THE BRAKES OF THE OVERNIGHT SLEEPER TRAIN FROM PARIS squealed steadily as it drew into Toulouse Matabiau station just after seven o’clock in the morning. I hadn’t slept much during the night: the tip-down couchette had been cramped and not very comfortable, and besides, my mind was too full of expectations about the summer ahead. The train came to a halt as the force of the brakes overcame its awesome momentum. The station was busy, with people criss-crossing between the ticket hall and the platforms. I jumped out of the way of a motorised luggage trolley as it nudged impatiently through the crowd.
I bought a ticket and boarded a local stopping train to take me on the next leg of my journey to Saint-Gaudens. The clack-clackety train took a roundabout route through the sidings and suburbs of Toulouse before heading out up the valley of the river Garonne. A light morning mist hung over the river. Fields of maize stretched across the broad valley floor. Rolling hills rose up on either side. I knew that somewhere up there, in the high hills between Toulouse and the Pyrenees, was my destination: a small village named Péguilhan, where I was going to spend the summer.
The journey to Saint-Gaudens took about fifty minutes. This was as close to Péguilhan as I could get. Only a few people got off the train when it stopped and they soon disappeared. I looked around, my heart full of the excitement of arriving in a new place. I climbed the stone steps up to the old town on the hill. The streets were quiet. I decided to take a breather before heading on to Péguilhan: I needed to get my head together, I hadn’t had any breakfast and I was tired and hungry. In the clear blue May morning, I sat on a café terrace with a coffee and a croissant, admiring the panorama of the valley. The sun played with sharp shadows and bright open spaces. I felt the warm air of the South on my face, like a gentle, welcoming caress. Along the terrace the paulownia trees were in full bloom, their pale lilac flowers, hanging in clusters, giving off a distinctive, earthy, musk-rose scent, captivating and evocative of rich smells and tastes.
How was I going to get to Péguilhan? I spread the map out on the table. It was about another thirty or forty kilometres away, in the middle of nowhere. There was no railway line. I asked in the café, but they were rather vague and told me they didn’t think there was a bus that could take me there. I walked to the edge of town. There was no one else around to ask. A road sign with a diagonal red line through the name ST-GAUDENS marked the end of the town and the start of open country. The morning was warming up and a heat haze was beginning to shimmer above the tarmac. The road, shaded only by trees spaced at intervals along the verges, stretched out into the distance. This was the last frontier; from here on I was heading into the unknown.
I tried to hitch a lift from a passing car, but when it stopped the driver told me he was only going to the next farm. A tractor driver shrugged his shoulders as he went by, as if to tell me he had no room. After that there was no traffic at all for what seemed like ages. Standing by the empty roadside, the excitement I’d felt earlier was quickly evaporating. I felt a twinge of uncertainty, not knowing what I’d let myself in for. You can always turn round and go home now, I thought. I had an open return ticket from Toulouse to back to London. No, Martin, I told myself, you’re made of stronger stuff than that.
I walked back into town, found a phone box and phoned the Auberge to ask if someone could come to meet me. After more than an hour a big white Renault 25 saloon drew up, swung round and stopped in front of me. A tall woman, with dark curly hair and an imposing manner, got out of the driver’s seat and came over to me.
‘Are you Martin?’ she asked me cautiously, in French.
‘Yes, that’s me,’ I replied.
‘Ah! Very good,’ she said, reassured. ‘I’m Marie-Jeanne Cazagnac.’
Her manner changed: she became less serious and much warmer. She shook my hand and asked if I’d had a good journey. Before I could reply, a teenage boy of about 14 got out of the other side of the car and came running round to greet me, beaming with excitement at the new arrival.
‘Monsieur Martin! Monsieur Martin!’ he cried. I think the repetition was more for his amusement than to confirm who I was.
Marie-Jeanne introduced me to her youngest son, Nicolas, and we shook hands exaggeratedly. Still tired from my journey, I was a little taken aback by the attention.
I was given the new arrival’s special privilege of sitting in the front passenger seat, while Nicolas perched in the back, leaning forward between the two front seats, talking excitedly as we went. He kept a running commentary going as he pointed out things along the way.
‘Up that road is the farm where we buy our ducks… I go to school over that way… One of my best friends from school lives on that farm…’
We turned up a narrow road. The land rose, then dipped, then rose again towards an undulating plateau.
Nicolas went quiet for a moment, until we passed the sign entering Péguilhan, when he announced proudly: ‘Here is our village!’
We drove along the main road through the centre of the village, past the château and the church. There wasn’t a soul about. When it seemed we were about to go right through Péguilhan and out the other side, we turned off sharply to the right. Nicolas tapped me heavily on the shoulder.
‘It’s there, the Auberge,’ he said, pointing straight ahead up the hill.
The Auberge stood on high ground, up a narrow drive, above the double hairpin bend in the road into the village from the north. A hand-painted welcome sign stood at the corner of the drive: BIENVENU À L’AUBERGE.
It was a solid-looking building, golden-brown stone and render, with an ancient panelled oak door in the centre. Carved into the stone arch above the door was the date 1769. Attached to the wall to the right was an old bell with a rusty chain pull. Symmetrical and simple, with five windows and one door, the front was like a child’s drawing of a house. Wooden shutters framed the windows, geraniums tumbled from window boxes and wisteria trailed up the wall. Under a cerulean sky, a low-pitched terracotta-tiled roof evoked long, hot, dry summers. This was a plain country house, squat, with thick walls pressing into the earth. Made from local materials, the building appeared to blend with the land.
A paddock for horses lay to the left of the building and wooded slopes fell away to the sides. A children’s swing stood in a clearing in the trees. The hilltop setting was a peaceful oasis. The Auberge looked a happy place to be.
‘Wow,’ I said, ‘this is beautiful.’
The front of the Auberge looked out over the valley. The air was clear, and far in the distance I could see the faint grey and white jagged outline of the mountains.
‘The Pyrenees,’ Marie-Jeanne confirmed.
We walked up the short flight of steps leading to the front door, into the relative dark and cool of the hall, then down a few steps into the dining room, where I met Jacques-Henri Cazagnac, the aubergiste.
‘I am a Gascon,’ were his first words to me. He grabbed my hand between his big, strong farmer’s hands and shook it with robust enthusiasm.
‘Welcome to Gascony,’ he continued, stepping back and spreading out his arms expansively. A typical Gascon farmer, he was short, stockily built, and a larger-than-life character.
Marie-Jeanne, assuming that an Englishman far away from home would appreciate some tea, offered me some and disappeared into the kitchen.
Jacques-Henri pulled out a chair for me to sit down at the table. I looked around the room. A bow-sided grandfather clock stood in the corner, its heavy pendulum steadily keeping time in the stout, violin-shaped case. Family photographs were on the mantelpiece, some old black-and-white portraits of people from a bygone age and more recent colour photographs. I recognised Jacques-Henri and Marie-Jeanne, and a younger Nicolas.
Marie-Jeanne reappeared, carrying a tray with a pot of Lipton’s lemon tea and a slice of her homemade plum tart. Jacques-Henri hovered attentively to see if I would approve. I thanked them both and said the tea made me feel quite at home. They looked pleased – this was obviously the right thing to say.
When I’d finished my tea I was shown up to my room. The wood of the old staircase was battered and worn; the steps creaked, as if they might give way. Slats hung loose in the banisters. The whole building smelled of old wood.
After I’d changed and unpacked the few belongings I’d thrown into my rucksack when I left home two days before, I came downstairs and Jacques-Henri gave me the pair of turquoise rope-soled espadrilles I was to wear for most of the summer.
‘They’ll be comfortable,’ he said. ‘This is what everyone wears here in summer.’
The word espadrille comes from the old southern French dialect word espardillo, referring to the rope-soled canvas shoes originally worn in the Pyrenees for clambering over mountain pathways in fine weather.
In the afternoon, Marie-Jeanne showed me round the Auberge. We walked along the gallery round the rear courtyard. The back walls were timber framed, in a vertical-lined structure, which Marie-Jeanne told me they call torchis et colombage. The dark brown wooden beams were infilled with sand-coloured plaster. In the courtyard below us, a big rectangular stone table stood on a raised gravel terrace. Marie-Jeanne enjoyed pointing out the flowers growing plentifully in wooden barrels and stone troughs: pelargoniums, fuchsias and marigolds. Climbing roses cascaded over the edge of the terrace. Crimson bougainvillea and multicoloured sweet peas trailed over a trellis set against the wall. The flowers created lively splashes of colour in a landscape that was otherwise shades of golden brown and green. The impression was rustic, a little disorderly, yet lovingly cared for. The windows to the rear of the old stable block gave commanding views over the picturesque valley of the river Gesse. The land immediately behind the building plunged down to a wheatfield far below, where an old shepherd’s hut jutted out from the edge of a wood.
We walked out of the roofed gateway back onto the front drive. I looked down towards a very curious-looking construction, the like of which I’d never seen before. Standing beside the drive, it was a sort of open shed consisting of a wooden frame, several metres long and about a metre wide, with chicken-wire walls, a door at one end and a single-pitch tiled roof.
‘What’s that?’ I asked Marie-Jeanne.
‘It’s a séchoir,’ she told me. ‘They are used for air-drying maize. This one isn’t used any more, but come September, you’ll see other séchoirs in the village stacked full of yellow maize heads.’
I stifled a yawn. I’d been travelling by train and boat for about thirty-six hours. Marie-Jeanne was sympathetic and suggested I go to have a rest in my room before dinner.
In the evening, feeling revived, I met the rest of the family. Paul, the eldest son, was 22. He’d just finished his military service, which he was keen to point out he’d hated. Bruno, the middle son, was 18 and was hoping to go to agricultural college. We all sat down around the stone table on the terrace, where we would eat en plein air most evenings. We enjoyed a hearty meal of stewed lamb and rustic red wine.
With everyone talking quickly in the southwest accent, I struggled to follow everything that was being said. I listened closely to try to hear the patterns. They pronounced the normally silent e that shouldn’t be said, and they also added a twangy g to words ending with a nasal vowel. As I listened, I noticed how the accent had an earthiness about it, and a lively, singsong quality.
‘Martaing, tu veux du paing et du vaing?’ Jacques-Henri asked me.
‘Huh?’ I asked, smiling awkwardly.
He repeated the question. Then he offered me some bread to go with the stew and some more wine. I had to think for a moment. At last, the light dawned. What he was really saying was: ‘Martin, tu veux du pain et du vin?’ Martin, do you want some bread and wine?
He laughed cheekily. I suspected he may have been playing up the accent to confuse the foreigner. Now at least I could understand what he was telling me when he said that tomorrow – demaing – he would show me around the farm, where I would be starting work.
It was a good first evening. Despite the communication problems, I was made to feel at ease by the warm welcome, the easy-going manner of the family and Jacques-Henri’s sense of humour.
My room was at the back of the Auberge. That first night, when all was quiet, I could hear the old building creaking gently as it breathed. I looked out of my small, high window, up towards the cloudless sky. There were no main roads nearby, no streetlamps, few dwellings and no large towns. The night was dark and the stars shone brightly in the heavens, as if some celestial hand had turned up the brightness. There seemed to be more stars than there was sky to hold them. I recognised the W form of the constellation Cassiopeia, shining more brilliantly than I’d ever seen it before. For the first time I experienced the distinctive night-time smell of the countryside in Gascony, a faint odour of burnt earth and sleeping animal.