Jeremy Josephs - A Vineyard in the Dordogne--How an English Family Made Their Dream of Wine, Good Food and Sunshine Come True

SHE WAS HOPING for a girl. Though when she thought about it more rationally Agns Bacco knew very well that she really ought not to be expressing any particular preference. For by the early spring of 1963 she had been hospitalized for a little over a month in Bergerac, a picturesque Dordogne town and a centre of French gastronomy. There, just a stones throw from the river that gives the region its name, she had been left with little choice other than to comply with her doctors orders not to stray from bed so long as her bleeding showed no signs of abating. She might not have been able to read and write, but the rather squat, dark-haired nineteen-year-old hardly needed reminding that the chances of her pregnancy ever proceeding to term were slender indeed. Yet the fact that the odds seemed to be relentlessly stacking up against her did not deter Agns Bacco in the least. For as long as she could recall she had dreamed of one day giving birth to a daughter. She therefore summoned up all her spirit, the only resource available to her, it seemed, and positively willed the baby within her womb to be well. A devout Catholic, she would while away the hours in hospital by repeatedly urging the good Lord to intervene on her behalf and bless her with the gift of a girl.

The following week Agnss husband, Joseph, five years her senior, came to an informal accord with the temporal powers entrusted with his wifes care. Since no miscarriage appeared to have taken place Agns would be allowed to return home provided she remained confined to bed for the duration of the pregnancy. That meant another seven months with her feet up plus one injection per day for each of those thirty-odd weeks. A little sorrowfully, they returned to their village of St Germain-et-Mons, ten kilometres away, where Joseph earned his keep as a manual worker in the vineyards of Philippe Van der Molen, a Frenchman of Dutch ancestry.

Joseph wasted no time in adjusting his daily routine to meet the new challenges ahead. Before long he was as adept with a needle as any of the physicians or nurses who would call upon his wife, and soon learned to dispense with their services altogether. Each day, at approximately 6 p.m., after a hard days labour in the vineyards but before the evening meal, Agns would reveal her rear end for her husbands ministrations. With increasing confidence and expertise he would select a buttock and inject Agns with the progesterone prescribed by the family doctor to help ward off the possibility of a miscarriage. For the time being this twin strategy of inaction and injection seemed to be successful, for Agnss belly appeared to be growing bigger with every week that passed.

Wherever he went and whatever he did, Joseph preferred to proceed at a sprightly pace. He was often to be glimpsed at work, hurrying between one row of vines and the next as if he had an urgent appointment to keep. There could be no doubt that he did the work of at least two men, a fact which not unnaturally endeared him to his employer. Yet Joseph seldom paused to assess himself in such a way; he was simply doing what he enjoyed most of all hard work out in the open. Short and stocky like his wife, he was endowed with an enormously powerful frame, while his face already bore deep lines carved out by years of physical labour in all weathers, giving him a much older appearance than that of a man only in his mid-twenties. A legacy of formative years spent in a hot climate, the sunshine still shone out from his dark-brown eyes.