A Visit To The Lovely House part one

13th December
If it's your first visit to the Lovely House you'll have driven a long way along windy, ill-signed roads, when you suddenly see the house through the gates you have to make a sharp turn. If you get your vehicle through the iron gates without the stone pillars scraping a groove down the side of it you will be feeling relieved. You'll park alongside the big barn doors, look back at the stable block and thank the Jesus, Mary Mother of God person who is living in the niche above the stable doors.

You'll see trees in the yard; there's a big cedar by the gates, then some lime trees, a persimmon and some flowering bushes, including a big pink smelly rose bush that has been flowering since we got here.

Beyond the walls on this drawing is the 'park' (staff would lay out picnic lunches here in Ye Olden Dayes) with grand specimen trees; mature chestnuts, redwoods and cedars. There's a Giant Sequoia which has been struck by lightening - the resulting split houses a large bee community. Wandering further you would come across a couple of large ponds (mare), dug to provide the clay to make the bricks to build the house (which doesn't have foundations). The resulting pond fills with water from the many springs around here and provides irrigation for the farmland. Old Landlord dug the second, much bigger mare (it's pronounced 'mar') in the 'fifties, partly because he wanted more water to irrigate his expanding farm empire but also to fill with fish.

Beyond the biggest mare is a vast bramble-bound walnut grove and a hay meadow, Mrs Druid will be bringing her sheep to graze here in the spring.

Dirty tricks

24th August
Old Landlord (see Fish Pomade)stories are getting darker, I have now understood that he was a scrap merchant. Buying and selling anything that could turn a profit: including textiles, scrap iron, old bathroom fittings … Animals too but applying the same ruthless business sense. One year he decided to keep geese for the Christmas market - as did everybody else, so the market price dropped. Old Landlord burned his barn down with the geese inside.

When the women in the village mention Old Landlord they shudder - and I’ve picked up some good vocabulary here too. At village dinners one of his party tricks was to put stuff he didn’t want on his neighbour’s plate (gristley bits of chewed fat, gnawed bones etc.).

I’m also starting to get a picture of the social rifts in the village. Grievances with roots so far back that no one can remember why they fell out in the first place. Elections are the earthquake zones where new faultlines are created and old ones deepen. The Salle des Fetes was built some years ago amid bitter controversy, half the village didn’t want their taxes used this way and when it opened the Young Turks of the village set up rival events at the bar as a spoiler to anything going on at the new place. The incumbent Maire was ousted at the next election because of his support for the building. Earlier this year when two groups put themselves up for the local elections (a list of about 12 people is put forward to support whoever wants to be Maire), it became apparent that there were more than one set of fathers and sons opposing each other.

The village has less than 100 souls in residence, the elected council has the power to tidy up the graveyard, plant flowers, put up a road sign – and that’s about it. In the face of not needing to have policies the candidates indulge in personal mudslinging, rumours of torrid affairs mostly, but the main slogan against the Bontettes was: THEY HATE OLD PEOPLE. Elections are won on the basis of who is considered less evil by more people - thus it has always been the case that one half of the village will have nothing to do with the other half.

Fish Pomade - mmmm

7th August
It’s taken all day to unpack the van which should have gone back to the UK this morning. Last night we noticed it wouldn’t start so I headed to the cafe to see if I could borrow a battery charger. A football match was on tv there with all the local men watching. I’ve realised by now that you can’t just kiss hello to the people you know, you have to greet everybody. By the time I’d gone round the whole crowd I'd forgotten that I had a mission and got embroiled in drink and gossip. It wasn’t until the Director came looking for me that I remembered about the charger.

Despite securing a charger the battery still wouldn’t work, so this morning the van was declared dead and towed away which is a good thing because now we don’t have to drive it back to the UK.

In the bar last night I started finding out about our landlord’s father. He bought the Lovely House in 1943 in pristine condition and, according to my companions, set about destroying it. His main farming activity was pigs but he diversified. I had noticed how the once rather grand carriage house had been carved up by concrete divisions with an enormous feeding hopper bursting through the ceiling. Old Landlord was famous for his meanness and lack of hygiene standards. Stories abounded, how he set traps and ate whatever fell into them - cats, hedgehogs, crows... One of my companions told how had turned up at the Lovely House one day to see Old Landlord using a knife to eat sardines from a tin. Fish finished, he poured the oil from the tin into his palm and slicked back his hair with it.