautiful Autumn days. Jays in the forest, chiffcaffs still calling, a booted eagle made one last visit and the kites wheel and dive when the ploughs turn the fields to red. Drought conditions here and the well is practically empty; about 30cm. of brackish water lies over the silt bottom. No use in pumping water, the trees just have to cope. I do worry about the cherry though. Its leaves droop and dessicate prematurely. Around the pear trees hornets and butterflies, red admirals, commas, speckled woods and occasionally a grayling feast on the fermenting, rotting, dropped pears. I'm glad to leave them. I've made enough pear conserves to last until Christmas.

The nights are not yet cold enough for a fire but the heat of the day is tolerable now; balmy in fact. It`s almost a full moon and I find that some bats have moved to the roof terrace for their summer roost. They plop and scrabble out of the metal edging to the roof, that is at a right angle to the pointed stone walls. Plenty of cool, daytime cavities for them there. Droppings scatter over the tiles but I'm glad to sweep them up and feel a proprietorial pride in them!

Emile is looking forward to his retirement, he says mournfully. Doesn’t rate the pension, though. Can`t sell his cows which is another catastrophe burdening him. So many years of work, he says, and look what he has got. Marie has clucked a bit on this subject and says they will have to go on working for a couple more years, at least. I can’t help biting my tongue and thinking few European farmers, the ones who are not tenants, that is, are really poor. Don’t they own land and machinery and livestock? Sooner or later these surely can produce cash.

A big flock of sand martins are skimming the lake, coming in over and over again, their brown backs flicking over to white undersides as they twist and twirl and chatter through an invisible net of insects.

58.

May 10th.

This is the first evening it is warm enough to sit out,. A warm wind from the south west stirs up the grass. The cut fields shine in stripes until Monsieur Raymonde turns the haylage with his tines, way into the evening gloaming. The shrieking swifts are here once more. A just off full moon rises in the grey-blue sky, behind the white flowered horse chestnut, while the sun leaves its last pink tint on the west facing edges of the crags. A flock of bee eaters darts and dances, way up, chirruping all the while. A pity that such lovely birds raid already beleaguered bees.

Emile has told me about Marcel Benoit, this afternoon. Apparently he joined up with the resistance, the Maquis in 1940/1 at the age of nearly 18. He lay out in the woods near the top plateau, took refuge there with a small group, received air drops from the allies into a tiny airfield until it was discovered and the Maquis routed. At this point in the story Emile tilted his head and sharply raised it and I was meant to read into this that someone’s family was tainted with the scent of betrayal.. I couldn’t interrupt though, as this was the longest talk I had had with Emile, to date. Three young men escaped into Spain, two were shot and the other two sank into the shadows of the mountains and their own families, returning to the harvests, the cultivation of their land and the movement of their beasts. People around stayed stumm and grew up beyond the war. One of these was Benoit. Probably silent for many years but now boldly speaking of his history, as he enters his 87th year. Is his conscience clear, I wonder?

I wanted to ask about the two brothers shot outside my house; whether there was a connection, but I thought better of it.

57.

May 8th again.

A grey day. There has been a storm during the night; the wind rattled the shutters and old window panes and plane and poplar twigs strew the square. The Mayor again brings out his piece of paper and, as his hands shake, he rests the sheet on his growing belly and reads out his speech. It is moving nevertheless. No one sings the Marseillaise this time but it is piped through two speakers and we stand to attention. I feel a bit of a fraud. Mme J. is more confused than ever, sings, then falters and listens. She grumbles to anyone who attends to her, after the 2 minutes silence, that the young have no connection with the past. Quite whom she means by the young is unclear. There were certainly folk in their 20s and 30s still perusing the stalls, pointing and chatting during the ceremony. Someone agrees and says that litter is a big problem now. Somehow they have made that connection. They are going on a trip to Austria soon, where it is cleaner than clean, they say. Taxes are high and there are heavy fines for littering, but that is worthwhile, they add. I say, you should see England; this is unsoiled here, in comparison. A few tutt and move on. They are rarely interested in England and my comment only confirms their apathy.

Back in the hamlet for the afternoon it is muggy and warm. I ask Emile, when his rotovator is quiet, whether he used to attend the ceremony. ‘ Pfftt’ he answers. I wait, sure of elaboration. ‘What’s the point? Same thing each time; Mayor just a bit more pissed.’

‘That`s surely the point, though, Emile, the same reminder each year for the victory in Europe’.
‘I`ll tell you what does change and depressed me each time I went: the number of faces which disappeared. Too much like an empty mirror. I was only a thought during the war but I don’t want to be the only one left here who remembers my father describing a squad of German soldiers marching across the square.’

This must be the longest statement I have heard from Emile and I am impressed with the imagery.

I tell him that I had talked with Mr. Benoit, who told me that he had joined the resistance when he was 17 years old and hid in the forests above, taking drops from the allies.

‘I`ll tell you about him another time, Emile hints, ‘ but I have to go look at the cattle now’.

I feel pleased with this conversation and sit on the roof, listening to the afternoon sounds: mowers, tractors, birds, dogs, children. Only 12 houses and all this life.

May 3rd.

I am watching two lovers. The raven couple, always around, twining and intertwining, air acrobats. Their croak is softened, almost musical, but their dance is interrupted, first by a magpie who makes straight for them, quite high for a magpie; and then the very insistent, male kestrel chases them far off, and the magpie is left behind.

I've realised, with a bit of research, which I should have done before, that the kestrels are, in fact, lesser kestrels. The male has no flecks or spots on his ginger brown back, and when his wings are open and I can look down on him from the roof, his wings have a blue-charcoal grey line at the elbow, or wrist? And his tail is the same tone. This would explain why they are so vocal, although not living in a social group.

Marie is at the washing line again; I notice she never hangs out underclothes there. So I’ll never get to see Emile’s underpants, due to this obvious custom. I write this with some relief. Sheets, covers, curtains, jeans and coats flap about in the wind, adding a clapping to the bird performances.

55.

May 1st.

On May 1st. I hear Bee eaters lirrupping high overhead. A gorgeous sound; the harbingers of the real summer weather. The nightingales are quieter this year. What does that mean?

As I am coming down the lane from the hills a male cuckoo keeps flying off the telegraph wire ahead of me and moving further down. His tail fans as he leaves the wire. Finally he dives into the valley, twirls a bit and disappears into a copse from where his bell like call rises up to me . It has been a morning of sights, as on my walk, about an hour ago, a stone marten crossed my path with a limp rabbit in its mouth. It hauled it up an ash tree, only meters away from me and languidly lying across a fork, rabbit still held, it watched me pass. I couldn’t resist stopping, of course, and it still watched. I moved off and then looked back . It was gone. It is these moments that I wish I carried a camera or camera phone as well as my heavy binoculars. But I don’t and probably won’t.

This afternoon, in the windy sunshine, I'm mowing the grass and for sure I can hear Emile singing above the motor noise. He is tinkering with the small, yellow tractor and he is singing loudly and pretty tunelessly in Occitaine, but it’s the first I've heard.

54

April 28th.

I must swallow my words today, for Sylvie and I are taking the b & w dog to the vet. We are stroking her while he seeps an excessive amount of a type of morphine into her forepaw. She had, he diagnosed, a liver tumour and extreme anaemia. She had lived 19 years without illness, irritating us all with her yapping but endearing us to her benign and gentle nature. It is Sylvie’s decision. Her death costs her and Bernard, who refused to take her up in his old Renault, 93 euros. They are a little taken aback, shocked even, but I’d be happy to pay that for a peaceful death!

On the drive back down the curling hills we see the vultures again, a pair, very high and circling, there undersides sparkling in the sharp, early evening sunlight. Sylvie becomes animated, convinced again that they are after her hens. I try to tell her that they are particularly interested in carrion but she says that they are eagles and eat anything living or dead that they can carry away. We leave it at that; after all she had just watched her old dog fall asleep for the very last time. Now I feel a bit of loss and a bit of guilt and go and sit by my fire, staring into the flames.

53 APRIL27TH.

The little black and white dog, who for years has lived in the barn and yard of Sylvie and Bernard is slowly dying and yaps no more She has a distended stomach, moves stiffly, lies for hours and can pass nothing solid . I suggest a blockage, a cancer perhaps, but Sylvie and B. don’t think in terms of vets, so have syringed some olive oil into her, front and rear. They live in hope but I go and speak a few words to the gentle girl who lifts her head heavily and stares at me with doleful eyes until my heart falters and I turn away. There is a rank smell emanating from her stall. She has annoyed me for years with her noise but she should be eased out of this mortal coil quickly and painlessly.

3 or 4 Griffon Vultures swirl and loop in the high thermals, their pale heads catching the light and their long and spread fingered wing tips, dark and shadowed. Earlier in the day I had seen the 2 Egyptian vultures, very distant, but with the binoculars their back wing edge markings clearly visible.

52. April 25th.

Horses and quads roaring up the hill path, shouts of excitement; no more hunting so the dogs are restless and noisy, setting up unison howling .

There is an eccentric English woman here who has gone through a few husbands and has lost most of her money. She keeps horses and a quad bike for transport and rides one while trailing the other two behind her, one on a lead rein, the other pony galloping free, way behind. She has adopted some dogs too and to exercise them she tears down the tracks on the bike with the dogs thundering behind her. I haven’t spoken to her yet, but I hear lots.

This has been the wettest winter the locals say they can recall, although the ski businesses are happy with plenty of snow still, @ 2000m., even avalanches.

The annual flower seeds that I've been sowing in the meadow gaps are all germinating; but no sooner do the Cosmos break than the slugs raze `em to the ground. I must use those slug pellets based on ferrous sulphate that the hedgehogs will not mind. . They work by interfering with the digestive system of the molluscs. They die. Snails of course, climb , so will attack plants from the top and sides. Clematis up against a fence or wall, for instance, will suffer from above while the snails can hide during the day in the crannies of the wood, stems or stones. Still, enough Sweet William and Ox Eye Daisies are spreading to cover the bare patches and give a wonderful sward this year. The flowering will be early but I'm optimistic that the Rudbeckia and Echinacea and Corn Marigold will follow on with some Cornflowers and Cosmos surviving for later summer. I can’t wait; amazing how this process can fill me with pleasure and erase the blues

l51

Nightingales at last, quietly, unassertively in the slow April drizzle. Sparrows wait for their breakfast on the barn window shelf; toasted breadcrumbs and grains of soft cheese. So cheeky they practically cross my doorstep threshold.

Emile is continually puzzled by my kneeling work in the meadow. My knees are wet and muddy.
‘Still weeding?’ he asks. I explain that I am lifting out some wild weeds and sowing others. This baffles him further. A bevy of buzzards circle and wail overhead so I point to them and tell him they are observing my work too. A shrug of his shoulders, a stretch of his neck and a pushing up of his lower lip but not a ‘Wisshtt’. This means he is curious and not dismissive, I think.

When I go in for my bread and cheese lunch the post woman arrives. Here, all the post people are so proud of their yellow vehicles that they rarely get out of them. She drives down my dead end alley just to put a few bits in the end post box; then she reverses back up. I ask her if she has a copy of the urbanisation plans and enquiry minutes. Looking surprised, she finds a box of them and gives me one leaflet.
‘I didn’t think the English would be that interested’, she comments.
‘ If the chalets and mobile homes creep any nearer, I’ll be really interested!’ I laugh.

Money comes to the villages and hamlets mostly through the summer tourism but a new mixed housing estate is planned in the main village and there is a lot of talk, talk. We’ll see.

ON BATHING MY MOTHER



She steps over the edge of the bath, heaving the left leg slowly, bending it at the knee, gripping the rail when the right leg follows, to sit then on a high stool while I squeeze warm water over her. Her back stirs me a memory. It is the same back, her back, in a navy blue swim suit with low, scooped straps, the slight lean forward, the bow and curve, the moles and freckles. But now there are many more with vivid sun mottling and there are folds, drooping between the arm and the breast. The shape, the hue, it is the same back as I, a child, remember on a thirty ish woman; calling out with pleasure as the cold, Welsh sea came up to meet her.

BEATING THE DOGS

The black dogs had been threatening again, like an inevitable February mantle. When they come it is as though I see and hear the world with heavy wax in my ears. Sensation or experience become distant, earplugged. And this affliction I have passed to my dearest son who suffers like a male; unwilling to share his anxiety and misery with his friends. He pretends and then opens like a wound amongst this close family.

Now that the worst is over, for the time being anyway, I have travelled south by train from London. Via Lille, Lyon, Valence, Narbonne I watched the spring speed up from the train window. Memorable were the swags of violet Wisteria climbing up a tall Cypress. As were the deep magenta flowered Judas trees, the Cercis. Here in the foothills of the Pyrenees, mine are yet in bud, waiting ….But a small tree, a Sophora that I planted nearly 9 years ago is in full yellow flower. Exotic, hanging clusters of golden, whiskered, bell like and lipped blooms have braved the late, sustained winter and are covering the stunted, wizened branches of this Chinese miracle. The plums and pears and cherries blossom anyways, mindless of the unappealing weather.

APRIL AGAIN.


The ghost harrier loses its own silver in the rolling, rippling, silver underside of the meadow, on the slopes ahead. He is there daily, sometimes dropping and vanishing in the long grass, other times rocking on the wind just above, sweeping and checking, head down, elegant dark wing tips on such a wide span.

Larks rise and trill in the warm sunshine but are silent when the clouds gather and a typical April day turns grim and shifty. Plenty of swallows swoop in and over the slopes and roofs, chattering all the while. Nesting time not yet started so I can leave the windows open. A cuckoo or two sound out the territory but the grey, cold days silence them. When the sun comes out, it is suddenly warm, hot even, and the song of spring begins again.

Carrots, onions, lettuce are all sown or set and I am painstakingly removing, one by one, the rank weeds from the flower meadow with a nifty tool that will twist out each deep root while not damaging the crowding other valuables. Echinacea, Rudbeckia, Aster, Corn Marigold, Cosmos, Corncockle, Liatris, Flax, Cornflower, Sweet William, Oxeye Daisy and Toadflax - all mingle with grasses, Yellow Rattle and Nigella - to make, or to begin to make a thick sward. The list is here, named, so that you might try the wild look garden yourself! I've mowed it once over, last week when it was dry, and now I won’t cut again until September. I have to know exactly the look of the leaves of the desirables, so those broad leaved, pernicious ones can be taken out now. And I do know them all, like I know the backs of my hands. Meanwhile my lower back gives me pain and my legs ache as I crouch; such is the ageing process, especially cruel to those who have always been so active.

I am re reading Primo Levi’s IF THIS IS A MAN. If one wants to talk about physical strain and pain, look there. The indifference of one sort of man to another is clearly there: ‘every stranger is an enemy’. ‘For the most part this conviction lies deep down like some latent infection; it betrays itself only in random, disconnected acts, and does not lie at the base of a system of reason. But when this does come about, when the unspoken dogma becomes the major premise in a syllogism, then, at the end of the chain, there is the Lager’. The concentration camp. Or a different genocide.

I have spent the last 3 months back in Britain, giving my time to my mother and son, who for very different reasons have been more than low.

48


FEBRUARY 8TH.



Visitors, avian ones, delight me this cold day. A male bull finch shyly lights on a branch above the food table. He thinly whistles and warbles while eyeing the ground up meal. He prefers to strip the buds from the fruit trees but I grant him that sometimes because of his brilliant, plum pink breast. A female blackcap has stayed around this winter, surviving the cutting climate and spending a great deal of time chasing the tits, the timid chaffinches and the feinting pied wagtails away from the food supply she claims as hers. Much amusement.

The weak sun gives way to a grey, purple cloud tinged with an eerie yellow which presages snow. Sure enough it comes, first in big, flat flakes, then thinning to snow sleet for a time. Unlike the Inuit or a snow expert like Scotsman, Adam Watson I cannot define the differences in snow more clearly. Soft, big, flat, light, sharp, wet, that‘s as far as I can go.

I love the way the near full moon light falls into my bedroom and onto the wooden floor, silver on gold. I can lie in bed and watch it slither across the boards. Snow again, this time thin, spiky flakes which glitter and freeze quickly on the moonlit roof tiles. A tawny owl calls for a mate: Tee whit! And the answer comes urgently: Too whoo!


I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.


Thanks Robert Frost and The Road Not Taken.

46 January 30th.


That date again; the gathering smaller. The mayor reads from a journal recovered after the war. He speaks hesitantly about the lost and stolen lives, the families stripped and bereft. Holocaust Memorial day, the 27th. January. A bomb explodes somewhere on the Israeli border.

It is raining. The snow melted away several days ago and is a memory of luminant softness and wood smoke.

Seven of us eat next to a great brown hearth. Two tables run together with plastic, yellow table cloths.. The meal has seven courses, each one small. I eat the meat, saying nothing. I cannot bring myself to. The conversations and family anecdotes dart to and fro like machine gun fire. They are not shouted but shot loudly.

Sylvie has cooked and I have placed the table. Her brother chews his bread slowly, tearing nuggets. Her cousins have come visiting from the central Pyrenees and speak of retirement, cattle and food. They will stay for three days and nights before going on to visit other family remnants near the Med. They are friendly, mostly incurious, very short and dark skinned. Stephan has huge hands with arthritic knobbles on each of the middle fingers. He does ask me a question about the food I grow in my garden and he tells me that the old pear tree was planted there when he was a child and lived with his aunt here. Good for cooking, he says, with lots of sweet wine and cloves, baked slowly and then eaten cold. He then finds it difficult to understand my plans for wild flowers. Prairies are everywhere in the Pyrenees, he scoffs and you cannot get the orchids to grow anywhere but where they choose. Quite right, I can't help but agree with him, but I`m not just using native seed. I`m mixing in American prairie seed. He sits up hard and stares at me. How is that? I explain in the best way I can and earn a quick couple of nods. Is that just a little less than approval?

45.

January 15th.

The wood, the wild place, der wald. It can only truly be viewed from a clearing, a glade where the light streams. This day the snow lies in heavy silence and even the depths of the forest are backlit by reflected sunlight. A red squirrel scoots along a diagonal, from one tree to another and vibrates a fringe of snow which drops then in a long, tremulous shower. The ditch is frozen in splinters, the moss banks, sheltered from the snowfall show intricate patterns and webs of multiple hues of green. The wood holds its breath while I stand as a living mark amongst wraiths of past lives imprinted in the undergrowth and in the tree barks, in this forest that has been worked, cut and replanted over the last 3 centuries.

England seems a far memory already. It was odd to return to the house here, see it for what it is, constructed out of an earlier workshop or barn. Its 18C origins jolted me into a scurrying fervour of small renovations until the snow fell in soft, flat flakes for 2 days and to resist the call of the outside would have been a wasted chance. The house could wait: as it often has.

I watch two starlings take the hoar frost from the undersides of twigs, as drink, as I return along the lane. Sylvie is cracking the ice at the base of her downpipe drain, outside her house. Bonne annees have been exchanged days ago and the new year creeps on fast. Soon the village will remember the dead from the concentration camps once again, while in Gaza the rubble of an ill balanced conflict memorialises the future.