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.