we’ll stay.
It’s as if people in the French countryside have a collective memory that reaches back much further than even the oldest inhabitants’ earliest memories. In this sunny region where tourism is the lifeblood of many small villages, foreigners are usually welcomed if not with open arms then at least with a pragmatic tolerance. What initially surprised me was that the arms opened more readily for Germans than for the British. This despite the fact that even the tiniest village has a monument with a shockingly long list of inhabitants who died in two bloody wars against the Germans in the last century.
‘But the English were on your side!’ I said to Jean-Pierre one day. ‘The Germans were the enemy, weren’t they?’
‘Bof,’ he said, ‘we’re now talking about the recent past. What is a war or two between neighbours? Remember, the English were the enemy for centuries. Look what they did to Jeanne d’Arc!’
Of course that’s also why the French sided so enthusiastically with my Afrikaner ancestors during the Anglo-Boer War. It was simply a matter of principle. Any enemy of my enemy is my friend. When President Paul Kruger had to flee to Europe he travelled by train from Marseille to Paris, and at each station he was met by a crowd of cheering supporters. No other South African president would ever receive such a hero’s welcome here – until Nelson Mandela came onto the scene almost a century later.
It is some consolation that we’re not the only strangers in the village. Behind us, in a beautifully restored old farmhouse, lives a couple from Marseille. Marseille is barely an hour and a half away on the freeway – but it nevertheless belongs to a different universe, where people speak with a different accent, have different habits, eat different food. At any rate that is how the real pique-culs see it.
To our left, in a dignified three-storey building with grey-blue shutters, a jovial American has come to retire with his elegant Parisian wife and an Airedale terrier with a bandanna around its neck. Bad timing. Soon after their arrival the official relationship between the USA and France reached a historic low. During George W Bush’s official war in Iraq, I, like most of the people in the village, never mentioned the war in this neighbour’s smiling presence. He may have an impudent president, as eighty percent of the French believe, but the French have sympathy for people who have to live under an impudent president. (The year before it was touch and go whether France had Jean-Marie le Pen as its far-right president. And the current president’s nickname is Supermenteur. Super-liar.) Besides, the American has chosen to live here rather than in America, in this village rather than in any other town in the world, which to the true pique-cul is sufficient proof of his intelligence and good judgement.
His charming Parisian wife probably elicits more mixed feelings.
Paris is the centuries-old ‘enemy’ of the French countryside, perhaps even more so than England. A case in point: a while back, a South African friend started farming in the French campagne after more than a decade in Paris. And I mean literally farm, as in driving a tractor and tilling the soil. Lynn the Farmer soon realised that it was better to say she was from Cape Town than to say she came from Paris. It’s best not to mention Paris at all.
Her Parisian husband unfortunately can’t pretend to come from South Africa, so he follows a different strategy. When questioned about his origins, he names a village close by where they briefly rented a house while looking for the piece of land of their dreams. In the campagne anything is better than being Parisien. Even being American is apparently better than being a Parisian.
Back in Church Street, or just around the corner from Church Street, there is also a big-hearted Moroccan family. Eighteen-year-old Hakima, with the long silky hair and almond-shaped eyes of a young Scheherazade, is the hard-working daughter who sometimes comes to help out in our house when the stream of guests gets so thick that we can no longer keep our heads above water – dishwater, washing-machine water, bathwater, when a dozen people and everything they use have to be kept clean every day. As in that haunting hymn of my childhood, Hakima believes that she mustn’t go, or rather come, with empty hands to meet us. She always brings an offering – a bag of fresh sheep’s liver (one of her many relatives works at an abattoir) or a box of delicious tomatoes (another relative works at a vegetable market) or a pot of steaming couscous her mother has just made. We’re supposed to help Hakima earn pocket money (she’s saving up for a driver’s licence, an expensive business in this country), but sometimes it seems more as if it’s her family helping to keep our family alive.
These are our closest neighbours – from Marseille, America, Paris and Morocco. But in case you start wondering if everyone around Church Street comes from somewhere else, let me quickly add that we do have at least one example of genuine pique-culs nearby. To our right a crooked little woman and her aged husband, the latter already a little senile, have lived for half a century in a simple farmhouse with dark-green shutters that’s been in the family for goodness knows how long.
Outside this house there are no flowers or pot plants or any other useless decoration. Just a former chicken pen that’s been refitted as a kind of store room, a washing line, a white plastic table and two plastic chairs. Sometimes on a sunny afternoon the crooked little woman sits at the table chopping beans. That’s the closest this family ever comes to a meal in the open air. Which leads me to suspect that to genuine pique-culs our family’s summer meals under the plane tree might seem a strange habit. Many other people in the village also like to eat outside in summer – in gardens, on patios, on verandahs. But then of course many others in this village are also newcomers. They haven’t been here for two centuries.
What fascinates me about this house is that the shutters on the second floor stay closed day and night. We’ve never seen even a sliver of light in the top part of the house. Initially we thought that the two old people used only the ground floor, as people here do when they no longer have the time or the strength or the money to maintain a large house. In our own triple-storey house the top floor stayed wrapped in darkness for about fifty years until our extended family and many guests began to inhabit the dark parts again. And in Lynn the Farmer’s enormous house the previous owner used to live in a single room while the rest of the building gradually fell to ruin.
But then we discovered that the house with the green shutters had other inhabitants. At least two of the elderly couple’s middle-aged children live with them. We sometimes hear them arguing. (It’s nothing – our family makes much more noise when we argue.) We greet them outside on the street. And on some nights there are up to four cars parked in the gravel yard outside the house.
But where do they all sleep? Do some live like moles on the darkened second floor? Is there a secret annexe from World War Two hidden somewhere behind a cupboard?
Perhaps I read too many war stories when I was young. But to me it remains one of the great riddles of Church Street.
Despite what you may think, life in Church Street is not necessarily quiet. We are the only family with young children, but the tiny square outside the church has been colonised by the village youth as an ideal terrain for daring tricks with skateboards and Rollerblades. This means that we regularly have to dispense plasters, and more than once we’ve had to call the fire brigade. Not because the children set fire to the church, thank heavens, but because the fire engine also serves as ambulance. Any child who is rushed to hospital in the red fire engine, with screaming sirens, is the hero of the square for at least a week.
Fortunately, there are no irresponsible young people nearby who play ear-splitting music. But in our own irresponsible household anything from Led Zeppelin and Frank Zappa to Schubert and Mahler is sometimes played at ear-splitting volume. Many instruments, too. Thomas plays the bass guitar in a teenage rock band and practises in the sitting room for hours on end. Daniel started playing the trumpet last year and this year is learning the saxophone. Hugo recently also took up the guitar, Alain plays the harmonica and Mia plays the African
