Some People

Our nearest neighbours are a couple in their nineties. Monsieur is more sprightly than many forty year olds, hopping up and down steep steps and coming out to see whatever’s going on. Madame is less active, but both have been kind to us, giving us jam and a squash they grew in the garden, serving us cake and a glass or two of wine when we went to say hello.

We were told by a few people that he had been in the French Resistance, and at the time of D Day, during a major uprising which was crushed and punished by the SS, he was sent to Dachau, and only survived by the skin of his teeth. Many other resistance fighters were executed. In the resistance museum in the local town where this happened, there are photographs of some of these people hanging from the lamp posts that line the main street next to the river. We went to this museum in the autumn and were surprised to find the entrance in the corner of a scruffy yard and the museum itself, almost inaccessible at the top of three flights of steep wooden stairs. The exhibits pulled no punches, but there were no multi-media displays, no reconstructions, no airbrushing of this history for tourists. The two wars, with their memorials, are well remembered and carefully marked, locally. In November, in every small village we passed through, the Mairie or war memorial was decorated with flags and flowers. The local newspaper had photographs of numerous remembrance events. There are also many roadside shrines and markers, recording the struggles, victories, and losses of the resistance movement. It must be hard for local people, particularly the younger people, to keep remembering such horrors that happened here, in this place, on this ground, amongst, sometimes between, their own families, their grandpères and grandmères. So perhaps it makes sense that the museum is undeveloped, held in a black and white timewarp, almost hidden away. On the other hand the memorial at Le Champ des Martyrs, as it is called, is large and well-kept. The meanings of these contradictions are hidden from us, incomers, know-nothings.

In the river valley below the house, perched on the hillside , is a goat farm, a ramshackle, hippie-looking place with a dozen thin cats and a small pack of dogs which rush out barking, when you walk past. A man comes out and says, ‘lls ne sont pas méchants’ which is true and after a while they begin to whine and wheedle around our knees. The farm is surrounded by old machinery, abandoned cars, an ancient caravan with English number plates, vegetable plots hacked out of the terraced hillside. The goats plus a couple of sheep and some of the dogs come and go in a little jingly jangly herd up and down the roads and paths around the village and valley to find pasture, driven by some of the people who live in or around the farm: – a cool dude-looking bloke with John Lennon glasses and haircut, and a collection of other people: beautiful young women and men, who sit amongst the trees and grass, while the goats eat. In December I saw one young woman dressed only in layers of jumpers, thick skirts and Doc Martins, sitting on the frosty grass reading a book. The whole caboodle, place, people, animals, feels like a ghost of the seventies: all that collective-y, self-sufficiency, commune-y thing still going on here, golden girls and boys with blond dreadlocks and flowers in their hair, still dreaming in the garden.