Summer In September: A Visit To And Old Friend In South-West France — And To My Past

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

— A.E. Houseman Blue Remembered Hills (from A Shropshire Lad)

This is a tale with any number of possible starts or departures, some long fermented, others fast fermenting into the amber mead of legend, as the reflections chase the memories and the conviviality of a wonderful few days spent with my old pal Joel — and the friendships both forged and renewed — in his gorgeous old sandstone village south of Bordeaux.

And the twelve honeyed months I spent here so, so long ago, and working with this wonderful man. Not a grey hair between us then and few of life’s inescapable distresses had visited either of us. A man and his milieu I had long promised to revisit, and present to my wife. And had also secretly feared might not live up to my nostalgia-dripping expectations. Or inevitable reappraisals.

And so I am here now, in the gentle glow of early morning, as the light stealing through the not quite sealed shutters crosses the room to linger a moment on Anne’s serenely oscillating left shoulder, as she lies draped across the crumpled linen sheet like in an old Dutch masterpiece. Only we’re in France …

Lying under the light summer duvet all these years later, a zephyr is whispering through the trees outside and rubbing along the corridors of my past, insinuating itself upon the many rooms I have lived in since, before curling back into this guest room in Joel’s lovingly converted farmhouse. The yellow margined old grey doors creak softly and the tree birds trill their morning scales as I thread through the years that have passed since I dwelt in this little corner of my youth.

Ten at night now and the unseasonal September heat is still suffusing our outdoor fete, and us, as we feast on local meats and old stories, barbecued merguez sausage and succulent thick rashers, dessert and the pungent cheese platter still to come. A gathering of old comrades and their partners at the long table under the fanning chestnut tree, the chain of coloured lights the ever busy Joel has erected beaming down on this candescent carnival of reminiscence and reassessment.

The odd eerily plaintive car grinding up or gear-changing down the winding hill beyond the old stone perimeter wall is rare enough as to be paused for or remarked on — like that lonesome train whistle in the great American wilderness — before resuming the back-and-forth of tomfoolery and artless profundities.  

The special occasion cognac is swirling in the sultry dregs of the treacly espresso Anne and I down in one, to chase the plummy earthy local vin rouge, and the earlier subtly mind-altering regional beer my old Peruvian pal Eugene had brought from his adopted village nearby.

A merry court of craic and breeze-kissed conversation, is watched over by Monsieur Joel Biaut, native of Verdelais, deep in South West France wine country, and his partner, Our Lady Of Langon, the effervescently wise and witty Cathou (a variation on Catherine).

Anne and I were being royally lodged and feted by a man I last met up with over 30 years ago — and that several years after the year I spent working for him as a general factotum, while he, the maçon and all-round bricoleur and builder, did the skilled work.

And by Cathou, who I had never previously actually met.

A restless, endlessly improvising (typical Gemini, he once said) artisan, Joel always found time for a smile, as we pattered away in a melange of his charmingly erratic English — “You makes me a cigarette?”, or that note he left me one morning ‘You brings wilber, please” — I eventually worked out he was referring to our wheelbarrow —  or watered-down French for this idiot, my early spaghetti western English efforts that gave way to improving but ever irregular Francais, and the timeless Esperanto of friendship and bonhomie … just being on each other’s wavelength … most of the time.

We did a bit of everything, straight building work doing up houses, laying down paths and foundations, restoring old stone walls, a lot of repair work on old vineyard vats and caves (cellars), and we even made a basic family tomb in the local Verdelais graveyard, last resting place of the artist Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, who has massive family connections with this region, the Gironde department in Nouvelle-Aquitaine.

Francois, Eugene and I were just three of the strays Joel gathered in over the years, his friendship, geniality and plain decency always drawing a good day’s work from us all. 

And here we were all together again.

TO BE CONTINUED ….