Common Treasury

99. Mid April. Gerrard Winstanley as a TRUE DIGGER declared that the earth was a 'common treasury for all.' This was in 1649 in England.  In Languedoc, on a curved wall, edging a mountain road, is presciently written large  ' Le monde n'est pas un marche'...the earth is not a market place.

Bertrand has cut his ancient white Renault van in 2. The back part has become a covered trailer and he tows it with a 'new' old blue Renault, rattling through the square and trundling up the hill to deposit garbage beside his fields. This pile grows rapidly and is a cause for local concern and a few shaken heads. The centre of this heap is  the  engine & bonnet end of the original van.

Yesterday he and Sylvie passed me in the van, as I toiled up the lane towards the village. They passed and then slowed. Their heads turned to each other as they must have spoken.  I approached and saw the back seat piled high with groceries and rubbish, but the  derriere van  trailer was empty. Ah ha,I said, No thank you, I like walking; not far now, thank you again. They drove away grinning, trailer bumping and grinding!

Snow has come and gone. Up high there are still  snow pearl necklaces, shimmering in the cold sunlight but they too melt and the line rises hourly through the blue ranks of firs. Swallows come in low, scooping up the growing numbers of insects but the chill in the air surprises.

98. Wild cherry and pear blossom billow up the mountain sides. Every day the colours change, grey to white to cream to pink. After temperatures of high 20s in late March the days have turned grey and blowy. Plenty of rain. Daffodils have faded, tulips bounce in the winds and the cuckoos call. The first I heard in mid March. The rusty trills of cirl buntings and yellow hammers. Yellow brimstones, tortoiseshells, speckled woods and clouded yellows fly when the sun comes out, which it does between the giboulees. Eagles come in from the southern countries. A short toed one pale & glinting in the light and followed always by crows. The harriers skirt over the grass blades, twisting and sliding on their air, tacking and jibing like sail boats in a wind. Swallows passed around 20th. March and on the 25th. more stayed. E. has ploughed his potager and planted his potatoes. Sylvie has managed to kill all the rose cuttings I gave her in the Autumn so I`m potting up some more. Finally a plaque is erected in the square on a wall just above the lavoir. A grandfather and uncle to M. are memorialised at last. But she shakes her head and says she`ll have to keep watch. Things might happen to it apparently.

97. Very early April again. For two weeks in March the thermometer reached daytime temperatures of 26 degrees. But the skies are grey and sodden now. 10 degress it is outside. The cuckoos call, the first few swallows arrived on the 25th. March and today, in the blanket of drizzle I see a hoopoe in twirly flight. It moves as if tethered by some invisible thread to something more fixed. It flutters and pauses, twists on and back showing off its blacks and whites.
Tractors lug manure to the fields and new calves are out in the yards.

Talk is of a theft in the nearbye village, an opportunist sort of one when the householder disturbs the intruder and nothing is taken. Heads nod and shake and if the police are mentioned there is a cackle of derision. I hear this story over several days but can get no further or interesting information. I lock my back door slowly and carefully before I go out for a short walk. This is the first time I have bothered to do this.

April 2011.


96. About living in another land, Colm Toibin says, '.....it hits you that all the things you use to keep going are missing - friends, habits, spaces you`ve made, all those things are gone. So you are absolutely down to zero.` *

I'm beginning to feel this now so it is time to leave this spectacular spring and head for England. When I return the grass will be knee high once again and some flower shows I will have missed.


* Interview with Susanna Rustin in the Guardian Review pages, 23/10/10.

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.