Tim Bannerman's Cider Chronicles - Part 1 - From Somerset to Tordouet
The Bannerman cottage in Tordouet, France
It is the early 1990s. The first Iraq war is raging in ‘shock and awe’. We are living in France, in a little village in the Pays d’Auge. At the heart of this very rural part of the region of Calvados in Lower Normandy, is the small market town of Orbec. That is where I take my 6 year old daughter to the Ecole de Musique for her piano lesson with Mme Beranger, an operatically voiced and upholstered presence whom none may disobey.
The school itself is an ancient, crumbling, cock-eyed stone building, issuing fumbled strains of trumpet, piano, clarinet and voice. Around the walls, elegant inscriptions, Sappho-like in fragments, frame smells of mildewed paper, battered instruments and dust. Inside, the bowed stone steps and weathered floorboards bear witness to generations of children suffering their solfège, or compulsory music theory, under battle-hardened maîtres within. I deposit my young daughter and then wander to a favourite place to wait, up a narrow alleyway round the corner.
Picture ‘Le Calvados’, a little half-timbered colombage bar off the ancient main street of Orbec, in the heart of camembert, cider and, yes, calvados country. Here they call it calva, a powerful spirit distilled from strong, dry cider. Excellent with a little espresso to kick-start the morning, or as a digestif after lunch or dinner. Or, with more serious gastronomical intent, as the fabled trou normand, between courses, perhaps with a little sorbet to accompany it. Or lastly, as our great friend and neighbour, Claude, introduced it to us, as a melicasse.
Requiring a health warning, as Martin Hesp discovered on one of his many visits, this is a powerfully sweet concoction of two to three parts cassis, one part calva, best drunk in the grounds of a warm coffee cup after a good dinner, thus carrying you deep into the politics, philosophy and football-flavoured night. Or – to be partaken of as a strictly single, late afternoon quelque chose, while waiting for your daughter to emerge from her piano lesson in the Ecole de Musique round the corner.
In the bar, games of ‘Flipper’, pronounced ‘flee-pair’, and ‘Babby Foot’, are in riotous progress. It is all life and smoke and laughter with a tilt to it – hints of outback and a lurking madness.
Against a wall leans Patrick, a friend who keeps a roof tile in his pocket with the purpose of one day finding the sacred roof it belonged to, and thus his salvation. He was being teased by some younger roughnecks picking, as usual, on this vulnerable soul. Bored by his lack of response, they soon leave him to his eternal melancholy.
Elsewhere, a blind man is being led to the Babby Foot by a young child who puts the man’s hands tenderly on the forward handles. They play opposite a slender chestnut girl who commands all four handles with cat-like skill.
Another daughter – for they are all Madame’s children, it seems - cradles her little baby girl and cheers them on, without favouring either side. ‘Bravo, bravo!’ she cries as the blind man twizzles and twirls and feels for the next ball in the tray.
Around us, the walls gleam glossy shades of curdled cream and chocolate while Madame sits and knits, like a smiling, toothless tricoteuse, waiting for the next little round head to fall into the basket. And through the beamed divide, an old couple, papi et mamie, perhaps: he, gaunt, moustachioed, a yellow maïs pegged under the stained curtain in the corner of his mouth; she, all grey curls and woollen shawl; both looking on in shared enjoyment of the bucolic scene before them.
Madame and her many Daughters of the World, all of whom bear differing genes it seems, hold sway. But it is little Cindy, aged 15 months, who steals the scene when the Babby Foot game ends. As the chestnut girl smiles dazzling teeth in triumph and settles her long legs on a stool beside the bar, La Cindy is passed from lap to lap, to kiss, caress, to heaven.
‘Tu ecris un roman?’ – I look up from my notebook and see it is the chestnut girl, her amber eyes translucent in a shaft of sunlight, who is asking me. Not a novel, no, I say, but, who knows? And at that moment, Cindy, in her pink hat, pink coat, pink cheeks, throws her head back and – guffaws.
Meanwhile, I tip back the last drops of my calva with the amber eyes upon me while another game commences, the blind man determined this time to twirl his way to victory.
The Tordouet garden
*****
Like any drink, there is calvados and calvados, from the mass-produced industrial, to the fungal farmyard, and all between. Our favourite came from just up the road from our house thanks to a trusted confidant of an ancient inhabitant of the presbitary, the heart of the Communauté de Tordouet. This was the Taizé-flavoured Catholic foundation that sang and clapped lustily to a guitar or two every Sunday and many an evening in the old church immediately opposite our house.
Old Père Leconte, the eldest of three priests – the Bull, the Dancer and the Calvados-Maker – at 90 something, with his frail but fluting voice and twinkling eyes, had a secret only the chosen few had access to. No-one knew where he got it from, who made it, when. It was just his. Oh, but it was old and smooth and fragrant as a ripe Calville Rouge d’Automne, when picked warm from the late September sun and held, still pulsing, to the nose. And it was as strong as the angels allowed, when they had taken their share. Which was pretty damn strong. Which is why, disguised in a variety of innocuous-looking bottles, it was known as Perrier Fou or Mad Perrier, if you get my drift.
So is it surprising, on arriving here, having found a little house perched at the top of a little hill, which was an orchard, the thought should arise – what if? Yes, both house and orchard were somewhat dilapidated, but there they were, the trees, the terroir and, the clincher – a cellar, complete with rusty bottle racks on the wall.
The village of Tordouet, in Calvados, was where we lived in the little white house just opposite the West end of the nave of the church, with the scattered cider apple trees on the hill below. We lived there for almost exactly four years from August 1989 to September 1993.
Cider-making is a curious art. Like greatness, some are born to it, some achieve it and some have it thrust upon ‘em, as the Bard said. Except cider isn’t always great, of course.
My wife, Gill, and I were lucky enough to have cider-making more or less thrust upon us when, in 1989, we found ourselves living on top of a small hill opposite the village church in the Pays d’Auge in Normandy. And the South-facing hill just happened to be an old cider orchard.
My cider journey had started way back at Eli’s, if not before, as described in my Lockdown Diary contribution on 25 May. My time as a West Somerset Free Press reporter, as you would expect, required many hours of serious research in hostelries from the Quantock Hills across the Brendons to the further reaches of Exmoor and all between.
The delicious, cool penumbra that greeted you on a Summer’s day as you opened the green door of The Carew Arms and stepped onto the worn grey flags that led to the bar gave instant recovery from the trials of the Crowcombe Flower Show up the hill. With a head full of Jones’s, any one of whose initials misplaced might make the winner of the Onion Through a Three Inch Ring class the runner-up to the Victoria Sandwich Cake class, or vice versa, with hell to pay on Friday morning if I got them wrong – that first pint sang more sweetly than Caruso, believe you me.
The Luttrell Arms in Dunster, on the other hand, was a different kettle of fish. Not only did it have a bale of straw hanging from the ceiling of the Public Bar – to absorb the smoke, I was told – but it pumped its Taunton cider electronically from the cellar which gave it quite a different quality to the hand-pumped variety.
It also had a different clientele, in the Public Bar that is, the Lounge being the preserve of the respectable and the grockles. Interesting characters included a well-known poacher who would usually have something large and interesting concealed in his large and interesting all-weather coat, or trousers for that matter, even in the height of Summer. Fish, fowl, all manner of game, would be exchanged for an undisclosed sum in a twinkling of an eye. And once, he told me of witnessing something deeply disturbing up at an undisclosed location up on the moor.
Hinting at a hole being dug and something being placed in it, he would not speculate as to whether it might be loot, or something bigger and much, much worse. Those were the days when dark doings occurred in the battle for supremacy in the business of amusement arcades and other profitable diversions. The same names and faces appeared week after week in Minehead Magistrates Court. Reporters were known to have been threatened in nocturnal alleyways. Either the police would have had to drag the moor from Dunkery to Simonsbath and beyond or – well, perhaps I failed in my civic, even moral duty, I ask myself. Was it a body? Human or otherwise? Rightly or wrongly, I shall never know.
On the other hand, they held a life-drawing class upstairs at the Luttrell of a Thursday evening. There, at least, was a living soul as our model who just happened to be the same young woman who was featured in the saga of the feckin eejits, yours truly in particular, in the sports car in LD 70.
Reader, I married her, I’m glad to say.
And so it was that 10 years later, after eight grace-and-favour years in an old Hampshire farmhouse in a hamlet called The Golden Pot (named after the pub), our time being up, we had six months to find somewhere new. Five months later, having stuck a pin in the map, we found ourselves, now with four children, a dog and a very odd car, living in France.
