p.54. I go to the door and stand in the sunlight and look out over the garden, the valley, the hills, clear and bright on this midsummer morning and now more alive in my eyes than it has ever been, because of the songs that are already weaving their way through me. What happened yesterday and last night is a dream; very clear, but a dream. This is real. This is where it will happen. And I have my first ally, this record, these songs, this vision. Dylan is on my side. Blood on the Tracks, the summer’s record, the carrier wave.
I hear the heavy splash as Madame Bonafet throws a bowl of water from the top of their steps onto the cobbles. I hear the drag of Monsieur Bonafet’s sandals as he makes his pigeon-toed way to the bergerie, the rising clamour of the sheep, his shouts and curses as he pulls the half-door shut behind him, the rattle of the pail as he lifts it down from the wall, the quieting to a murmuration of sheep noise as he squats on his three-legged stool and begins to milk. I can imagine, feel, the suffocating sheep heat in there. When he’s finished he will go to the cow shed and milk a cow and take the warm foaming milk to the house for breakfast.

p.155. I woke early this morning. The Bonafet bantam cocks had stationed themselves at the corners of the cobbled area between the houses and were engaged in a crowing contest. On and on. Then suddenly they stopped. I could feel the vibrations of the air slowing, the air melting then resolving once more into a pure crystal stillness. I imagined the three flashy birds, with their red wattles and combs, the long iridescent curves of their tails, perched together on a fence rail, facing the newly risen sun, struck suddenly dumb by its incomparable magnificence and splendour. But sunrise was half an hour away. They had stopped because something inside had switched them off; it was time to do something else. The sheep shuffled in the barn. Birds sang. I went out.

 The air was sharp and clear, with the freshness that you get only in the very early morning at this season.
I walked along the twisting path, through the narrow gate, and stood at the edge of the meadow. From here the land slopes down into the valley. I could hear cocks crow miles away, an occasional dog. People here used to call to each other across the valleys, exchanging messages over a mile or more. You were never alone. Now, those who have, telephone, those without lead newly in-turned lives. I could see individual trees in the chestnut wood that fills the bottom of the valley, the hedges defining the fields, the cluster of buildings in the hamlet across the valley, all very clearly, each thing sharp and clear, as if there was no distance, only size. The sky was clear and pale blue, gold where the sun would rise. The chorus of birdsong echoed in the tall, slender ash trees that fringe the meadow. Their delicate leaves trembled slightly in a barely perceptible movement of air. The ash is called “The Venus of the woods”, and they do have, these, a long-limbed, smooth-skinned, lightly-clad beauty and elegance.

The grass of the meadow, tall now and bending over, its green fading brown, splashed with the colours of meadow flowers, stirred softly. A field mouse, wary but unseeing, crossed in front of me in a series of rushes and halts, like a clockwork toy, and was swallowed up in the cathedral grass. Thoreau’s words, “how much virtue there is in simply seeing” rose pleasantly in my mind like a bubble through water. But in doing, too, I suddenly thought – yes, in doing, for there is work to do, and is this not my meadow and does it not need mowing? Certainly it does. My meadow, my responsibility. I must cut the hay this year, at least so it can grow in good order next year; but also because I’ll need hay to feed the goats over winter. I have no goats; but we planned to have goats and goats need hay. No time now for reverie. I returned to the house striding, my first task of the day decided.

I got out the scythe and the whetstone, the pitchfork and the rake. The rake felt fragile, and when I shook it the handle broke. The head and teeth, made of chestnut, were firm and fine, but the ash handle was wormed and dusty.
I reached down the big-toothed bow saw and walked to the meadow to cut a new handle. I was wearing shorts and sandals and the grass was wet on my feet and legs as I skirted the meadow looking at the ash trees to find a suitable branch. How to choose, among so many branches? (It must be a branch – a sapling has no substance to it.) Clean length, thickness, straightness, accessibility, balance of the remaining tree – don’t look too hard, let the eye rove, rest on one: then dismiss all the others from your mind. There are many possibilities, each with its consequences; but once you have chosen, live with that and leave all the others behind, in the past, gone. There.
I scraped up a small ball of earth and shinned up the tree and made myself safe; drew the saw twice across the underside of the branch then sawed from the top, the rasp and hush echoing in the trees. The branch fell with a whoosh, landed with a clash, lay still. I rubbed the soil onto the cut surface and climbed down. I seemed to climb down into a bubble of extra brightness, in which everything was just right, in which I could do no wrong. I wasn’t conscious of this at the time, only afterwards when it was gone, but I can remember how it felt. I had a very clear perception of the physical – the saw biting through the green-tinged white wood, the branch bending then falling, the clash of leaves and the soft thud as the branch hit the ground (that seemed to be what triggered it), the shivering after-sound and then the silence. The green smell of sap. The feel of the bark against my knees as I climbed down. The hushing sound as I pull the leafy branch through the wet grass. My footsteps.

Then preparing the handle. Everything goes just right. Chopping off the twigs and the surplus length with deft strokes of the sharp axe; drawing my bright knife the length of the branch and peeling off the flexible bark. The wood is white, smooth, shiny, damp. It is like a long, firm bone. I run my fingers along the length of it, smell its green dampness. And then, again with the axe – an extension of my hand not an implement in it; this morning I could shave with it – shaping the end, carefully splitting the first two feet, the blade searching out its destined path through the grain, I pull apart the halves and press the points into the ready holes of the rake head. A perfect snug fit. Two wedges hammered home to tighten it for a lifetime’s use. I can see myself using this rake in thirty years, remembering this moment. I shake it; it is firm and responsive. And that’s it. The bubble slowly dissolves.

I had breakfast and did some jobs until the dew was off, then I went to mow the meadow.

I stood at the edge of the meadow and saw, at first, shades of green and brown with splashes of yellow and blue, purple and pink; a visual image, the ignorant city man’s view, an Impressionist painting.
On further looking I began to apply my recently-acquired knowledge: I saw feathery bents and furry vernal grasses, salmon-flowered sorrel and pink ragged robin, foamy meadowsweet and tall yarrow, brash buttercup and delicate forget-me-not. I’ve eaten green-apple sorrel, used yarrow for the I Ching….
Looking closer, pondering individual shapes and powers: the lion-toothed dandelion, dent-de-lion, diuretic pissenlit; the scabies-treating scabious with its devil-bitten root; the rock-breaking saxifrage, effective against bladder stones … I was looking at a food store, a materia medica, a living encyclopaedia of pre-scientific culture in which form, function, name are related in a different way to ours, in which the homeopathic principle is implicit, in which meanings overlap and interfold so there is no either-or … I was looking at something which is rapidly disappearing, superseded even in this region by grass re-sown every few years, and cut green for silage: ‘nutrient-rich’, weed-free grass; even though it has been found that cattle fed on hay from old meadows soon become healthier and more resistant to disease. I was standing, holding a scythe, the grim reaper, about to mow down, scythe through, make hay while the sun shone – a whole body of metaphor now historical, unexperienced by 99.99 (99 …) per cent of those who use it … I looked, and knew.

But my knowledge was acquired knowledge; I was a folklorist. The only way I could begin to know this meadow was by mowing it. I stepped forward.

In my mind’s eye I saw the long sweeps of the scythe and the neatly falling swathes of grass. Three times the point stuck in the ground. Twice the blade slid over the grass and stopped a hair’s breadth from my bare leg. My only wish was for a machine with a button to press. I tried swinging it like a golf club. I tried turning as in tai chi. As the point dug into the ground for the fourth time I heard a low, indrawn whistle. I whirled round. Gaston, Madame Bonafet’s brother, man of all work on the neighbours’ farm, was standing watching me over the fence, chewing as always on a sprig of mint, pushing his beret back off his forehead and scratching his head in wonder.
‘What am I doing wrong?’
‘Everything.’
‘Can you scythe?’
‘Of course.’
‘Can you teach me?’
‘I can show you.’

He felt the blade with a calloused thumb and pulled a face. He waved us back to the house, and checked through the tools the Combons had left. He picked out a cow’s horn, a spike with a crosspiece and square head, a lump hammer. Back in the meadow, he struck the spike into the ground until it stopped at the crosspiece, then hammered several times along the scythe blade on this portable anvil, ringing blows:
‘You do this – enchapplez – when you damage the blade on a stone. But you also need to do it regularly to temper it – especially a blade that hasn’t been used for a long time, like this one.’ Then he whetted the blade with long sweeps of the stone:
‘You must keep the stone in water, in a horn at your waist. Hay takes the edge off a blade very quickly – though not as fast as wheat – so sharpen it often.’ Satisfied, he felt the heft and balance of the scythe and nodded. ‘This was old Combon’s wasn’t it? It’s not bad – wasted on him, though.’ Then he spat on his hands, rubbed them together, and began scything.

With his right foot forward he swept the scythe back parallel to the ground, setting up the grass for the cut; the blade swept forward in a curve close to the ground with a hiss, cutting the grass so that it dropped on the spot with a sigh, neatly. A step forward, the blade sweeping back and then forward and the grass falling in a perfect crescent swathe. Balanced and rhythmical, an action that was never extravagant, always contained, that seemed almost too easy-going; until I saw the concentration on his face, the precision with which the scythe moved, the blade swept, the grass fell. He moved forward, inexorable, a light in his eye, a dampening of sweat on his forehead.
At last he stopped. ‘See?’ he said, a man in his element, but also a man in triumph, finding he can still do it. It looks straightforward enough I thought, and took the proffered scythe. I tried to keep the image of him working in my mind, to fit myself into it. I over-swung and fell over; I swung too little and the scythe stopped against the grass; I swung too straight and the blade hit the grass like a wall and wouldn’t cut; I curved too much and it curled round without cutting. Gaston doubled up with laughter. ‘It’s alright for you, you’ve had years of experience,’ I said angrily. He put his head on one side and said quietly, ‘you’re the one who’s come to live here.’

Gradually I learned, and at the end of an hour, dripping with sweat, I could scythe passably. What I had discovered was how much physical strength, especially of hands and wrists and forearms was needed; that you need to have a constant sense of the plane you’re working in so the blade is always parallel to it; and that there is a complex, but ultimately knowable relationship between the curve of the blade and the curve of the stroke. We talked a little.
‘I used to scythe that bank,’ he said, with a quiet pride, pointing to a steep part of the field beyond the fence. ‘No one else could – they always dug the blade in. I could scythe wheat – the others had to use sickles.’ He would like to scythe the corners that the mower and harvester can’t reach; his nephew prefers to grub out the hedges, straighten the fields, so the machines can reach everywhere. He is proud of his skills. But often it is the defiant pride of one who knows he is being bypassed, and that his skills will die with him.
He looked up at the sun, said ‘aye, aye, aye,’ and went off to do the job he should have been doing, a new jauntiness in his step, whistling. A few minutes later he returned, with a bunch of dried mugwort. ‘Fasten this in your belt: it’ll help against backache. You’ll need it.’ Another smile, and he was gone.

And so I scythed as the sun rose and fell in the sky. I listened to the hiss and sigh of the grass, smelt the different scents of each plant as it was cut, saw the swathe of cut grass widen, lighter in the sun than the uncut. By the end of the day I could hardly move, and my swollen hand holds this tiny pen with difficulty.

8th July
I finished scything the meadow.
It was late afternoon, the great heat was past, the farm stirring into life. I sat in the fragrant hay and watched birds dart and butterflies flutter. Birds sharpen time; butterflies break it up. A bird flight is a swift mark on the firmament, a pencil stroke, now. The butterfly’s bobbling movement, unhurried and indirect, makes a nonsense of the notion of the passing of time, expands ‘now’ into a multifarious, timeless dream. Once I was a bird. Then I became a butterfly. Now, maybe, I’m becoming a bird again. Or a butterbird. Or a birderfly … Shsh.

I lay down by a few spears of uncut grass, beneath them so they towered above me in the blue sky. I smelled the earth, touched it, sank my nails into it, tasted it under my nails with my tongue, its sharpness. I shrank and became very small, an atom among molecules of earth, staring up at the heaven-reaching sky, at one with the earth ….
Except, I own it. It’s mine, bought and paid for, and so, willy nilly, my responsibility. I might imagine that, like the Bushman or the Aborigine, or even to a degree the neighbour, I am as much possessed by as possessing, that some mystical relationship exists; that, as the phrase goes, I’ve borrowed it from my children rather than inherited it from my parents. But in reality all I’ve done is bought it, with money earned elsewhere, in a place where money is cheaper and land more expensive. A simple mercantile, capitalist transaction, supply and demand determining the price. I’ve bought it. And that’s all I’ve done so far. Whether anything more develops is up to me and what I do here.

I got up and walked along the edge of the meadow, looking at the unpruned plum trees, unlaid hedges patched with rusty corrugated iron, invading brambles, the ruined barn, all the work that needs doing. A line of Thoreau’s comes shudderingly into my mind: “how many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy foot by forty …”

I walked across to our vines, four hundred of them, all pruned by me; I’ve just finished the last bottle from our first vintage. The flowers have set, the tiny grapes, now the size of grape pips, have begun to swell.
A house, a garden, a meadow, vines. We fell in love with a dream; but a dream we had in the city, that we brought with us. I had intended to return in order to discover something. Instead I returned to own. At some point I had lost my nerve, the wish to discover replaced by the desire to possess. Was it because of Jane? Or further back, Melanie …? Perhaps the how and the why of my losing my nerve are the questions I have to discover the answers to, this summer.

p. 167. Gaston, Madame’s brother, is a bachelor, he works on the farm all found and a little pocket money. He has a round, humorous face, unlined by the cares that have aged prematurely Monsieur Bonafet; but hardening now in late middle age with, I suppose the inevitable regrets – no wife to share his bed, no children to keep his memory, no land to nurture and pass on.
But he is the keeper of the tradition. He looks after the vines and makes the wine, tending his terroir, his cellar with the pride and care of a Bordeaux specialist. The “progressive” farmers no longer bother with vines; our six hundred metre altitude is not ideal, and wine from the plains is so cheap that growing vines isn’t cost-effective. Gaston says the altitude gives the wine a distinctive, light quality, and that the commercial vignerons are more chemist than wine maker.
It is Gaston who yokes up the oxen and ploughs when it’s too wet for the tractor, who ploughs and sows the corners the machines can’t reach, who shakes his head at the hard-panning being caused by the new heavy tractor. He tends the garden. He replaces and mends the furniture, re-seating the chairs – though the straw from the new wheats is too short and brittle, he says, and anyway the harvester chews it up. He pollards the willow that grows in the damp hollow and makes baskets – last winter he showed me and I made a basket of willow and hazel, nothing fancy but sturdy and serviceable, in a couple of hours. In the autumn he gathers chestnuts by the sackful for the pigs. He finds the best mushrooms – cèpes and chanterelles as well as field mushrooms, but he’ll touch no other, even though I tell him they’re safe, and delicious. He knows where the walnut trees are, and will never tell me. He cuts ash branches for winter fodder in dry summers like this one. He repairs the hand tools, using wood grown on the farm, and knows how to use them. He spends a lot of time just walking the farm, looking, being, a presence that the natural world seems to feel at home with. But of course that isn’t cost-effective.

p.171. The animals are locked in at night, before the inhabitants bolt themselves in. At night the land is empty, abandoned to the wild, to ghouls, to – I don’t know what; it’s their night, not mine. In the morning there is a slow, sequential recolonising.
The hens are the first out. Madame Bonafet opens their section of the cave and broadcasts a few handfuls of grain and out they tumble, pushing and scrambling for it. As it disappears their frantic activity slackens, they slow, like mechanical toys winding down. For there is something clockwork about them – their jerky movements, their bead eyes, their expressionless faces, the way they seem to live in an eternal present. When the grain is gone, they spread slowly across the farmyard, scratching: looking straight ahead, the hen scratches the ground once, twice, quickly, then steps back and looks down, a look of great intensity that rapidly fades. Anything edible is pecked up, swallowed, forgotten. Hens don’t eat, they peck up and gulp down; no lips, no teeth, no chewing, no taste. And drinking; not swallowing – beak dip, then a raising and a tipping back of the head so water trickles down the throat.
Among the hens strut the cocks. Especially absurd are the black and white bantam cocks, so small beside the red hens. Such self-importance; and such impotence. As if they know that they are superfluous, that the busy hens produce the smooth placid eggs whatever they do. The cock flaps suddenly onto the back of an unsuspecting hen, treads heavily, screws madly, then leaps off, wings flapping, and crows mightily. A fierce flash of life, a bright moment of conquest – followed by the dawning knowledge of its tinsel futility. The hen shakes itself clean of the the cock’s impress and continues its industrious scratching without a backward glance. And the crow, when the cock rocks back on his heels, thrusts out his chest, throws back his head, the crow is not of power, of joy, but of self-importance and braggadocio.
Next come the ducks. They have finely shaped heads, are nobly formed, and even waddling on large webbed feet they retain a calm dignity. They are orderly creatures – as they walk from the shed they retain the order and formation they have on water, would have in the air if they were allowed to fly. Now they have only a tin bath to cool their feet in – the pond has dried up, the single frog silent. Later Madame will keep a couple in, force-feed, to fatten their livers. Not, as formerly, their webbed feet nailed to a plank, but gripping between her thighs and, with a long funnel, grinding maize down the gullet.
The pigeons flutter in their cages. They are easily caught – a handful of grain in an empty cage, the front dropped shut with a string from an upstairs window. The free pigeons and the caged blink at each other through the mesh, puzzled mirror images.
The caged rabbits are numb and dumb, warm bundles of quivering nervous energy, nibbling and copulating compulsively, waiting for the axe to fall.
The pigs grunt and guzzle in their sty. Once a month they are let out while the sty is mucked out, and they lumber about the farm, clumsy, curious, rather pleased with themselves. They look as if they think they’ve really got it made. One will go on the lorry to the pig factory. It is with genuine surprise that the other pig finds itself in November suddenly roped and tied down to a board in a circle of grinning humans, and feels its throat cut and its life blood belching out into the bowl held by the kneeling woman. Beatrice, the daughter, drives off to work at the pig factory.

Now Monsieur Bonafet takes out the sheep. They are nervous, stupid creatures, with bony, blank heads. They huddle together, bells tinkling, hurrying along, harried by the nips of the ill-trained dogs, eager to obey Monsieur’s whistles and cries but chaotic because they don’t really understand. The sheep are never left at pasture: someone is always with them, for they forget to eat, simply stand vacant, unless there’s a human there to urge and chivvy them with trills and calls; then, heads down, they nibble anxiously. “Just like consumers and advertisers,” Larry says.

Gaston takes out the cows. The rattle of chains, then out they come, one, two, three. Each skips a little as she feels the sun on her face. They are attractive cows, with lustrous brown hides, small shapely heads, large dark eyes, delicate feet. As the dogs snap at their heels the cows turn on them, heads down, strong necked, horns waving, re-enacting as ritual some dimly-remembered response from wild days. Then they order themselves and placidly follow Gaston.

 He returns to the cow-shed. More rattles of chains. I wait expectantly. The first ox emerges, then the second. They stand, unmoving, huge creatures with massive shoulders, but smooth and rounded, and somehow daintily proportioned. Eunuch cousins of great strength and peaceful disposition. They stand patiently as Gaston locks their heads together in the wooden yoke, tightens the strap across their brows, their long horns interlocked. He puts the light wooden plough over his shoulder and leads them away, making chucking noises. They lean together, strange twins, balanced, separate but coordinated, their steps surprisingly delicate, but plodding nevertheless. He is going to earth-up the potatoes. Past the sturdy wooden frame into which an ox can be fastened – I imagined to restrain it while some hideous act was performed; in fact to support it while it’s being shoed – an ox can’t stand on three legs. Didier, the son, roars out on the tractor, stereo blaring.

21st July
Monsieur Bonafet holds his hands under the stream of grain pouring from the harvester, plunges his hand into the sack, watches the grain trickle between his fingers. He gazes at the bounty, the pouring gold, delighted, his face the image of Avarice in a Brueghel painting. He jokes with his son, squints up at the driver; his breathing is shallow, his eyes bright, his thin tongue licks across dry lips from between yellow teeth. For just one day his farm is Las Vegas: the harvester is the fruit machine, and he has hit the jackpot. He no longer produces food. He is lost.

And so Gaston, who is central to the peasant tradition, the way of life that drew us here, is peripheral to what is going on now. For while the peasant way is to produce sustenance, the farming way is to produce money. They bring schools, and you need money. They bring electricity, and you need money. They sell you a tractor and you need money. They broadcast television and you and your family see things and want things and you need money. The man from Roquefort says – give me your sheep milk and I’ll give you money. Then the big farmers specialise, mechanise (milking machines for sheep), the price goes down, you have to keep more sheep, specialise, mechanise. The price of wheat falls by two thirds in ten years, because of fertilizers and new seed varieties – so you have to buy bag fertilizer and new seed each year (because you can’t re-sow the new hybrids), and pesticides because the new varieties are prone to disease …

p. 344. But sometimes, driving over the top on my way to the pig factory, on the empty road through the woods, I’d see things. Columbines, pretty as fairies’ dresses. Foxgloves, so secret and velvety I could see the silent fox slipping his paw out when he heard me coming. Horse mushrooms the size of dinner plates. Puffballs, edible white spheres from outer space. Wild strawberries, their taste, sharp and instant, the essence of strawberry without all that unnecessary fleshiness. Hedgehogs trotting along the road, up off the ground, quick prickly piglets. Once a hare lolloping along ahead of me, so long-legged and unrabbit-like I thought it was a dog. Even a hoopoe, pink, crest up, curved beak, looking like a cockatoo – where was I, the East Indies? Tarzan could have swung through the trees and I wouldn’t have been surprised, or a boy running with a pack of wolves, or Morgaine la Fée. The mysteries of ancient forests, messages I didn’t quite understand, undecipherable clues, a world lost to me though buried deep inside. Once, driving home in the dark after rain I saw something in the headlights and stopped and walked back with a flashlight. On the road, quite still, were seven black and yellow lizards, coal and sulphur, like something from the Amazon jungle or the Mojave desert or a moon of Jupiter. I looked them up. They were fire salamanders. Salamanders! Why not cockatrices, phoenixes, gryphons, unicorns …!?
Elvish mornings as sweet as a nymph’s breath. Nights as black and protean and bulging with life as a sack of blind labrador pups, or the creatures in the belly of Sin, or the moment before the first moment of creation – I’m grasping at images in a ragbag of knowledge. I have only history; no prehistory, no mythology. Maybe in a lifetime here, a life as in the manuscript I wrote in the tower, maybe then I would discover the mythology that is in the landscape and, maybe, inside me …
Sometimes I’d stop at the top of the hill and look down at the solid old stone houses of the village curled like a snail shell around the castle, the stream running through creating its own silver track, the gardens terracing up the hillsides giving way naturally to pasture and plough, vines and wood. And there, squat and square, on a site hacked out of the raw hillside, the breeze block and asbestos factory, where I worked. Then I’d take a deep breath, drive down, walk in.
Driving home I would sometimes stop and pick some flowers for Jane. Or fill the car with bracken, for the compost heap, and drive drugged by the heady scent. Or I’d think suddenly – my life’s been all spinning threads, when will I begin weaving? Or driving into a low, dazzling sun, squinting, hardly able to see, I would look in the rear-view mirror, at the clearly illuminated, perfectly visible landscape behind me, in the past, and say – life’s like that.

p. 271. We were digging potatoes. There’s a mystery about digging potatoes; you don’t know, as you sink the fork in, what you will find – the top growth gives you no clue. The feeling, when you lift the fork up from within the dark earth and the potatoes cascade onto the surface, or lie half hidden, like nuggets of gold or mystical eggs, is extraordinary.
Suddenly Gabrielle sat back on her heels, looked around, and said ‘it’s so beautiful here’. I looked up and suddenly saw – for a moment I think through her eyes, unattached, without the habitual weight of responsibility – the beauty. Seeing, it was like a punch between the eyes, the blow of the Zen master’s stick. I’m here. For a reason. But for none of the ostensible reasons. All summer I’ve felt watched; I thought by others, but in fact by myself, my selves, all those threads spun, the warps fixed in place, waiting for the first throw of the shuttle. Gabrielle has brought me back to the surface of things. I can see, feel, touch. Anxieties have receded, dark thoughts sunk back down, and I have risen up. I have returned to the surface of things.

p. 339. The neighbours killed their pig today. There’s often a pig killing in country tales: soon I will write about a massacre at the pig factory; today was just an execution.

A dozen were there – the men clumped together, silent and dark, clenching and unclenching their fists, talking quietly; the women voluble and shrill, bustling busily as they cleared the kitchen and scrubbed the surfaces and boiled water, as thorough as for an operation or childbirth. It was a grey still day, the hamlet hidden in cloud.
The men went for the pig, we heard the noise in the sty, they soon reappeared dragging it, stumbling, the pig lunging and squealing, a tremendous force held in the constraint of taut ropes. They threw it down on its side on the killing board and tied it firmly down, tight bindings criss-crossing it, digging into its flesh, so that in spite its heaving it was helpless. At first it struggled and squealed; then it just watched wild eyed the circle above it.
The butcher had drunk his glass of rum, had sharpened his knife and, with a single measured movement he thrust the shining blade into the pig’s throat up to the hilt, twisted and pulled out – dark blood poured out, over his hand, (I could feel its warmth) spurting as from a fountain in a thick arc. The pig struggled frenziedly, squealed desperately, heaving against the ropes as its blood gushed and flowed into the large white bowl that Madame held; she knelt at its head, whispering quietly as the red blood stained the white china, filled it foaming to the brim. The force of the pumping flow diminished, its eyes dimmed, its struggles became feebler, muscular movements gave way to nervous twitchings, and at last there was an out breath, a sigh, and its movements ceased. Its long-lashed eyes slowly closed. One last spasm, and then stillness. The pig was dead.
There was a moment’s pause, as if everyone moved back slightly. Then they fell upon the body in a rush of activity – ropes discarded, a knife in the belly pulled down like a zip and the guts tumbled out by the handful and carried away by the women to be squeezed empty of partly digested food and un-evacuated faeces and to be washed out for sausage skins. The men poured buckets of boiling water over to soften the bristles, and worked vigorously amid clouds of steam, scraping off the body hair.
Soon there was a soft, smooth, naked, baby-pink body; and the butchering began. Head cut off. Body split in two, gradually dismembered: bacon to be salted, hams to be smoked, tongue jellied, trotters boiled, slabs of fat, sausages, blood pudding, pâté, stock. Salting, smoking, boiling, freezing. The bubbling and industrious processing in the kitchen would go on for hours, but outside, in the misty darkness, the pig was gone, a shape on the board marking an absence. The larder was filling, the women chattered as they worked, the men talked as they drank, and for a day, as on all harvest days, there was abundance and plenty.

I’m still shocked by the sudden violence. But it’s not brutal. Gaston snapping a pigeon’s neck with his thumb, like a matchstick. Madame slamming the hen against the wall in mid-conversation. The sudden focussing of energy on an act of violence, but with no anger. I can’t imagine violence without anger; that’s the difference. 

p. 293. Vendange
Last year we did all the grapes together, the neighbours’ and ours, a dozen of us, uncles and aunts and cousins swelling the numbers on this, one of the gathering days.
I remember the youngsters, gamesome, squashing grapes into each other’s faces, high spirited and flirtatious. I remember cutting my finger with the curved serpette and Madame holding my hand tight and pressing grape juice into the wound with a surprising fervency. I remember standing on the swaying trailer among overflowing baskets of grapes, adjusting my weight to keep my balance without holding on as the oxen towed us slowly back (a creaking ox-cart of old wooden grape-filled comportes and youthful pickers, the cousins so briefly blooming), Gaston at their heads, half turned all the way so he can gaze contentedly, proprietorially, a mild Bacchus, at his harvest – and the sun suddenly breaking through the mist and spreading a soft light overall, a warm glow, a glowing mystery among leaf-thin trees, and a bloom on the purple grapes. I remember the meal around the long table, the many dishes, the wine, the eau de vie, the bawdy conversation – bright, flushed faces, brought to life, aroused even, by the grape picking, the soft squeeziness of grapes, the splitting skins, the dripping juice.

This year, on this grey foggy Sunday, I work alone. And when I’ve brought the grapes back to the house, instead of pressing them with Gaston’s mangle I take them straight to the cave and put them into the big tub, set barrel-high on bricks among the cobwebbed rafters, a tie of bracken over the corked bunghole, rustlings of nesting creatures and the scents of dry hay, faded flowers and damp earth; take off my boots and socks, roll up my trousers, and climb in. Yes, I’m about to tread the grapes.

I’d imagined that treading was to squeeze the juice out; in fact it’s to break the skins and release the juice so the yeast, naturally occurring on the grapes, can begin the fermentation (Dionysus trampled and torn apart). At first the grapes are hard under my soft feet, like marbles, and small twigs prick my soft skin; but as I tread and squash and as the grape skins break, I sink deeper at each step and soon I’m tread, tread, treading in fruit-filled jelly. At first cold the grapes, then warm the juice, pressing, squeezing, bare-footed, very sexy, imagine a story.

At last I climb out and dry my feet and legs with handfuls of scented hay. I dip a cupped hand and drink. I imagine blood-stained legs and feet, Jesus’ as he carried the cross, the spear thrust mixture of blood and water, Madame catching the pig’s belching blood. But juice is dying blood; wine is living, fertilised, inspirited by fermentation. Doors open back generation through generation to the beginning, to Dionysos, the first winemaker. I stare in awe at the dark liquid, at what it will become. Then I pull on my socks and boots and go upstairs.

p. 349. The oxen went today.
‘Where are they going?’ I asked Gaston as he watched the lorry go. He drew his finger across his throat. Behind his nonchalance I saw a man stricken.
‘But why?’
‘They eat too much.’
‘What will happen to them?’
‘We’ll eat them.’

The end of an era.