Young Writers Awards: Student winner
Little tales from Lozere
Clare Bayley
Most English people, and some French people, have never heard of a departement which lies between the Cantal Plateau, the Margeride mountains and the Larzac plateau in the Massif Central. In fact it is distinguished only by being the least populated departement in France, and the one with the highest infant mortality rate. This is an unfair vision, but it is not a Place for the gregarious: it is said that there are more sheep there than people, and that even the latter are difficult to communicate With, as they speak patois more easily than
French.
As an English language assistant I spent six months there. I arrived before dawn One morning in January, and was the only Person to get off the train. In fact it seemed as if the cosmopolitan Paris-Beziers night express — by which the villagers set their clocks every morning — had only stopped there as a condescension. I wondered if I Ivas perhaps the first foreigner to set foot "cre, and if not, what had happened to the last. I was met by the headmaster of the school. As we walked towards the school he told me that he too, was a foreigner, from a hundred miles south in the neigh- bouring" departement, and that because of that he had never been accepted by the People. He said that it was a barren and bleak landscape grizzled by a cruel and rude climate, and that the people took after their environment. My courage was failing. The town was on the most exposed stretch of plateau, and was far from being picturesque, having been semi-industrialised in the Sixties. The Most remarkable piece of architecture was a high-rise concrete council flat block. All that remained of the old town were wrack- ing personal feuds stretching over the centuries. The staffroom was divided by these, yet united against the headmaster. The major- ity at first regarded me with considerable mistrust. I was not only unknown, and foreign to boot, but also under suspicion of being the headmaster's acolyte and infor- mer. Their hostility melted slowly, like the snows, and by May, when the leaves began to show, I could not venture out of my room without meeting a chorus of 'Bonjour Mademoiselle'. The Head, however, avenged his position as an outcast by tirelessly- scrutinising the personal and pro- fessional movements of his teachers. When be invited me to his flat, which overlooked the school gates, apparently to celebrate Twelfth Night with champagne and special cakes with lucky charms inside, the con- versation centred exaggeratedly on what I knew about the other teachers. At that time I had barely spoken to any of them as I was still a suspect. But my guarded answers seemed to satisfy him, and whether by chance or by art I was the one to find the charm in my galette.
Soon, though, I was invited to supper by one of the younger and not indigenous teachers. Just before I set out to go there, I was summoned by the Head. He looked grave, and the way he said Asseyez-vous, Mademoiselle' rang with foreboding. He leaned forward over his desk and talked excitedly for half an hour in a low voice. He warned me of a group of people who, he feared, would try to befriend me, but against whom I should be constantly on my guard. He said they were not desirable either socially, politically or morally, and confided that the very man I was having supper with might have pretended to be married, but in fact was living with a woman. His speech culminated in the heady declaration: 'Those people are Com- . munists.'
By now I understood the game. I feigned horror and distaste and left as soon as possible. I went straight to my supper appointment, and because I was a little early, I walked straight into a meeting of the local Communist Party, with the Head's words still singing in my ears. They sat around the kitchen table, a mixture of locals and outsiders. All the men had beards and old leather jackets, and they often mentioned May '68. They called me by my name, not Mademoiselle. I told them my story of the Head's solemn warning, thus firmly allying myself to their side, and I had the sort of feeling that if there had been any galettes there, then I would again have been the one to find the charm.
The meeting was about the proposed laying off of 100 of the 300 workers from the local exhaust-pipe factory. Tempers were running high, and some of the older members seemed to think it a useful political weapon that they remembered a time when the factory owner had been accused of collaboration, and only saved at the intervention of the Communists.
In the end a deputation went to Paris to protest. They hired a bus, and drove all through the night, stopping only occa- sionally for a few minutes, in which time the men would form a semi-circle in the light of the headlights, and the women would rush to the back of the bus and squat in the freezing air, screaming with uproa- rious laughter. In the morning in Paris a cold and busy official met them. He lis- tened, and nodded, and shook hands with each in tern, and was never heard of again.
Because of the deputation at least 20 more people died having set eyes on the
Eiffel Tower. Many people from this area are born and die never having seen their
capital. It was hard teaching English to children who had never been on a train, let alone to Clermont Ferrand, let alone to Paris, and who would certainly never go to England. They form part of a disappearing generation in France. They are rounded up from the outlying farms and brought to school. Many of them have to board, because their homes are too remote for them to be able to come in every day, or because their parents otherwise prevent them coming to school, or because, in some cases, the school is a safer and more sanitary environment than their own homes. Even so, outbreaks of unexplained bruises are as common as infestations of lice.
At certain times of year attendance rates fall noticeably because the children are working in the fields. In May, when spring comes, and all the fields are covered with wild daffodils and narcissi, perfume- manufacturers pay about three francs for each sack of cut flower-heads. The children spend the money they earn this way on Gauloises and Michael Jackson. The fami- lies are too large to be able to pay pocket-money. One of my pupils, who was ten years old, had 11 brothers and sisters. He was constantly teased by the others for being a paysan and smelling of cows. He often used to get into trouble for spitting at other children, and never really saw any harm in it. He told me he used to have 12 brothers and sisters, but it was a good thing his brother died because his parents couldn't afford it anyway.
Yet the Pope's word was followed abso- lutely, which nearly landed me in a lot of trouble. A complicated misunderstanding with a group of 16-year-olds led to their thinking I was a divorcee. The next day a posse of outraged parents went to the Head demanding the re, oval from the school of an unprincipled Englishwoman, who was not ashamed to subvert their children. They were assured that they were mistaken, but the scandal only really sub- sided when another exciting one super- seded it. One night the stationmaster (whose morals were questioned daily in the Café du Commerce) had too much to drink and was still dead drunk and asleep in bed when the Paris-Beziers express passed through. The station was all locked up, and nobody could buy a ticket, and they all had to climb over two wooden fences to get in or out. As only four trains a day passed through the town anyway, this mes- demeanour really was looked on badly.
As a result I came to be considered in a clearer, brighter light. Soon I began to be recognised and greeted in the streets and in shops. I too set my watch by the train. They and I charmed each other mutually, and by the time I left, we treated each other with deference and warmth, for I was to them a stranger accepted, and so as significant a figure as the cure, the mayor or the doctor; and they had let me glimpse a disappearing culture.
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