The little town of Domfront, a few miles from the house, has a not too unusual silhouette for France, or really for most of post-feudal Europe. There’s a steeple—although a truly unusual one—as well as ruined castle, which aside from its surrounding gardens has nothing particularly interesting to say. It belonged to one of William’s lesser sons, who despite what most have seemed a rather disappointing and even desperate place in the family hierarchy went on to be Henry I of England, a concession I guess. Lesser known is a beautiful house perched on the side of the steep cliff face under the to-be-king’s castle.
During the second war it belonged to André Rougeyron, a Domfrontais engineer of some reputation as well as a place in a vigorous social circle. He used both to secure, hide, and secret away American and British air crews that had been shot down in the fields and forests nearby. He was ultimately captured and interned by the Nazis at Buchenwald. Like so many of his countrymen who could not imagine a France that was German, he sacrificed a life of stable complicity for one that offered very few good outcomes, except for those who were risking their lives to ensure he didn’t have to live that way. The house remains a subtle and hardly recognized memorial in a countryside full of them.
In the fields across the little lane in front of LaBu, the winter grass has been heaving as wind-driven waves of green signal the coming of Spring. Just yesterday was the first since I’ve been here that it was calm. All around on hillsides particularly, and on the south side of our garden, the daffodils stand out against the low heavy skies and shine like little fires when the sun breaks through. They are glorious.
I’ve been reading two books. The first is PG Wodehouse. PSmith in the City. Late last year, Madame—like all inveterate gardeners always attendant to the need to plant when the soil is right—sowed the seeds of our new library with a collection of 20 or so of Sir Pelham’s best works. Psmith is one of a handful of Wodehouse’s most successful characters, and less known these days I think than Jeeves. The first dozen or so pages are utterly incomprehensible to anyone who does not have cricket in their marrow. There was a time nearly two decades ago where I had a passing familiarity with the game. But whatever I knew then seems to have no relationship whatsoever with the world of Wodehouse’s characters and their obsession with hundreds and googlies. Our village has a pétanque terrain of play. Someday soon I’ll almost certainly embarrass myself as thoroughly as I did on those Yorkshire pitches in the mid-nineties.
The second book, the first installment of Heywood Hill’s year of books, is Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss. It is about a young teenager who in the midst of her father’s fascination with, and insistence on living in an imagined Iron Age, finds herself succumbing to the memories of a girl her age, sacrificed to the bogs in the heart of England. It is a small book, and beautifully written.
Tomorrow, dear friends arrive from the American South, a place full of its own rituals and strange ageless practices, some as incomprehensible and wonderful as Wodehouse’s cricket or Moss’s experimental archaeology. We’ll embrace more local traditions, eating and drinking, and trying to tame the land and stone structures of this time and this place. Both of which owe as much to men like Henry and Rougeyron as those young other Americans and Brits seeking honor, glory, and a place in the world.
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