Petit Cochon and May 8th.

Last week, we were on the terrace everyday with the sun shade up and the sun cream lashed. Cicadas chirruped. Bees buzzed in the Wisteria. The sun was hot and the butter melted. We raked the boule court and, with our lovely, if competitive visitors, were out every evening having a women against men tournament. (I don’t need to tell you who won)

Fortunately we’ve got a boule set with the rules, and as the week went by we began to get the idea and to improve. The clacking of the boules brought out our neighbour who leaned over the wall and watched for a while adding a little commentary. Probably fortunately, none of us could understand what he was saying and later he came down and we began a confused conversation about his petit cochon, (the tiny boule which the English call a Jack is called a little pig in France) - conversation which occasionally bordered on the risque, and seemed - bizarrely - to involve not eating pork while playing. For a time I thought this might be an old onomatopoeic French custom – e.g. you only eat bouef when playing boule and pork when playing pelote, kind of thing. But it turned out that the talk had slipped, unnoticed by me, into a discussion about Swine Flu. Such are the unexpected joys of having the linguistic understanding of a four year old.

A few days later, on the morning of May 8th, our neighbour was off to Tulle, the nearby town, wearing his medals, for one of the Victory day ceremonies that take place throughout France on that day. May 8th is a public holiday and, (apart from La Boulangerie, let’s not be ridiculous) all the shops and businesses are shut. Of course, May 8th is VE day in the UK, but not a holiday, not so noticed or marked. The war and its aftermath feels more powerful here, more real and immediate: terrible events happened in these small and local places, these towns and villages were occupied, people fought in these forests and hills.

There was a ceremony in the village, Madame le Maire led a small parade from the square to the war memorial where a wreath was laid and she read out a statement detailing the events of the war and also giving a message from President Sarkozy. She was careful to refer to Nazi Germany as the aggressors. There is much evidence here of the huge efforts to do away with bitterness between present day France and Germany. This year’s national focus was on the contribution of the African, particularly Moroccan, troups who landed in Provence after the D- Day landings in Normandy. All the French television news programmes showed Sarkozy surrounded by black and brown soldiers, as the French air force painted tricolour jetstreams on the sky over the Mediterranean behind him. Inevitably, one of the points of this display, is that, in today’s multi-racial France the President needs to be seen not to be racist or partial. As always, the past is enlisted to serve the needs of the present.

What struck us about the village ceremony was how ordinary and unceremonial it was. People shook hands when they arrived in the square. There were about thirty people, a few of them men who may have been old enough to have

been young men in the war. Nobody tried to

organise anybody else, there was no formal marching, no agitation about ceremonial or precedence. There was just the laying of the wreath, a small speech and then silence.

I thought of my father who, in photos, looked happy and fit before the war, who joined the air force in 1938, then came back from Italy in 1946, haunted and damaged by whatever it was he did or saw there. He died young after many nervous breakdowns and illnesses. Wars can kill slowly as well as quickly.

Some people describe my generation as the lucky generation, in Western Europe at least, not knowing war except for limited places, experiencing prosperity and freedom. We sat on the terrace today in the sun and wondered what we had done to deserve this luck, this peace and calm? Neither of our families ever went abroad except in the war. Both of our fathers died young, mine in his forties, R’s in his fifties. The war like an earthquake in their lives. A coup de foudre. Shocking. Thrilling. Never recovered from. My father would have been 91 at his next birthday, a few years younger than our French neighbour who survived Dachau. I’d like to reach back and pluck my Dad out of the past, bring him to sit here in on this warm terrace, to play boule with le petit cochon, to drink wine in the sun. We have done absolutely nothing to deserve this.

C. E. L. 1919 - 1965