95.


April 23rd.


There is a Mexican wave of wind through the long grass: silver - green, green- silver. The black cap insistently declaims and has stolen some thrush riffs. And always, in the background, is the faint cuckoo call; I miss it then hear it, now here, now further. The hawthorn blossom is blowsey in the hedge and field edge. Its musty, heady scent is carried on the light wind.

To be lost in nature and landscape, delving and dowsing for that sense of place,, it's like looking for that lost childhood world, that care-less, rough time. From the narrowness of the human world it would be well for us to look up and out and take note that no bail outs are due from nature.

94.

April 21st.

Along the lanes the pale planes, pollarded exquisitely so that they are dancers, are twisting and reaching elegantly upwards. The pinkish haze that was the oaks' first leaf has turned to pale green, covering the lower mountain slopes. Fresh with the deep blue of the spruce.

I`m on a shopping spree with Syvie who has had difficulty getting into the van. My legs won't climb any more she huffs. She searches the rails for the most frilled, the most emerald or purple or bouffant of blouses and then states that they are too expensive. 'Sarkozy dit qu'il faut travailler plus pour gagner plus,' she and the shop owner chant; they know each other. Cackling and chuckling, a shirt with large sprigs of some pink and purple flower is chosen, tried and proudly purchased. 'Sarkozy says to have more money you gotta work harder', they repeat the refrain and leave me out of the joke.
....

93.


April 17th.



Ahhh! Mr.Bourelle, explodes Emile. A fine man and yet not a very nice man. How do you mean? I ask. I have told Emile of my visit a couple of weeks back. You met his daughter? Beaten back in life, a mouse; his wife had a hard time of it too. He was an irrascible sort of fellow, a hard husband and father. Maybe hardly surprising given his experiences. I didn't know him before the war of course; wasn't there! Emile laughs at his own joke. We are talking over the hedge, comme d'habitude.

The watery bubbles of quail quiver past in the long grass behind him. He doesn't notice or doesn't hear. Hunting season over, hunting senses off. The quail quails. A new southern speckled wood with a bent and folded, copper splashed wing rests on the spindle tips between us. Emile glances at it and I remark that the butterfly is a duller colour in Britain. Well, naturally, Emile smiles, dull weather dull colours. It is pretty hot in Britain at the moment Emile. Almost hotter than here.
There is a wshhht pffftt! and he goes back to his rotavator. I am dismissed.

92.

April 14th.[of April ].

Mr B.'s house lies on the crook end, going out of the next village ; about a 30 minute walk. His house is ramshackle, straddling the river, with a strong, wooden bridge leading from the main house to the barn, sheds and garden. We took tea sitting on the widest part of the bridge, his front door opening onto it so his daughter could trundle in and out carrying wafer biscuits and lemon tea.

It won’t be long before Japan disappears below the sea, he commented, as an opening, after the little niceties. We have to look at human history in huge numbers of years. My little life, though long, is a spot, a fleck.
Nevertheless, interesting, not usual, I said. And he agreed.

Those rockets we were transporting from Auschwitz, he went on, they were fuelled by what you English called the Red Biddy, a methyl alcohol which our French prison workers couldn’t resist. No wonder they were going blind by the day.We had nothing to treat them with. You know, when we volunteered to look after these troops we lost our officer status, the Germans took away everything, all our medical equipment. You would think they wanted the prison workers kept alive but obviously medical supplies were needed for their own. And anyway some of the troops had refused to work for a period because they had objected to the number of graves they were having to dig. Not normal they had said. We were just outside of Aushwitz camp, remember, part of the complex. It was a kind of strike. Germans said: no dig, no food and took away our last remaining supplies. Well you can see the strike couldn’t last long, could it?

While he was freely talking we sipped our insipid, milkless tea; his daughter had quietly joined us. She had heard this story many times; you could see from her face.

When finally the war was limping to an end all the survivors were marched towards the West. As days passed more and more German guards flitted away, probably to seek out their families or friends. None of them wanted to meet the Russians. Men died by the roadside, in makeshift camps and at the end of the long march, Mr. Bourelle said. His English friend passed into the American zone and then made his own way back to England by stealing a local Mayor’s car, driving to an allied airfield and hitching a lift. He, in his turn, waited in the French camp, treating as many of his compatriots as he could, as there were more medical provisions by then. Finally they were repatriated .

Apart from re unions, visits to England and medical conventions he had tried not to go far from his home again. This old mill house had been his mother’s family’s for generations. Not working now but he could still hear the sounds of the working mill and the voices if he listened hard enough to his inner head.

I was silenced really. These stories. These lives. So few left. So absorbed I only just caught the tail end of a kingfisher sweeping the river. I heard its long peep just in time to look up.

Ah yes, said Mr. B. ad I see otters sometime on the little weir there. I was jealous for a moment!

We said our goodbyes. Adele, his daugher was very reserved but shook my hand warmly. Come again they both said

91

APRIL 4TH.

A green hairstreak rests on a post looking like a gauze covered half coin.There are orange tips and yellow brimstones, red admirals and peacocks each seeking the warmth & probably an egg laying site.

I heard one cuckoo 3 days ago. A few more join the call today. Swallows add to their number every hour and Emile has looked at his journal. He saw the first on the 29th. March this year but last year it was on the 24th.

A hotter early April than I remember: 28 deg. but it can change at any moment. I have not forgotten the snow on May 4th. last year. But right now the insect chorus is hotting up too, the Sophora is leaning with the weight of its gold; great tits are in & out of the barn wall, lizards skitter along the stones and a grass snake, lovely in its grey, black & green skin slides the length of the fence base and then flicks fast into the thick nettle patch. I keep that as my secret.

I spend the day mowing, cutting, strimming and weeding. Emile suggests that a lunch stop is essential. He also suggests that he could drive in his tractor and plough up half the meadow for a potager. Not yet Emile, not yet, thanks. I take a supper break instead and light a fire as a chill creeps through the house.

My second visit to Mr. B delivered an astounding finale to his war time stories. I’ll write it in the next blog as I’m going up on the roof. It's late already. Here the huge crescent moon sits below the rest of its shape just like an eclipse. It dips below the line of the western hills and at its final glint there is a veiled, silver aura. I am watching time. An optimistic scops owl yearns for a mate.

90.

End February..

A tentative song from the black cap rewards me for feeding him throughout the winter; a weak, floating tune announcing his readiness. The plumage of the male siskins are showing canary yellow. All these signs ice my hopes. Keep shining, sun. It`s 17 degrees in the glorious sunshine.

89.


  End February.


A frog's chorus and then spawn in the ponds.
 

Monsieur le docteur Bourelle is a dark, small figure, twisted into a wheel chair at the age of 96. Once he was spry, brave and starving he tells me.

I have come to an aperitif; 7 oclock in the evening, dark already and the sky is a clear Prussian black backdrop.The star points are so numerous they sweep a silver  veil over it.

Mr. B. sits next to me and tells a story that is so staggering I am worried that by 8 he will not have finished and that we will have to part.

Captured in France in 194--, as an officer he spent time in a prisoner of war camp, twiddling his thumbs and wondering how it would go. With 3 other doctors, English, French and Belgian,  they volunteered to medically serve the soldier prisoners of a work camp. They found themselves moved with a troop to Auschwitz, Ozwieciem,  to work on the outside, on transports and warehousing. They lost their officer status because of their volunteering and had nothing to treat any ailing man with. Mr. le docteur B. experienced horrors beyond imagining; but while working on a new hardware transport that the Germans were sending through to the west,  he and the other doctors noticed that the work force were showing signs of blindness: it turned out that they  had been drinking the industrial alcohol within  some strange, bullet shaped containers passing through. He was convinced that these were the war heads of some new weapon..

After the war it became obvious that these had been the new V2 rockets

We nibble the hors d’oeuvres and sip our Muscat. Time to leave politely but I have been cordially invited to the doctor’s house for tea one day next week. We could talk some more , he says, since he likes the English. One of his best comrades in arms was an Englishman, sadly deceased. They had been friends ever since the war and often visited each other while their families were growing up.

I listen to the blackbird’s dusk song . He rings his kingdom with riffs of marvellous purity. He knows not that his early hopes may be ruined. Snows and winds might tear at his first nest. But they might not. This creeping spring might be gentle.

88.

Emile is stomping about the living room, collecting the glasses from a rickety cabinet, the bottles from the kitchen and a cloth from a drawer. He makes a fuss doing it as I stand with my back to the fire.
"I would at least like to know where I come from, " he is saying, " BE where I come from. I don't know how you do it. Your roots must be in England, surely".

This has all come about because I have been talking about my mother, how, as she shrivels and shrinks, back into the soils from whence she came,  I go more to England.
My roots and tendrils are from England, indeed, I answer, but I have ancestors from Languedoc, the Auriols, and I want to be more in France nowadays. Must be the landscape, the wild. He nods slowly and glances at me from behind the bottle.

Marie will come in soon from the barn, struggle with her boots, tut and swear and then roll forward with a wide grin to join us in an aperitif.
"And the folk, the people here ? how do you manage not to feel a stranger?"
I do feel a stranger, I say, always a stranger, even though you are all very kind. But that's not quite the point because I have not burned my boats. I explain that cliche and he's tickled by it. He'll make up a verse before too long.

After the drink and conviviality I tackle the wind outside again and weave my way to my own fireside. The sun is stronger every day. It was 16 C. yesterday but today the sun's warmth is displaced by cold gusts.

87.

Jan 27th.

 That day again. The wails of those lost souls echo down the years. How many like the amazing, sturdy and bright light survivor  Alice Herz-Sommer  were lost in that Holocaust hell. Though I am uneasy at Israel's present position on Palestine, uncomfortable with a perception of tangible hypocrisy; I hope that those lost voices are just that: lost but not forgotten for ever.

 The village holds a small procession around the square and to the mairie. Just a few are wrapped up and walking. The sun is bright and warming although the wind edge is sharp. An aperitif warms the belly too and instills in me a short spell of guilt. We are subdued but whole,  and here. The mayor drinks to memory and coughs repeatedly.

Sparrows scuffle under the tiles of the mairie and are noisier than we are . I walk up the hill and am still touched  by the winter sun. On the bird table a male black cap shovels its thin beak sideways to scoop up the remaining grains of the peanut flour. It has the tenacious energy over and over again to drive off  another, a female with russet cap, attempting to take the food. Soon their hormones will change, their plumage colour will intensify and  glow and relations will be different! And I shall hear their song.

 

86.

Mid January.

In the 2 hours of  warm sunshine a yellow brimstone butterfly has woken from its winter hide and dips into the grass humps and marjoram seed heads running the river banks. From a blackthorn thicket 2 yellow hammers pipe weakly. But to me it is a strong song, a joy to  hear which  gives me a sharp pang of hope for spring. I heard a song thrush at some point in my stroll but couldn't place it.

The relationship with landscape:  its shapes and sounds and memories; they are like a pocket book. I will look at it occasionally when I`m too old to be out there and when there are other landscapes to deal with,  and say, this is the way it used to be, this is how people like me experienced it. 

85.


Early January.



I have just received a text which begins GUESS WHO AM I? Clever ruse. It goes on to advise me to check out a website. So I do out of curiosity. Here it insists the Qu'ran states clearly that to kill one person is a sin; it is as bad as to murder many. So far - good. Then it continues to claim one absolute truth after another in the mathematical ratios and calculations inherent in various natural phenomena. By this time I'm a bit lost. Haven't I heard this somewhere before? The loping, stilted, gappy English is beamed across the ether to be picked up by gullibles.

 Still, the early, grey dusk belies the real truth; that a dunnock pours out its songs so early in the year and that there is the smell of woodsmoke if you  try hard to remember it.

84.

End December.

Snow melt. The black caps are  no longer puff balls but sleek warblers again,  feeding on the ground peanut meal. A male blue tit is inspecting a nest box in the eaves and carrying out a little homework. A great tit chimes out its territory. Greyness pervades and I think I might prefer the bright cleanliness of the snow. Now the litter and  plastic hedgerow decorations sing out. Isn`t a society's condition reflected in its rubbish? And Britain one of the richest nations in the world?