by Tony White
‘Are you okay?’ he asked.
‘Oui, merci,’ she said, dusting herself off slightly, then leading the way around to a small overgrown yard off La Petite Rue, not twenty paces from her front door. It was densely packed with brambles, and Sylvie pointed across the vegetation to the small and windowless building with its arched double door. It looked like a stone shed, really, or an outhouse, and it fronted on to this yard. ‘Voici,’ she said, ‘la boulangerie!’
There was a familiar, funny face painted across the double doors in faded violet paint: a big-nosed cartoon character peering over a wall.
‘Kilroy was here?’ JJ asked.
‘Ah, oui, American soldiers must have stay ’ere at the end of the war to make R and R,’ said Sylvie. ‘When we arrive, he was everywhere. Et aussi, we found some slot machine, you know? A pinball and some ninepin? Abandonné, yes? In one of the ’ouses. They must have ’ad to leave very quick, but you know they would ’ave ’ad to bring the pinball machine up ’ere on the back of a donkey!’
This two-bit shed wasn’t at all what JJ had been expecting the bakery to look like. Hungry as he was, in his mind’s eye he’d seen a magical-looking shop-window display of baguettes and tarts, nameless sweets and savouries, croissants and doughnuts, the works. Instead Sylvie was showing him the padlocked door of a shed. ‘Je ne comprends pas,’ he said, and not for the first time. ‘This doesn’t look like a bakery. Is that the mystery?’
‘Oh, it’s a terrible story, Joe. Monsieur Houlette tell it to Victor one time. This was the bakery. Look, there is the chimney. During la Seconde there were still a few people living here. Those who were too old to fight, some widows with children whose fathers were never coming back. The baker, he had remained here only out of loyalty to the commune, because he felt useful, and he knew that he could help to feed the ones who were left. But when the Italian occupation collapse, the Nazis move in and occupy this whole region. And when he hears that they ’ave reached Grasse, that they will be here in less than thirty minutes, he decides that he ’as ’ad enough: he will never bake bread for the Nazis. He just stop what he was doing, right there. He switch off the oven, hang up his apron and close the bakery, locking the door behind him when he go, just like you see it now. No one has been in there ever since. They have just let them grow. What do you call this in English?
‘Brambles,’ said JJ. They were chest-high. ‘Or blackberries.’
‘Oui, “black berry”. So now it is like a memorial.’
‘Didn’t he come back after the war?’ JJ asked.
‘No, so maybe he go home and get his gun, the one he use to hunt the wild boar when he was young, but he realise he is too old to go up into the mountain, you know, and fight avec la Résistance, so he turn the gun on himself instead and blow his brains out.’
18: PLANTOIR (DIBBLE)
Gradually JJ got to know the various members of the small community at La Fontaine-en-Forêt a little better. Milo was a Parisian and of indeterminate age – though obviously a few years older than JJ, perhaps twenty-five? – handsome, and with the ruddy, outdoorsy face of a farmer, and that great Roman nose, but skinny, tanned and perpetually filthy. He had a mini-van – a rust-bucket of a Citroën, bought for a snip, a farmer’s box van with a roof rack, the kind you’d see selling produce by the side of the road – which he kept in the village car park at La Fontaine-lès-Vence. Whenever anything or anyone needed running down to Nice or Antibes, or if paraffin or butane cylinders needed collecting, Milo was the one to do it. And with JJ staying at La Fontaine-en-Forêt, Milo now had an assistant to hand, more or less whenever he needed one. JJ considered helping Milo out in this way to be a form of rent, payment in kind to the commune.
There was always something that needed fetching and carrying: whether it was picking up sacks of clay down in Nice for the potters in Tourrettes or La Fontaine-lès-Vence, collecting a job lot of gardening tools – spades and trowels, dibbles, rakes, that kind of thing – from Mme Valériane at the hardware store in La Fontaine-lès-Vence, or delivering the special day-old cheeses to all the local shops on behalf of whichever goat farm up in the mountains. Later, Élise would tell him that Mme Valériane had once been a famous model for the painter Amedeo Modigliani.
Milo enjoyed the work, and thus made it enjoyable for everyone else. He told JJ that the variety – of load and destination – made up for the monotony of driving. He could probably have made a living at this too, if he stayed here for long enough or if he ever considered the notion of actually charging people anywhere near the going rates for these jobs. It wasn’t that they didn’t want to pay him, nor that he lacked financial nous, rather that the whole concept of business was anathema to him. He made enough to simply treat this as a spare time job, something he could do just for pocket money when he was here, a way to keep the van in juice.
JJ enjoyed sitting in the passenger seat, ears popping from the descent, as they criss-crossed the Sud, from Biot to Grasse, from Cannes to the Cap, which was French for ‘Cape’ – as in the coastal feature, rather than, as back home, JJ and his friends’ parent-defying rhyming slang for marijuana: Cape of Good Hope – but by which Milo might variously mean the Caps d’Antibes, d’Ail, Bénat or Ferrat.
But Milo was a bit of a stoner too, and a couple of times they went along to Fréjus, two hours’ drive along the coast. On those occasions, Milo told his English helper, ‘Désolé’ – sorry – but these were heavy people that JJ would not like to meet, and who would most likely not want to meet him either. He was a stranger, after all. JJ was cool with this; he didn’t mind. He was happy enough to sit and have a cigarette and a coffee in the sun for as long as it took, while his mate drove off to meet his connection from the airbase and take delivery of whatever had just come in fresh from Algiers.
In dirty overalls and carrying his trusty socket set, Milo could have passed for a mechanic stopping by to repair a tractor. But later he opened the toolbox with a grin to show JJ the massive slab of hash – a fine, blonde double-zero – that fitted beneath the moulded plastic interior. That day they took a detour to Roquebrun, a mountain near Fréjus that was as red as the cliffs on the South Devon coast, if mountain was the right word for a single outcrop of this kind. Victor the potter would have a chemical and geological explanation – JJ made a note to ask him later – but seeing this great red rock also gave JJ a twinge of nostalgia for home, driving down to Padstow in his parents’ old forest-green Rover 2000 TC. He could practically smell the sun on the cream leather upholstery.
Milo seemed to know people wherever they went. Once, as JJ had been unloading clay outside one of the little potteries in La Fontainelès-Vence, Milo had said hello to a woman passer-by before disappearing with her into a neighbouring house for half an hour, leaving JJ to finish the unloading. ‘That is my ex, Frédérique,’ he shrugged later, by way of explanation, as they walked up the track towards La Fontaine-en-Forêt. ‘But don’t tell Élise, oui?’
JJ shook his head.
‘I try to give her up, but I cannot. Frédérique, she give the best oral, you know?’
Another time, on the way to a job in Saint-Paul, a sudden torrential downpour that had rolled noisily in from the sea meant they had to pull up and shelter in the lee of the old stone church in Tourrettes-sur-Loup for half an hour. There had been little they could do but roll up the windows and laugh at the severity of the fusillade pounding on the Citroën’s thin tin roof. From his passenger-side window, JJ had watched the rain dissolve the tracing-paper confetti that had been left from the previous Saturday’s wedding. The storm stopped as suddenly as it had started, the heavy artillery on the roof dwindling to a gentle pit-a-pat, and then sunshine, but roads had briefly turned to rivers, and they had had to drive carefully through the mud that had been left along the old Route de Provence.
Milo was not just useful with his hands, he was good company, and JJ enjoyed bouncing around the mountain roads talking politics as they went, denouncing this bigwig or that tyrant. Milo
talking about the work he did on Greenpeace expeditions – ‘They need the mechanic as much as the biologist or the oceanographer, non?’ – or extolling the virtues of Petra Kelly and the Greens in Germany, with their creed of non-violence, social justice, ecological awareness and grassroots democracy, talking about the artist Joseph Beuys and his Damascene conversion from fighter pilot to activist, or listening to Brecht and Weill on the van’s tinny radio and cassette player.
Until Milo had introduced him to it, JJ had never heard of The Threepenny Opera, nor even The Beggar’s Opera on which it was based. But he knew his Bowie. And although The Doors’ version had not been collected on the one Greatest Hits record of theirs in his collection, he knew their version of the ‘Alabama Song’ too. So there was at least one track that he could join in on. These were carefree times: he and Milo, the van’s sliding doors open to the warm spring air, singing along at the tops of their voices as they barrelled down the mountain towards Cagnes-sur-Mer. Even knowing the politics – once Milo had explained that these were left-wing songs – it felt subversive and punky to be driving around the South of France listening to songs like ‘Mack the Knife’ in the original. Older people would turn in shock, some deep-seated animus aroused, unsurprisingly, by the sound of the raucous German voices. Even at a distance of forty years, the Second World War and the Nazi occupation still felt very close: just a Place de la Libération, a derelict bakery or a bomb site away.
19: PRIMEVÈRE (PRIMROSE)
Milo and JJ stopped in Vence on their way back up the mountain. Parking up on the steep slope outside the Auberge des Seigneurs, they first bought some lemons and a huge, flat lettuce from a stall by the side of the road.
Milo went to the fishmonger in the old walled town to see what was fresh in, sending JJ over the road to get the bread.
As he queued to buy baguettes to take back to La Fontaine-en-Forêt for the communal supper, JJ thought again of that terrible story of the village bakehouse that had been locked and deserted since the occupation – the story of suicide rather than surrender – and of the abandoned oven within. He had been trying to visualise this, imagining great hemispherical steel bowls for mixing the dough, proving and drying racks, the oven; he didn’t have much of a clue. But what if they could clean it up and get it working again? JJ couldn’t act unilaterally, that much was clear. He would have to get the approval of the commune, but why not? They could be self-sufficient in bread, sell the surplus from Milo’s van by the roadside, as seemed to be the way around here. He would raise the subject on the way back to the village and see what Milo thought.
‘Blanchaille!’ said Milo, handing JJ a large plastic bag of small fish as they got in the van. Then: ‘Hey, do you like Elvis Costello? You know, one time I ’ad the ticket to see Elvis Costello playing in Nice. I really love ’im at that point. And it was the strangest thing, you know, because on the day of the concert I was quite excited, yes, and then suddenly I bump into him by Les Pêcheurs in Antibes, eating a plate of blanchaille and singing in front of the camera. And I am, like, “What? This is crazy, man!” And then maybe one hour later, I am right ’ere in Vence, and I cannot believe but I see ’im and ’is band again! This time they are dancing over there by le point de vue, with the Baou de Vence in the background. I realise a year later when I see it on TV that they were filming the pop video for that song ‘I Can’t Stand Up for Falling Down’, do you know it? Man, it was so funny. Like I could not escape from Elvis Costello!’
As Milo started the engine, JJ punched the ‘Play’ button on the cassette player in the dashboard. They had been listening not to Elvis Costello, but to ‘Reel 1’ of Sandinista! – the other cassette box set in Milo’s glove compartment – which against all the odds was fast becoming JJ’s favourite album by The Clash. Now, leaving Vence on a road that followed the old railway line, they turned it up and sang along to the chorus of ‘Ivan Meets G.I. Joe’.
It would all depend upon who you asked, Élise said later, spearing the last few whitebait with her fork, then wiping a hunk of bread around her bowl to catch the last crisp and oily golden crumbs, the lemon juice. ‘You ’ave seen the ruins at Pont-du-Loup,’ she asked, ‘above Victor’s factory? Incroyable!’
They had been having a chinwag over supper, although JJ hadn’t quite got around to discussing his plan for the bakery. Victor and Pea-tag had been locked in some intense and heated conversation about French politics for what seemed like hours. Some names JJ recognised: Mitterrand, or Giscard d’Estaing. Unable to really join in, JJ had instead asked about the bombed viaducts, relics of the same railway whose route out of Vence they had traced earlier, and which from the 1890s and for sixty-odd years had meandered between Nice and Meyrargues, a couple of hundred kilometres to the west. Milo had pointed out some of these ruins – a cutting here, signal gantry there – on their travels to one errand or another. At Pont-du-Loup, all that remained of a once spectacular stone viaduct was a line of great broken-topped pillars that towered high above Victor’s factory, dwarfing his brick chimney. The viaduct’s delicate and elegant arches had been pulverised into several thousand tons of rubble – or building materials, depending on your point of view – that had been strewn across the valley floor far below.
‘Victor might say differently,’ said Élise, before telling JJ that, supposedly, when the Allies had retaken Grasse at the end of the Second World War, a small Nazi commando unit had escaped along the railway line under cover of night. Planting explosives as they went, they had destroyed the line behind them at several key points in an attempt to stymie the Allies’ advance. First of all here at Pont-du-Loup, then further down the mountain at Pascaressa, below La Fontaine-lès-Vence, then nearer the coast at Siagne.
In an impoverished post-war France – the story went – the cost of rebuilding these masterpieces of civil engineering was prohibitive, besides which the railway had never been particularly profitable, so the ruins were left where they stood. Some local stretches of the line had remained operational for a year or two, but by 1949 it was clear that it would never be worth rebuilding, and in 1950 the line finally closed for good, with some of the remaining staff redeployed to road construction or to working in the various local administrations. The former Ligne Central-Var, which had once carried Her Imperial Majesty the Queen-Empress Victoria to Grasse, was no more.
Victor joined in and took up the story. Others maintained, he said, that this had been the work of a local Resistance hero who had in fact been trying to delay the fleeing Nazis, to hamper their retreat rather than the Allies’ advance. But there was another theory too. The distinctly minority view, with not an iota of proof to back it up, was that it had actually been a home-grown Gunpowder Plot, a business-minded blitzkrieg carried out by some petit-bourgeois Baader-Meinhof, perhaps – an unlikely-sounding coalition of industrialists, the Resistance and organised crime – which had merely used the end of the occupation as cover to further the region’s and their own ends, cementing their own positions of power that had been acquired within the wartime status quo. The railway had been bombed, adherents to this particular conspiracy theory might whisper, as Victor was doing now, because it had been thought that, by doing so, more post-war investment could be forced into the area. Now, with the railway irreparably destroyed, the argument went, roads would have to be built, which would in turn lift land values and property prices, bring money and development opportunities to an area that had after all known more than its share of hard times. It sounded unlikely, Victor went on, but just because all of these things had subsequently happened, it didn’t mean the conveniently retrofitted conspiracy theory wasn’t true!
‘Really?’ asked JJ, incredulously.
‘You cannot really be such a choir-boy!’ said Victor, impatiently. ‘Who knows if it is true or not, but such things cannot be a complete surprise? It is so basic, non? Or I suppose you don’t ’ave corruption en Angleterre?’
JJ pushed his empty bowl away and shrugged his reluctant agreement in classroo
m French: ‘Oui, peut-être.’ He wondered if this might be a good time to bring up his idea to revive the bakery?
By now quite pissed, Victor was warming to his subject like some bar-room sot. ‘You English like so much being spanked by your Maggie Thatcher, but isn’t the real technique anglaise how you can appear to be both reasonable et supérieur: your fucking royal family! At least in France we see through that ethereal bullshit long ago! While behind the scenes you are in the gutter making deals with the devil, non? And fuck anyone who gets in your way, whether that is the colonies in your glorious British Empire or to sell out your own working class!’
JJ was shaking his head, pointing at his badge. ‘I didn’t sell out the working class! I supported the strike—’
But Victor was having none of it. ‘Listen,’ he said, interrupting. ‘We were just talking about Chirac, you know ’im? Ah, there is no reason why you would. He was Prime Minister of France a decade ago, and maybe he will be again – what do you English say about the bad penny? – but at least ’e ’as got one thing right, and maybe for ’im it is nothing more than a slogan, but it is true what he say, that economic laissez-faire is the lie, a cover for the terrible ultralibéralisme beneath. But you know, sometimes I feel it right ’ere’ – he pounded his broad chest – ‘ici, dans mes os – in my marrow – that perhaps all we Europeans are just the same kind of ’ypocrite. We are all just so many cog in the same imperialistic machine, non? Yes, even we in La Fontaine-en-Forêt! We think we are revolutionaries, but we are just petit-bourgeois Europeans! What are we doing that is any different? Look at the Norwegians. They are what? A superpower, but in the field of the peace and les droits de l’homme? That is their story! But is just a story, non? Do you think these politicians and oilmen in Oslo would not do anything, sell out anyone, to protect their export interests with whichever authoritarian regime it is, whether in China or anywhere? So, yes, certainly your miners are great heroes, and anyone but a fool would support them, so congratulations, mon ami, at least you are not a fool, but even they, the most powerful union, they could not vanquish l’ultralibéralisme.’
