by Mary Moody
I became more relaxed and accepting of my body shape in my early twenties, but the first time I ever really thought I looked beautiful when unclothed was when I was about six months pregnant with Miriam. I caught a glimpse of myself in the full-length mirror on my way to the shower, and saw my curved hips and belly in quite a different light. It took my breath away. I actually had breasts for the first time, and pale pink nipples that were full and ripe. David also adored my new pregnant shape, and constantly stroked my rounded tummy and full bottom and told me I was gorgeous. I believed him, and this probably helps explain why I took to pregnancy and motherhood with such great enthusiasm. At last my body was doing what it was shaped for. Not parading for the lustful eyes of surfies at the beach but carrying a child. The fact that my body then performed brilliantly during the birth, doing all that was expected without complication, also lifted my self-esteem and confirmed my belief that my body was finally serving me well.
In my late twenties and thirties, when I became seriously involved in gardening, my body became strong and flexible in a way that again was very satisfying. Years of lifting toddlers onto my hips, chopping wood for the fires, lugging great bags of manure to the garden beds, digging and barrowing and working in all weathers gave my body a power and strength. In spite of my fairness, my arms and legs became quite tanned and tough, although I now protected my freckled face with lots of creams and broad-brimmed hats. The breasts I had developed during my various pregnancies and when feeding my babies didn’t disappear or turn into pancakes, instead they remained quite firm and perky.
My mother had always been and always remained very thin. I suspect it was her terrible smoking habit that caused her appetite to dwindle more and more as she grew older. As a young woman in photographs she always seemed unnaturally thin to me, with dark circles under her eyes. And the few grainy snapshots of her when we were little, especially those taken after baby Jane died, show a woman who looks as though she has just been released from a concentration camp. For me, my mother’s thinness was a legacy of her ill-health and the hardship of her life, and so I never aspired to be like that. I was happy in mid life to have my own shape, but to be fit and well-muscled at the same time.
In France, without my normal busy physical schedule, the weight that I gain so rapidly is more flab than muscle. I don’t like the appearance of the extra chin in the mirror, and I hate the belly that I can’t suck in, no matter how hard I try. I just don’t feel comfortable in my own skin, which is why I am trying so valiantly to shed at least a couple of kilos here and there. I am gradually accepting that while I lead this carefree lifestyle I am bound to be well-padded. It’s such a small price to pay for so much fun. Then through careful observation I realise that French women simply don’t eat the same quantities that I have been so happily devouring. They do participate in every course, but always have a modest serving of each. Not several large ladles of soup and second helpings of pommes frites. So I gradually modify my eating habits and discover that I am more than full at the end of every meal. Not groaning with overload as I get up from the table, as I have done before.
I am certainly thankful that in our family eating food has always been a pleasurable activity, and not one tinged with guilt or anxiety about weight gain. Several young contemporaries of my daughter have had serious problems with eating disorders and I wonder if their own mothers’ attitudes to food and eating have had a negative effect. Miriam and I both love our food and derive a lot of pleasure from planning and cooking meals for the family. She too has weight that fluctuates, but seems to have a healthy attitude towards her shape.
For the entire time I stay in Villefranche I keep up my daily walking regimen. It not only helps clear my head of cobwebs caused by too much of the high life, it introduces me to the tremendous range of local flora that crowds the roadsides. The small things you see when walking simply can’t be appreciated from a car, especially if you are the driver. As I walk from the centre of the village the views on all sides are a delight. Fields crammed with maize and old farmhouse buildings in various stages of decay. There is always a strong fragrance and looking downwards I see my feet are crushing plants along the roadside. There are wild mints, including corn mint and pennyroyal, which release abundant aromas when I crush them between my fingers or walk on them. There are also several dainty purple-blue salvias, including Salvia pratensis or meadow clary, which produces tall slender flowerheads that pop up through other wild weeds. Wild yarrow is growing everywhere, with its dainty, small white flowerheads and ferny foliage that forms a richly fragrant mat at ground level. Other perfumed delights I stumble across on my walks include wild basil which has bright pink blooms and foliage with an intense aroma; various wild thymes including the common Thymus praecox; clumps of sweet-smelling marjoram; and sprays of callamint with mauve flowers and aromatic foliage. As I walk I train my eye to pick out plants that at home would be part of a perennial border or formal herb garden; it’s often hard to distinguish them growing in the wild because they are much smaller and often jostle for space between grasses and other wild plants. Blackberry, such a noxious weed at home, is in its element here and grows down every country laneway, offering rich sweet fruits to be gathered in summertime. It’s a nuisance here too, of course, because it catches and tears your clothes as you walk by and can easily invade the precious fields and meadows if not kept in check. But I must keep in mind that here they are not an introduced menace, instead a natural plant that just needs to be kept under control. Common buddleia is also omnipresent, having found its way here from China some centuries ago; it springs up against every wall and in every crevice, and has a charming habit of attracting butterflies by the hundred when in full bloom.
Over several months of walking I identify dozens of wild plants in flower, and my gardening friend, Pam, lends me several excellent English-language reference books to help me confirm my guesses at the species. I gather large bunches of those in flower and those with distinctive perfumes, and take them back to my small room where they fill the warm night air with a rich mix of aromas. There are various evening primroses (Oenothera sp.) with tall stems and blowsy yellow flowers, which I am surprised to learn are all of American origin, having arrived some hundred or more years ago and followed their habit of spreading like wildfire across the countryside. There are mallows (Malvea and Lavatera) everywhere, in gardens as well as along the country lanes, and they are a charming addition to the natural landscape with their profuse pink, white or mauve flowers. I also identify several species of Silene, commonly known as campion or catchfly, and am fascinated to read that there are eighteen species, quite a few native to this region. I love their inflated calyxes, which in some instances dominate the petals to become the main feature of the plant. As the season progresses the plants in flower change, and in later summer I will find wild sweet peas, the showy white angelica, and banks of purple heather; these I try to identify in the more comprehensive guides without success, but eventually I track them down in a local French wildflower guide as Erica carnea, or Bruyère des Neiges, which translates as heather of snow, because it originates in the Alpes Maritimes. It’s a truly beautiful small plant which has naturalised down grassy roadside banks, generally in half shade.
When I finally move from Villefranche it’s to be near the woods, and I anticipate many more walks and botanical discoveries. But my walking days are seriously curtailed. It’s not through laziness, but because of the start of the hunting season which makes casual country walking, especially in the woods, a hazardous experience. I am still able to take sunny walks around the fields that lie on the south side of the house, but any sauntering into the woods or even along the side of the road is risky; the hunters are constantly stalking prey, and all too often mistake innocent walkers for a wild boar or deer. My nervousness about the anarchistic way in which the hunts are conducted drives me back inside as the weather cools, except for Wednesdays when the hunt is forbidden. This is the one weekday when children are home f
rom school, and previous mishaps have demonstrated that children and hunters on the loose at the same time are not a good combination.
22
ONCE JULY AND AUGUST ARE over and most of the summer holidaymakers have gone back home to England or Holland or Paris, my chances of renting something slightly larger at a reasonable rate suddenly improve. There’s talk among our friends about the opportunities to do some housesitting in the autumn and winter because so many part-time residents leave their country abodes deserted for six months at a stretch, and are more than happy for someone to keep an eye on things as long as they contribute towards the running costs and maintain the garden. But the one strong possibility on that score falls through at the last moment when the owners hint that they’d also like quite a substantial rental—something I can’t really justify given my limited budget. Realistically I don’t need a four-bedroom house, especially if it is going to cost a fortune.
My friend Carole from Madame Murat’s comes to the rescue. She and Bob have friends at Pomarède—Olav and Hannah from Denmark—who have inherited a small stone cottage in the woods from Olav’s father. They can only visit the property four or five weeks a year, four in the summer and one in autumn. During the last autumn while the house was lying empty, their gardening tools were stolen from the barn, so they are delighted at the prospect of somebody minding it for three months. The rental is still within my budget—2,000 ff ($500) a month plus electricity, although I will need to get firewood for the open fires, for it’s certain to start getting rather cold in October.
Pomarède is on the way to the shopping township of Prayssac, and it’s a route I travel often, whizzing past Madame Murat’s popular restaurant. Lucienne also lives in the village, which is little more than a collection of old stone houses, a church and a mairie (town hall) which is in the process of having an halle de fête (festival hall) added for the regular summer parties and celebrations. No matter how small, all the villages seem to want their own hall as a sort of status symbol—some of them are quite grand and would have been costly—even if they are only used half a dozen times a year. The new hall in Pomarède looks as though it will tower over all the other buildings, and it’s a cause of some controversy within the village. My little house in the woods is only a couple of minutes from the village as the crow flies, but feels much further away because it is reached through such a series of winding back roads that it takes a few visits to memorise. Once you leave the main road and start weaving through these tiny country lanes you get a sense of being in ‘deep’ France.
Carole drives me through these winding country lanes to find the little cottage which is completely hidden from the road by dense chestnut woods. There is a cleared field out in front, but on three sides it is overwhelmed by tall trees that cast long dark shadows in the autumn light. The house is a typical small farming or woodcutter’s cottage: one main room with a vast open fireplace where once all the cooking would have been done and a stone sink for washing up, and one smaller room plus a loft where the tobacco crops once grown so widely in the area would have been dried. To one side is an annexe with two very small rooms that would have been the original pigsties. This area has been enclosed with a log cabin style extension, and the pigsties have been converted into a kitchen and a bathroom. So I’ve gone up-market. From a kitchen tucked under the stairs and a loo inside a wardrobe to a couple of rustic renovated pigsties. Even though this little house is isolated and could become gloomy during the colder months, the fact that it has a garden and a place to sit out and enjoy what remains of the balmy weather is enough to convince me it will be just perfect for my needs. Having lived in a township and then in the countryside I will have experienced the best of both worlds: village life with bars and restaurants and stray cats, and country life with open fires and wild woods on all sides.
However, before packing up and leaving my small room in Villefranche-du-Périgord I decide to throw a party to thank all my new friends for their unstinting hospitality. It can be quite embarrassing being asked out for dinner repeatedly, and not being in much of a position to return the favour. With a kitchen so small and inadequate, a tiny table, and a toilet inside a cupboard, it’s hardly a suitable venue for elaborate dinner parties. But a farewell cocktail party with nibbles and wine should be well within my scope, so I pick a day and start making up a guest list. To my surprise I realise there are more than thirty-five people I would like to invite, and I wonder how on earth I am going to squeeze them into such a small space—with only three chairs and a bed for sitting down. Someone also warns me that some of the people on my list don’t necessarily mix socially, that there are various groups within the group and that I had best not have them all together. I decide to totally ignore this bit of advice, because I don’t intend throwing two parties just to satisfy some quirky social hierarchy. They will all have to cope, and so will I.
My guest list includes an eclectic bunch of new friends ranging in age from three to eighty-six. The three-year-old is the granddaughter of Jock’s part-time neighbours, Andy and Sue Greif who are also friends of the Barwicks and who have been drawn to the region after making several visits on holiday. In their former lives Andy was a colonial police officer posted to Tonga, Kenya and the Caymans, and after retirement they tried hard to settle down in the UK but found the weather quite impossible after decades of tropical living. They now divide their time between France and Spain—winters in the sparkling heat of Alacante, and summers in the Lot at the time of year when Spain becomes impossibly hot and overcrowded with tourists. They are a good-looking couple who love having people in for drinks, an impromptu game of boules or a meal in the garden. Sue is an accomplished artist and also an animal lover—she has adopted two gorgeous village cats in Spain and brought them to St Caprais for the summer. Their daughter is visiting from England along with her two small children, and will still be here for my party.
The eighty-six-year-old is Godfrey, a fellow resident of Villefranche, also English and also retired. His wife Joyce, affectionately known around the traps as ‘Joyce the Voice’, is one of those people who cannot abide a nanosecond pause in the conversation, and who has taken it upon herself to make sure that a social gaffe such as a pause for breath never occurs. Her jaw is like lightning, zapping up and down and filling the air with all sorts of information that is of no interest to those unfortunate enough to be the target of her tongue. Her favourite subjects are her family and her friends, very few of whom anyone has ever actually met, mostly only known by name, but Joyce does not let this stop her. Her penchant for detail means you must also be told about the offspring of her family and friends, and in intimate detail. Especially their academic achievements and personal triumphs. It’s exhausting.
I first encounter Joyce at a drinks party. No more than five feet one inch, she is grasping her wine and nailing her victim with nonstop details of her grandson’s latest examination results. She then talks to me for twenty minutes about her sister’s husband’s niece’s brilliant career and after it I am left wondering who the hell she is talking about. At the communal lunches and dinners people fight openly about who has to sit next to Joyce, and it is generally organised so that unsuspecting newcomers take the honours.
Godfrey, on the other hand, maintains an air of quiet irritation combined with a certain resignation. After a few glasses of wine, however, he starts taking swipes about her verbal dexterity, and if she’s in earshot, things can get lively indeed.
‘My two worst problems in life are being eighty-six and being married to Joyce,’ he once whispers in my ear, but not very effectively because he’s deaf and tends to shout.
‘What was that you said, Godfrey?’ says Joyce, having heard every syllable. ‘Very funny, I must say. I hope YOU find him amusing, my dear.’
Even though Joyce can be exasperating, as a couple they can be good value and I really want to invite them along to my party, so I call in at their house unannounced late one afternoon. What I intend as a quick visit is so
exasperating, I almost wish I hadn’t come.
‘It’s on Wednesday the tenth. Six pm. Bring your own glass.’
Quite simple I would have thought. But first a cup of tea then Joyce consults her diary. An opportunity to expound on the intricacies of her life. She begins two weeks ahead of my proposed party and tells me about the visitors she is expecting on the twenty-fourth.
‘Godfrey’s nieces are coming for four days, or is it five? Is it five, Godfrey? I can’t quite read what I’ve put down here. They’re coming from Canada, of course, because their parents went there in 1940. She was a brilliant girl, of course, and could have done a lot better if things had been different, and he was a scientist of some note. They lived there for twenty-three years before moving to the Middle East where the children went to school. Well only the youngest, Brian, the others were at college and later they went on to a special university, of course, because they could speak three languages, and her sister also had three children and the last one was a girl. She said later that if she had known it would be a girl she wouldn’t have bothered because the boys were both so good, you know. And the girl was hard work. Although I think one of them had motor problems. Motor problems, wasn’t it, Godfrey? Anyway they are coming from Geneva and it will take about nine hours, it’s a long day, and my problem is how to get all the beds changed because they will overlap with Jeremy. And he never says how long he’s staying and I have to organise the beds because then there’s Leo and his friend Joe who are staying in an old house in Brieve with eighteen friends. They’ve just finished their Bach exams and Leo did very well, which was hard for him because he took French and after all those years at the other college he found things very hard indeed.’
