Tim Bannerman's Cider Chronicles - Part 2 - The French Orchard

I had been an actor on stage and screen for a while by the time we moved to France. After experiencing a similar run-in with the MD of the Free Press to Martin, in 1978, it was an amateur performance as Hamlet in the open air that summer, in the stunning 18th century surroundings of Stourhead Gardens, that changed my life, yet again.

I was offered a job, with an Equity ‘ticket’, with a touring theatre company who needed someone, anyone, to plug an urgent hole in their team of strolling players who just happened to be performing nearby. And just at the moment that my old Chief Reporter offered me the job he’d promised on a Middle Eastern paper after leaving the Free Press himself, I’d made the choice to live with Gill and her little boy. Thus I abandoned all sane employment to train properly as an actor, once more an impoverished student, at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. 

The Coronation Tap in Clifton was a sleazy dive back then but, nevertheless, a mecca for the seasoned cider drinker and much favoured by theatre school students and BBC Radio Drama types, of whom I was occasionally one, after a hard day’s recording in the studio next door. But by the time Gill and I left Bristol, we were married, with two children now, and the quest for good cider had to take second place to the need for a roof over our heads and some form of income to pay the bills. 

However, it was cider that found us the farmhouse at The Golden Pot, thanks to an opportune pint at Bill Lucy and Mrs Shepherd’s wonderful Red Lion at Kilmington, in Wiltshire. Playing darts with Gill, I overheard someone at the other end of the bar talking about an empty house near Alton in Hampshire, going virtually for free to someone who would live in it and keep it warm. At an interview in the plush Mayfair mansion of Sir Robert McAlpine a few weeks later, her Ladyship took a shine to us and there we were for the next eight years.

By some miracle the work came in and by 1989 a combination of commercials, tv and old-fashioned repertory theatre, some generous relatives and friends and selling almost everything we had, enabled us to up sticks and buy our little house on a Normandy hill for the princely sum of £28,000, on a 50% mortgage.

Not only was there a somewhat broken down old orchard of traditional Normandy cider apple varieties but under the house was a lovely, cool cellar. Just right for the purpose it was designed for.

All we needed now was a barrel – and someone to tell us what do.

The good thing about that part of the world was that nearly everyone knew about cider, either as makers, or the sons and daughters thereof, or as self-professed experts who had never made a drop in their lives. It may not surprise you, however, that everyone has a different view on how it should be done.

The man we bought the house from had an aunt. Who had a barrel. It might not have been used for 20 years or more but – imagine the Gallic shrug – we all have to start somewhere…

It was huge. And ancient. With staves as loose as an old man’s teeth and bearing scars which dated back to before the war, or so the old lady told us. But now it was ours and it had work to do for the first time for many, many a year.

It also had a little door at one end called a guichet. This was chamfered so that, as the barrel filled, it would force a tight seal between the door and its rectangular frame. It was, we discovered, just big enough for me to wriggle through by squeezing my shoulders in on themselves in order to inspect and clean the barrel from the inside. A small child, however, well, Victorians and chimneys come to mind. We had plenty of them, children that is. And they didn’t have ‘Health and Safety’ back in ’89, or not in rural France, that’s for sure.

The problem with an old barrel is that if you fill it before checking that it’s fit for purpose, all the cider runs out through the gaps in the staves. So you have to swell the wood first. With water. 

It took gallons and days of filling and refilling, getting quietly desperate, but in the end, it held. Mostly. And was very, very clean.

Then, of course, you need the fruit. Now, to fill a 1200 litre barrel, you need the juice of quite a lot of fruit. Between two and three tons of little, round, hard cider apples that everyone locally piled up in a tas. In our case, that was a lot of apples in a big heap on the grass at the bottom of the hill.

From late September onwards, we picked. And kept on picking through October, November and into the hard frosts of December. God it was cold, prising the hard pink balls of the Noel des Champs from the clasp of the frozen grass, one at a time. Many varieties had identities that were ‘lost in the night of time’, as the saying goes, in the sense that they could have been bitter or sweet, with only a bite into the tight, little balls of varying levels of juice to tell you vaguely which was which. Acidic or mouth-dryingly astringent would give an indication as to levels of sharpness or tannin, whereas the late-cropping, pale speckled pink Noel des Champs were sweet with a whole Summer and Autumn’s sun to swell the sugar and imbue the cider with the luscious succulence of a classic cidre bouché of the Pays d’Auge.

Over those months, the pile would grow and those that rotted along the way, we would pick out and donate to the birds and beasts of the fields – who helped themselves anyway from the pile itself, of course. Until the moment came to drop in on M. Armenhoult. 

Old Monsieur Armenhoult was now the doyen of the family and no longer able to do more than old farmers do - boss his sons and daughters around and drive them mad. But his knowledge of apples and their ways was second to none. He proudly told me that he could eat good apples all year round, thanks to judicious planting over the last 60 years, and his father before him, ensuring each variety covered the seasons from July right through to February, with good storers to bridge the gap thereafter.  

He was a fount of knowledge about the whole process of cider-making and over coffee and a deep, powerful calva or canard of his own making, we talked apples and their virtues.

On his farm, beyond the old half-timbered farmhouse and the yard, with turkeys gobbling, logs neatly stacked and well-stocked potager with every vegetable the good Lord and Mme Armenhoult could provide, lay the orchard. There could be found old, gnarled apple varieties including St. Martin, Bedan, Rambault, St. Philbert, Bonnes Sortes and many others, a mix of sharp, bitter sharp, bitter sweet and sweet. Of the Early, Middle and Late croppers, the best were moyen or Middle, he felt.  From 17th July, precisely, onwards, he could also call on a succession of pommes a couteau, eaters that would see him through the year.

In amongst them were English ‘Hoo Vert’ (or so it sounded) and, surprisingly, Canadian Red Delicious varieties and, above all, his treasure: an ancient, almost lost variety from the nearby Chateau de Mailloc, late of the Colbert family (Jean-Baptiste of that name being the Minister of Finances under the great Sun King himself, Louis XIV). He called it ‘Col Appui’ or Support Collar, in English, named after a monk in Louis XIV’s time who had brought the pépin ‘from distant parts’, an almost black pip with a long drawn out body, as he described with his trembling, veined old hands. 

Greffage or grafting should take place in the April croissant, the rising moon, for apple trees, he told me. This is to use the rising sap to help the graft ‘take’. The moon, as we were to discover, plays a big part in the process of cider-making here, as it does in so many things, from vegetables to hair-cutting, the rise and fall of the moon helping leaves to sprout and hair to curl, or roots to delve and hair to grow straighter. Some may laugh at the influence the moon may or may not have on plants and animals alike. Not here they don’t. Think about the tide.

Then, in his capacity as Mayor of the little village neighbouring his farm, to mark 8th May ‘Cérémonie Patriotique’ of the ‘Amicale des Anciens Combattants et Demobilisé de La Chapelle Yvon’, he formally invited me to place the gerbe or Hydrangea flower on the Monument aux Morts. More particularly, as I was English, he felt it apposite for me to honour the grave of an English soldier, mitraillé – machine-gunned – by the Germans just after D-Day in 1944. After being shot, the soldier had been taken to the local chateau which had been turned into a makeshift hospital at the time, and, when dying of his wounds, had asked to be buried in the churchyard at La Chapelle Yvon, close by the chateau.

Marcel himself – by now we were on first name terms – had been taken prisoner when the French Navy capitulated shortly after the Occupation in June 1940. In 1942, he managed to escape from his German prisoner-of-war camp and, having crossed the border into France, somehow smuggled himself eventually on a train to Toulon and thence back to St. Pierre de Mailloc, his village. He had to hide not just from the Germans but also from ‘certain French’ who would have betrayed him if they could, he said. They were lucky in that the German officer who was billeted in their farm was, in Mme Amenhoult’s phrase, a ‘thumbs up’ character, and he protected them from the nastier SS element who not only got drunk but tried to ride a donkey into their house. Imagine!

Many wartime stories emerged over our coffee and calva, such as a Red Cross nurse at the hospital who tended German, Canadian and English soldiers equally alike, including one without any trousers on, after the Debarquement. Tragically, she was burned alive in her car – she was the only woman driver for miles around – when ambushed and machine-gunned by the Germans. 

Another story was about a German prisoner-of-war camp guard who had helped not only him but a friend of Armenhoult’s escape, with five others, all of whom made it back to France. When it was discovered how Willi, the young German guard, had ‘carelessly’ allowed these men to escape, for punishment, he was sent to the Front at Caen following the Invasion. It wasn’t long before, luckily, he was captured by the Allied forces and put to work in fields by chance not far from the Armenoult’s home. One day, Marcel was out on his horse when something about this figure in the fields caught his attention. On coming closer, he saw to his disbelief that it was the very man who had helped him escape from the prisoner-of-war camp. After the war ended, Marcel and Willi kept contact and became great friends, with Willi naming his first-born Marcel.

Mme Armenhoult, who bore her years of toil well, had had the tough upbringing common to so many at that time. Farmed out to an uncle as a child, she rose at 4 every morning to start her working day, with exception of Sundays. Then she had to get up at 3 in the morning to bring in the mare and harness her up in order to be in Orbec by 7, ready for Mass at 8.30. No wonder that generation and those before look at us and wonder what planet we were born on.

Marcel’s son, Michel, was a big, powerful man with a shocking blood-red birthmark across one half of his piratical face. Could he come with his tractor and trailer for us to load it up and then take it round the narrow, steep lane up to the top of the hill, ready for the travelling press to arrive on the day booked? Often it was his trusty farmworker who came, a bright red flower invariably clasped between his teeth – better than a cigarette, he said – and we shovelled the two to three tons on to the trailer. Good exercise before or after Christmas as a way of diminishing the crise de foie when a deal of partying had inevitably occurred.

So we now had an orchard, a cellar, a barrel to put stuff in and a great deal of prime cider apples piled up on a trailer. All we needed now was the press.

Au Monument aux Morts

Wrapped in paper, the pot of hydrangea

        (Hortensia, he called it, Old Armenhoult),

        Registered the rain as Old Armenhoult

        Called out the names that to a stranger

        Or newcomer like me, rang faint bells,

        Here and there, like other faint bells

        Reminiscent, damply, of a distant danger.

        The English soldier had been shot at the corner

        By the house where the road went past the church.

        There was no roof at that time then left on the church,

        Said a man from the village who had been born there

        And whose mother had seen the English soldier fall

        ‘They shot him from the churchyard. She saw him fall.’

        In later years she became his solitary mourner.

        I placed the flowers of the grave of A. J. Haughton

        Who had died on 3rd September 1944.

        Strangely, his age had also been 44.

        Above us, a Union Jack was stuck, caught on

        The lanyard. There wasn’t much wind to speak of.

        The minute’s silence said all there was to speak of

        While we stood on sacred ground these men had fought on.

TB, La Chapelle Yvon, ’ 93