Only the other morning I was walking the dog. It was bright and early and still quite cold. In another couple of hours the day would be made glorious by this sun of Lot. We were passing the farm, Daphne and I, when we were joined by a young woman bearing a rucksack. It was Cécile. The last time I had seen her close-up was around 15 years ago, when we were still new in these parts and she was a sturdy, red-cheeked girl in her mid teens. We went sledging together in the field that slopes down from the back of the cow sheds, the concentration camp, to the road that leads down to the hamlet of Bonnard, where she lived with her parents, Jakob, a big bear of a bearded Dutchman with a dodgy hip and Christianne, a kind-hearted woman with a voice louder than the proverbial fish wife, which carries on a clear day as far as our house. Back then, we'd had some serious falls of snow and we shot down the slope on makeshift sledges of black plastic bin-bags.
It was a memorable, unexpected turn of everyday events, so I've always had a soft spot for Cécile, who seemed like a girl with lots of spirit. Tilley had bumped into her the other day near the farm while walking Daphne, so she alerted me that Cécile was back in town. I had guessed it was her behind the wheel of a plastic-fantastic camping car a week or so before. Sure enough, her home-on-wheels was parked nearby, beside one of the ramshackle farm's abandoned outbuildings. Last I'd heard of her – because I try to avoid Christianne if I can, for the sake of my ear drums, and Jakob's Dutch accent is so strong that his French is just plain unintelligible to my unconditioned ears – she was driving lorries somewhere down near Toulouse. Before that, she'd learnt to be a plumber working beside an uncle or a cousin. Taps and pipes and boilers clearly weren't for her.
We chatted about life's developments: how she'd given up driving lorries and bought her camping car and was now a traveller of no fixed abode; how she was here for a few weeks to help her older brother put a smart new roof on the ruined house just up from the sheep sheds we were walking towards. We refer to it as 'the little house on the prairie'. It's been abandoned for decades judging by its appearance, but is now rapidly becoming a house once more thanks to the siblings' endeavours. It was bought by the daughter, or so we've deduced, of Monsieur et Madame Mouchette. It's not their real nom de famille, but the name of their old and remarkably aggressive dog. Whenever Madame Mouchette, a timorous woman seemingly afraid of anything on four legs, who drives her little blue car at around 30kph, is out walking their dreadful dog, we turn around and head back home lest the beast aggresses Daphne again. Mouchette must have long ago picked up on her mistress's neuroses, so protects her from any potential foe that comes too near. So you can't blame the bitch; it's another case of the owner, not the dog.
Anyway, the little house on the prairie is getting a significant make-over. But once the roof is finished, Cécile will be off on her travels. Her brother, too, is heading for pastures new: the Pyrenees in fact, there to learn to be a cordiste. Rather than seeking clarification, I let myself imagine that a cordiste had something to do with tuning musical instruments, quite a departure for a roofer. My good wife put me straight later that morning by suggesting that it was something to do with ropes. Maybe a rope-maker. Later still, I discovered that it's someone who works by ropes on high or difficult places. A dangerous job in other words, requiring the kind of steely nerves that a roofer might possess. Even after a quarter of a century in this fair land, my grasp of the language is still tenuous enough to lead me down strange dark alleyways of miscomprehension.
Their younger sister, meanwhile, whom I engaged for a few weeks to work as a cleaner alongside our daughter in a holiday home I misguidedly managed for a couple of years, is still in the area – the same age as Tilley the Kid, a mother of a young child and, I'm pretty damn sure I understood this time, a plasterer by trade. A most practical family. I forgot to enquire about their kid brother, last seen as a robust teenager with the build of a rugby player and the kind of constitution that deems a T-shirt suitable garb for the middle of winter. Presumably he has gone to work in a steel foundry somewhere. Perhaps he even plays rugby for the works' team.
I asked about her own plans. She wants to travel around Europe in her camping car, but obviously this ambition is on hold in the current climate of uncertainty. But France is a big, beautiful place and there's plenty to see without crossing borders. She agreed. Her next stop, in fact, is Brittany. She might explore the coasts in her mobile home. It gives her all the creature comforts she needs: cooker, shower and bed. There wouldn't have been much more than this in the little house in Bonnard that once accommodated four children. But what they lacked in life's luxuries, we surmise, they made up for in family love.
We arrived at the little house on the prairie, already looking like a habitable home. I said goodbye and bon courage to Cécile, knowing that I probably wouldn't see her again for another few years. Waving to her brother, the wannabee cordiste, I swung my leg over my bike and pushed off in the way that I remember my maternal grandmother cycling off to the shops in Finchley High Road. Daphne and I continued on our customary way, past the meadow and then down the stony track to Bonnard, then back up the road to home, where the plum trees beside the house are in magnificent blossom and our twisted willows that have survived the willow-grub are succulent with young leaves. Spring may be disconcertingly early, but it's reassuringly glorious.
It's rare for me to have anything to report to the women folk when I get back, but close encounters of a neighbourly kind can occasionally trigger a glow of conviviality. I felt really good about and for Cécile: a nice young kid who has turned into a really fine young woman, someone with limited but refreshingly individual ambitions who seems admirably level-headed, despite everything that's befalling our world-on-a-knife-edge.
