Celia Brayfield - Deep France : A Writer’s Year in LA France Profonde

In memory of Glynn Boyd Harte

On the Road

Its after 2 a.m. and Im driving through the Landes. And driving through the Landes. And driving through the Landes. And driving through...

Sometimes I think the Bearnais arranged the creation of this wilderness to make sure that northerners would despair, turn back and leave them alone. If it wasnt dark, the landscape would be putting me in a trance. Flat, covered in pine trees, ferns and heather, a dark forest stretching away to infinity all around us. The Sleeping Beautys best defence.

My daughter Chloe is dozing in the passenger seat. About an hour ago, I missed our turning off the ring road and we went round Bordeaux twice. She woke up long enough to point out that wed driven off the Pont Francois Mitterrand before. The first time I said improving parentlike things, like: See, the French are happy to name a big public monument after a politician. You cant imagine anyone in Manchester wanting to name a bridge after a Prime Minister, can you? Shes gone back to sleep now. Shes taken a few days off from university to help me start this adventure.

On the back seat are our three cats. They stopped yowling about six hundred miles ago, but they are not happy. Tarmac well, guess what, hes the black one is sitting on top of the cat boxes keeping watch; he knows hes the only being in the household with a decent sense of responsibility. Piglet, the long-haired tabby, is sitting in his box with outrage on his whiskers. His mother, the Duchess, has crammed herself under the seat. Shes a James Bond cat, a white Persian. Long pedigree, no brains. Everybody warned me not to have one.

Behind the cats is the rest of my life. A box of books, the computer, the duvet, a bag of clothes. Youre a writer, you can work anywhere. Can I really? People have been saying that to me for years. Now Im going to find out if theyre right. Nobody, but nobody, warned me not to do this except a writer friend of far greater distinction, whose eyes widened in horror when I said I was taking off without a contract for my next book. Apart from him, the hardest part of the last few weeks has been dealing with the universal envy which I provoked every time I said, Im going to live in France for a year.

Friends, family, neighbours, colleagues. The bank manager, my accountant, the estate agents whove rented out our house, the lady in the dry cleaners, the guys in the garage. They gave me back my elderly Daihatsu jeep with a card: Have a good time in France, Easy on the wine. Thats how the average Brit thinks of France. A place to have a good time. With wine.

I could be having a better time. Im tired. Ive driven hundreds of miles and I dont actually like driving. Ive packed our possessions into a container and turned our home into a neutrally decorated wood-floored rental property. Ive said tearful goodbyes to my friends, a whole ocean of emotion poured into the few stress-free moments we could find in our diaries.

Ive lived on the same page of the London AZ since I was twenty. Page 73, with a few short excursions to Page 74. I used to love living in London. Now Im tired of the crackheads and the chewing gum on the pavements. Ive been a writer since I was twenty; I still love writing but after eight novels and a mountain of non-fiction, a girl gets cabin fever. And Ive brought up Chloe alone for twenty-two years. From the tooth fairy to the tuition fees, and beyond thats a long time to do two peoples jobs. Ive been thinking, I said to her about six months ago. I could rent our house out and go and live in France for a year. What do you think? Go for it, Mum, she said at once. Now maybe shes not so sure.

The guys in the garage, bless em, have buggered the electrics so the stereo doesnt work. Somewhere in Portsmouth I bought a blue plastic battery radio that looks like a foetal Dalek. Its hissing at me on the dashboard while it tries to pick up a French station. I dont think Im starry-eyed, but thats something you never know about yourself until its too late. Will I be able to live with French radio for a year?

Im driving south, south, south. My destination is almost as far south as you can go in France. Just half a valley away from the Basque Country, an hours drive from the Spanish border. Deep France in the geographical sense and Deep France in the cultural sense. La France profonde, the France of fields and farms, of little villages and ruined castles, of vineyards, of cows and sheep, chickens and ducks, corn and cabbages. Actually, the Barn is not noted for its cabbages, but for garlic and Juranon wine, the national symbols.

What am I looking for? What everyone, French or otherwise, has always looked for in Deep France: a simpler, more authentic life. Im a modern Marie Antoinette, I want to play at being a shepherdess with freshly washed sheep in my model village. Well, it would be nice to grow artichokes and keep chickens, anyway. The key to my new home is heavy in my bag, a great iron key about eight inches long. A real key to a real life.

I am also looking for the spirit of the land. For ten years Ive been visiting this small and overlooked corner and it seems as if Ive never been here long enough. The mountains always call me. Of course, when you get into the mountains, the peaks beyond them are still calling. Already, Im ten years older than when I first saw the snow shining in the far distance beyond the green hills, and if I dont set off now, maybe Ill never get there.

Finally, the never-ending Landes gives way to the undulating hills of the Chalosse. Outside Dax, we pass the statue of the carteur, the cruelty-free Landais matador who stands weaponless in the path of a charging bull. The road from here is a Roman road, leading straight as a die into the darkness. I turn off and drive through the sleeping village of Ossages, with its commanding church spire and the house of the friends who introduced me here, but theyre away now so were on our own.

Between the Chalosse and the Barn is the valley of the Gave de Pau, a broad green river that rises in the Pyrenees, above Lourdes. The river has been joined by the motorway and the Route Nationale 117, which we cross at a village called Puyoo, built a hundred years ago as a railhead and dormitory for the rope-making industry. The rope-works sign, Tressage de Puyoo, is still painted on a wall by the side of the bridge.

Now were in the Barn, though it hardly shows. Thick patches of mist lie across the road as it sweeps up a steeper hill, then descends to the roundabout with a fountain outside Salis-de-Bearn. Nobody about. No police running a stakeout for ETA terrorists or drunk drivers, no customs officers hoping to catch a foreign truck importing drugs from Morocco. Its November, thank God, so the begonias on the roundabout have been removed. The roundabouts of France, the nadir of municipal art, the proof that not all the clichs are right, that everything French is not automatically more stylish than everything not-French.

Chloe is awake now. I turn off, and we pass an avenue of plane trees. They look too young to have been planted to shade Napoleons army, about the same size as those painted more than a hundred years ago, by Monet and Pisarro, up in the north, safely close to Paris. No Impressionist ever ventured this far, not even Van Gogh.

Three deer leap across the road in front of us. The road starts wavering, pottering, winding, climbing, twisting. I can feel that its running along the spine of the hills, following an old shepherd path chosen for the best sight of the sheep. The night is now absolutely dark and starless.