Free A House in the Sunflowers by Ruth Silvestre

‘Watch,’ she said. Above the platform, at head-height, there was a line strung across the shed with a row of short metal rods suspended from it. She fixed the pronged hook to the bottom of the rod, lifted a sheaf of tobacco by its thick stem and, pushing the hook through it, suspended it upside down. When all four hooks were full we detached the whole thing and carried it across the shed to where Raymond waited with a rickety pulley. He hoisted them up gradually until there were five sets of four sheaves, one below the other. Now the reason for the great height of the shed was clear. As it began to fill with its canopy of dense green foliage it was like some exotic jungle or a set for a commercial for coconut bars.
    Again we sang. Raymond started it. ‘
Chantez Philippe, chantez Véronique
,’ he shouted. France had just won the Eurovision song contest with a surprisingly reasonable song about a child and a bird and I remember Véronique’s sweet small voice in that cool leafy interior while the sun blazed outside. Pushing the hooks through the tough stems made my fingers ache and, as I so often do, I watched Grandma and marvelled at the strength in her apparently frail body. Raymond grumbled about the low prices the dealers would give for the leaves when they were dry and taken to market.
    ‘How long will it take for them to dry?’ we asked.
    He shrugged. ‘
Ca dépend du temps
.’ It depends on the weather. The farmer’s universal cry, but we had already begun to appreciate that in this corner of France it was unpredictable.
    And, once again, we all ate round the farm table. So many meals we have enjoyed there. Claudette seems to think nothing of working three or four hours in the fields and then preparing six or seven courses for a dozen or more. Grandma scurries about to help her and everything is grown or prepared on the farm. And the melons! This summer was our first real gorging on the local, small, Charentais melon. Round, striped green and yellow with perfumed apricot flesh, once the season has started there is an abundance. Thatyear was particularly good and our friends kept us supplied.
    ‘They must be eaten,’ Claudette would insist, bringing us another basketful. We ate them at every meal – especially breakfast. What joy to find a
gourmandise
that did not fatten!
     
    ‘Les Fostaires’ left eventually for England and we began to realise that we too would soon have to close up our house in the sun and go back to London. The weather was still perfect. The evenings were shorter but it was still warm enough to eat outside and wait in the silent darkness for the first stars to appear. Sometimes a satellite would trace a path across the universe. How would we adjust?
    The list of things for Easter ’78 grew ever longer. In exchange for the original furniture in Bel-Air we had agreed to bring out, the next time we came, anoraks and sweaters for the children and a Black and Decker drill, all much cheaper in England. We planned and measured. Where could we put a bathroom when we could afford it? What about the kitchen? Washing up in a plastic bowl on a sloping camping table had lost its appeal. Should we make the small south-facing room off the main room into a kitchen? We could not decide.
    ‘Think about it,’ said M. Albert, the plumber, ‘and let me know when you come again next Easter.’ At thatmoment Easter seemed an awfully long way ahead.
    We closed the rickety shutters, just another thing that needed repairing, and we locked the door. Bumping down the track for the last time we hung out of the windows to get our last glimpse. Strange, we never did this when we left London.
    ‘
À la prochaine fois!
’

C HAPTER S IX
    Easter the following year was early and cold but there was no snow. We spent many hours collecting firewood, there being, alas, no floorboards left to burn. Now we understood the neat woodstacks adjoining local houses. Fortunately Matthew and Durrell enjoyed dragging dead trees