The first time I go by myself to France, I am visiting my penfriend, who lives on a farm near Dijon. I fly on a tiny 16-seater prop plane into what is basically a military airfield. Customs and border control consist of a Nissen hut with a table in it and a bloke in uniform, pistol on hip, behind the table, smiling amiably and saying, “‘Jour m’sieur, ‘jour m’dame.” No-one gets their cases checked.
Outside, my friend and her mother are waiting by the mother’s car, an appropriately burgundy-coloured Renault 5. The airfield is in the Rhône valley to the south of Dijon – a very wide, splat-flat floodplain in a rift valley between the Massif Central and Jura – but the family actually lives in the outskirts of a village high on the edge of the Massif Central, above Gevrey-Chambertin.
Madame loads my case into the boot and insists that since it is my first visit to the area, I should sit in front, to get the benefit of the views. My friend climbs in the back, and off we go. The road past the airfield is single-carriageway, arrow-straight and raised above the floodplain on a sort of embankment or levée between fields of tournesols. It has a helluva double camber on it, dropping steeply towards both verges. Madame drives straddling the central line, to keep the car on an even keel. She chats merrily of this and that, keenly observing my face as I reply. Her observation of the road is less keen. For several minutes now, I have been watching a 2CV looming rapidly larger in front of us. It, too, is coming straight down the middle of the road. Madame continues. The 2CV continues. I wonder in a detached sort of way how close they will be by the time they move to their own sides of the road. If they don’t do it very soon, they will . . . Phew, the 2CV has cracked. He moves to his right. Madame carries serenely on. The 2CV realises at the last minute that she is not going to move over in turn. He wrenches his wheel further right. Madame pays him no heed. We are past him. I turn and look behind my friend. The 2CV is nose-down in the sunflowers. When it is far enough behind that I can see it in the wing-mirror, a diminishing figure in bleus de travail is capering next to the Citroën’s skew-whiff rear end, impotently shaking its fist at the victorious, retreating Renault. After a while, we turn right and head for the steep slopes, topped by sheer cliffs hundreds of feet high, that are the Côtes de Nuits.
Beyond Gevrey-Chambertin, a gorge runs west into the falaise. The road crawls upward on a ledge along the side of the cliff. Madame shifts down to second gear and floors the accelerator. There is rock to our right and a sheer drop, protected only by a flimsy-looking crash barrier, to our left. The road winds round outcrops, ducks through kinked, blind tunnels, doubles back on itself round hairpin bends. Madame drives at a constant speed, not braking for corners or slowing for poor visibility. She does not react when she hears a warning horn-blast from an approaching car. She appears to be giving the road about a quarter of her attention, the remainder being focussed on sustaining the endless stream of speech. I am no longer making sense of her words, or even listening. I am blind and deaf with terror.
Eventually, the road levels out to a gentle slope between wooded banks, beyond which can be seen undulating fields. We have survived. We have arrived. Madame turns into the big, walled barnyard and shuts the engine off, then seems to clock that I am chalk-white.
“Tiens, qu’est-ce qui t’arrive, ma petite?”
“Maman!” almost screams my friend. “C’est toi qui lui as fait une peur bleue, avec ta façon de conduire!”
Madame looks stunned. “Tu as eu peur?”
I nod mutely.
“Mais, ma petite, il n’y a aucune raison! La voiture ne peut pas être accidentée, elle est protégée! Lorsqu’elle était neuve, j’ai fait venir M. le curé, et il l’a bénie.”
*****
Later on in my stay, we went to visit a convent. I don’t remember the name of convent, although I do remember that its speciality produce for sale was pastilles d’anis; small hard globes of white, perfumed sugar with an aniseed in the centre of each one, like the middle of a gobstopper.
I bought a little olivewood rosary as well. I think I felt I had some catching-up to do on the supplication front.
*****
The car-blessing curé came round in person at some point, ‘pour prendre un verre’. He’d always told my penfriend that his English was very good, so he couldn’t run away when she proudly presented him to me as an Anglophone conversationalist. What he hadn’t told her was that while he read English pretty well, he was not at all fluent as a speaker. His opening gambit, in the heaviest of Burgundian accents, was, “Du ew knoh Sue Sahntaw?”
I duly disclaimed acquaintance with this lady, whereupon he pronounced, “Ah ‘ave been een Sue Sahntaw.”
I think my shock at this confession must have been visible, but mistaken for linguistic confusion, because he repeated ‘Sue Sahntaw’ several times, waving his hands about. I abandoned English as a lost cause and asked, “C’est qui, Sue Sahntaw?”
Now it was M. le curé’s turn to look shocked. “Non, non, ce n’est pas une personne! La ville!”
In the end, I had to get him to write it down for me.
Southampton.
Who By Fire 