2006 - A Piano in The Pyrenees Read online

  “Put your foot down, Grandad, for Christ’s sake.”

  I usually oblige, just for an easy life, but it’s not something that comes naturally. I prefer to take it nice’n’easy. I’m not sure why, as I’m not someone who lives my life without taking risks. Perhaps it’s just that I can’t see the point of hurrying everywhere. One of the great ironies of modern life is that people rush like crazy to get to places where quite often, in their heart of hearts, they don’t really want to be. Not me though—I happily flirt with the lower end of the speed limit, however unfashionable it may be.

  It wouldn’t have been a problem in these parts had I been able to enjoy empty roads on which to dawdle with impunity. Unfortunately I had to share them with others, and they happened to be French Pyrenean drivers. What distinguishes this particular group from many others is their total disregard for braking distance. It is simply a concept they cannot grasp. Why allow a little space between you and the car in front, enabling you to relax and enjoy the drive? Far better to spend the entire journey in a constant state of anxiety by hugging the rear end of the car in front, even if all you’re doing is nipping down to the supermarket for a pint of milk.

  Just as I was driving through the local town at a sensible speed, a young couple stepped onto a pedestrian crossing in front of me, pushing a baby in a pram. I probably could have kept going, swerving where necessary, but I wasn’t entirely sure whether the couple were expecting me to stop, and I had no idea whether they would continue to walk into my line of fire without looking. A split second of indecision followed before I resolved that stopping would be a better option than killing a young family. I quickly applied the brakes and drew the car to a halt at the crossing. However, a quick glance in the mirror immediately revealed that the vehicle behind me had been taken somewhat by surprise by my act of mercy. A bloody great big van was careering towards me, brakes screeching and driver making an excellent fist of looking horrified.

  Fortunately the van had good brakes.

  Unfortunately this didn’t mean that collision was avoided. The van did hit me. Just not as hard as it might have done, that’s all.

  Thud!↓

  ≡ Bang! or Crash! would do here too. You decide which best conjures up the noise of a large van colliding with a small Ford Ka.

  My head was jolted backwards, but the seat’s headrest did its job and whiplash was avoided. For a second I just sat there—emotionless, stunned. A beat later and I was able to feel relief. Relief that I hadn’t been injured. This was closely followed by disappointment. All things considered, having a hefty vehicle smash into your rear end isn’t the ideal finale to any shopping trip.

  Meanwhile, the couple with the pram crossed in front of me, as calm as you like. They looked across to me and managed a nod of thanks. Was that it? Was a cursory and almost desultory nod all I was going to get? I’d just saved their lives for God’s sake—had they not realised this? And I’d sacrificed the rear end of my car in the process.

  Not having a face to pull that could successfully express these feelings of outrage, I nodded back and the couple moved off, continuing their day seemingly unmoved by the recent collision of van and hatchback. No such luck for me, however. I got out of the car only to find myself confronted by an angry man. He was tall and wiry, and even though he wasn’t wearing a beret, he was quintessentially French. I guess he was around forty years old, with a ruddy complexion, pointed nose and features that somehow suggested a penchant for intransigency. He waved his arms and berated me for having stopped. I timidly pointed out that I hadn’t wanted to kill three people. This seemed a reasonable enough point of view, but my position had been immeasurably weakened by the fact that I was undoubtedly not French. Worse still, I was English.

  Experience had shown me that the whole ‘French not getting on with the English’ business is nothing but a fallacy promoted by our modern tabloid culture, but every now and again there was a moment when one could almost begin to subscribe to it, and such a moment was upon me.

  I persisted with my defence, doing my utmost to form the best French sentences at my disposal, perceiving that errors in grammar would do more to harm my argument than any flaws in logic. Slowly, and with each correctly delivered turn of phrase, my Gallic foe calmed down. I pointed out that no one had caused the accident deliberately and that we could discuss rather than accuse, and soon we started to become chatty, almost to the point of being a bit ‘pally’.

  The best news of all was that close inspection revealed that there had been no noticeable damage to either vehicle. Miraculously my hire car, sturdy customer that it was, had withstood the impact without a scratch, and I was saved from an administrative nightmare involving insurance and car hire companies. This happy discovery enabled the two of us to shake hands warmly and say goodbye, only one notch short of arranging to meet for a drink later in the week. We had proved that European brethren can get on, even after one of them has driven into the back of the other.

  I noticed as he drove off, however, that his vehicle was no ordinary van. No. Of course, it was a white van. What was it with me and white vans?

  I hoped that I was living a good enough life to make it to heaven, because I reckoned I knew what my welcome at hell would be like.

  “Ah, Hawks, there you are. We’ve arranged to have the soles of your feet beaten before you go to spend the night with the ravenous jackals. It’s just a short journey of five hundred miles. Ah—here’s the dodgy vehicle that will take you there now. It’s a white van. Have a good trip…”

  §

  “There are a lot of lorries parked in the square, aren’t there?” said Brad.

  “Yes. I wonder why.”

  Brad and I were driving through Bagneres on the way to the mountains where we were planning to take a nice walk. It had been my suggestion. It was a beautiful day so why not take a break from all this furniture assembly, fitting of lights and putting up of shelves? We were flying back to Britain the following day and we needed to be sure that we got ourselves a dose of some healing fresh air.

  “It looks like there’s been some sort of bike race going on,” said Brad.

  The clue had been the scores of men in multi-coloured Lycra and the hundreds of state-of-the-art bikes strapped to vans and jeeps. A logo on one of the vans revealed the identity of the race.

  “It’s only the Tour de France!” I said.

  It was a measure of just how cut off we’d allowed ourselves to become that the most watched sporting event in the world could pass by under our very noses without us knowing anything about it.

  “It’s a shame we missed that,” said Brad. “I’d love to have seen the tour come through. Just a bit of it.”

  “That’s all you would have seen,” I said. “A bit of it.”

  I’d cast my eye over this race the previous year after having been persuaded by a friend to travel over to northern France for the day to watch it from a roadside. This experience had shown me that there may be many stages to the Tour, but for the spectator there are only seven.

  Set up by roadside three hours before the cyclists are due to arrive and watch an empty road.

  Eat a packed lunch whilst watching an empty road.

  Half an hour before the arrival of the cyclists, become assaulted by a caravan of publicity vehicles with blaring loudhailers. Allow yourself to be bombarded by free samples of shampoos, peanuts or sweets, all tossed from the backs of passing vans by bored blonde models.

  Wait for the brouhaha to die away again so that you can get on with the fascinating business of watching an empty road.

  Enjoy thirty seconds of immense excitement as a pack of a hundred or so cyclists flashes by you at great speed.

  Applaud.

  Watch an empty road for a bit, and then bugger off home.

  The Tour de France, rather pleasingly, was becoming France’s Wimbledon—that is, a world-famous sporting event that nobody from the host country seems to win. It has been a generation since a Frenchman has tr
iumphed in the tour and, worse still, in recent years it’s been dominated by an American. Salt in the wound.

  We drove on through Bagneres and left behind the ant-like hustle and bustle of the tour’s enormous entourage of back-up teams, promotions people, television crews and journalists. We were heading for more peaceful climes. I dropped the car down into second gear as we began to climb towards the thinner air of the mountains.

  This was to be my first proper mountain walk here, presumably the first of many. Up until this moment walking had never been a pursuit that had appealed that much. It wasn’t exciting enough and it had no competitive element. Yes, walking is an event in the Olympics but everyone knows full well that it’s the worst event in the games by some margin. I mean, that kind of walking isn’t really walking anyway. It’s nearly running. And what is the point of nearly running? If someone is chasing after you with a red-hot poker intent on inserting it where the sun don’t shine then you don’t nearly run away from them. I’m sorry, but you run as fast as you can. That’s why running as fast as you can is such a tiptop event. Unlike the walking. I believe that in the Olympics the walkers (for want of changing one letter in their name) should have to enter another event as well—called Nearly Swimming.

  No, for me, walking had always been an activity for middle-aged people. Maybe that was why I was looking forward to it so much.

  Casual walkers (I can’t speak for the competitive ones) are extremely friendly. As Brad and I set out on the ninety-minute walk across the side of a Pyrenean foothill towards a pretty lake, each person we passed offered up a jovial ‘bonjour. Every single person, without fail. It was almost as if the moment they’d left the speed, noise and fluster of the town behind and exchanged it for the freedom of the countryside, their manners had changed.

  “Bonjour!”

  “Bonjour!”

  “Bonjour!”

  “Bonjour!”

  We all said.

  Initially Brad and I found this all rather charming and we happily returned each salutation at volume, and with relish. However, as the walk progressed and we were called upon to expend a lot of energy on a long steady climb, we began to resent every bonjour, seeing each one as a waste of valuable oxygen. I started to mumble my bonjours, and then, as I became even more out of breath, I noticed that Brad had come up with a good technique. He simply put his head down and avoided all eye contact with passing walkers. If a bonjour was still forthcoming from the opposing hiker then he did little more than mumble or grunt. A clever technique, and one I immediately adopted.

  The problem was that, although these people were saying bonjour, they didn’t really want to stop, chat or pass on any meaningful information. I was reminded of a coastal walk I’d taken once in California where everyone I’d passed had said, “Hi, how ya doin’?” I wouldn’t have minded if they’d paused for a moment to find out how I was actually doing, but no, not the slightest reduction in the speed of their gait, not even a turn of the head to see what my reply might have been.

  “Shall we take a short break here? I’m knackered,” I said to Brad.

  “OK,” said Brad, without a hint of hesitation.

  We were looking out across a stunning vista. Rolling hills, meadows, pastures with grazing sheep and cows, a busy stream and a smattering of barns and farmhouses. The town of Bagneres was visible in the distance, as was the whole region of the Bigorre, in all its bucolic simplicity. We scrambled up to a large rock where we could be ‘bonjour -free’ for a while. Here, contented and calm, we sat and marvelled at the peace of it all.

  “You see those sheep over there?” said Brad.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, why do you think there’s one lot all sticking together and pointing the same way, and another lot over there, doing exactly the same, but having nothing to do with the first lot?”

  It was a good question. Were sheep tribal creatures? There were definitely two distinct gangs on this mountainside.

  “I wonder if they ever switch from one group to another?” I mused.

  “And do they like each other—or is there an undercurrent of tension between them?” added Brad.

  Neither of us had any answers.

  We were fast discovering that this is what it’s like when ‘townies’ go for a country walk. For the rest of our outing we found that every ten minutes a question was asked to which neither of us had any answer.

  “How long can that buzzard hover there before he gets tired?”

  “What kind of animal leaves droppings like that?”

  “What altitude do you have to be at for grass not to grow?”

  And all the time, the question to ourselves: why didn’t we pay more attention in geography at school?

  Finally Brad went for a sudden change of subject and delivered the killer question.

  “So, did anything Paul and Berry said make you any closer to making a decision about the swimming pool?”

  “Well, it’s a shame,” I replied. “But it does look like I’m going to have to be patient and wait until next August.”

  “What? You can’t wait that long!”

  “Well, there’s no alternative. What else can I do?”

  “Do it yourself. They sell kits.”

  “That’s what Paul said, but he hadn’t seen what a mess I made of the clothes rail. Do we want a swimming pool or a hole with a swamp around it?”

  “You could hire in some local builder to do it.”

  “There aren’t any available. Paul and Berry say that there’s a shortage and that they’ve all got more than enough work already.”

  Brad scratched his head. He had a determined look on his face. I’d seen him like this before—in problem-solving mode.

  “Maybe the answer,” he said, eventually, “is for you to fly Ron out to join you. You could do the pool together.”

  “Ron?”

  “Yes, Ron.”

  I looked askance at Brad, but I could see he was serious.

  “The same Ron who recommended the white van which made it 500 yards on the epic journey to the south of France?”

  “Yes.”

  “The same Ron who has been holed up on his boat for the past few months saying he’s feeling depressed?”

  “Yes. But a trip to France will probably snap him out of it. He’s a great builder. He’d be able to mastermind the pool—and do some of the other jobs you need doing.”

  “I don’t know. I think it might be better just to be patient and wait a year till we can get the pool professionals to do it.”

  “Well, you know best.”

  I hate that expression, mainly because people only use it when they mean exactly the opposite.

  “We’ll talk about it on the plane home tomorrow,” I said, closing what was fast becoming a difficult subject.

  Brad’s enthusiasm for the pool project was colouring his judgement. I’d have him brought back to his senses by the time we landed back in London.

  Common sense would prevail.

  9

  Something in the Woodshed

  The next time the plane touched down in Pau airport I knew that I wouldn’t be seeing Britain again for months. The to-ing and fro-ing was over. This was it: I was moving to France for the summer. I was saying goodbye to driving on the left, traffic jams and the loud thwack of leather on willow on the cricket greens of our fair villages. It was ‘cheerio’ to TV soaps and the lurid sensationalism of the tabloid newspapers. I was bidding farewell to Britain and going to live with what some might describe as the beret-clad, garlic-chomping, onion-selling enemy. However, like the big man that I am, I was prepared to set our differences aside. So what if we’d once fought with each other for a hundred years? So what if de Gaulle and Britain hadn’t always seen eye to eye? And never mind that some of the French saw us Brits as a nation of shopkeepers who boil everything until the flavour has gone. I didn’t mind all that, I was happy to be going to live in France and it felt wonderful. It felt romantic. And it felt a little odd.


  Odd, because when I checked in at the airport, my travelling companion was not the beautiful woman of my dreams—my soulmate, friend and lover all rolled into one. No, it was a fifty-six-year-old bearded bloke with a healthy gut and a cigarette hanging from his lips. It was Ron.

  Common sense had not prevailed, and as a result Ron and I were going to be living together for the summer. Brad had put together a pretty persuasive argument on the flight back to Britain. How could I pass up the chance to lounge by a pool after my hours of piano practice were complete? Hadn’t Ron always done a good job for me? Who else would be free and willing to do a job like this at short notice, and away from family and friends?

  Under duress, I’d weakened and called Ron to see if he’d be interested in a daily rate to come and convert the garage into a living space, and start work on constructing a swimming pool.

  “What do you think, Ron?” I’d asked. “Would you be up for it?”

  “Yeh, I s’pose so,” he’d said, somehow managing to keep his excitement under control.

  I hadn’t been as nervous as I might have been about inviting Ron to live with me. Technically he may have been my ‘builder’ but we’d never really had a relationship like that. Ron had overseen all the knocked-through walls, extensions, lofts and patios of my life, and I’d never had to suffer the torment that seems to engulf others at the moment they let ‘the men with hammers’ through the front door. “Bloody builders,” they usually exclaim with a combination of frustration, contempt, resignation and self-pity. “What a nightmare we’re having!”

  Not me though. It had always been fun with Ron. He’d turn up with whoever he’d mustered together to help him on the job, and the weeks that followed were invariably filled with cheerful banter. It didn’t matter that I was the one who ultimately wrote the cheques, I’d be the butt for as many jokes as anyone else, perhaps more. The job always got done—perhaps not precisely on time or exactly as I’d envisaged, but it was a pain-free experience and that was good enough for me.