A House in the Sunflowers by Ruth Silvestre Read Free Book Online

Grandma poured the coffee Grandpa left the table to return with two bottles from which he offered us a choice of
eau-de-vie
made from plum or pear. This spirit was made on the farm by fermenting the fruit in wooden barrels. It was then distilled by the travelling still or
alambic
and it was so strong that I was glad that the glasses into which he carefully poured it were the smallest that I had ever seen. I noticed that neither of the women drank it and Mike finished most of mine. More to my taste was a delicious prune marinated in
eau-de-vie
which had been sweetened with sugar, and which had to be served into our still warm coffee cups.
    This wonderful meal at last finished – it was by now past three-thirty – the children hunted for the Easter eggs which Madame had hidden. Philippe and his sister were intrigued with the English eggs filled with chocolate drops. I helped Madame and her mother towash up while the men sat talking – not a situation encouraged in my family but when in Rome…We were given a lift back up to our cold little ruin before it got too dark and loaded into the car with us were eggs, potatoes, onions, jars of jam and gherkins, wine and a lethal-looking scythe to tackle the waist-high brambles. It had been a marvellous Easter day in spite of the snow.
     
    Mercifully the cold weather did not last and as the skies cleared the brilliance of the spring sunlight made us screw up our eyes each time we came out of doors. With the warmth came the wild flowers and the fields around Bel-Air were splashed with the sharp green and yellow of wild daffodils. White narcissi and vivid grape hyacinths glowed in the long grass. A cuckoo called confidently in the nearby wood, frogs in the now full-to-the-brim pond croaked in chorus night and morning and we could even hear the plaintive call of the peacocks in the garden of the château which, we were told, was just a few kilometres across the fields. We were simply too busy to go and look.
    The wheat in the field at the back of the house (it was not to be maize this year) grew incredibly fast. The leaves on the ash trees began to uncurl. All this energy and activity exactly suited our mood and each time we came out of the house, on whichever side, we found ourselves saying ‘Just look at that view!’ Itbecame a joke, but after London the sense of space was like a miracle. On cloudless days the sun was already hot enough to sit in without a coat. This was what we had come for. Our only problem was that we could not afford the time to enjoy just being lazy, there was so much that we wanted to do indoors.
    The children from the farm often came up to help us. We seemed to be an attraction. With Véronique’s assistance I cleared all the rubbish from the wide earth-floored corridor. In order to see we threw open the big oak door on the west side of the house and the strong breeze swung the thick cobwebs and the tattered shreds of linen bags of dried herbs, long since crumbled to dust. Véronique swept expertly with a besom, pressing the flat bristles into each corner like a rosy-cheeked Cinderella. Underneath yet more boxes and coils of rusty wire we found, set in the wall, the original, hand-hewn, granite sink and I determined to scrub it out thoroughly the next time we came.
    As neither of the stoves in the main room worked we reluctantly moved them, chimney pipes and all, in order to clean the filthy wall behind them. There were only two lights in the house, both in the main room. One hung in the centre of the ceiling where, alas, the handsome original lamp had been and was no longer, and the other was a grimy bulb on the inside wall of the chimney which illuminated the fireplace. I cooked most meals on the open fire, burning up every singlefloor board from the great pile in the porch. I sat on Anaïs’s special cooking chair with its cut down legs peering through the steam as I stirred my iron pot, my hair filling with wood smoke. My father’s ancestors were