In late June 2003 the temperatures across Europe start to climb rapidly and by mid-July they are hovering daily in the high 30s. While it’s usual for most parts of France to experience high temperatures in July and August, this particular summer is much, much hotter for much, much longer than any summer on record.
In rural France the summer heat is dry, like inland Australia, and therefore more tolerable than the humid heat experienced in other regions. But this summer is not just hot, it’s breathless. There are no breezes to bring relief in the still of the evening, and even during the long twilights the temperature barely drops a degree or two.
During previous summers in France I have experienced several weeks of heat followed by much cooler spells and some blessed rain. This year, hot days turn into hot weeks which turn into hot, hot months. It is relentless.
Our village house faces south and gets sun on the front wall from mid-morning right through until the evening. The dark bitumen road abuts the house, with only a narrow concrete footpath barely 60 centimetres wide as a buffer between the house and the road. There are no patches of green lawn or shady trees to soften the impact of the sun. It just beats down on the house, punishingly, day after day. The trucks roll past belching diesel fumes that seem more caustic than usual, and tractors laden with bales of hay also rumble past our front windows on a regular basis. It’s hot and noisy and dusty and quite different from the previous summers I have spent here.
The walls of the house are more than a metre thick, and normally this ensures that the interior remains cool even on the hottest summer day. But not this summer. During July, the stone gradually soaks up the heat from the sun as well as the reflected heat from the roadway. It becomes like a heat bank, storing it overnight and into the following day. I am advised by the village women to keep the heavy timber shutters closed from sunrise to sunset. It certainly makes a difference, but it means that the house is in constant darkness. The windows inside are left open in the hope of a welcome breeze that may flutter through the cracks and gaps in the shutters. But the breeze never comes. Inside the house it just gets hotter and hotter, so that by August it’s much cooler outside in the courtyard at midnight than anywhere in the house itself. Sleeping becomes an ordeal.
I try to buy an electric fan to make the bedroom more tolerable at night, but they have sold out everywhere. Weeks ago. Bottled water is also scarce on the supermarket shelves and when a new batch is delivered there’s a frantic rush to buy up whatever stocks are available.
The heatwave is a crisis all over France, but news of its devastation is slow to filter through the media. And for us, living without a television and rarely reading the local newspapers, there is total ignorance of what is going on in the wider world. The weather reports about the heatwave are consistent, but it will be many weeks before we get news of the alarming death toll.
The heatwave is all anyone talks about. Locals are glued to their television sets at night, anxious for news about the weather. Desperately hoping for a storm or a cooling change to come through. People are only venturing out in the early mornings or the evenings, and nobody wants to sit on the plastic chairs and tables outside Le Relais except late at night. Even Madame Murat’s restaurant, normally packed at lunchtime during the summer, is eerily half-empty except for the road workers and truck drivers who are obliged to keep working despite the conditions. It’s just too hot for the rest of us to contemplate a huge five-course lunch and all that red wine in the middle of the day. Heaven knows how Sylvie and Madame Murat manage in the kitchen, deep-frying frites and baking roasts of veal and lamb. It must surely be unbearable.
But holidaymakers seem to be enjoying the hot conditions, especially those from England where days and days of hot sunny weather are such a rarity. They sit out until midnight in shirt-sleeves, drinking beer or chilled wine and relishing the almost tropical atmosphere. During the day they sleep or sit wherever there is some shade – in stark contrast to the local farmers and other manual labourers, who have to endure the beating sun on their backs all day long. It’s a very trying time.