Saintes Glaces, Lune Rousse

"Attention aux pommes de terre, la lune rousse n'est pas passée encore"
Marie-Joseph is full of bonhomie this May morning, keeping out of the wind and out of Camille's way, having a crafty smoke and feeding the three token sheep in his makeshift paddock.
He is giving me a lesson on the russet moon, the first one after Easter. The one which threatens frosts, especially in the middle of May at Les Saints de Glace.
"Quand la lune rousse est passée
On ne craint plus la gelée..."
M-J pulls out a dicton de circonstance. He does this at frequent intervals to show his expertise.
Every year it's the same. A week or two of glorious weather in Sainte-Cécile, then the icy, Midnight Cowboy blast from the north-east.
Marie-Jo shuffles to the back corner of the shed, and pulls a hidden bottle of red from between a half-eaten haybale and a multi-recycled sheet of once-upon-a-time galvanized iron.
While he pours a single glass and downs it in one before refilling and offering it, there is just time to register the irony of my friend's name. For someone with a girl's moniker, he is the most un-feminine person I know. Except for the lady down the road who used to keep the goat, but she died back in the late eighties so doesn't count.
"De toute façon, il ne faut pas être pressé pour semer les patates, mon vieux. Camille est peut-être forte en goule, mais c'est moi l'expert du jardin..."
And this seems to be as good a reason as any for him to do as little as possible today. I leave him to his bottle, then jump in the 2CV and cast around for something to take away the taste of vinegar, Gitane sans filtre and sheep shit.
Lexique (Il y en a beaucoup aujourd'hui); Rousse; Roux au féminin. Cf blond/blonde: brun/brune...
Pomme de terre = patate
La gelée; Quand il fait froid la nuit, le lendemain matin il peut y avoir des gelées. C'est dangereux pour les jeunes plantes tendres. Surtout les patates, les tomates ou des fruits en formation.
Forte en goule; On adore! C'est du patois vendéen = une femme qui parle beaucoup. Goule = bouche (ou visage)
Pensez aux lunes; Lune rousse, lune bleu, lune de miel...
Dicton; proverbe populaire.
Saints de Glace; Tradition/superstition folklo-catholique. Le 11, 12 et 13 mai. Regardez sur Wikipédia.

La Couleuvre, et le Docteur Pouce

"C'est une couleuvre, c'est inoffensif, tu sais...ça n'a pas de venin"

Marcel is by the jardin potager sharpening his croissant. He squints against the early morning April sunshine. He speaks slowly and works the stone against the blade with an easy, practised movement.

The grass-snake is more than a metre long, and, not yet warmed by the morning sun, it it slides lazily over our boots.

"Autrefois, il y avait des gens qui mangeaient ça. Le vieux Pompard, par exemple. On appelait ça l'anguille des broussailles".

Hedgerow eels indeed.

The real deal eels are a delicacy in the Marais Poitevin wetlands south of here, where they are cooked over smoky embers, and washed down with the crisp but unfortunately-named Vin de Pissotte.

I ask Marcel how he received his petit-nom sobriquet of "Docteur Pouce". I knew the answer, of course. He'd told me dozens of times over the years. As he nears eighty, I love to see the glint in his eye as he tells me of his talent.

Farmers used to come from far and wide to benefit from the healing properties of Marcel's thumb, and a very few still do. It is well-known locally that on one occasion, following an excursion to Brussels on the "La Thatcher à la mer" demo circa 1983, an agriculteur from Bournezeau turned up while Marcel and a dozen neighbours were grape picking. Le patient and Le Docteur retired behind the grape press, to emerge two minutes later both smiling. Marcel was fifty francs richer, and the relieved farmer's hémorroïdes [can't you spell it in English? Ed] were now back in a more comfortable location.

Our green and yellow grass-snake becomes a little too curious, and entwines itself in the strawberry netting. We spend a few minutes extricating the creature, my companion's legendary dexterity clearly extending to his fingers.

Tu prendras un verre, Alan?

He asks, and we retire to the cave to drink, as is customary here, alternately from the same Arcoroc glass. Marcel jokes that on that day the Bournezeau bloke turned up for thumb therapy, nobody wanted the glass after Le Docteur...

Lexique: Croissant; C'est bon au petit-déjeuner, et c'est aussi un outil pour couper l'herbe.
Jardin potager; On y cultive des légumes (carottes, tomates, pommes de terre...)
La Thatcher; Premier Ministre du Royaume Uni 1979 à 1991. Les agriculteurs en France ne l'aimaient pas beaucoup.
Cave; On y stocke le vin. Ce n'est pas une grotte.

Rossignol, Rossignol...

Click on Luscinia Megarhyncos/Rossignol Philomèle/Nightingale to hear the April night-time song of Sainte-Cécile.

"Philomèle: qui aime le chant. C'est du latin, du grec à l'origine..."

The last place you'd expect a dummy's guide to the classics is the zinc counter of the mobile bar at the village fête.

I'd just got the hang of serving Kronenbourg from a chilled chrome tap, and it was going down well at 11 am under the azure canopy of sky and the pracariously propped serving hatch which ran the whole length of the stretch-model Citroën HY truck. The hatch threatened to decapitate any drinker who slapped his francs down too hard, but it hadn't done so, yet.

Jean was our resident classicist. He'd spent four years in Hamburg during World War Two, where he worked in a bakery as a forced labourer, "un prisonnier"...There was little to do at night if you wanted, as he did, to minimise fraternization. So he studied Latin and Greek from two ageing text books which were in German...

His fingernails were long. He traced two circles on the zinc, one the size of a ping-pong ball, one that of a football.

"La RAF, quand ils bombardaient, ils détruisaient ça...Les Américains, ça". He described alternately the smaller and larger circle.

"...et les Mosquito de la RAF faisaient un passage avant le bombardement, à basse altitude, pour nous prévenir. Les Forteresses Volantes, jamais. Ils étaient trop hauts".

We chatted for half an hour that day, in the lead-up to lunchtime at the fête, as the barbecue smoke and odours of saucisses grillées started to drift across the lawn of La Salle Polyvalente towards Le Camping.

I told our former prisonnier des Nazis that I hadn't slept well because of the nightingale, and that was when I discovered Jean's knowledge of Latin and Greek.

So at 6 am this morning, as Lucinia Megarhyncos, who had sung non-stop all night, got the better of my struggle to ignore the panoply of phrases, I rose to write this.

And to picture Jean ten years ago, in the afternoons towards the end of his life, sitting on his bench in Le Camping, facing Le Petit Lay, rolling his smokes and running through the Latin names of the birdsong.

Lexique: La Salle Polyvalente; Encore du latin et du grec: Polyvalent = multi-usages! C'est la grande salle des mariages, des fêtes et des manifestations de notre commune. Elle est construite en 1985.
Le Camping; Il se trouve entre la salle, et la rivière qui s'appelle Le Petit Lay.

Les Dessous des Cartes

There were no vapour-trails and not a cloud in the sky when I was driving home through Sainte-Cécile in the middle of Tuesday morning.
<Glycine/Wisteria Floribunda
I waved to Claude, who made the almost imperceptible Vendée nod of the head which signals "Arrête-toi une minute pour discuter un peu".


He commented on the volcano-induced chaos in the air-travel industry, then said;

"Il faut que je taille ma glycine, Alan. Sinon elle devient envahissante."

Claude stops his vélo level with the car. He has a box, which he made seventy-five years ago from four pieces of poplar, on the luggage rack. In the box there are two lettuces and a sizeable, fin-de-saison leek. The scent of the latter, more delicate than oignon, drifts past his front tyre, my nose and then on towards the Place de la Mairie.

Here in Vendée, the definition of "Une minute" allows for a generous degree of interpétation.

So an hour and a bit later, we are still in Claude's kitchen, with a 1933 road map, which I found on a nerds-R-us foray into a bookshop the previous afternoon, spread out on his table.

Neither of us has noticed the passing of time, as we emerge from the labyrinth of anecdotes which unfolded themselves along with La Carte Michelin.

"Quatre francs pour une carte; c'était beaucoup"...

Claude tells me that when he started work in 1933 at fourteen years old, he was paid 2 francs a day as an apprentice joiner.

"Par contre, j'étais nourri et logé", he adds, explaining that it was normal practice for young workers to receive board and lodging if they were some distance from home.

Claude's eyes are clear blue, and his immaculate pullover is the same colour. Since his wife died, ten years ago, he has kept his house in immaculate order. "C'est ainsi qu'elle aurait voulu que je fasse", he says. [using a conditional perfect and a subjunctive which is really going to stuff up the bilingual approach. Ed].

We look closer at the géographie.

"Ah. Le Petit Train. Il allait de Chantonnay, et passait par St Vincent, puis Sainte-Cécile et à travers champs jusqu'à LOie".

We trace the Tramway symbol along the N137 and across country, linking communes and communautés.

"Il y avait deux voitures à Sainte-Cécile quand je suis arrivé en 1923. Tout le monde prenait le Petit Train. Ce n'était pas trop confortable, avec des sièges en bois..."

Claude has lived in the village since he was 5, and well remembers the two cars of his childhood.

According to Claude, the charcutier had a van which was very difficult to start, requiring adjustment of the ignition via a lever on the steering wheel, much swearing and easy access to lard for damaged knuckles occasioned by the starting-handle.

"L'épicier possédait un véhicule qui démarrait mieux". But the grocer's van had a chain drive "Which had a big cog on the back axle, and a smaller one near the engine. Like a vélo, but back-to-front. Otherwise it would have gone too fast, we thought as boys."

"Les chaînes faisait un boucant incroyable. Et les vitres étaient en mica, une sorte de plastique mais pas très transparent. C'était dangereux"

<Le rêve de l'Epicier en 1933? Pour les Lingonerds: Le Michelin Man s'appelle Bibendum en français, du latin bibere/boire. "Le pneu Michelin boit l'obstacle..."(Publicité Michelin, début 20è siècle)

What was also dangereux, he said, was Le Petit Train which passed on its narrow-gauge through the village four or five times a day.

"Mon petit frère se prenait la roue de son vélo dans le rail, et il est tombé plusieurs fois"

Claude's little brother was more fortunate than the old lady who, one winter night around the time of La Grande Dépression, and because of the darkness and her deafness, failed to hear the train's warning bell outside where Docteur Maigre's surgery is now.

"Elle a été tuée sur le coup. Je m'en souviens très bien. J'étais gosse, j'avais neuf ou dix ans".

Claude's clock strikes eleven. We fold away the map, and go outside to trim the wisteria before sharing a glass of Muscat de Rivesaltes.

Lexique; Juste un peu de langage familier pour aujourd'hui.

Un gosse; C'est un enfant. On dit aussi un môme, et en Vendée, un drôle. Ce qui est amusant, non?

Un boucant; C'est un bruit fort et désagréable.

...et vous voudrez peut-être chercher envahissant dans le dictionnaire si vous n'arrivez pas à imaginer une glycine qui pousse très vite et qui passe partout.