42
JULY: FAIR PLAY
Over the past few weeks, I have been teaching English to a young French student called Sara, whose grandparents live in a nearby village. This week we translated a section of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets:
What we call the beginning is often the end.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The longer I am here, the more these lines make sense to me.
Having begun my time in France with a lily-livered townie’s knowledge of farm animals, the best moment so far has been the birth of my lambs, despite being swiftly followed by the slow death of Emil. And now comes the second most thrilling event: the imminent birth of the chicks, hard on the heels of the death of poor old Mildred. I now see that all those questions from Cruella De Vil the estate agent, about how many outbuildings Monsieur wants, were not entirely academic. I thought outbuildings were for deluded people to convert into unlettable gîtes. Yet my pigsty has proved a worthy poulailler for the chickens. And with chicks ahoy, I’m jolly glad to have the barn, too, as a safe haven for Martha, Melissa and their unborn dynasty.
Others may go in for lavish barn conversions with gothic double-glazing and faux-medieval chandeliers, but my old barn has already proved its worth as a swallow sanctuary, wood store and infirmary for sick sheep.
With the help of Carrie, an ex-girlfriend who is over from New York for a few days, I’ve rigged up a makeshift chick run, using two stone carvings left behind by Zumbach to prop up the heavy wooden worktops I bought for the kitchen of the maison des amis, in the days when I thought the plastering might be finished before the Beijing Olympics. At least now they’ll have chicken in them, if not on them. That’s if any of the eggs are fertile: I’ve done my best to candle them with a torch, an oil lamp and a household candle, and can’t see a damn thing through any of the shells.
I like it when old friends like Carrie come to stay at La Folie: city people who yearn for the countryside. Pretty and petite, Carrie jets around the world for UNESCO, has a brain the size of a planet, and has won every argument I have ever refused to have with her. In London, we would have our frantic catch-up chat to the soundtrack of a noisy restaurant before hugging goodbye and promising to see each other more often. Here at La Folie, there’s no television, no radio, no nothing. There’s just Titus, punctuating the silence with his piercing cocorico, and now the pleasure of sharing the birth of my first ever real-live chick with someone who will appreciate its magic.
My main worry is that the eggs aren’t all going to hatch at the same time. This is my own fault. Ignoring the advice in Starting with Chickens, I failed to separate Martha and Melissa from the sisterhood as soon as they became broody, thinking that this was only necessary if punch-ups broke out. But the real reason for separating them becomes clear during one of their comfort breaks.
With both mums AWOL at once, I take the opportunity to change the hay in the nesting boxes. Mon Dieu. While Martha’s nest still contains just five eggs, Melissa’s hides a vast stockpile of twenty-seven, over which she has heroically been managing to spread herself. The other girls have clearly been adding new ammo to her arsenal on a daily basis. I perform a hasty cabinet reshuffle, make it sixteen apiece, and hope they don’t notice.
I now have absolutely no idea how many chicks to expect, nor when. But with two mums and thirty-two eggs between them, it could be mayhem. I’m secretly hoping for two complete rugby XVs, plus a referee and someone to bring on the oranges at half time.
Next day, I know something’s wrong as soon I open the barn door. An epic pong defiles the air. And Melissa’s nesting box is full of green slime. At once sour and sweet and rotten and ghastly, this noxious odour vaguely reminds me of something I once ate in South Korea, or the strange whiff I experienced when I got hit on the head by a cricket ball at school. I never want to smell it again.
An egg has exploded. Suddenly that ray-gun from Gamm Vert begins to seem like excellent value. I don’t want any more eggs to self-detonate. What if Melissa and Martha are sitting on thirty-one UXBs, each of them powerful enough to stink out half of Jolibois?
But a shriek distracts me from my thoughts. It’s Serge’s wife, Jacquie, who has come to help me paint all the windows and shutters the wrong shade of lavender; lurid eye-shadow on the face of an old woman. Between finger and thumb she holds up a freshly shed snakeskin she has found just outside the kitchen window.
‘You should cut that thing down,’ warns Jacquie, waving the snake husk fiercely at the dense creeper that runs from the flower beds straight up to my bedroom window, ‘or les serpents will be up it, and into your room.’
Thus perturbed, I’m relieved when Gilles drops in for a chat after milking. ‘There aren’t any snakes around here, are there, Gilles?’ I ask as casually as possible, having introduced him to Carrie and asked after Josette.
‘Si!’ he retorts. ‘There are vipers whose bite can kill you. But they won’t usually attack you unless you step on them.’
‘And if I do?’
‘Get to the doctor fast.’
‘Don’t I have to kill the snake first, to show the doctor what bit me?’
‘That helps.’ Gilles hesitates. ‘But in your case, I suggest you get straight in the car and drive.’
‘Ah.’
‘Don’t worry,’ he chuckles, relenting. ‘Your chickens will kill any snakes they find.’
‘Mes poules?’ I watch Gilles carefully, to see if he’s pulling my leg. But no, he’s deadly serious, launching into a terrifying mime of a chicken grabbing a snake and pecking it to pieces. Or else he is pretending to be a furious toddler trying to escape from a play-pen. Either way, it’s scary. And though I don’t want to count my chickens before they hatch, I’m beginning to think that the more the merrier.
I am wondering, too, how Martha would feel about sleeping in my bedroom. She could perch on the towel-rail for snake duty and story time. Well, why not? The Tower has its ravens. Manlius had his geese. Why shouldn’t I have a chicken?
The main problem is that the cat would feel deeply miffed. Oh, and the hypothetical copine who has yet to wander into my life is unlikely to be thrilled to discover that I am most comfortable sleeping with une poule. Particularly if I am forced to explain to her that it’s either that, chérie, or a bunch of snakes.
Sound the alarums, sennets, tuckets, and what you will. Most days, when I go into the barn, the only sound is a disgruntled clucking from Martha and the shrill trilling of the swallows. But today there’s another sound bouncing off the walls, like the bleeping of the time bomb just before 007 disarms it.
I peer into the straw-lined nesting boxes.
Melissa blinks back at me. And there, poking out from under her wing, are two new faces, each a winsome ball of fluff with a beak like the tip of a golf-tee and two grains of caviar for eyes.
‘What’s all the yelling about?’ asks Carrie, hurrying in.
‘I wasn’t yel—’
‘Oh … my … God,’ she murmurs, her hushed voice rising a major-seventh with each word. She is so desperate to pick up the chicks and cuddle them to death that I have to make her swear not to touch them. One of them is pure black, and Carrie insists that I name it after her.
Next day, Melissa has three more cuddly toys under her wing. She looks deeply smug, while Martha waits, alone and confused, for the glory of motherhood.
But by the time seven chicks have hatched, the two mums have clearly decided to make a go of it together. While Melissa snoozes with just a single chick stashed below decks, Martha sails out – proud as you like – with the other six munchkins in tow. So not only have I now witnessed the birth of my first chicks; I’ve seen my first ever French lesbian chicken adoption, too. We’re nothing if not progressive, here in Jolibois.
There is more and different glory to come. I have absolutely no idea how this happened. Indeed, I fully expect a gendarme with an outsize moustache to come and tell me it was all une grande blague and that I’d
better give the thing back sharpish.
No, Monsieur Étang the plumber has not come to build the bathroom upstairs, and Monsieur Laveille has not come to lay the floor in the summer sitting-room. Douglas the giant still hasn’t finished the rendering, because his wife Jill has reasonably insisted that he construct a roof for his own house first. No, the fact is that I have just been presented with a vast and glittering trophy at the tennis tournament in Peyrat de Rocher.
Miles away, in the real world, England’s drubbings in every sporting contest on the planet have not escaped me. It was quite clear that something had to be done. And I’m happy to say that I have done it. Yes, Wright has stiffened the old sinews and brought home the international silverware. The Englishman can now look the Frenchman squarely in the eye once again. Rule Britannia. Taran-tara. God save the king.
And I didn’t just win a trophy, either. Alongside my golden cup (which I dare not leave in the sun, lest it melt), I have also been presented with two biros, a spooky glass ornament painted with woodland creatures, a game of Spillikins, a pack of cards and a craft knife. I bet you don’t get Spillikins when you win Wimbledon.
So spectacular is my trophy that Claude the tennis-playing electrician goes quite pale when I show it to him in the kitchen of the maison des amis. I was hoping he’d find it funny, but he doesn’t.
‘You won … that?’ he says, slowly laying down his screwdriver to stare at my prize. This makes me uneasy. For a second, he looks like Gollum gazing at the Ring. And then he remembers himself just enough to gasp: ‘But how?’
‘C’est une bonne question, Claude …’
Over the past few weeks, I have been desperately entering local tennis tournaments in the hope of finding someone horribly hung-over whom I can out-lob to get a classification, and thereby drag myself out of the non-classé (untouchables) bin. Everyone in France is classified according to his ability or, in my case, lack of it.
Fortunately, I meet a chap called Hubert in the first round at Peyrat de Rocher. Hubert is a cheery teddy bear in mirrored shades and a Hawaiian shirt, who prepares for our match by smoking several Gauloises, and can’t stop telling me how terrible he feels. I don’t think this is mere gamesmanship. His voice sounds like he has been gargling bicycle cogs.
‘Didn’t you sleep well last night?’ I ask, attempting not to sound too pleased.
‘No, I was with my friend, Jack Daniels,’ he rasps, staggering on to court and making a few optimistic, Oliver-Reedy swishes in the air with his racquet.
And so follows a masterclass in French obscenities. Hubert isn’t a very good tennis player, but his swearing is world class, and a small crowd gathers to listen to him play. I don’t need to be able to understand the words to know that I am in the presence of greatness.
At the end, there is some polite applause. Not for my victory, I think, but for the breadth and depth of Hubert’s vernacular.
My pyrrhic victory over Hubert is swiftly followed by an England-style collapse against un joueur classé in the second round: the silver-quiffed charmer who runs the hunting-and-fishing shop in Jolibois, and whose fifty-a-day smoking habit doesn’t seem to have any negative impact on his tennis, at least not when faced with a challenger of my negligible abilities.
Nevertheless, beating Hubert has somehow qualified me for the tournament’s non-classé final, where I am up against a strapping young SNCF railway worker called Christophe. Here again, I allow myself to dream briefly of glory, when it emerges that Christophe has only had two hours’ sleep since coming off the night shift. Even so, he soon manages to make me feel like a diesel shunter beside his hurtling TGV. Serves and volleys whizz past me like a flashing landscape, and it’s all over so fast that we arrive at our destination almost before I’ve had time to find my seat. But at least I win the odd point – I have come a long way since my whitewash at the hands of Norman Handley in his Dunlop Green Flash – and it is enough to have been present on the journey: my name is writ large in the annals of international sporting glory, and the finalists’ cup is mine.
News of my unlikely triumph travels fast, so that everyone seems to know about it by the start of the next tournament on the calendar: the Jolibois Open. Sipping a drink with a few of the other players before my first match, I find it hard to believe that this is the same clubhouse where, all those months ago, I gazed out at the deserted clay courts with their advertising hoardings – Babolat, Banque de France, Roland Garros – and where Amélie Mauresmo is still about to clout a fizzing backhand, frozen in time and space on the wall. The trapped bird I saw, fluttering at a high window, has long since flown.
‘You English, you come and buy all our houses, and now you steal our cups, too,’ laughs a burly, handsome man with tousled black hair and piercing blue eyes, slapping me on the back hard enough to make me spill the glass of orange juice that I’m holding. Though we have never been formally introduced, I know exactly who this is. Everyone in Jolibois does. Le Grand Mermoz is the bullish fellow who runs the higgledy-piggledy hardware store opposite the cemetery, an Aladdin’s cave of Useful Gadgets staffed by a workforce of such eccentric charm and helpfulness that it is easy to imagine them as the cast of an unusually heart-warming sit-com. ‘But we like les Anglais,’ he adds with unforced joviality. ‘You are all très fair-play.’
‘Oui, nous sommes très fair-play,’ I reply, ‘et vous êtes très généreux.’
I hop from foot to foot as I wait for my first-round opponent to arrive. But he never appears, and Jean-Michel, the hawkish club president, declares a walk-over.
‘Tu vois, Michael?’ he says, cheerily putting his arm round me. ‘Now that you have won a cup, everyone is scared of you.’
For a second, I almost catch myself believing him. And when Le Grand Mermoz tells me about next week’s sports club pétanque tournament, I sign up on the spot.
Admittedly, I’ve never in my life played pétanque. But, thanks to the bowls gene that runs in the family, I am quietly confident of bringing home another trophy for the nation. In the 1970s my parents had a set of carpet boules from Habitat, and it can’t be all that different. The game – tiddlywinks played with cannonballs – looks easy enough. Buying the equipment is, I am about to discover, another matter.
*
‘Vous êtes pointeur ou tireur?’ asks the daunting lady in Jolibois Sports when I make my request. Perhaps she thinks I’ve come in for a job interview. Statuesque, fiftysomething, and with a lacquered ash-blond hairdo that would do Princess Anne proud, Madame looks as though she should really be selling Chanel gowns in Paris, not shin-pads in Jolibois.
‘Er, je ne suis pas sûr …’
‘Well, do you point or do you shoot?’ she repeats, folding her arms.
‘That depends …’ I mumble. They never ask you this down at the Megabowl in Streatham. There, the man behind the till just says ‘Showsoys?’ to which the correct response is ‘Forty-two, please,’ and to start untying one’s laces.
Madame looks at me pityingly as I wring my hands and scan the shop’s brown carpet-tiles for inspiration.
‘I shoot,’ I guess at last, looking her firmly in the eye.
‘Most beginners,’ she sighs, ‘prefer to start by learning to point.’
‘I point,’ I say, correcting myself.
But Madame is not listening. Real pétanque players, she explains, specialize either in landing their boules close to the jack – le cochonnet – or else in smashing their opponents’ balls out of the way. Hence pointing or shooting. I think I know which one Madame would be. But where do my own special gifts lie? I feel like I’m trying to buy a dress for a woman I’ve never met. Suppose I’m an all-rounder? Madame doesn’t seem to think this is very likely.
And so, twenty-five minutes and sixty euros later, I emerge from the shop clutching a clacking trio of championship boules. I am a committed pointeur, and let no man say otherwise.
At the town stadium, while others warm up for the tournament with a massed Pastis session under a can
vas awning, I hide behind a lorry for a spot of furtive pointing on the gravel. And then I almost land one on the soft top of Le Grand Mermoz’s flashy convertible, and decide to rely on hidden potential. At least my boules don’t look quite so shiny and virginal now. No one will ever guess I’m a débutant.
The tournament doesn’t go quite according to plan. I was right about pétanque being an easy game. The problem is that all the other players – perhaps seventy of them – find it even easier than I do. And though I manage to notch up a couple of jammy victories in my four matches – thanks to being paired with super-bons tireurs – it is not to be England’s day. I have to watch as someone else collects the trophy: my trophy. That enormous statue of a pétanqueur would have gone very nicely on the high oak ledge of the summer sitting-room at La Folie.
I’m glad I came, nonetheless. There is much laughter over the fact that un seul Anglais has been foolhardy enough to enter the tournament, and at least by letting the French win I have helped preserve the entente cordiale.
‘What’s everyone eating?’ I ask one of my playing partners afterwards, seeing people tucking into something that looks meaty and irresistible, served on a procession of paper plates emerging from behind the bar.
‘Couilles de mouton,’ says Christophe. His smile is not entirely encouraging, as if he were enjoying a private joke. ‘You should try.’ Before I can stop him, he’s ordered me a plateful.
‘Is this what I think it is?’ I ask, suddenly not hungry after all.
‘Oui,’ chuckles Christophe. ‘Bon appétit.’
‘Ah, formidable,’ I hear myself say, when what I really mean is ‘Eeuuwgghhh.’ And then I am grimly tucking into my plateful of fried sheep’s testicles, doing my best to swallow them without tasting them too much, and thinking how unfortunate it is that here in rural France it’s so much easier to buy balls than boules.
C'est La Folie Page 28
