by Tony White
They had chatted as they smoked. Pea-tag’s well-practised pidgin English proved a more effective means of communication than JJ’s rusty CSE French. ‘Ah,’ Pea-tag had nodded, when JJ had introduced himself. ‘JJ, like the Frenchman in The Stranglers, non?’
‘Oui,’ JJ had said. ‘Peut-être.’ There was a pause. ‘Mais. Aussi. Mon. Nom. Je suis Joseph Jonathan, so JJ for short.’
Pea-tag had found JJ’s plans highly amusing. The idea that anyone might think they’d be able to find some secluded beach upon which to pitch a tent on the Côte d’Azur! In Northern Greece, perhaps, Pea-tag had said, in his broken English, or Turkey, yes, there were plenty of deserted beaches like that over there – ‘I ’ave seen them’ – but not here, pas ici. Come and look, he said. Also, he had a little marijuana they could maybe smoke on the beach.
This had been music to JJ’s ears. He didn’t need to be asked twice. If this Pea-tag bloke liked Killing Joke and he smoked dope, then he was exactly the kind of person – both hip and worldly – that JJ had hoped he would meet on his travels. Pea-tag told JJ that his family was from the deep south-west, near the border with Spain. A small rural town in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques, Basque Country, that was famous for making just two things: a particular kind of knife and a particular kind of cheese. The kind of place you have to escape from or die. ‘I think to myself,’ he told JJ, ‘That there must be more to life than this!’
JJ had never been to France before; never been abroad at all until now. A couple of children in his class who were from wealthier families than his went on camping trips to France every year. One of their dads wore unusual navy-blue sailing jumpers and drove a big Volvo estate. The others had a Citroën 2CV and baked their own bread; canvassed for the Liberal Party in local government elections.
In fact, JJ had been the recipient of a small travel bursary, one of a couple of regular prizes that were awarded to students by the college during the A-level year. The modest prize monies were drawn from a bequest that had been made to honour the memory of a past sixth-former who had died from a sudden illness midway through her studies, and JJ had initially been delighted to learn that he had won the college travel prize, but then he had let the whole thing slide a bit. Until, that is, he’d received a note from the school office after Christmas, enquiring after his plans, and reminding him that the two-hundred-and-fifty-pound prize needed to be spent by the end of the financial year in which it had been awarded or it would have to be given back. The sudden urgency that this news imparted was the reason he was travelling in the early spring. It was also why he had perhaps not planned his trip as carefully as he otherwise might. His choice of destination had been influenced by vague ideas about the Impressionists, and a desire to come and draw and paint in the South of France, forgetting that a century had passed in the meantime. He had chosen Cagnes-sur-Mer because it was by the sea and because he remembered from A-level art history lessons that it had been the final home of the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, who was JJ’s favourite Impressionist. Naively expecting to find exquisite pastoral scenes and fields of lavender at every turn, he’d instead found himself in the middle of a major infrastructural construction site: the soon-to-be-completed easterly section of the A8 motorway, which, once finished, would link Nice with Aix-en-Provence, just north of Marseille one hundred and fifty-odd miles to the west, and home town of another painter of the period, Paul Cézanne. JJ had planned to end his trip at Aix-en-Provence. Just to see Mont Sainte-Victoire, much less to paint it, seemed to JJ to promise an almost mystical connection with those revolutionary nineteenth-century artists. In anticipation of this, JJ’s return rail ticket to London Victoria was already booked in advance from Aix.
They had crossed the road, ducking between the cars that were parked diagonally to the carriageway along the perimeter fence of the Hippodrome – Cagnes-sur-Mer’s buggy racing track – and dodging the traffic that sped in both directions, to reach the narrow beach that ran along the other side of the road, more or less uninterrupted from Nice to Antibes. JJ had still not quite got used to the cars driving on the right, rather than the left as they did back at home, and had to keep reminding himself to look both ways. He had been surprised to see that there was no sand on the beach, just large grey pebbles interspersed with the occasional boulder. Peatag had still been talking about camping, and he told JJ that there had used to be campsites a couple of miles further on, but now? He shrugged and pointed along the coast to the west, where JJ could see cranes and another construction site where it looked as if some huge and futuristic ziggurat was emerging beyond the trees.
It was only March, but there had been a warm wind blowing in from the sea, and the air was clear enough that, as they smoked the spliff, JJ had been able to pick out individual buildings, rooftops and spires in what Pea-tag told him was the port of Antibes far off to their right, where the westernmost part of the bay curved around to Cap d’Antibes. When Pea-tag told him that the bay was called Baie des Anges, JJ thought he said Singes, and though he couldn’t remember if that meant monkeys or goats, it seemed hysterically funny either way.
‘You can come to La Fontaine,’ Pea-tag had announced, as they’d walked back through Cagnes, after stopping at a Crédit Lyonnais bank, where JJ had cashed one of his travellers’ cheques. ‘It’s cool.’
‘Have you got a tent?’ JJ asked. With nearly two hundred and fifty francs in his pocket, he was feeling rich again.
‘Non,’ said Pea-tag, matter-of-factly. ‘We have a village. Come, we get the bus, but first, du pain.’
And that is how JJ found himself climbing a rocky track that zigzagged its way up a steep slope somewhere off the Route de Grasse in the mountains above Nice, between the olive trees and the prickly pears, through air that was richly scented with aromatic herbs, batting away horseflies with one hand and trying to hold a bundle of baguettes together with the other.
Hanging from the frame of JJ’s rucksack was a large knotted bag of what looked to him very much like the kind of young dandelion shoots his parents used to give the family budgerigar as a treat, fixing the leaves to the bars of the bird’s cage with a wooden clothes peg. In fact that is exactly what they were, but here they were eaten as salad greens, and they came into season at just this time every year. Pea-tag had been excited to see them in a basket outside a small, side-street greengrocer’s.
‘I am excited to see the pissenlit, because they are two weeks early,’ he’d said, as he paid for the leaves.
JJ hadn’t really understood what Pea-tag had meant by this pronouncement, but found it funny nonetheless. ‘Pissenlit?’ he’d asked.
‘Oui! It means the same in English, non? You must soak them in cold water before you eat, or you will piss your bed.’
Back down on the road, a few yards from where the bus had dropped them off, they stopped at what looked like an animal trough. A stone receptacle with a curved front, like a bathroom basin, but set at about shin level, a foot or so back from the kerb. Rising from the rear of the basin stood a cleanly faced rectangular slab of stone. Protruding from this at around chest height was a battered bronze pipe, from which flowed a continuous stream of clear water, filling the basin below before draining away through an aperture beneath the rim at the back. Across the centre of the basin and set into the stone six inches apart were two flat iron bars, running parallel. Bars upon which you might stand a bucket to fill it, and probably strong enough to take the weight of a good-sized horse. There was enough space on either side of these central bars for any animal to drink from the basin. The drop between spigot and basin rim was sufficient that Pea-tag was able to kneel on the stone edge and – by bowing his head slightly, as if in prayer – lean in beneath the pipe, so that the cold water cascaded over him, drenching his hair and clothes. Standing up, he shook himself off, pushing the wet hair off his face with his hands. Then he leaned in again to wash his face, before cupping hands to drink the water.
JJ followed suit and doused himself too, but thirsty though
he was he felt reluctant to actually drink. Being English, he had grown up with a mistrustful ‘Don’t drink the water’ attitude to foreign countries, which might have had some historical basis in medical fact, but in highly developed late-twentieth-century mainland Europe was more like a prejudice, xenophobia masquerading as common sense. Pea-tag guessed the reason for JJ’s reticence and soon dispelled this apprehension by telling him that it was spring water from the mountains, and that that he could personally guarantee its quality because they had laid the pipes themselves, or made them. JJ didn’t quite understand. ‘This is ’ow we survive,’ Pea-tag said, and JJ wasn’t sure if he was referring to the life-giving properties of the water itself, or to the money that might be made by laying – or making – pipes.
Just beyond this trough, the road curved into the beginning of a deep cutting, the pale stone faces of which still bore the traces of the dynamite that had been used to blast it out: shot holes still visible, regularly spaced across the surface. They ducked off the side of the road and scrambled up a steep, scrubby slope, which eventually gave on to a gentler stony track, and continued its zigzagging climb for perhaps half a mile as the crow flew, but it may perhaps have been three or four times longer than that on foot.
At the brow of the hill was a standing stone, a menhir, the track beyond it leading off into the trees, and beyond that, looming in the distance, was a great pale cliff formed of what JJ could see – remembering school geography lessons – was an inverted ‘V’ of exposed sedimentary rocks. Before continuing along this path as it dropped down to La Fontaine-en-Forêt, they stopped and turned around to look back the way they had come. Far, far below, beyond the rolling and forested hills that gradually fell away to the south, lay Antibes. From this distant vantage point, the warm stone walls and terracotta rooftops of the ancient port town seemed to be bathed in a kind of crystal clarity that may have had something to do with the light or with the dry atmospheric conditions, but could also have been a product of Pea-tag’s very strong grass, which they had smoked back on the beach, and the effects of which JJ was still feeling. Somewhere down there, closer than Antibes, but hidden by the crest of these hills, was the huge construction site, a broad scar cutting through the landscape, where work continued – they could hear it – on the massive concrete viaduct that would carry the new autoroute above the streets of Cagnes-sur-Mer, connecting Nice and the Italian border to the east with Aix-en-Provence far to the west.
Standing here, the contrast between the two epochs felt almost palpable. The menhir marking not just the entrance to Pea-tag’s village, to La Fontaine-en-Forêt, but also – it seemed to JJ – a path to an earlier age of humankind. It was a way-marker in both space and time. JJ had read about ley lines, so he knew that this stone was just a nodal point on some royal road that linked it to the next menhir, wherever that was, or to a whole network of stones, but it was also a means of travelling back through the eyes of anyone who had ever gazed upon it, or reached out and touched it, as Pea-tag was now doing, and as thousands must have done since whoever it was had put it here for whatever unknowable reason. Stoned as he was, JJ found it incredible almost beyond belief to think that people would have walked this very path ten or more thousand years earlier. How many generations was that? His maths wasn’t good enough to work it out. He wondered if those hommes néolithiques – or hommes et femmes – had already learned to soak the new season’s leaves that they were able to gather for food at this time of year, and, if so, from whom might they have learned it?
Tapering slightly towards its apex, the menhir looked rather like the ones that Obelix threw in Asterix comics.
Pea-tag laid both hands flat against the stone. ‘Come, try it, man,’ he said. ‘You can feel the vibrations, non?’
‘Hang on,’ said JJ. ‘What was that you were just saying about the Miners’ Strike?’
15: SYLVIE (ANEMONE)
The bag of dandelion leaves, the pissenlit, that they had bought down in Cagnes-sur-Mer were destined to form part of a large supper for at least some of La Fontaine-en-Forêt’s current residents. A communal dining table was set upon a broad, stone-flagged and low-walled veranda, which was raised slightly above street level like a simple dais or stage. It could well once have been the ground floor of a house. On one side this veranda opened on to – and looked over – the small, cobbled square that formed the centre of the village, while at the back it gave on to a gorge, the depths of which were largely obscured by dense, deciduous forest. Above them, at one end of the village, towered the great cliff. The warm air was filled with hundreds or perhaps thousands of swooping, darting swifts, which feasted on the insects rising up from the forest below, following the insect swarms in a continuously unfolding and almost infinitely complex aerobatic display, screaming, clucking and screeching as they went. The noise created by so many birds was intense, and as JJ would discover it continued until dusk, when it would be replaced by the cries of more earthly, nocturnal creatures. Later, as JJ leaned on the veranda’s waist-high parapet to watch this incredible display, one of the small brown birds would seem to hang in the air next to him for a second or two, almost close enough to touch, certainly close enough to make a kind of inter-species eye contact, before suddenly plummeting down towards the treetops far below.
Beside the veranda, a steep set of steps led from the square down to some perilously narrow-looking terraces. One of these was the familiar dusty pétanque terrain that he’d seen from the train, for playing the French game of boules; the rest seemed to be under cultivation. Perhaps this was the source of Pea-tag’s home-grown. Sheltering the veranda in all weathers was a terracotta-tiled lean-to roof that projected over the steps and was supported along that side by three rough-hewn and age-blackened tree-trunk pillars, and by similarly ancient-looking joists that were set at their other ends into the stone wall of the adjacent two-storey building. Sockets and angles of various shapes and sizes that had been cut into the wood spoke of previous structural uses for each of these timbers.
Access to the veranda from the square was gained by a small stone step that led through a single open gateway – it looked like the original doorway – the threshold of which was just as worn as the doorsteps of all the other houses. Above this entrance, such as it was, a wooden board bearing the stencilled letters NOS RESTO had recently been attached to one of the beams.
Pea-tag bowed extravagantly, showing JJ through with a courtly flourish, as if to parody the actions of a waiter or a maître d’ in some more salubrious establishment: ‘Bienvenue, monsieur.’
A blackboard was fixed up on the one complete stone wall in Nos Resto, as if for a menu, or a list of the day’s specials. Instead it bore the mysterious phrase ‘Tridi 13 Ventôse CXCIII: Fumeterre’. Perhaps noticing JJ’s puzzlement, Pea-tag took a tatty almanac from one of his pockets and explained that it was today’s date, and something about living the revolution. He said that fumeterre was the particular type of herb that today’s date celebrated, and that the calendar was republican. It reduced everything to the same level by honouring the quotidien – the prosaic, or the everyday – instead of kings and queens and gods. JJ didn’t really understand, but then he had grown up in the UK, where the word ‘republican’ was little more than convenient political shorthand for the IRA, so he simply shrugged and nodded as if that might cover the range of likely responses.
So Pea-tag and his friends had the whole place? Wow! But what kind of place was it? JJ wasn’t entirely sure about the naming conventions for human settlements, but as he was shown around he wondered whether La Fontaine-en-Forêt might be more hamlet than village, with its maybe twenty or so houses, several of which were ranged around this small central square, while the rest clustered along both sides of a narrow alley, La Petite Rue, which looped behind the single larger house that lay directly opposite the veranda. Unlike the other buildings, which were made of rough and rustic stone, this larger house was faced in smooth ashlar, its light-blue-shuttered windows surrounding a l
arger set of wood-panelled double doors that were more ornately constructed and embellished than the ‘Z’-braced, barn-style front doors gracing most of the other buildings.
In the centre of the square, and seemingly out of proportion to all of the other buildings, apart from what JJ was already thinking of as ‘the posh house’, was a large baroque-style fountain. A straight-sided pedestal of smooth stone that stood some ten feet high was topped with an ornate stone urn. Around the base of the pedestal, at the foot of each of its four faces, was a semicircular pool or bath, hip-high and with raised rims broad enough to sit on, the tops of which were polished smooth with use. Above each pool a continuous stream of clear, cold water gushed from one of four pewter-coloured swan-necked pipes, which reminded JJ of the spouts of some extravagant teapot. The pools themselves appeared to be drained by means of crescent-shaped overflows that were cut into the stone at the rear of each, perhaps joining beneath the central pedestal. Two of the baths were bisected, front to back, by parallel pairs of stout iron strips upon which buckets and other vessels might be placed to be filled, just like the smaller, more functional trough in which JJ and Pea-tag had bathed down on the Route de Grasse. From the base of the frontmost trough, a shallow gully crossed the square, and beneath the grilles that covered it JJ could see the restless reflections of light twisting on the surface of the rushing black water as it ran away to who knew where.
