Peasants

The end of the tunnel

Elisabeth Luard

The view at the thick end of Madame T'acher's tunnel, due to debouch into the flat and fertile fields of Picardy some time towards the end of the century, will reveal nothing new. The men of Picardy and their neighbours have been bellowing more or less acrimoniously across the Manche for centuries.

It was from the little Picardian port of St

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Valery-en-Somme that Duke William took ship for Hastings. Across the estuary in Le Crotoy the Maid of Orleans was held prisoner before her transfer to trial in Rouen. The boulders of Hitler's Atlantic Wall still edge the shifting dunes of the Somme's mouth. A few miles inland Mon General, then Mon Colonel, de Gaulle was himself responsible for organising the fierce resistance of the citizenry of Abbe- ville to the German advance in 1940 --- an effort for which the good burghers were rewarded by Allied bombing raids which flattened the remaining edifices. The blackened and gutted cathedral church of Abbeville still towers, clad in scaffolding, over the centre of the rebuilt town.

Further inland, in anticipation of the new wave of invaders through the tunnel, the town council of Crecy is thoughtfully rebuilding the windmill from which, on 26 August 1346, Kind Edward III of England watched his archers slaughter the com- bined armies of Philippe IV of France and John the Blind of Bohemia.

The farmers of Picardy, in common with the rest of the 15 per cent of the French population which earns at least part of its living from the land, subscribe to a deep- rooted peasant conservatism. Bleu-de- travail is robustly true blue. La T'acher is rivalled in popularity only by Princess Diana and the late Marcel Dassault. (At election after election in the neighbouring departement the multi-millionaire purveyor of Exocets was returned on the first ballot until last month when, as one of his former constituents put it to me, `the Eternal Banker called in His loans'.) Here are no 3,000-acre farms or 300-acre fields. The average Picardian holding is 30 hectares or about 70 acres. The French small farmer survives (somewhat surprisingly in a nation notoriously unwilling to co-operate with its authorities) through the co-operatives.

It is the co-operatives, acting as wholesalers alongside the private sector, which receive most of the 'famous EEC subsidies. They cater either to arable or dairy farms, and 80 per cent of all French farmers belong to one. The relatively small Abbeville grain-farmers' co-operative, with a membership of around 1,000, ser- vices 50,000 hectares of cultivation. Seven- ty per cent of its members are tenant farmers, working a three-year rotation crop and living at near-subsistence level. Every member deposits 5 per cent of his annual turnover in the co-operative's bank account to be spent by the 15-member Conseil d'Administration. The council meets twice a month on matters ranging from a proposal to invest in plant and machinery for grain storage, to the bulk buying of such domestic items as water- proofs, wellington boots and mousetraps.

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The meetings, held in a magnificent mediaeval building adjoining the co-op's vast warehouses, last from midday until late at night. In Picardy seed-corn selection is an issue in which politics, philosophy and personal animosity outweigh mere practi- calities.

The near-by farming community of Noyelles-sur-Mer has its fair share of philo- sophers and bar-room politicians. Two of them, both Abbeville co-operative mem- bers, were in the Bar J. Bernard (no relative, except in spirit, of the Spectator's distinguished correspondent) when I took shelter from the sheet lightning and torren- tial rain with which the Eternal Banker had chosen to mark the first of May. The two were cousins. The unseasonable storms, they observed gloomily, threatened the year's harvest. They had no doubt about the cause. It was a combination of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster (l'affaire Tchernobyl) and the malevolent influence of Colonel Gaddafi (l'affaire Quaddafi), who had, as the television news nightly reminded its viewers, not yet released six imprisoned French journalists.

We turned to matters nearer home. Jean-Louis, the elder and thinner of the pair, had a passionate although somewhat marginal interest in agriculture. A garage- mechanic by trade, he had inherited under the Code Napoleon a stake in a few acres of semi-submerged meadow where, in sea- son, he spent every daylight hour shooting duck over tethered decoys. It was more than enough to justify his membership of the co-operative, and allow him a vitriolic analysis of its affairs.

His cousin, the portly Pierre-Benoit, came from a smaller family and had fared better under the Code, which gives equal shares in an estate to all offspring. His inheritance was 28 hectares, which he uses largely as pasture for his cattle — Mail are the traditional crop in Picardy's salt- sprayed fields. Although his income was well below the national average there were, he explained, patting his stomach, compensations. He had the farmhouse and a hard-working wife who even on this very Labour Day was at home tending his six geese, twenty-two chickens, dovecot, rab- bit hutches, two milk-cows, sow and ten piglets, in addition to preparing the fami- ly's large midday meal. One of the ten piglets would be exchanged for a year's supply of mussels from a cousin who had gathering-rights in the Baie. Another pig- let paid his wheat-farming neighbour for a year's supply of straw. Farmyard animals need bedding, so the blackened fields which blight the British countryside after the autumn stubble-burning are rare and deplored.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau's noble savage, a philosophical concept long dear to the French heart, is today legally deemed to farm less than 80 hectares. Pierre-Benoit's holding fits nicely inside the category and he happily takes advantage of the compan- ion legislation. His long-suffering wife is taking a state-run course which will entitle the couple to special priorities and grants. But the mention of subsidies and grants in the presence of a Briton prods a tender spot in the underbelly of the French agriculteurs. Madame T'acher is suddenly no longer the Bar J. Bernard's reincarna- tion of the young heroine who briefly graced Le Crotoy's dungeons. Bleu-de- travail turns purple at the thought of the last affray in Brussels.

The skies outside seeming momentarily less threatening than the storms within, I left the bar and drove back through the beautiful forest of Crecy past Edward

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windmill. The forest flanks the Ni auto- route down which stream car-borne British tourists on their way to the beaches of the Mediterranean. The 14th-century invasion triggered the Hundred Years War and the breakdown of all of Europe's then well- developed trade routes and communica- tions. It was a period which, in the words of Low and Pullen's Victorian Dictionary of English History, though 'bracing up the national life of France, brought little to England but barren glory, chequered with disgrace, and a factious and unruly spirit that found its outcome in the civil wars that now fell upon the land'. From the windmill on a clear day, the workmen assured me, it might even be possible to see the mouth of Madame T'acher's tunnel.