France

After a week of pain in my knee and back, I set off to recover in Southern France. I wake delirious from dreams, sweat soaked from many hours resting and knowing that like a storm, this too will pass.

Today, I can rise, and move slowly, one small step and one small victory.

The trees abound with birdsong, including the Golden Oriole who in the evening bursts into a push to drench the stillness.

But now close your eyes and drink in the silence. 

I could be in a Suffolk rectory, but am in very rural Southern France in a farmhouse that sprawls onto fields and no one lives close by. Tracks that seem ancient wind and disappear into furrows across healthy green fields.

There is little wind but hot sun. 

Now open your eyes and enter into a house of a gentleman, he was of another age. A stockbroker before the Big Bang, so the pictures are of faded First World War uncles who stare from faded prints. Portraits of glamorous ladies in fox furs and pearls study one as you go upstairs. Hunting scenes of East Anglia, with maps falling out of frames and dusty nooks hold treasures, small pots and vases. There are many crucifixes, some rough hewn, some gaudy but all smoothed from hands that believed.

A collection of medals hang on a nail, along with two swords from George Vth, and book shelves groaning with histories of long gone Regiments, hunting and sailing almanacs and dog and horse reference tomes.

It is quiet, and let the silence drift over you and soon another world comes closer. In the kitchen, with heavy French tables, stone basins and wooden platters with soft melting Camembert spill over. The inside cat, one of three, watches for a bonus. Now go to the window, peer through to the drooping wisteria, heavy with bloom and your first sounds are tired flies butting the glass. I open the frame to let them out and my next friends start. They are the frogs in the deep green pool who battle from each side to be the loudest. The banks are overgrown with wild garlic and ancient trees stoop down to give more shade. 

A Lipizzana and an Arab horse always curious look at me from the paddock but are shy and trot away into a large stable which they share with a Shetland pony.They say little but observe the comings and goings which now is reduced to my daily inspection to see they are still standing.

I talk to the dogs who live a happy life away from a rescue centre and follow me. A sort of pug and a Labrador, warm and moist noses press into my thigh as the evening draws on. 

But I have other dreams as I read a book about the escape lines for airmen shot down over occupied France in 1944. From where I write I can see the pink snow topped Pyrenees that would have been the goal for many, walking along the same tracks I do. They were dressed in workman’s clothes, with shoes if they were lucky, sleeping in barns and like the farm cats here, suspicious of everything, begging for water and food. Many were betrayed and history relates those episodes.

As I wander back towards the farm house, I can almost see them in a deserted landscape with ordered fields and inviting buildings and still no one to talk to. There is a gate by the house, thick with bind weed and pushing that open I can imagine the shallow indent under the thorn hedge where they might have laid up during the day, dreaming of Suffolk from where they started.

It is magical here and very healing.