4
It’s time you met a few neighbours.
Our most important, in many ways, is the river. Because she’s always there whenever you need her. Whether it’s for an instant cool-down on a hot and humid day, a therapeutic massage in the ‘jacuzzi’ (where the water spills over the rocks that once formed a weir), or simply lending a sympathetic ear. She’s a great listener and has heard many a rant, confession and lament of mine. Cry me a river? Done that.
The Vienne may be a relatively noisy neighbour, but her din is far from unpleasant. She is the first thing we hear in the morning and the last at night — her swirling currents and rushing foam harmonising in a white-noise lullaby. The sound is due to the aforementioned rocks; on walks further along the river bank we marvel at the silence and stillness. However, because these strolls take us along the edge of private gardens, the quiet is invariably shattered by shouts of ‘Coucou!’ (Hi!), or ‘Bonne soirée!’ from neighbours dining or taking apéros (apéritifs) outside. No one minds one bit that we pick our way around their garden furniture and over their stone walls. The river is a communal asset, after all.
Our neighbour Gabriel, whose house is also on the water, bathes in it every single day regardless of weather or season. Christine, a diminutive forty-something French potter with curly hair and dimples, comes down to the river at dusk. Living opposite the moulin in the tall four-storey house that once belonged to the mill owner, she has no direct access to the water but walks down to the bank to watch the ‘fish ballet’. ‘The fish, they leap in the air at this time of night. I don’t know why they do — jumping for insects maybe? But I love it.’
Others canoe, kayak, fish off the rocks, or swim with their dogs. And with three hydroelectric dams — ‘barrages’ — in our nearby village alone, the river isn’t just a pretty face but also brings power to her people.
I love the river’s mood swings. One minute, right before the rocks, she is as calm and unruffled as stretched polythene. The next she’s a chaotic mass of curdled foam, all passion and hectic energy as she smashes over the straggly granite barrier. Within seconds order is mostly restored, and she hurries on her way. She has places to be.
We think of this beautiful stretch of water below the mill as ‘our river’. Technically Alistair does own this portion, and has even ‘gifted’ some of the islands (some no more than boulders with weeds) to various friends. One is dedicated to a dear buddy who passed away. Another to his mate Steve. Sarah’s is the sunbathing rock. But of course we can no more lay claim to the river than we can to the shimmering blue dragonflies or the otters.
And while the Vienne’s incessant chatter lulls us to sleep, we’re eavesdropping on a mere snippet of a much lengthier conversation. Stretching 363 kilometres, this major artery of south-western France pulsates through five départments (a sub-category of a région). Our départment of Vienne is one of them. She starts life in the plateau of Millevaches then passes through a multitude of villages and towns — including Limoges (where her water was once used in the making of the famous porcelain), Charente, and L’Isle-Jourdain.
She eventually feeds into the Loire in Candes-Saint-Martin, said to be one of France’s most beautiful villages. This seems fitting. If you are going to give up your whole identity upon marriage — as does the Vienne through her union with the great river — you should at least do it in a decent setting.
Fun fact — I used to think fleuve and rivière were interchangeable, but no. Which word you use isn’t down to choice, but topography. The Vienne is a rivière because she flows into another river, whereas the Loire is a fleuve as she spills into the sea. Je vous en prie. You’re welcome.
To live by a river is a wonderful thing, and I never thought I’d hear myself say that. After emigrating to New Zealand, I’d grown so used to being a seaside dweller, to having those vast unpopulated beaches right on my doorstep. In Auckland, the ocean wasn’t just a geographical fact, but a forceful presence, a charismatic personality who could take or leave me but who I simply couldn’t do without.
Please let me talk about the sea for a moment. Because now I am reminded of it, I have the strongest urge to wade back in.
I’ve always loved the ocean. Standing with my feet in the water gazing at the horizon, I can’t help but sense infinite possibilities. And I have always found the wild, frothing madness of the surf to be both intimidating and invigorating.
I truly believe the sea can heal almost anything, even sadness. Especially sadness.
After one particularly searing relationship break-up, with someone I had met post-marriage, I was invited to a friend’s holiday home at Ōrere Point, about an hour south of where I lived. It was an overcast day, but I couldn’t wait to get to the beach and hurl myself into the choppy, glacial depths. I’d been crying on and off for days, but as I breaststroked through the churning surf, my tears of self-pity were drowned out by this far greater body of salt water. I swam and I battled the current and I emerged from the ocean not cured, but with a sense that it was all going to be okay. You know, like when you lay out all your jigsaw pieces … it’s nowhere near a cohesive picture yet, but you know it will be.
Of course there is a scientific explanation for this soothing effect. Ocean swimming helps release feel-good hormones, and the magnesium in the salt water helps to relax muscles and relieve stress. But I still like to think I literally swam through one giant teardrop and made it out the other side.
The sea, to me, is also memory. I’ll stand on a shoreline and the past will come swirling around my feet. I’ll see my children, glossy with sun lotion and hair like wet seaweed, launching their boogie boards into the waves time and time again — salt-coated, exhilarated. I’ll remember a freezing shoreline in Dublin, burying my face into the overcoat of a lover, both of us hungover and knowing it was the end. I’ll recall a night in Spain after dinner at a beach restaurant when my late mother — dressed impeccably as always in a silk dress and strings of pearls — threw off her heels, lifted her skirts and splashed into the Mediterranean. I can still see her now, throwing her head back in laughter at my astonishment.
The trouble with memories like this is that you can drown in nostalgia. But the sea, as I have said, won’t let you. It keeps you emotionally afloat. I remember another time visiting my mum, realising how few of the old friends remained — the older ones dead and the younger ones gone away. And the grief for everything lost threatened to carry me off on its currents. But when I headed out for an early-morning walk along the sand, before the package tourists had claimed the beach, when the mahogany-skinned fishermen were still attending to their nets, I watched the waves and was reminded of life’s unstoppable rhythm. Reminded that all is exactly as it should be. That the tidal metronome will continue to mark time, that people will come and go, that fear will rush in one day, happiness the next. It’s just the natural way of things.
So yes. Saying goodbye to the sea, I thought, would be too sad. And it was. But when we leave behind our friends we don’t say ‘Well, that’s it. I am not going to make any more.’ The Vienne is my new friend. She’s a different personality, but a friend all the same.
The river is less angry than the sea, but you still have to show respect. The water level by the mill is low, so the chance of drowning is slim. But you must tread carefully, as the stones are slippy and a shin banged against a sharp rock is no fun, I can tell you.
My preferred river attire is an old singlet and a pair of baggy bikini bottoms — or sometimes a T-shirt and shorts. Nakedness would be wonderful but since this is a popular canoeing route, and the canoeists often get stuck on the rocks and linger awhile, I decide best not. It’s easy to think you’re invisible here, that it’s utterly private. But no. Alistair tells me of a former riverside inhabitant who had a thriving cannabis plantation on the little island opposite his home. Seemed safe enough to him. Then one afternoon an off-duty cop came down the river in a kayak with his kids. Long story short, delighted cop, arrested neighbour and as far as I know that was the first and last island cannabis plantation around these parts. (Seems odd to me that a nation which has no problem with a cheeky wine at breakfast has such an issue with cannabis, but hey.)
One afternoon in August, Alistair points out that our local canoe club is running a three-hour excursion at the weekend. The sortie includes a guide who will tell us all about the wildlife that inhabits the Vienne. He suggests I go along, given that he’ll be busy on a motorcycling trip with some mates from the UK.
I am hesitant. It’s not the canoes and the critters that are off-putting, but the notion of diving solo into a group of strangers.
The hardest thing with a new language, I’ve found, is engaging in banter. Making statements such as ‘We live in the old mill by the river’ is easy enough. But small talk is an entirely different level of fluency.
Alistair is right though — I can’t just sit here watching Netflix while he’s away. And after the jaunt down the river I’ll be so knowledgeable. I’ll be able to point out the window and say annoying things like, ‘Ah, look at that young male Ardea alba out there (oh, sorry, you know it as an egret), diving into the water for shrimp. No, not that, silly — that’s a pigeon.’
Arriving at the canoeing club on the Saturday, I find an assortment of folk — mostly couples or families. A very smiley Mexican lady and her daughter strike up a conversation with me, and I start to relax even more with the arrival of a Dutch couple I vaguely know: Jan, who makes craft beer, and Elsa, who runs horse treks.
Our guide, Philippe, is clad in head-to-toe khaki: long sleeves and long trousers, even on this stifling afternoon. With a large net on a pole in one hand, he looks like he’s come as a naturalist to a fancy-dress party. Philippe is a good sort, effervescing with enthusiasm, which is exactly how you want your river guides.
After we’ve donned life jackets and before we get into the canoes, Philippe lists the wildlife we’ll be keeping an eye out for, including the loutre (otter); the castor (beaver); libellules (dragonflies); and demoiselles (damselflies).
Everything is making sense apart from the name of one creature that sounds like ‘dragondon’. When I inquire what one is, Philippe starts to explain, aided by a sudden outburst of miming from my fellow canoers. One is waving his hand behind his butt to suggest a long tail, another woman is slashing the air with invisible claws, yet another clamping her bottom lip with her top teeth in a display of fangs. Whatever this beast is, I don’t want to encounter it. Then suddenly, an epiphany. ‘Ah!’ I exclaim. ‘Now I get it. “Dragon dents” — teeth of the dragon! Because it has big fangs.’ Everyone erupts into laughter. ‘Non,’ says Philippe shaking his head with a smile. ‘Ragondin, not dragondents.’ Turns out it is a humble aquatic rodent, the coypu: somewhere between a beaver and a muskrat.
We spend a thoroughly pleasant afternoon, spying no otters or beavers sadly, but when we pull up our canoes at various islands we find an abundance of coypu poo and otter caca. Philippe also points out an impressive piece of trellis work, allegedly the work of beavers, and stumps of wood carved by rodent teeth into perfect pencil points.
My canoe companion is a young man called Luca. He’s excited to be coming back from another village for the summer, where he will guide trips like this and spend happy months on the water. ‘It’s the dream,’ he says. Maria, the Mexican lady, has also driven over an hour to be here and I realise how lucky Alistair and I are to have all of this in our own backyard.
Back in the canoes, we shout questions at Philippe or to one another. ‘Why is the river so green?’ yells someone. I miss much of the reply but the gist is that it’s ‘good’ weed that’s nourishing for the wildlife. ‘But the locals don’t like it and pull it out,’ our guide says disapprovingly.
I think it best not to share with the group that tomorrow I will be doing just that, joining a neighbour’s working bee to clear their portion of the river. Our immediate voisins are sick of all the algae and other plants hampering their enjoyment of the water, so they’ve invited about forty people to help pluck it out. Afterwards there will be a barbecue on Jacqueline and Gabriel’s lawn. I’m all for free food and fraternising with the locals — even if it means indulging in some ecologically questionable activity.
I bring up the question the next day, as we’re all thigh-deep in water ripping out weed and loading tonnes of the stuff into various canoes, kayaks and paddleboards that people have brought along. ‘Pah,’ says Fabienne, our immediate neighbour and one of the organisers. ‘I have lived by the river for twenty years, and when we first arrived it was like that.’ She points to a clear patch of water. ‘I’m all for “eco this and eco that”, but honestly sometimes these green people exaggerate. If we didn’t pull it out, it would choke the river.’ Her partner Dom agrees that climate change has introduced this noxious weed to the waterway and that, like climate change, it’s not welcome.
I have no idea what to think, but in the name of neighbourly relations and the fact the barbecue smells so good I say, ‘Oui, I understand. And look! There’s plenty of weed left anyway!’
The working bee–barbecue is so typical of the French attitude to work-life balance, from what I’ve seen of it so far. Yes, we spent a few hours slogging away in the river, but we’ll be well rewarded with food, drink, music and conversation. The work was a mere prelude, an entrée to a feast of a day.
I know few people at the barbecue, but Jacqueline kindly comes to sit by me so I am not alone. It’s easy to feel like an outsider; everyone here is either related or has lived in the locality for decades. Fabienne smiles tenderly at the baby she is bottle-feeding — the child of one of her daughter’s long-time friends; children are sitting with aunts and uncles; an eight-year-old girl is cuddling her baby sister; old friends are arranging tables and talking easily as old friends do. They have so much shared history, and I am not a part of it. Still, these are excellent hosts and they fuss around me to ensure I feel at home. Who knows … maybe one day that shared history of theirs won’t matter so much. And shared histories are not only made up of good memories: beneath the surface there may be lingering grudges, misdemeanours not entirely forgiven. I am a clean slate to them. I can be the person I want to be — kind, fun, community-spirited. Someone who will stand shoulder to shoulder with them against a common enemy — even if it is just a few patches of noxious algae.
‘Eat, eat!’ urges Jacqueline. Formerly vegetarian, I’ve been literally dining out on the excuse that ‘It’s not possible to avoid meat over here’. Which is true in rural France, but here there are quinoa salads, roast vegetables, tabouleh, melon, vibrant green salads, tomatoes in oil, olives and golden sticks of crusty baguette. As well, of course, as merguez — hot spicy sausages — succulent chicken and juicy steaks.
After an hour or so I make my apologies and head back to the mill. They invite me to stay longer, but the introvert in me only has so much conversation capacity. I later watch some of the guests launch their kayaks into the weed-free water, and hear the party’s music and laughter late into the afternoon.
My second introduction to some of the locals comes one Wednesday evening, at the local campsite. Once a week in summer, the camping ground becomes a social hub for the community, with a cheap set menu on offer.
We cycle the seven minutes to ‘le camping’ and sit at one of the many picnic tables under the trees, among families basking in the evening sun. Sunburnt men move slowly like big red crabs, glasses of beer held lovingly between their fleshy pincers. Offspring run gloriously wild — little legs pedalling madly on bikes, scooting along on ‘trottinettes’, playing chase or splashing in the pool.
We sip chilled rosé from plastic cups, purchased for a song at the buvette (kiosk). The buvette is run by two ladies I recognise. One of them is a forty-something woman called Carol, who works at the mairie (town hall). She is also the postmistress and the librarian. If we ever have a fire, I won’t be at all surprised if she also turns out to be the Chief Fire Officer. Or if she’s the only person to arrive at the scene, driving the fire truck. For a person with so many responsibilities, Carol is supremely calm and always has time for a little chat.
But then our village, as I have said, isn’t exactly a heaving metropolis. You can quite happily vest responsibility for multiple roles in a single individual and they’d probably still have time every day for a three-course lunch and a siesta. There was a time when not just ours, but all the surrounding villages had just one midwife. I once witnessed our friend Antoine talking to a local tradie he didn’t know well, asking if he was from round here. ‘Yes, I was born here,’ the plumber replied. Antoine, also born locally but a good twenty years older, wondered if they’d had the same midwife. He proceeded to ask the man to lift his shirt so they could compare belly buttons. And there they were, like two three-year-olds, gazing at each others’ navels with great seriousness. They concluded that the knots looked sufficiently different to cast doubt on the shared midwife theory. I love that with a signature twist of an umbilical cord one woman has put her name to so many local creations.
Ah, but back to the camping ground.
The buvette sells wine and beer and an array of soft drinks, but tonight plates of fat, juicy mussels and crisp fries also emerge. The man cooking up the moules on a barbecue behind the buvette is Marcel, the mayor. To be mayor, it seems, is to be endowed with a flexible schedule, a portable cooking apparatus, a trusty employee called Carol, and a genuine concern that your electorate should be fed and comfortable. (Some months after this, following weeks of rain, Alistair mentions to the mayor that our driveway has become perilously muddy. Our poor Citroën slips and slides on descent to the mill, and one of these days we’ll end up in the river. A day later a truck arrives loaded with gravel and fixes the issue. Now that’s what I call service.)
Marcel cooks once a week in summer. His repertoire is limited but then he’s a mayor, not Gordon Ramsay. We can hardly say ‘Call yourself a chef ?’ when he quite clearly doesn’t. One week it’s moules-frites, the next saucisses-frites.
We load up on wine, order our food and Alistair points to a table. ‘Here are some people I’d like you to meet.’
The friends are introduced as Brigitte and the aforementioned Antoine, a couple in their sixties who live about an hour away, but spend most of the summer here.
Antoine is like a French-speaking Jack Russell: short, wiry and bristling with energy, even when he’s standing still. I like him immediately; he’s fully engaged and present when you are talking to him, he has mischievous blue eyes, he smiles a lot, and a joke (or an apéro) is never far from his lips.
The French have a reputation for being intolerant if you don’t speak their language, but I never find this. Especially not with Antoine — if you say the wrong thing he will look at you with genuine concern, say ‘Uh, no, no,’ and blink concentratedly as he searches for what you might mean, then excitedly tap you on the arm as he comes up with the mot juste. He is always happy to correct you — not in a ‘You ignorant clown’ kind of way but rather in a ‘I love that I am helping you’ manner.
Antoine gently puts me right when I describe someone as débile (dumb) — the word I want is faible (weak). He roars with laughter when Alistair refers to peanuts as an overly literal noix de singe (nuts of the monkey), kindly informing him that the word is cacahouettes. I am to discover that Antoine knows everyone, will help anyone, and is an absolute treasure.
Brigitte is friendly enough, but a seam of sternness remains. Her welcome is like that of a schoolteacher who feels it’s not appropriate to get too chummy with her students. Brigitte is a series of contradictions in a dress. She has warm brown eyes but severe glasses; the deep golden tan of someone who loves nothing better than a book and a sunlounger but silver hair in a neat crop that’s all business. I pop her into a file marked ‘to be decided’. She and Antoine have been married for 50 years — they tied the knot aged seventeen and nineteen, at the local church. As someone who’s rarely stayed in one relationship or one location for more than a year, I can’t fathom how that must feel. That depth of history and continuity with one place and one person. It must feel solid. Safe.
Then there is another married couple in their fifties, Annique and Jean. Annique is delightful — petite, lively and eager to chat. Her hair has a sexy Monica Vitti quality. Thick, short and slightly mussed up, it says ‘Hey, I used to live in Paris but I’ve got over myself now.’ She and the hair and Jean did live in a Parisian suburb, but moved here some eighteen months ago and ‘have never looked back’. Jean has the gentle, avuncular air of a priest (one of the good ones), and spends most of the time talking to Alistair about motorbikes.
Annique wanders off to the loos and when she returns I ask her to point to where they are as I need to go too. ‘Là-bas,’ she replies, indicating a row of what look like Victorian seaside changing sheds on the far side of the field. Then she does an extremely amusing low, deep squat with her hands clasped in front to balance her. This is to prepare me for what I will find there. Nothing can prepare you, though, not even an excellent mime. These squat loos are a challenge — and clearly conceived for a clientele who have not just downed four tumblers of rosé.
We cycle back home, wobbling slightly more than three hours earlier, but with little danger of anything more serious than a collision with a blackberry bush.