French Letter: Life, death – and cider – in the Breton countryside
The Breton hamlet in which my wife and I live looks at first glance to have changed very little since the first day we saw it back in 1999.
On the left, just over the bridge that spans a fast-flowing trout stream, is a stone cottage occupied – and “occupied” is the word – by a single mother from the Belgian border and her two small children.
Next door is a large, mustard-coloured house, home to our neighbour, a mechanic, and his wife. Opposite is the neo-Breton house built back in the 1960s by its owner, a roofer, with the help of another neighbour, Alexei, sadly no longer with us.
Finally, just over the rise to the left, is the rather grand home that when we first moved in belonged to an elderly couple both of whom were hard of hearing and used to bellow to each other like mastodons.
And then, of course, there’s our house, built in 1951, with land on all sides – too much land, if you really want to know – that every year from March to October mocks my attempts to impose order on chaos. A couple of months ago, I wrote to Gardeners’ Question Time to seek their advice. Wisely perhaps, they did not respond.
All pretty standard. Not exactly timeless, but not governed by a stop-watch either.
Now look more closely. The stone cottage, owned by a gay couple from Lille, is soon to become vacant again. The existing tenant tells me she is planning to move with her children to Morocco or Tunisia. Given that she is said to owe a small fortune in rent and back-taxes, that may be considered prudent, though risky. Her former partner, whom she met in Réunion, seemed to be a pleasant fellow, but he disappeared a while back and turns up only occasionally to say hello to his offspring. I remember he tried to interest me in the purchase of a wood-burning stove he had made that was later found to be unsafe. Since I was fully stoved-up, I politely declined.
The “new-build” across the road is now empty. A year or so ago, its owner, in his 80s, was taken away by men in white jackets from the council and placed in a care home some 20 kilometres to the north. We haven’t seen him since. The house he built was never lived in. More than that, its owner hadn’t stepped inside for more than half a century. If you looked through the kitchen window, you could see the piles of tiles and a sink that should have been installed back in 1967. Marcel (we’ll call him Marcel) lived instead in the attic, reached by an external stairway. The only way you could tell he was there at night was by the glow from his television screen.
My theory is that he was jilted on his wedding day and threw the key away. The house in which he would have raised his children became instead a monument to the enduring tragedy of his life.
After he was removed, I was invited to take a look at his garret. It was unutterably filthy and plagued by mice and rats. Today, a thorn tree has grown across the front door, like something out of a fairy tale, making it impossible to enter. Marcel had no family and the mayor doesn’t know what to do about the house, which in the fullness of time will be entirely shrouded in ivy.
The large house on the rise is thriving, but the owners are no longer Amédée and his wife. They moved to a small townhouse some years back, having sold up to a retired couple from Leeds whom we hardly ever see but are prodigious gardeners. Two years ago, the husband demanded that I cut back a laurel tree that was casting a shadow across the bottom end of his vegetable patch. When I did so he complained that I had robbed him of his privacy.
The one constant, beyond us, in recent years has been our immediate neighbour, the mechanic, who for years thought I was called Peter. I am very fond of (let us call him) Jean-françois. He is a countryman born and bred but entirely devoted to his machines, with no interest in anything farm-based that doesn’t run on diesel. I mentioned last week the death of his father, which upset him more than I would have thought given that they were not close and that he (the father) hadn’t visited his son for at least ten years. Several times in the days following the funeral, I heard Jean-françois in his workshop cursing the darkness. His wife, never off the phone, used to work in the local creamery, but is crippled with arthritis and now, somewhat heroically, spends much of her time looking after their daughter’s small son, whose father died suddenly of an undiagnosed heart condition at the age of 31.
I can’t let you go, though, without further mention of Alexei. A stonemason, built like Obelix, with a suitably luxuriant moustache, Alexei had lived in his tiny dwelling – a lean-to tacked on to the back of Jean-françois’s place – ever since his intended fell ill and died back in, it must have been, the late 1950s. He was a boy during the war years and remembered vividly hearing the news that four young men he knew, barely out of their teens, had been shot by the Germans in 1944. Years later, he served as an army cook in Algeria (the only time in his life that he lived more than ten kilometres from where he was born in the Breton countryside). But he preferred not to talk about that. In the summer, during his long decline, Alexei would sit at a rickety table outside his little house, forever inviting us to join him for un coup – a drink – so that he could fill us in on the gossip, always with a twinkle in his eye.
Alexei died in April 2007, slumped across his dinner table next to the stove on which his trademark pot au feu was still bubbling. My wife and I were still living in New York at the time and missed the funeral. But we mourned him. We miss him still. He was one of a kind.
So much death. But life goes on. A woodpecker, which I have since discovered is known in French as un pic, came into our garden the other day to perch vertically on the trunk of a tree whose apples Alexei used each autumn to make cider. A sturdy fellow, with green wings and a red head, the bird struck me as a perfect reincarnation of our friend. Was he searching for a suitable home? Possibly. If so, I hope he found it. We did.