Provence
In the hope of renting out the main cave house during the summer, I’ve been clearing to make room for guests. At the bottom of a cupboard I found two of Jeremy’s Barbour jackets. He bought them compulsively in secondhand shops and I’ve given away three already.
Standing at the clothes recycling bin in the car park, I remembered just in time to check the pockets. With Jeremy you never know what you’ll find. The other month, rooting about for scissors in his as yet uncleared bedside cabinet drawer, I found a sizeable lump of granite-hard hash which must have been at least six years old. My hippy ceramicist neighbour Geoffrey was delighted. There were no drugs in these jackets, though, apart from a small bottle of hoofable Boots ‘Dual Defence’ to prevent colds and flu. Instead, a page, typed on both sides, of journal dated 16 January 2020.
What a pang the sight of it gave me. He’d been clearing his mother’s house, where he’d also lived on and off for 32 years, and which she’d run as a nursing home. He recalled the residents. The naval commander who served at the Battle of Jutland and greeted Jeremy’s news that Britain was at war with Argentina with laughter and ‘Oh! What a nuisance!’. And then ‘Molly, dear Molly who had enjoyed every minute of the second world war, mainly because she had so much sex’.
It is three years this month since Jeremy died, and reading his words only gets harder. April and May are particularly difficult. Because I was nursing him at home, and rarely left the house, that last spring went largely unnoticed. Now the inevitable sadness of May sometimes makes the irises with their sweet lemony fragrance and showy flowers, and the jasmine and honeysuckle with their high, almost sickly floral notes, unbearable. Similarly, the sound of the nightingale throwing his love song into the cool evening air isn’t quite as entrancing as it once was.
But I had to get on: it was VE Day, a big deal down here. I’d invited Monica, André and Geoffrey to come at six o’clock for apéro dînatoire, and still had to put up Tricolor and Union Flag bunting and make food.
Later, on the terrace, André told us that during the war his father had borrowed money to buy a grocery shop in Cannes but found getting supplies difficult. By 1944, much of the little produce they sold was acquired on the black market, away from the gaze of the police, who were under Vichy control. One day his father got news there were cauliflowers to be had in Antibes and set off at 1 a.m. on his bike towing a trailer to make the three-hour round trip.
In Antibes, after loading the trailer with 20 cauliflowers, he – a lifelong non-smoker – went back as an afterthought to ask if the shopkeeper had any cigarettes for sale. The man produced two packets of 20 Gauloises, all he could spare. At 4 a.m. in the inky darkness André’s exhausted father made it back to Cannes, but as he turned the last corner, in a moment straight out of ’Allo ’Allo!, he collided with a cycling on-duty policeman. Neither was hurt, and the bikes were undamaged, but the policeman wanted to know what was in the trailer.
‘Ah, M. Renaudo, I know you, my wife uses your shop. Where did these come from?’ he said, lifting the cover from the trailer. Remembering the cigarettes in his pocket, André’s father opened a packet. The policeman eagerly helped himself. In a friendly gesture borne of desperation, André’s father also lit one and gamely puffed and coughed his way through a Gauloise. The policeman said: ‘You know I should report you, but my wife likes your shop.’ Arm outstretched, André’s father offered the remainder of the packet. The policeman accepted the gift, tipped his kepi and cycled off.
After loading the trailer with 20 cauliflowers, he asked if the shopkeeper had any cigarettes for sale
By nine we’d got through most of the smoked salmon, olives, houmous, crisps, asparagus, homemade pizza, plus a cream cheese Geoffrey had made from yogurt, and were edging towards the Gariguette strawberries. It was dark, the bunting was blowing merrily above our heads in the breeze and, wrapped in shawls and fortified by Crémant, white Château Roubine Réserve and a red Croix Basson, we were merry too.
Nothing like war tales and a jolly evening to lift the spirits and, as the nightingale in the woods across the road began to sing, I was glad. But it wasn’t just the company or the wine; in a couple of days I would be heading back to the UK again, this time to meet my gorgeous newborn granddaughter. A few years ago, I had no grandchildren. Now I have four. None of them is ginger. According to a full three seconds of research, the collective noun for grandchildren is a ‘commotion’; quite good, but what about a ‘shriek’ or a ‘giggle’? The collective noun for grandparents is a ‘nag’. What rubbish, an ‘adoration’ of grandparents, surely?
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