William Boyd - Bamboo - Essays and Criticism

L. Lunch

When we were having our house renovated in France the builders would work from eight to twelve, then they would stop for lunch. There would be an aperitif (Pernod, usually) then a full three-course lunch with a hot main course (provided by the wife of the head builder) served with wine and as much bread as you could eat. Work would start again at two and go on until six.

When our house was being renovated in London the builders would go out at odd times of the day to buy fizzy drinks, sandwiches, hamburgers and chocolate bars. They ate them fast, often not bothering to sit down.

M. Manifestations

The French are much better at political protest than the British. I was once in Marmande where a mountain of fresh tomatoes had been dumped in front of the Marie. I was denied access to Bergerac because local ambulance drivers were protesting about an insignificant pay rise. I’ve missed planes because lorry-drivers have blocked motorways. There is an easy formulation that claims some countries make bad citizens and good soldiers and others where the inverse applies. It seems to me that being a good citizen — caring about your rights, protesting about your rights, trying to safeguard your rights against an overpowerful government — is more valid in this day and age.

N. Nice

I first went to France when I was seventeen. I stayed in Paris for a week before hitch-hiking to the Mediterranean. I spent my last few days in a cheap hotel in Nice and came to like the town enormously. This drew me back two years later when I had the chance to study at a French university after I left school. I chose Nice unhesitatingly (I could have chosen Aix, Montpellier, Tours, Grenoble). When I lived in Nice as a student in 1971 there was a protracted postal strike in Britain which lasted many weeks, meaning that no money (my allowance) could be sent out to me. I have never been so poor and so alone. I could afford to eat one frugal meal a day at the restaurant of the Fac de Lettres. I lived in a small room above a cafe. The cafe owner took pity on me and every evening allowed me to eat what remained of his croissants, chocolatines and pizza — free of charge. So I survived pretty well until the strike ended. I was away from my family, friends, language, country and culture. In many ways I think Nice was the making of me.

O. Oaks

Symbol of England. But in France I live surrounded by dense oak woods, with tall ancient trees. We have a large oak wood on our property called “Le bois de Vinaigre.” This year I am planting fifty oak saplings. And the next year. And the next.

P. Paris

I love living in London. Perhaps the only other city I could move to would be Paris. Yet Paris, beside London, seems so small. In an hour or less you can walk from Montparnasse to Montmartre, but an hour’s walk in London hardly gets you anywhere.

I spent a week in Paris in 1969 when I was seventeen, sleeping on the floor of a house on the Ile St Louis, planning the great adventure of the hitch-hike to the Mediterranean coast. Even then my callow eyes were struck by the city’s classy beauty. Now I go to Paris several times a year and, banal observation though it is, its claim to be the most beautiful great city of the world is effortlessly re-established.

Q. Quiet

Nowhere is as quiet as our house in France. In bed at night with the shutters closed the loudest sound you hear is the blood rushing in your ears. In the total darkness of the bedroom it is almost as if you are taking part in a sensory-deprivation experiment. The consequence of this silence in the night is that you become abnormally sensitive to noise in the day. The sound of birds — the cuckoo’s call echoing through the woods — the angry sound of distant chainsaws, the creak of old beams, the battering of a stink-bug against a light shade, rain spitting on window panes, the hum of bees in the lavender, the wind in the big oaks. These are the sounds of la France profonde.

R. Republicanism

A few days ago, I flew from Edinburgh to London on the same plane as Prince William, the future king of Great Britain. The plane was absolutely full but this twenty-two-year-old young man sat beside his detective and around them was a protective ring of nine empty seats. Who paid for all these empty seats, I wondered? The British tax-payer? Why did he have to have nine seats, three full rows, empty? Why were we being kept at such a distance? I suspect the official answer would have been security but I bet the real reason is privacy. They just don’t want anybody getting too close to a royal. In that case I would reply: then don’t travel on commercial airlines, don’t pretend you’re a “normal” passenger catching a normal plane like anyone else — why not fly in one of your royal aeroplanes, the ones that we pay for anyway.

It was not Prince William’s fault — he’s a nice enough lad, by all accounts — but the symbol of this young university student with his expensive and needless cordon sanitaire made me think. It reminded me of the undying hierarchical structure of British life: it was a sour indication of our unhealthy obsession with royalty and aristocracy and titles of all kinds.

I know that the fact I’ve been living on and off in France for the past ten years has made this tendency in me — this anti-royal, anti-aristo, anti-class feeling — more pronounced. It’s not because France has no class-system — every society has a class-system of some kind, every society contains snobbery — but the saving grace is that because France is a republic the notion that every citizen is as good as the next seems hardwired into the social life you lead. I feel that in my dealings with the French men and women that I meet — whether a captain of industry or a plumber, a femme de ménage or a novelist, a mayor or a schoolteacher, a vigneron or a député —there is an implicit and strong egalitarianism that functions in that encounter. We are all “monsieur” or “madame”; no one need defer or kow-tow; no one need assume superiority or inferiority. I find it enormously refreshing to relate and communicate with other people in France because I know that when I cross the Channel back to England I go back to the Land of Rank and Artificial Status. And, moreover, I go back to a country where so many judgements and aspirations, so many ideas of success and failure are determined by your perceived social classification. Furthermore, and even worse, this social ranking has nothing to do with ability or talent or achievement. It’s all a result of an accident of birth or an expression of patronage.

I think that this is an iniquitous and degenerate situation and it breeds other noxious side effects: snobbery, pretentiousness, hypocrisy, class-hatred, social shame and so on. Almost everything I dislike about British society can be traced back to this type of aristocratic ranking and its outmoded values.

S. South

Where I live in France is, I feel, where northern Europe ends and the south — the “South”—begins. Some people place that demarcating line further north at the Loire valley, but for me it is signified by the Dordogne river. The transition is marked: five miles north of the Dordogne feels and looks completely different from five miles south. Périgueux, the capital of the Périgord, possesses a quite different ambience from its regional rival, Bergerac, forty kilometres south, and straddling the river. A friend of mine, a Bergeracois who lives in Périgueux and works in Bergerac, tells me that the weather is different too and that those forty kilometres mean that Bergerac is usually a noticeable few degrees warmer. It’s hard to determine what’s different about north of the Dordogne — maybe it is something fundamentally atmospheric, a less luminous quality of the light, a preponderance of dark pine woods — but once you cross the river you notice some distinct change has taken place — the landscape is gentler, the skies seem higher, the air is sweeter. There are other more easily verifiable, more obvious signs of the south too: not just the clustered vineyards but also, in summer, the fields of sunflowers and maize and the pale mottled salmon-pink tiles on the low farm buildings and the great pitched roofs of their barns. And yet here we are not in the citrus belt, no oranges or lemons will survive the winter frosts and neither will you see any olive groves; but as you venture south to the Lot valley, down past Agen towards Toulouse, the landscape is imbued with a hint of the approaching Mediterranean, another few hundred kilometres away, but present somehow in the mineral, pure quality of the sunlight, in the flaking crépis of the rural churches, the shuttered fastness of the villages at noon.