Three quotations from English people living in rural France. (1): "No one considers what might be called the English option - tear out the hedge-rows, grub up the copses, go for agribusiness ... It is understood where such efficiencies lead: to the disappearance of kindergarten and primary school, the end of the bus service and the death of the village." (2): "Our farmyards are authentically tatty, our beautiful brick barns remain unconverted, and we wake each morning to the crow of the cockerel and the rattle of the tractors going out to the fields." (3): "Despite chemicals sprayed by farmers, we are deafened by nightingales ... in our tall cypresses live families of squirrels ... alas they come into the edible class. Apparently they are good, grilled."
The first and third quotations are from Languedoo in the south which sends us a lot of wine, the second from Picardy in the north. One of the writers confesses to have been "seduced by a way of life that refuses to die." There are echoes of the late John Healy's Death of an Irish Town in all three, more particularly in the urge of the inhabitants to hold to their own old ways as long as they can. The first place is Caunes in the Minervois district of Languedoo. The writer sketches the village as having "that usual strictly controlled quota of shops and services: butcher, baker, pharmacist and the coffin-maker, who is also the village carpenter. Two restaurants, a cafe, a bar, a dentist, a bank, two hairdressers, a vine co-op, a volunteer fire-station. And the village policeman stands outside the primary school, morning and evening. The local bus threads the necklace of villages carrying older children to the lycees in Carcassonne, our nearest market town."
To this writer, the extraordinary thing "the shock I cannot get over - is not that this might one day fade away, but that it exists at all. And that my neighbours regard it as entirely natural." At the heart of every village is the maire. "The Mayor is both monitor and fall guy;" It is a poor place. Young people without jobs sit outside the cafe all day or drift to the towns. But how is all the structure afforded? Subsidies, of course, and taxes and the Parisian purse. "We are in a classic fix. We make too much wine, but wine is all we have."
Poor France, again, in the Picardy article "the loo in the school is a hole in the ground in the yard." All in Country Life for July 2nd. Y