Free A Short Walk from Harrods by Dirk Bogarde

a trace of dribble on his chin, his dull eyes keen for the size and weight of the stone. The only other job he could manage was sweeping up with a long-handled broom. It took him hours.
    However, with the Troupe under the eagle eye of Monsieur Rémy, with me offering my untutored assistance, and Forwood on the terraces, we all managed very well. In time the dark pit with the stone sink in a corner was gutted and transformed into a spanking modern kitchen, a garage built against the north wall, a pond dug where the cesspit pipes had cracked and leaked into a green mossy bog, and the mistral finally deflected, anyway from the front terrace, by a stone and beamed
porte d’entrée
hung with a big oak door salvaged from the original kitchen.
    The house, as far as I could see, was secured. All that was needed were some trees. Although I had an hectare of ancient oak wood climbing up the hill at the back, there were no trees round the house itself, save for two old pollarded limes planted to shade the terrace. What I wanted was a frame ofcypress trees. I didn’t want to wait for them. I wanted instant timelessness.
    I got it. The trees were carted up from a nursery in the valley, thirty to forty years old, secure in enormous wooden tubs or, rather,
bacs.
These were then inched towards the pits, dug by Fraj and Plum-Bum and lined deep with manure and heavy gravel. The staves of the
bacs
were eased apart and the trees manually slid into place. I bought three originally. Monsieur Rémy insisted that three was the correct number for a Provençal house. Faith, Hope and Charity – or, if I preferred it, the Holy Trinity. Anyway, they guaranteed luck, health and prosperity, and, as he was quick to point out, with no damp-course, the walls built on living rock, the roof riddled with beetle, and the tiles unfixed, at least I would need the luck.
    In time, more cypress trees were planted: a grove of five down the slope of the track, one outside the kitchen window, one at the edge of the pond, so that it was reflected in the still water to remind me of the peace and elegance of Hadrian’s Villa outside Rome. All nonsense, of course, and vastly expensive.
    In order to achieve all this bounty I had to go off and work again. Two depressingly awful films earned me enough for the kitchen, the pond, the trees and a new electric light system. The
poteau
had at last been stuck down on the boundary between Madame de Beauvallon’s land and mine, but the EDF (Electricité Departmente Française) agreed to paint it green to match the olives and it really hardly showed. But we were at least now connected for the first time to the mains. So I bought a refrigerator too … And, apart from breaking my self-imposed rule of ‘no more movies’, no greatharm was done. No one ever saw, or remembered, them. I don’t think they even made it on to video.
    Florette Ranchett pushed a copy of
Nice Matin
towards me: ‘You see? Soon I will be behind bars. Like a beast of prey.
Ouf!
What has happened to the world?’ A black, banner headline: ‘ATTAQUE BRUTALE!’ TWO youths, masked and on a moped, had stabbed, bashed on the head, and then robbed the postmistress over at Saint-Matthieu, not far away. She was near to death in hospital, the youths had escaped, the countryside was in shock. Naturally enough. If the
bureau de poste
in a tiny hamlet could be attacked, what hope was there for the rest of the area? The age of innocence had finally ended in violence. Within a few weeks (after the unhappy death of the Saint-Matthieu postmistress) every small village shop, every post office, had iron grilles slung along their counters. The simple, easy, trusting village life had finally finished.
    Florette Ranchett said sadly, ‘Innocence and kindness have gone. This was a village which the world forgot. We were bypassed completely! They nearly forgot to liberate us in 1944 because they were up on the main road and we