Songs From the Auverne (1)

The feisty and erudite Jane Shilling who writes an elegantly crafted column every Friday in Times2, claimed the other day to ricochet out of bed each morning at 5.30am. That is not a word that could possibly be applied to me, I thought, as the alarm went off at the same barbaricly early hour. I like my bed, for all sorts of reasons, I have my best thoughts there and it is my favourite place for scribbling; I am always reluctant to leave it at any time.

Yet today the ricocheting thought is appropriate for we face a mad dash across England to Stansted and the plane to France. Nevertheless, as first one foot meets the floor and then the other I feel like some hibernating beetle awaken in the depths of winter - able to move only at a speed that would have a lazy sloth gauping with admiration.

I flounder downstairs for a restorative cup of tea and in true Scots tradition make the porridge to get us going. Then, cases piled into the car, I drive out on to the road and head for the sun, just breaking in the East, praying that today is not the day that a hay lorry catches fire on the M4 as it did last week, with calamitous results for anyone with a deadline.

But Fate is kind. We arrive ridiculously early and in a few hours alight deep in 'La France Profonde' - a tiny regional airport where even the 'douanier' smiles at you - a marked contrast to the press and surliness of Stansted. Our friends J and B wait to welcome us and we drive off in the sunshine.

The air is softer here, I reflect, the light more luminous, the temperature warmer. The poplar trees are heavy with mistletoe, the almonds in full blossom. Yellow forsythia abounds with the occasional pinky-red japonica just open.

The country here is very like mid-Wales, but on a grander scale. The hills are higher, the valleys longer, the rivers - our route took us alongside the Lot - broader. It has been similarly abandoned by its inhabitants with farming and tourism the only remaining economic lifestays.

We stop somewhere for a beer, sit in the sunshine, catch up on the news. I notice two buzzards over head. A dungareed man walks past smoking, a little round head on which sits a disproportionate nose, fleshy and hooked, so that he resembles a kind of parrot. Yet again I regretted my inability to draw, to capture in a few squiggly lines the essence of that typically eccentric face.

We arrive at the village and descend the steep road down to the Mill, granted its first licence more than two hundred years ago. Fifty acres of field and forest and disused buildings, full of machinery left as it was when work finished some fifty years ago. I hear again the rush and rustle of the millstream, see the calm of the millpond, cleaner and clearer than when we were last here in the autumn.

I walk with J up the old unmetalled road that climbs steeply up the valley. Who built it, I wonder, and why? It seems impassable to anything less powerful than a 4 x 4, yet, I supposed, at one time horses must have climbed it with carts behind them. Collecting timber in the woods and bringing in supplies to the Mill nestling below us, surrounded by walnut trees.

The Mill house has long been modernised and back there I join B in the kitchen as she prepares supper. Our conversation is always eclectic. Tonight we find ourselves discussing liberty bodices and by what supernatural mechanism do pillow cases always end up inside duvet covers when you wash them in a machine.

I go outside. Though we live at home in what the government defines as 'a rural area' it is so easy to forget what real countryside is like. Where the only sound you hear is natural, the rushing water, the tweet of birdsong, the gentle swaying of branches in the wind or the bark of an animal. Where there is no light outside apart from the sun or the stars and where in the night you cannot see your hand in front of your face.

An early bat wheels in the gathering darkness. I am beginning to feel tired. More tales from the Mill very soon.

Posted by Fennie Somerville

(This blog appeared first on the Country Living website www.countryliving.co.uk)