to my amazement it isn’t a frightening thing. Granted, the first time I turned as pale as the corpse with shock but that was just because no one had warned me that there was a dead person in the living room. All I wanted to do was to write my name in the thick book that’s always placed on a small table outside the house where someone has died. It’s one of those things that are expected of you when you live here. A neighbour’s elderly mother had died and when I asked an unknown relative where the neighbour was, meaning of course the living one, he thought I meant the dead one and pointed to the lounge. The moment I entered I realised that the room was as cold as a fridge and as silent as the grave. And there the dead neighbour lay flat on her back in front of the TV.
At least the TV was switched off.
I was equally shocked the first time I saw a hearse that didn’t look like a hearse. Not even black. A four-wheel-drive vehicle, something between a Land Rover and a station wagon, in a dark shade of blue. Now that I’ve become an experienced funeral-goer I know that most village cemeteries lie at the top of the highest hill in the area. I don’t know if it has something to do with respect for the dead, but around here the most breathtaking views are often reserved for them. As an experienced funeral-goer I also know that the winding paths that lead to these final lookout posts would be too much for any ‘ordinary’ hearse, particularly in winter when everything is covered in mud or snow. Now a four-wheel-drive makes perfect sense to me.
What still doesn’t quite make sense, even after numerous funerals, is the odd appearance of the undertakers. All right, I suppose one has to be a little odd to want to become a funeral undertaker but I can’t recall that the species ever caught my attention in South Africa. On the contrary. There they are usually the proverbial little grey men who melt into the curtains, as if they’d been trained to become invisible. Here in the French countryside they look like characters from The Addams Family.
On our local team there is, for example, a formidable woman with muscular arms, cropped hair, a dark-blue men’s suit and a tie. (It took three funerals before I realised she was a woman.) One of her colleagues is a tattooed tough guy with the shoulders of a bull and the nose of a boxer. At first I speculated that they were chosen purely on account of their muscles, to ensure that they’re able to carry even the heaviest coffin. But then I saw the third colleague. A skinny, middle-aged little man who looks as if he could barely manage the weight of the black-rimmed glasses on his nose, with false teeth that threaten to pop out every time he opens his mouth. I suppose muscles alone couldn’t keep a funeral parlour in business. Perhaps he is the brain behind the undertaking. The fourth member of the group, apparently the leader, has grey hair, a paunch, and the poker face of a government official. He doesn’t really do anything. He just stands there with hands folded and a prim frown. I suspect he was hired to lend the illusion of normality to his bizarre colleagues.
The liveliest show in town. That was the observation made by a South African friend who watched two funeral processions outside our house last year. Actually, there are just three shows in this village. Funerals, weddings and the boules played alongside the river. And believe me, I’ve seen enough of all three to agree with my friend. Sometimes a funeral is indeed the liveliest entertainment in a French country village.
3 Things you miss
‘What can we bring you? What do you miss the most over there? Biltong? Mealie meal? Rooibos tea?’
Like the Three Wise Men the kindest guests always bring an offering from the Beloved Country. I’ve been asked so many times what I can’t get my hands on here, which gift would make my heart leap with joy, that these days I constantly walk around with a little list in my head.
Of course I’m talking about things you can pack in a suitcase. What I miss most are people and places, family and friends, Table Mountain and Kogel Bay. Things even the guest with the best intentions cannot bring me. But it is nevertheless remarkable how a gift that’s been lugged all the way from Africa can make a gloomy day seem less grey.
I’m talking above all about food and drink. Grape jam and green fig preserve. Chutney and dried sausage. Koeksisters and clingstone peaches. Yes of course you can buy a fantastic variety of fresh fruit at a Provençal morning market. But I’ve never found peaches that crunch under your teeth like those gigantic, bright-orange, syrupy-sweet peaches of the Boland.
So – all the typical and traditional South African treats. Everyone knows that’s what one misses. What keeps surprising my guests is that these items are fairly low down on my list. Not that I’d spurn a strip of biltong, far from it, but in the French countryside there are so many other things I can’t find. Things I’d never thought I’d miss because I was barely aware that I was using them. Things that were just always there.
But now I’m here and these things aren’t, and suddenly they acquire a significance that they don’t really deserve.
Food colouring, for example. Those cute little bottles of blue, red and yellow liquid with which you colour the icing for your child’s birthday cake. French children apparently don’t know such colourful cakes. French mamans probably consider such cakes a little vulgar. On little Alexandre’s or Amélie’s birthday, maman buys a cake at the pâtisserie, usually a cake that resembles a work of art, an elegant creation with glacé fruit or chocolate curls, something you want to frame and display on a wall. Nothing like the children’s cakes I know.
The children’s cakes I know look like toys. Trains and helicopters, pirates’ chests and castles. Colourful and kitsch. The taste is completely unimportant. A dozen excited children will each take one bite and leave the rest in a messy heap on their paper plates. That’s how it works where I come from.
So imagine how panic-stricken I was when Daniel celebrated his first French birthday and I couldn’t find a little bottle of colouring anywhere at all. How do you have a children’s birthday party without coloured icing? In the end I baked a chocolate cake in an elephant-shaped cake tin and covered the whole thing in chocolate spread. A brown elephant, I told Daniel. Nice African touch. The tin I’d fortunately brought from South Africa. In France cakes looks like cakes – or works of art – but certainly not like elephants.
By Daniel’s next birthday I was prepared. In the grocery cupboard an entire collection of little colouring bottles waited like soldiers on a parade ground – thanks to a few guests who’d responded to my strange request. At least one of these guests probably cursed me during the rest of her European trip. A bottle of red colouring had shattered inside her suitcase. Her clothes, underwear, accessories and books had all been dyed interesting rosy shades from salmon to mulberry.
Speaking of red, red jelly is also unobtainable. So is any colour jelly, actually, but red jelly is what I need for the trifle I try to make every Christmas. I say try, because up until now I’ve not yet managed to produce a trifle that tastes remotely like my mother’s traditional one.
Every family has its Christmas traditions. And for mine Christmas just isn’t Christmas without a bowl of trifle that reminds you of an old-fashioned church bazaar. I mean my South African family of course. Here in France you eat oysters and truffles and for dessert a kind of ice-cream cake in the shape of a tree trunk. I don’t mind the oysters and the truffles and all the other pleasures, not at all, but I put my foot down when it comes to the tree-trunk cake. Tradition is tradition.
Believe me, when you’re living far from your native soil, tradition can suddenly become quite important.
But the first time I attempted my mother’s traditional recipe in France, I discovered that the French didn’t know what jelly was. Nor custard powder. The closest thing to good old English custard around here is an instant dessert that is sold in yoghurt containers. Crème anglaise, they call it. English cream. I
