TO THE MANOIR

BORNE

Last spring, I read about a perfect house for a murder. Or, at least - if there was to be slaughter - this was would’ve been the perfect place to enjoy it.

At that stage, the chances of a good murder were encouraging. After all, fourteen of us, from four different families, had taken it into our heads to go on holiday together. It was an enterprise with all the promise of The Children’s Crusade, which, in a sense, it was. We’d be setting off with a rabble of semi-feral children, two enterprising toddlers, our own rather vocal baby - Lucy - three prams, umpteen potties and an inflatable shark. Whenever we went anywhere, we looked like the Mothercare wagon-train. Surely someone would crack?

The house had done nothing to deserve us. Everything about Font Blanche sounded unsuspecting: ten acres of tranquillity; an estate in the heart of Provence; breath-taking views. Even the price tag was breath-taking but – divvied up between us – we realised this wasn’t much more than a week on the Costa, encased in concrete. Better still, we’d be basking in the reflected glow of Gordes, which is generally reckoned to be a giant anthill inhabited by filmstars.

 

In order to insert ourselves into this scene as inconspicuously as possible, we took the train. As someone who regards air-travel as a test of faith, and roads a test of endurance, I love Eurostar. I love the way you amble on at Waterloo, and - a newspaper, two sandwiches and a bottle of wine later - you find yourself somewhere diametrically more exotic, like Avignon.

I’ve no idea what the toddlers thought of the new world streaking past, but I was thrilled. As the train hummed its way south, France Frenchified; the earth reddened and erupted into castles and gorges; the blues deepened, and there was a feeling that the odd century or two had slipped by the way. The statistics of this transformation are bewildering. Eurostar tell us we’re being pulled along by the equivalent of twenty Formula Ones. This is rather hard to imagine, even with wine.

 

Font Blanche was all it promised to be, and rather more. When we first saw the views, there was a collective gasp, and then silence as the ‘semi-ferals’ were absorbed by the space. Before us, across our hillock, was an alluring sprawl of honey-coloured loggias, courtyards, balconies, halls, caves, look-outs and pergolas. What had once been a little silk farm had - over the centuries - somehow pupated into a commune. It was all so ramblingly large that I lost count of the beds (after 22), and kept bumping into people I’d forgotten I’d come with.

Not much chance then of driving each other mad. Even the toddlers were overwhelmed by grandeur. Lucy had her own suite, and her little friends each had dens of taupe and crisp linen. The older ones thought the whole place was Harry Potty, which of course it was. There were Hogwartian fireplaces, stone-flagged dining rooms and a beautiful snake, asleep in the garden shed. Oddest of all was a tree trunk in the kitchen ceiling, bent double by a force-8 mistral.

I’ve seldom spent so much holiday in a kitchen. This was partly because the plunder was good (fresh peaches, wafers of beef and flutes of absinthe) but also because the kitchen terrace stood at the head of the Luberon valley. From up here, one could have watched all the best invasions of France – Romans, Goths, Sardinians, Redcoats, Nazis and Americans. In fact, it was these latest invaders who’d installed the kitchen, and nicely so. Our Commune Américaine was like Provence perfected, the old idyll but with some thoughtful refinements – such as sanitation, ice-makers and a 300hp coffee machine.

I’m not surprised Provence was so often invaded; it’s so energetically seductive. Below us was a landscape seething with pleasure; cherry reds, ripe yellows, furrows of lilac and flashes of ochre. Each day would suddenly flush with colour, glowing into the evening and then becoming thrillingly sultry. This was opera time, rousing arias sung by a massed choir of frogs. Small wonder that Van Gogh had suffered sensory overload. There were literary victims too. From the terrace, we could see the homes of Camus (Lourmarin), Peter Mayle (Ménerbes) and the spectacularly nutty Maquis de Sade (Lacoste).

Sure, all this affects people in different ways. Up in Gordes, vertigo and splendour seem to have driven people half-underground. We even found troglodytic cars, and a jazz band playing in a cave. The town has been at the hub of most invasions and has a Croix de Guerre for its cheek. Nowadays it’s a roost for the rich, but just crumbly enough to be charming. Every week, a market is hauled up the hill, apparently from Morocco. You can buy a dish-dash and sequinned shoes but not a lightbulb. According to its artists, Gordes is psychotropically colourful and everyone’s naked.

Enjoyable as this was, it didn’t feel particularly Provencal. To meet the locals, we had to hire the ugliest car in the world (a metallic-green bread van) and grind our way up the valley. There, pimpled on every hilltop, was a fortress town. I shan’t easily forget these little terracotta communes, half rococo, half-rockface; Rousillon, Bonnieux and Goult. In each, I suffered an irrational urge to throw it all in, and go native (surviving on chatting, perhaps, or scratching and ambling). For most, such urges soon pass, and so the villages have remained doggedly French. Up here, open-air film-shows had survived, and cheese was still sold by the wheel. Once, I even saw a spaniel sitting in a restaurant, having lunch all by itself.

The children found unexpected pleasure in all this. The toddlers loved the bread van, the croissants, and the frogs. In restaurants, the semi-ferals found themselves out-feralled by the dogs, and Sarah (aged 10), even offered me her pony-tail to paint a landscape. Sensing a market for body parts, her brother, Sir Harold (country squire, aged 6), chipped in with a kidney. Provence, they declared, was wild.

It was never more wild than the day we bounced down the Sogue. We were supposed to be canoeing but – on such a healthy torrent – we merely bobbed. We spent all afternoon like this, gliding from one fairytale to another; past improbable fortresses, dark woods, giant waterwheels and a cloud of purple dragonflies. For the adults, it was a rare moment of digestion. For the semi-ferals, it opened up a whole new vista of chaos, known as naval warfare.

In France, according to the writer Anouilh, everything – from weddings to duels – is merely a pretext for a good dinner. So it was on our commune. The adventures of the day were merely rituals preceding the serious business of the night. We never felt the need to go out. As the fighting simmered down so the popping and chopping began, and a Communard’s dinner emerged; fish, ducks, smoked chicken and chevre. Occasionally, we’d call for reinforcements, and a cook would totter down from Gordes. Her salmon tartar was probably the best I’ll ever have and yet she was so densely tattooed that it was hard to see a person within. Which memory of these evenings, I wondered, would linger the longest?

And that, perhaps, is the problem with Provence. A week is barely enough for the senses to grasp. Everything seems so deliciously concentrated: colour, taste and even time. Blink, and you’ll find yourself back home, torn away from friends and frogs.

 

 

 

John Gimlette travelled as a guest of A&K Chapters (www.villa-rentals.co , 0845 0700600). A week at Font Blanche (which sleeps sixteen) costs £7,140 a week in July or August. Dinner can be provided for around £38 a head.

 

Eurostar (08705 186 186) run a weekly summer service to Avignon from London Waterloo (every Saturday from 9 July to 10 September). A standard class return costs from £109.