Pages from ‘Diggers and Dreamers’, a novel set in the drought summer of 1976. The full text is in the drop down menu above, MY BOOKS.

p 270
We spent four days alone together, the days and nights of the full moon. How happy she was, how contented to be here. For her it was a culmination, a fulfilment, what her long, extraordinary summer had been leading to, its fruition. That’s how she saw it, how she expressed it. At the end of a summer of many people and many places, of a slow shaking off of the city, of the cracking open of the greyness of her given self and the flowering through of her real self, a place, a man, an arrival.
‘“Three days of happiness already”.’
‘Sorry?’
‘I saw it painted on a wall at the Sorbonne in ’68. Actually it was “ten days”, but that’s how I feel. “Under the cobblestones, the beach”. “Be a realist – demand the impossible”. “Society is a carnivorous flower”. “The purpose of the enemy is to break our bones; our purpose is to defend the collective imagination”. “Freedom is the consciousness of our desires”. All those slogans. But not slogans – truths.
‘I was only a child, but I went to the Sorbonne during the occupation, talked to people. Everything was so exciting, everyone so happy. A whole new way of life coming into being, before my eyes. There was a grand piano in the courtyard and someone always playing – Chopin at dawn, ragtime at midday, the blues as darkness fell, Scriabin at night. Ten days of happiness already. The happiest days of my life. Until … So much love.

‘But then the flics came, the CRS, shining black armoured beetles crawling over the barricades, beating, maiming, crushing the flowers underfoot. Then the dinosaur bulldozers, breaking down the barricades, letting that awful world rush in.

‘I talked to my father. He was one of those on strike – seven million at one time – just before the workers were bought off, and that just before they realised their power, that they alone turn the wheels and that without them the wheels stop. He said – and he’d been a Communist all his life – “the union preaches revolution, teaches resignation. This is the last chance to change things, and they’ve allowed themselves to be bought off with a few francs, a few pieces of silver”. No more union meetings for him. Now my parents spend every day of their holidays building their own little place in the village they came from, to retire to. But I need to act now.’

Happy, she helped me gather in the harvest. Together we salted beans, dried apple rings, bottled tomatoes, strung onions. Each activity had a different quality, a different rhythm, the shape and feel of the fruit in our hands, the smells on our fingers changing from task to task.
Lifting potatoes, me forking them up, Gabrielle hunting for them in the dry soil like a child searching a bran tub. 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 my self, my selves. All those threads spun, the warps fixed in place, waiting for the first throw of the shuttle, the making of my life.
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.

We had gone for a walk in the afternoon. I guided her to the vines, my most peaceful place.
The grapes were fat and black, with a soft bloom on them but still a little hard, with an edge of bitterness, not ready yet to harvest. We lay down among the vines, the earth warm beneath our backs, staring up, looking at the clear-edged, soft, bright green leaves – leaves you can wrap food in and eat – the thick clusters of grapes, the twisting curling tendrils, all clear against the blue sky. It calmed me a little. We got up, walked, sat down in a broad field to watch the sun set.
Directly in front of us the fat red orb sank slowly onto and then began to slip down behind the hill. The sky turned violet. The light was pink, a pinkness spreading across the land. She whispered ‘rose’, and the word spread across the land, filled the air. The sun had set.
And now the moon rose. A full moon, exactly opposite the place the sun had set, like the lighter rider on a cosmic see-saw.
As we watched the balloon-like orb rise into the sky, I told her of the time I was on a boat crossing the Mediterranean, from Africa to Europe, having slept on deck and awakened early. I lay, quite alone, listening to the regular throb of the engine, feeling the firm deck beneath me. I felt the smallness of the boat, the vastness of the sea stretching to the distant edge of the earth all around, a perfect circle, the darkening, densening depth of water beneath me. Alone, tiny, unafraid. Turning my head to the right – the newly risen sun, a finger’s width above the sea, solid, radiant, golden, fiery. Turning my head to the left – the full moon, a finger’s width in the sea, setting: the moon under whose rain of cold fierceness I had spent a troubled, momentous night; now opalescent, translucent, benign. I felt, at that moment of symmetry, at the centre, the fulcrum, of – what? The world? Creation? My life? Just at the fulcrum, the pivotal point, just there.

p277
Our last night together, the weather broke and it began to rain, with a symbolism almost laughably neat. But why do I write “laughably” when it was so?
The long summer was now, definitively, over. And when the end came it was quietly, in the night. No violent, shattering thunderstorms like I’d seen at this season in Spain and Greece; no epic battle, no titan clash of weather systems, maritime conquering continental; no trumpeted victory of melancholic humour over sanguine. The summer slowly weakened, the autumn slowly strengthened; the time of one was over, the time of the other had come. That’s all. But what now was beginning?
We awoke to a different world – grey sky, the steady patter of rain, long-forgotten scents, temperature down ten degrees. The pond was beginning to fill and everything was sodden, but there was still a dryness underneath. The landscape was like a man in a raincoat – the coat is soaked, the rain pours off, but underneath he is still dry. The soaking in, the percolating down of rainwater to groundwater, all that will come later.

The first days of autumn 
p281
The summer is over. The hotel in St Leon has closed, the holiday homes are shuttered. Even the last of the Dutch and English are straggling home, and there are just two tiny coloured tents marooned on the flooded camp site. The wind sweeps in from the west, the clouds churn, change predominates.

The neighbour’s farm has struggled into motion: potatoes lifted, fields ploughed, lambs dropping, milking resumed. There is a new green bloom on the shaven fields, and fresh brown earth in long contour lines turned by the shining curved ploughshares. Figures loom from the mist, guns fire, birds plummet into the deep freeze. Gaston whistlingly sulphurs his wine barrels. Monsieur Bonafet has come back to life – all he needed was a good soaking.

I gather chestnuts by the sack. I’ve plenty of firewood. My storage shelves and root cellar are well stocked. Soon there will be wine. With a sack of grain, some sugar, tea, coffee, I could spend the winter here for next to nothing. But for what purpose? Thoreau moved to his hut to “transact some unfinished business with the fewest obstacles”. I came here to live with Jane. Now I need to earn some money, because I can no longer use hers – her investment –, after Gabrielle … And what I earn in a month will enable me to live here for the winter, if I choose. I pack my bag and drive to Gaillac, to find work picking grapes. 

p283
At the employment office, where the North Africans, with their cheap suits and cardboard suitcases, are routinely “tu toi’d”, pushed around, insulted, as they wait with dignity and patience, I’m told there are no grape-picking jobs, but there’s work picking apples at Cavals, a few miles north. By seven o’clock I’m settling into the little cottage by the apple orchards where I will stay.

I’ve come out of the wild hills, descended to the domestic plain, in search of money. Whether as brigand, as supplicant seasonal worker, or to give myself up and, amnestied, to go straight, I don’t yet know.

The alarm clock wakes me with a start, and I have to get up. I’m back in the world. I imagine a horse that has run free all summer in a flower-splashed meadow feeling the first touch of the collar on its neck, the forgotten taste of metal in its mouth. I feel the tremble, the twitch, the snort; and then the familiarity, the resignation as the harness settles. And for me, it’s something to push against, somewhere to dream.
I look out of the window; a barn owl flaps silently past, a scrap of white in the blue early morning light. After breakfast I go out.

I’m in a wide flat valley between white cliffs. A roof of thick white mist, of cloud, is a few feet above my head – the tops of the apple trees catch it, melt into it, and I will climb into it when I reach for the highest fruit. It is quiet and still among the trees, but cars pass frequently along the road at the side of the valley. The grass is thick and wet and my feet, soon soaked, leave deep prints. Moisture drips. The trees are symmetrically planted so that wherever you look they stretch away in straight lines until they disappear in the mist. They are pruned identically, and with their tight polls of leaves look like army recruits’ heads. Perfectly-shaped, light green apples glow invitingly among darker leaves.
‘Have one,’ the farmer says, selecting, plucking, polishing, offering, a smooth innocence nestling in a rough knowing hand. It is glossy and blemish-free, a clear green with a hint of yellow, and it settles solidly in my hand. I bite into it. Its texture is perfect, crisp, clean, juicy. I chew, wait for the taste. It tastes of nothing. It has no taste. It tastes of absence of taste. The farmer waits eagerly. ‘Fabulous,’ I say. He beams.

I begin to work. I will work for three weeks, six days a week, nine hours a day. I will fill six boxes an hour, with sixteen kilos in a box and nine apples to the kilo. That’s an apple every four seconds. 139,968 apples. An apple a day for 382 years.

Occasional events intrude. A single drab butterfly flutters around me, the only moving thing, stays with me for a long time, eventually lands, folds its wings slowly, expires. The sudden smell of mint crushed underfoot in the lush grass. The cloud lifting, the cliffs rising higher, the sun breaking through, sudden colour transforming a grey world. The Moroccans working in the next field, families of them who, as the sun begins to shine sing, calls and responses, songs that endlessly meander, that move from pain to yearning to joy to sadness, songs that both create and reflect the changing moods of a long, repetitive working day. It is Ramadan, and they work the whole day without eating or drinking. I work in silence.

The first evening I write in my diary:
“I pick in a day more apples than I’ll eat in the rest of my life. But they’re not apples. They don’t smell of apples – at the end of the day my hands smell of rubber. They don’t taste of apples. When people buy them in supermarkets – see them piled high, pyramids and mountains of “Golden Delicious”, so inviting, such abundance – I think: they’re not buying apples so much as the idea of apples; sanitised, blemish-free memories. But they are to real apples what the rebuilt quarter of Albi is to what was there before – an idealised, predictable, safe replica. They are the image of apples, but with too little “appleness”.
“I remember, last autumn, climbing over a broken wall and taking an apple off an old tree. The apple was scabbed and misshapen, even had a caterpillar that I had to shake out: but when I bit into it, the taste, the time – climbing the wall, the changing formation of the clouds, the way the birds darted – fixed themselves absolutely, and because it was so specific, so exact, that apple bite connected me to, enabled me to remember, other specific, quite different apple bites. The taste of these apples, in contrast, is blurred. They’re blurred in taste, so memories are blurred.
“In the supermarket people remember apples, buy memories of apples. They’re dissatisfied, but they persist because they can still remember – although they wonder why the memories are blurring.
“But what happens when we’ve forgotten apples, when a generation grows up which never knew apples? We’ll continue to grow them and eat them and call them apples. But something – appleness – will have gone. Our lives will be irremediably diminished, and people will experience a nagging sense of frustration and dissatisfaction, and not know, amid all this apparent perfection and abundance, why.
“Because they’re produced by a process concerned with number of units, and somehow appleness is diluted, spread too thin through the whole number.

“The process is the problem because as so often – always? – the process and the product are inseparable. The farmer here isn’t a specialist, he’s a monoculturist. The specialist focuses all his knowledge and all the knowledge of the world into a particular activity; his specialism is a lens which both focuses the world, and through which he sees the world; his activity and what he produces are everything, and one. The monoculturist applies certain general principles to the production of a particular item. The nature of the product is subsidiary to the productivity of the process.
“And here, I’m part of that process; I learn nothing, contribute nothing, nothing happens. Time passes through me, and I sell that time for money. My justification is that I can live for a week at La Balme on what I earn in a day here. And I wonder if that is sufficient justification.”
For three weeks I pick apples, read, walk. On the surface my life goes on uneventfully. 

One Saturday afternoon I drive back to La Balme, to pick our – my – grapes.
On the way I pass the mobile distillery, polished and steaming and wheezing, where the paysans bring their grape pomace to be made into eau de vie, a strict quota for each so they can’t sell it and disturb the commercial spirits trade.
The next morning it is grey and wet as I drive the car over the stubble to the vines. I pick in silence and alone, cutting the bunches with the small curved serpette.

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 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, for one day, his acolytes – 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 between 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, so he may transform). 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 grapes 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.
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. But juice is dying blood; wine is living, fertilised, inspirited by fermentation. Doors open back generation through generation to the beginning, 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.

p339
The following weekend, the neighbours killed their pig.
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 if 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 with ropes, 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 ropes criss-crossing it, digging into its flesh, so that despite 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, its lifeblood, 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 the 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 hot guts tumbled out by the handful and carried away by the women to be squeezed empty of partly digested food and unevacuated faeces and to be washed out for sausage and boudin skins. The men poured buckets of boiling water over the body 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.

p298
To Gabrielle: “The full moon. One month. I wish I could hear your voice, see your face, touch you. Driving back here early – sun warm, air clear, sky a soft autumn blue. Leaves turning golden, fields growing green, rich brown of ploughed fields, firm destiny of furrows, tractors everywhere, autumn energy. Two more days of apple picking.
“You asked what “keep in touch” means and said what a beautiful phrase it is. I want to keep in touch”.
“p.s. I will come and see you”.

At the end of apple-picking, with a pocket full of paper money, I drive to the hypermarket and fill the car with all manner of goods, like a trapper on his autumn visit to the trading post.
Back at the house, I light a fire in the house, light the stove in the tower. I pin up, in the tower, Jane’s painting of a longhaired figure – male? female? – flying a kite. I eat an enormous meal, play Desire, get very drunk, go to sleep in the dark in the tower.

The next day the world has disappeared. I hear noises, people moving around, but I can see nothing. A dense fog all around, the world blotted out, this place lost in the clouds.
I sit at my desk, surrounded by evidence of Richard, Gabrielle, Jane. Alone. There is a pile of paper at my right hand, an empty space at my left. I take a sheet of paper and write “1999” at the top, then commence to write.