Peter Mayle - A Year In Provence

The pale shoots were as fat as thumbs, delicately colored and patterned at the tips. We ate them warm, with melted butter. We ate bread that had been baked that afternoon in the old boulangerie at Lumières. We drank the light red wine from the vineyards in the valley. We supported local industry with every mouthful.

Through the open door we could hear the croaking of our resident frog, and the long, sliding song of a nightingale. We took a final glass of wine outside and looked by the light of the moon at the new lavender bed while the dogs rooted for mice in the lucerne fields. The rabbits would eat well this summer and, Faustin had promised, would taste all the better for it in the winter. We realized we were becoming as obsessive about food as the French, and went back indoors to attend to some unfinished business with a goat's cheese.

BERNARD the pisciniste had brought us a present, and he was assembling it with great enthusiasm. It was a floating armchair for the pool, complete with a drinks compartment. It had come all the way from Miami, Florida, which in Bernard's opinion was the capital of the world for pool accessories. "The French don't understand these things," he said disparagingly. "There are companies making air cushions, but how can you drink on a floating cushion?" He tightened the last wing nut on the frame and stood back to admire the chair in all its Miami dazzle, a vivid block of styrofoam, plastic, and aluminium. "There. The glass fits here in the armrest. You can repose in great comfort. C'est une merveille." He launched the chair into the water, careful not to splash his pink shirt and white trousers. "You must put it away every night," he said. "The gypsies will be here soon for the cherry picking. They'll steal anything."

It was a reminder that we had been intending to get some insurance arranged for the house, but with the builders making holes in the walls I couldn't imagine any insurance company taking the risk. Bernard removed his sunglasses in horror. Didn't we know? There was a higher burglary rate in the Vaucluse than anywhere else in France except Paris. He looked at me as if I had committed an act of terminal lunacy. "You must be protected immediately. I will send a man this afternoon. Stay en garde until he comes."

I thought this was perhaps a little dramatic, but Bernard seemed convinced that robber bands were lurking close by, waiting only for us to go to the village butcher before swooping down in a pantechnicon to pick the house bare. Only last week, he told me, he had found his car jacked up outside his own front door with all four wheels removed. These people were salauds .

One reason, apart from idleness, why we had neglected the matter of insurance was that we detested insurance companies, with their weasel words and evasions and extenuating circumstances, and their conditional clauses set in minuscule, illegible type. But Bernard was right. It was stupid to trust to luck. We resigned ourselves to spending the afternoon with a gray man in a suit who would tell us to put a lock on our refrigerator.

It was early evening when the car pulled up in a cloud of dust. The driver had obviously come to the wrong house. He was young and dark and good-looking, resplendent in the costume of a 1950s saxophone player-a wide-shouldered drape jacket shot through with gleaming threads, a lime-green shirt, capacious trousers that narrowed to hug his ankles, shoes of dark blue suede with bulbous crêpe soles, a flash of turquoise socks.

"Fructus, Thierry. Agent d'assurance. " He walked into the house with short, jaunty steps. I half expected him to start snapping his fingers and make a few mean moves across the floor. I offered him a beer while I got over my surprise, and he sat down and gave me the benefit of his vibrant socks.

"Une belle mesong." He had a strong Provençal accent which contrasted strangely with the clothes, and which I found reassuring. He was businesslike and serious, and asked if we were living in the house all year round; the high rate of burglaries in the Vaucluse, he said, was partly due to the large number of holiday homes. When houses are left empty for ten months a year, well… the shoulders of his jacket escalated in an upholstered shrug. The stories one heard in his profession made you want to live in a safe.

But that needn't concern us. We were permanent. And, furthermore, we had dogs. This was good, and it would be taken into account when he assessed the premium. Were they vicious? If not, perhaps they could be trained. He knew a man who could turn poodles into lethal weapons.

He made some notes in a neat, small hand and finished his beer. We went on a tour of the house. He approved of the heavy wooden shutters and solid old doors, but stopped and sucked his teeth in front of a small window-a fenestron that was less than a foot square. The modern professional burglar, he told us, will often work like Victorian chimney sweeps used to, sending a child through openings that would be impossible for adults. Since we were in France, there was an official, established size for juvenile burglars; they were all more than 12 centimeters wide, and narrower gaps were therefore childproof. Quite how this had been calculated Monsieur Fructus didn't know, but the little window would have to be barred to make it safe from the depredations of anorexic five-year-olds.

For the second time that day, the itinerant cherry pickers were held up as a threat to domestic security-Spaniards or Italians, Monsieur Fructus said, working for a pittance of three francs a kilo, here today and gone tomorrow, a grave risk. One cannot be too careful. I promised to stay on the alert and to barricade the window as soon as possible, and to talk to the dogs about being vicious. Reassured, he drove off into the sunset with the sound of Bruce Springsteen bellowing from the car stereo.

The cherry pickers had started to hold an awful fascination for us. We wanted to see some of these light-fingered scoundrels in the flesh; surely it would be any day now that they would descend on us, because the cherries were certainly ready to pick. We'd tasted them. We now had breakfast on a small terrace which faced the early sun, twenty yards from an old tree bowed down with fruit. While my wife made coffee, I picked cherries. They were cool and juicy, almost black, and they were our first treat of the day.

We knew that organized picking had begun the morning we heard a radio playing somewhere between the house and the road. The dogs went to investigate, bristling and noisy with self-importance, and I followed, expecting to find a gang of swarthy strangers and their larcenous children. The leaves on the trees hid their bodies from the waist upward. All I could see were various pairs of legs balanced on triangular wooden ladders, and then a great brown moon of a face under a straw trilby poked through the foliage.

"Sont bonnes, les cerises." He offered me a finger, with a pair of cherries dangling from the end. It was Faustin. He and Henriette and assorted relatives had decided to gather the fruit themselves because of the wages demanded by outside labor. Someone had actually asked for five francs a kilo. Imagine! I tried to: an uncomfortable ten-hour working day perched on a ladder and tormented by fruit flies, nights sleeping rough in a barn or the back of a van-it didn't sound like overgenerous pay to me. But Faustin was adamant. It was daylight robbery, mais enfin, what could you expect from cherry pickers? He reckoned to get about two tons of fruit for the jam factory in Apt, and the proceeds would be kept in the family.

The orchards were well stocked with pickers of all shapes and sizes during the next few days, and I stopped to give two of them a ride into Bonnieux one evening. They were students from Australia, red from the sun and stained with cherry juice. They were exhausted, and complained about the hours and the tedium and the stinginess of the French peasant.