Tim Bannerman's Cider Chronicle Part 5 - Tale Of Trilbies and Dark Glasses
Cider Chronicles Part Five
(Editor’s note - if you’d like to hear Tim’s famously dulcet tones reading one of his own wonderful poems, do make sure you reach the bottom of this page and click the arrow in the box to listen….)
‘Eros! Viens ici! Eros! Eh, bien, mon beau garçon, embrasse moi!’
Heard before seen, the unmistakable voice resolved into the burly figure of our village mayor, lord and master of his little fiefdom here in our corner of the Pays d’Auge.
Eros was not a figment of some cider-fumed, homoerotic fantasy, or his pet name for me, you may be interested to know. It was, in fact, his scruffy little terrier who was the only creature seemingly not under his thrall – unlike the rest of us.
Monsieur le Maire and his family lived in a rambling farm on the edge of the village where his father and his before him, had made cider and calvados in their caves there for a hundred years or more. His grandfather, sadly, came to a sticky end one day when transferring the raw spirit from the alembique, or copper still, to the barrel. Somehow a spark was struck, his hobnail boots, perhaps – and you can guess the rest. No better way to light a Christmas pudding than with a spoonful of distiller’s proof calvados. You can imagine what a cellarful can do.
Here, though, was an unscorched man in his pomp, come to share a moment with this interloper and his family who had had the temerity to install themselves at the heart of his village.
The Bannerman family collecting mistletoe in rural Normandy
Nearly four years we’d lived there, with our three younger children at the local schools. They had barely a single word of French when they arrived. Within weeks, it seemed, through song and play, they were chatting away with their new friends and writing in a new Babar script, each letter painstakingly tongue-in-corner-of-the-mouth curled and linked, tail to trunk, like little baby elephants.
For Sam and Amy, aged 3 and 5 respectively, school was like a warm bath of maternal care, including the prescribed after-lunch snooze in little beds all squeezed together in one room. Sam, however, decided this was not for him, as with so many things, and remained the defiant non-snoozer among them. He was also asked early on the dreaded question all children fear: ‘Que fait ton père, Samuel?’ Or ‘What does your father do?’
Amy in the orchard
After a moment of frozen panic, the little boy looked out of the window and saw the baker’s bread van go past. Inspiration struck! ‘Mon père est boulanger’.
Josh’s experience, aged 8, was rather different. Le Grand Meaulnes or The Lost Domaine in the English translation, is a wonderful romance by Alain-Fournier, the only novel he wrote before being killed in the First World War. It paints a vivid picture of school life at the turn of the 20th century, not that different 90 years later in the Ecole Moyenne in la Chapelle Yvon, just down the valley from our village. It was an austere world in which discipline could be harsh, teachers not always the kindest of souls and to be the only English child in the school – well, it wasn’t the easiest of baptisms, top of the class or not.
Meanwhile, our 16 year old eldest, Leo, was between worlds in England and France. When he was living with us, he caused a sensation at our village hops in the Salle des Fêtes. He would appear, scattering the dancers on the old tin trolley he’d commandeered from the kitchen on one occasion, in clothes he’d designed himself. With his hair half pink, half green, he danced like a demented, beautiful, hip-hop Nijinsky leaving the locals open-mouthed in awe.
Leo was a sensation at the village hops
For all the rewards and wonders, though, we were on shaky ground. If nothing else, financially. To try to keep the wolf at bay, I’d set up an embryonic company using drama as a learning and development tool with a consultancy in England. This was thanks to a chance encounter with one of the handful of people who change your life in extraordinary and unforeseen ways.
Michel Fustier was an industrial consultant, living in Lyons, who just happened to be the brother-in-law of a man a friend of ours suggested I meet in Paris. Our kind friend thought we were all going to starve by going to live in France. The smooth Parisian businessman and I looked at each over our langoustines. We realised almost immediately that we had absolutely nothing in common. I knew nothing about business. He knew nothing about theatre and the arts. Then he said – but my brother-in-law’s a bit of an oddball like you. Why don’t you give him a call – you never know…
When I met Michel, after inviting me down pretty well there and then, I found a distinguished 65 year old man, almost paralysed with grief after the recent death of his wife. I became a kind of lifeline over that weekend. We would talk – he was one of the most dauntingly erudite men I’ve ever met – and then he would say he was fatigué. Tears streaming down his face, he would retire to his room. There he played his violin, Bach fugues mostly and not particularly well but with a spine-shivering intensity, hours on end, day or night. Then we would talk again, eat something, again not particularly well, but food was the least of his interests.
What inspired him was not only the ability of human beings to create profound change at critical times in the history of the world and society, but also why they fought tooth and nail to resist it. We travelled from the Greek philosophers to the Industrial Revolution, from Galileo to Einstein, from the Odyssey to Apollo 11, from Bach to Stravinsky, from Descartes to Jung.
I was dizzy with it all as I left him on the Sunday afternoon and it wasn’t until halfway back on the TGV that it sank in. We had agreed to set up a company together as a learning tool for any organisation of any kind, using the Shakespearean concept of theatre from Hamlet.
Hamlet says to the Players, arriving serendipitously out of the blue, that their job is: ‘to hold, as ‘twere, the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure’. And later: ‘I have heard that guilty creatures sitting at a play have, by the very cunning of scene, been struck so to the soul that, presently, they have proclaimed their malefactions… the play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king’.
Little did I know that 30 years later, I would have retired from a job that took me and scores of actors all over the world to ‘hold up a mirror’ to countless thousands of participants from every form of organisation under the sun. This included some in the full blaze of the public eye, some hidden away in the dark – catching quite a few consciences of kings and queens along the way. And all from that first meeting with a grief-stricken man.
Back then, though, the money coming in was limited and sporadic. I knew that to stay in France, we would need more than the few hours of teaching English, translating for a local estate agent and selling a few bottles of cider to a local restaurant or two. My continuing to do the occasional commercial or TV in England was not enough. So I designed a course for learning English through drama that I proposed to Evreux University and, for a short while, believed that it might just take off. But no, despite their enthusiasm, there were not enough applicants. By early 1993, with the English pound worth a great deal less than on our arrival, our life in France had become worryingly tenuous.
‘Eh bien, mon gar! Pas trop tôt pour un p’tit coup? ’ cried the mayor in his ‘hail, fellow, well met’ way, crushing my hand in his great, calloused paw as Eros made frantic love to my leg. A ‘shot’ was required, as always on these state occasions. However early or late.
We made our way up the hill and sat down at the kitchen table with a bottle of his favourite malt – they were all his favourite – and discussed his favourite subjects: the prowess of the French rugby team, particularly when compared to England, the imminent end to the traditional way of farming in the Pays d’Auge and the world at large and… At that point, he produced a roll of paper from inside his coat. With a flourish, he unrolled it on the table, and plonked a glass at either end. It was a map.
This is our new mairie, he announced. And pointed a stubby finger proudly at the outline of a large building in a large plot – the bottom half of our orchard. But, I said… This, he continued, will be my legacy when I finally retire. But, I said again… And this is the perfect place, he said, fixing me with his bloodshot eye. So, I said… And as I have the right to requisition land wherever I want, I have chosen the best place, right at the centre of the village. We start building this Autumn.
So the die was cast. It seems he did have some arcane right to requisition land for official purposes and there seemed to be nothing we could do about it.
We, too, had a legacy though, from our challenging, rewarding, impoverished and yet entirely wonderful four years in France. Above all, we had lifelong friendships with our beloved neighbours across road, Annette and Claude and their three children, all bosom pals on and off with our three younger children.
We had a knowledge and understanding of the rural way of life in France, much of it unchanged since the war whose ghosts still hovered, above and below ground – as a curiously heavy, encrusted metallic object found by the gosses in the field below and plonked on the kitchen table bore witness to on one occasion. Having evacuated the house and warned the neighbours, never was the sound of the pompiers’ siren coming towards us up the valley more welcome!
Our children had a new language that they spoke as if they’d been born there, our daughter, Amy, even dreaming in French when I heard her in her sleep. And Gill too, from virtually zero, could discuss politics, religion and all the rest of it in our many impassioned discussions with French friends, not least over an idea for a play. Eight hundred years it spanned to bring alive the story of our octagonal clocher across the way, chiming centuries of life and death with its endlessly beautiful bells. It never happened, the play, but who knows, one day…
We’d kept, and eaten, our own sheep, if with heavy hearts – until the smell of new season lamb and rosemary drifted through the house that is. Had chickens too, when the fox allowed, who inhabited the old henhouse and laid eggs in secret places all round the orchard. Including the remains of our old 1973 Citroen Ami Super that we’d arrived in, wheelbarrow on the roof. A rare beast these days, the jolie-laide Ami, being unusually right-hand drive in our case. It had given more than one French driver coming the other way a near heart-attack in those days as they saw this archetypal French car approaching with, seemingly, no-one in the driver’s seat.
Preparing for the show
We’d been accepted and more by the village as a whole and had even put on a show in the church across the road which took its inspiration from Thomas Hardy’s ‘Under the Greenwood Tree’. A brilliant friend and renowned Dorset folk musician, Tim Laycock, came out to help to put it together and perform it with me. And the Communauté had enfolded us in the cycle of birth, first communion, weddings and funerals. The children, a whole gang of them, played out these rituals in the house or in the woods around, with Sam usually being the body in funerals as he was the smallest – if not the most compliant.
And we’d learned a wonderful and extraordinary craft that had been more or less ‘thrust upon us’. Not just by physical circumstance – the orchard, the cellar – but by so many people who said: il le faut. You must. So when we were visited by the distinguished Times Wine Correspondent, Jane Macquitty herself, we were both humbled and hugely flattered to be given a half page to ourselves, more or less, on 6 June 1992. The headline? “Beating the French at their Own Games”.
The Bannerman’s achieve fame, if not fortune - in The Times newspaper
You will not be surprised at my not showing the headline to Monsieur le Maire in case he thought we had got somewhat ‘au dessus de notre gare’, as Churchill might have said. But even our neighbour Annette’s father-in-law, a well-seasoned cider-maker in his own right à l’époque, complimented us on making a cidre bouché to compare with the best of them. ‘Ma Foi, c’est droit. Eh, oui, droit comme il faut, mon gar,’ he said. There’s no better compliment than that.
Now it just so happened that a couple of years before the unrolling of the mayor’s map, we’d had quite a lot of cider left over after bottling. About 420 litres or thereabouts. By then, mid-Summer, it was almost too dry to drink, let alone bottle, and I was seriously thinking of giving the hens a wild night in the undergrowth where I was planning to dump it.
As so often, the door to the street crashed open, quite possibly after church on Sunday, and a lovely old friend, Gaby, and his wife, the rosy-cheeked Lucienne, stood there with big beams on their faces. Isn’t God marvellous? he would say, his arms spread wide. How blessed we are in all we have! And then would bestow large, smacking kisses on both cheeks, trois fois, to all concerned.
Gaby was also a cider and calvados-maker who lived in the village over the other side of the valley. He had bow legs you could drive a pig through, the consequence of a contretemps with a grumpy bull, having made the mistake of turning his back on it when he was a younger and greener man. Come to think of it, his cider had a somewhat greenish, let’s call it ‘mossy’, tinge too.
But Gaby’s real pride and joy was his calvados. When I shared with him my regret at having to jettison all that undrinkable cider, he leapt to his feet with a cry of pain. ‘Bah, non!’ he said. ‘C’est po supportable!’ He had a strong local accent, hence ‘po’ instead of ‘pas’. ‘Faut l’ammener chez moi. J’ai le bouilleur qui vient. La nuit, hein? Faut l’ammener la nuit. On va faire un vrai Camélote, toi et moi.’
And so it was, one dark and moonless night, that a nameless assistant and I, having decanted the cider into various small containers, put on our trilbies and dark glasses – which the nameless assistant wore most of the time anyway – and made our stealthy way across the valley to Gaby’s farm in the moth-eaten old flying carpet that was the Citroen ID.
Like many at that time in that part of the world, Gaby had what was confusingly called the ‘Droit’ – not as in the adjective for ‘straight’ or ‘correct’ but in the noun for the legal Right. This was still something one could inherit then, from father to son or daughter, on the death of the previous holder.
It was the right to ‘boil’ or distil. Thus cider-makers who made rather more than us, as had their forbears since time immemorial, could turn what they didn’t drink as cider into calvados by distilling it. We didn’t have the droit but Gaby did and so he kept our cider till last and just added it to his pot.
The penalties for illegal distilling were draconian, up to and including the guillotine, quite possibly. Nevertheless, with Gaby, devout Christian that he was at the helm, it couldn’t be that wrong – ‘adding to his pot’. Not really. Could it?
Why ‘Camélote’ though? I never asked but enjoyed the Arthurian sense of knights on a quest, drawing something precious from the stone that had ground a thousand apples into a magical elixir worthy of Merlin himself.
The call came a week or so later. ‘Elle est lá. La Camélote. Vient. C’est dans l’acier. Ca va le manger. Vient vite!’ He’d put it in a milk churn and was worried that the calvados, still at pot strength, would start eating into the metal, if that was possible.
So out we went again that night, my brother, Richard, and I this time, to pick up this milk churn full of the finest calvados the world had ever seen. With Rich holding on to it in the back, not realising quite what he’d roped himself into on a family visit, I drove as carefully as I could, hoping we wouldn’t meet a gendarme on the way. Just in case he might wonder what these two characters were doing, trying not to look suspicious with a milk churn not full of milk in their car.
If you have ever tried pouring 30 litres of freshly distilled calvados into a small barrel, you will know just what kind of impact this can have. The fumes alone can intoxicate you as if you’d been drinking the stuff all day. The nameless assistant and I were both giggling like 6 year olds by the end, having placed a chiffon over the funnel in the bunghole to catch any stray bits of straw from the can.
Who was this pouring 30 litres into a milk churn? No one this site can recognise, legally speaking anyway.
And there it was. 30 litres, or more, of the finest Camélote that money couldn’t buy. In a little barrel, there to mature over the next 5, 10, 20 years to ‘âge inconnu’. Who knew? Until the irresistible moment came to try it.
Except, rather sooner than expected, fate took a hand. Attempts to earn a living in France had failed. The consultancy in England, recognising the potential of Michel’s and my little enterprise, had offered me a salary – my first since leaving the West Somerset Free Press nearly 15 years earlier. And now Monsieur le Maire wanted half our orchard for his vanity project, the new mairie.
The writing was on the wall and it was with heavy hearts – except for Josh who couldn’t wait to get back to where he’d left his heart behind – that we decided it was time to go.
But wait. What about the Camélote, oh and scores of undrunk bottles of the finest cidre bouché the world had ever seen? Well, we worked it out. If we put the calvados into identical corked and wired bottles as the cider and then mixed them all up in the crates in the van, it would be very unlucky if the customs officer opened one that blew his head off when he took a sniff, or worse, a swig.
Just imagine it then, if we had. We’d have been enjoying it, if only for Christmas puddings, casseroles, flambée’d chicken and all the rest – it would still have been too powerful to drink at nearly 70°, except perhaps in the occasional mélicasse, for old times sake. Or to allow a drop on the tip of the tongue to fill one’s skull with the essence of all things apple and oak and beautiful bells in old, old stone.
There might even have been some left now, nearly 30 years on. Enough to celebrate rediscovering the joys of cider-making, this time in Herefordshire, having planted our orchard in 2012 to include a corner of French cider apples, the Noel des Champs, for one, bought at the 600 year old Foire aux Arbres in Lisieux (of which more to come with Martin in the forthcoming Lockdown days).
Well, it’s a nice idea. And, who knows, my memory’s not as reliable as it was. Did we – or didn’t we? How nice it would have been if we had.
The Devouring Flame (for Guy*)
He kissed me, here and here and here again
And then held me, his pale drawn face
At arms length and with the other arm
Pointed in a great gesture to the sky
Where the bells reverberated into blue:
‘La clef!’ – the key – he said, his eyes
Reverberating into blue where loss, rebirth,
Merged as one, clear devouring flame.
*Guy was the Dancer of the three priests at the Communauté, the others being the Bull, still there, and the Calvados-Maker, long gone now. When he died the children all came together to make a wonderful work of art to place in his grave. He was greatly loved and never ceased to offer his welcome to those, like us, who professed no faith but shared his joy in fellowship within the community.
Camelot*
From Camelot, the view around the hills
Is fine, is blue and green and fills
The mind. The lungs drink deep,
Suck liquid air until they keep
The memory, like a map of all the places
Where you have seen and kissed the faces
Of your family – so many people
In your church of tower and steeple,
Vault and valley, arching stone and spreading bough,
So many, so much to love, you wonder how
To meet them in the memory or map, this mind,
Which holds the secrets only you can find
In the air you breathe, up here, where you draw deep
To delve within the darkness of the castle keep.
*written after a walk up on Cadbury Castle, near North Cadbury in Somerset which is one of the suggested sites for King Arthur’s Camelot, hotly contested by Tintagel and others, of course. It was also a time when my mother was in the early stages of dementia and this was one of our last walks together.
