In times of war and pestilence, perhaps the last thing on the agenda should be a family day-out, particularly with the price of diesel having gone through the roof. Nevertheless, what else can you do with your spare cash when all is said and done: build an underground bunker and/or sink those anti-tank iron spikes they used in the last European war?
In any case, we had to take The Daughter to the airport in Limoges for her first trip back to the UK since the pestilential brouhaha has quietened a little. It always seems wrong to be taking an airplane, but we don't do it very often and, after reading reports of empty planes 'flying high in the friendly sky' (as Marvin Gaye once put it) simply to keep their slots open at the airports either end, it seemed to be neither here nor there in the great scheme of things. So we dropped her off, I disobeyed the notice on the door that only passengers could enter the airport in order to satisfy a pressing need to use the facilities, and we – the Dame, the dog and I – took off on our projected detour.
The final day of last month happened to be one of those days: a beautiful balmy late-winter's day under a limpid, cloudless sky with a distinct promise of the spring to come. Besides, a French friend of ours, a photographer by profession who is currently photographing the Limousin for a book, went there early one morning not long ago and reported that it is a wonderful place. On such a day, too, our girl might look down on us from up in the sky and see her parents waving from the summit. On the other hand, the Ryan Air pilot, driven by tight schedules, might prefer to head due north for Stansted.
We took off cross-country north of Pierre-Bouffière, a little staging post where we once stopped for an early morning coffee when the motorway hadn't even been finished. There's an aire de repos nearby, where I paused a few years later for a rest on a long solo drive south from the Channel back when I attempted such crazy feats of endurance. I remember it well because it wasn't very restful. Alone in the deserted car park, a stray nocturnal car came and pulled up within spitting distance of our old Peugeot 205. It was either a good-ole'-boy looking for a victim or a Mr. Lonelyheart looking for love, I figured. Or perhaps a lady of the night looking for a client. I didn't hang around long enough to find out, but quickly resumed my journey. A spooky episode.
On the cross-country leg of the journey to Mont Gargan, we barely passed a car. The rolling landscape of meadows and woods is dotted with occasional settlements that might harbour a boulangerie, but precious little else. It's a lovely part of the world, but not a part to inhabit unless you have a hermit's chromosomes.
When the road became more hilly, we picked up some signs for Mont Gargan. They lead you up to a village, where you turn hard left and climb a road with woods on either side. Then left again and up to a car park. We followed two vehicles: a private car and one of those pick-ups that good-ole'-boys convert into hunting-dog transporters. It was the final day of February: the day that marks – so we believe – the final day of the hunting season. Just our luck, to stumble in such deserted parts upon a party of hillbillies bent on one last legal slaughter before they have to hang up their rifles. But the pick-up pulled into a lay-by and I watched in my rear-view mirror as it turned round and drove back off again. No doubt, this was a protected public site and they were up to something illegal. Just their luck that two private cars should materialise.
The woman in the other car let her dog out of the back just as we liberated Daphne. She heard us talking together in English and addressed us both nervously in the same language. She was sorry, she explained, but she had just tested positive for Covid. She'd had the requisite vaccinations, though, she added. I reassured her that I'd just had it myself (and didn't give a monkey's whether she was vaccinated or not, but I kept that to myself). We moved off in separate directions.
Mont Gargan is around 730 metres high, which makes it a mountain in Britain and little more than a big hill in France. It rises up out of the surrounding countryside in splendid isolation – like the Wrekin in Shropshire, only bigger – so the 360o views on such a beautiful morning were almost limitless. But even more spectacular is the avenue of ancient beech trees that leads you up to the summit: trees like the oak that once hid the fugitive Charles II from the forces of parliament, with branches that spread upwards and outwards. And although I've never seen it, I like to think that this arboreal landmark is as splendid as that tunnel of trees in County Antrim to where the tourists flock now that Game Of Thrones has highlighted the natural wonders of Norn Iron.
And lo! during our circumambulation of this magical place via the department's thoughtful 'discovery trail' (which, I can confirm, is definitely not suitable for pushchairs; the 40 steps that take you back to the summit were a challenge to two fit people and perhaps even their dog), we learnt that the local Resistance was the sole unit during the war to win a pitched battle with the forces of occupation.
Just a few days later, we learnt more when we went to lunch with an old friend from our days in the Corrèze and his new partner, a retired schoolteacher from Bordeaux. We call Jean-Claude the 'wild man of Wongo'. He's spent most of his adult life leading groups around the countryside to explain which nuts and berries you can live off and which mushrooms to avoid; making films about his patrimony; or restoring old barns in which to house his eco-museums. In the days when we were scratching around for a buck, Jean-Claude gave me some pocket money to help him roof an outbuilding with chestnut shingles. He gave Debs her first break, too, by co-hosting a course in the old school in our local commune, which involved an element of aromatherapy massage. Unfortunately, the publicity they created together involved the use of the word 'massage', which they discovered – when the course was shut down by order of the medical Mafia – was an illegal term for anyone other than an accredited kinésithérapeute (or physiotherapist). For years afterwards, she used the term 'lymphatic drainage'. Now she's old enough and wise enough not to give a flying flacon of essential oil.
Anyway, while we ate our resuscitated mushrooms he'd picked in the autumn, accompanied by a salad of field-fresh dandelion leaves and a hard-boiled egg laid by the chickens, garnished with home-produced walnut oil, and in between consulting his useful notebook of natural nutrition to compare the vitamin content of dandelions, say, to oranges, Jean-Claude told us about the leader of the Resistance in the Haute-Vienne: a chap by the name of Gingouin, who fell out with the French communist party after Hitler and Stalin signed their pact, then organised the local Maquis. After the battle of Mont Gargan, Gingouin disobeyed orders from a communist leader to take Limoges by force, and the rest of his (long) life was characterised by slurs on his character and actual physical abuse from the police and magistrates whose anger he had also incurred during the war. Highly decorated by the state for his war efforts, he was rehabilitated by the commies in 1998 – to which Guingouin replied, rather splendidly: 'It's a problem the Party has with itself. It doesn't concern me anymore. I've reached the age of serenity.'
I haven't quite reached that stage of my life yet. However, Jean-Claude's revelations did inspire me to pitch an idea for an article to my very nice editor at France Magazine. She has commissioned a feature deriving from our grand day-out. So you can read more about Mont Gargan and its history sometime next year at a newsagent near you. If, that is, with the world 'in a state of chassis' (as Sean O'Casey might have had it), such familiar establishments survive until then.
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