Summer in France: Heat, Howls, Hydrangeas, and Hunting Hidden Hughes Houses

It has been a while since my Epona review, which is now on sale for those anxious to try it! I came to France nearly three weeks ago, and have - perhaps counterintuitively - gone and chosen one of the hottest days of the year to sit down and write a blog post finally. It is 38C in the shade today, and was 44C in my car earlier before I got the aircon going. The heatwave has been ongoing since the day after I arrived. No one can possibly believe in that old adage that says men "perspire" and women "merely glow". I am doing a lot more than glowing, let me tell you... I remember my visit in April being the coldest spring trip ever, with the temperature in my house never getting above 13C the whole fortnight. I had five layers on indoors at all times, including a roomy dressing gown over a "coatigan", and prayed to the weather gods that they would make things up to me in July when I came back. Talk about being careful what you wish for!

Heat

You would think the locals would be well used to such searing temperatures, yet the heat is a main topic of conversation in those little exchanges you have with people you pass in the street. There is much sharing of anti-heat strategies (such as closing shutters during the day, which I don't want to do as they are closed most of the year, haha, having a cold shower before bed, laying frozen gel packs on your stomach in the middle of the night etc), and especially suggestions of where to go to instantly feel cool. 

The supermarket (but with the added danger of overspending)

The church (there's a limit to my back's tolerance of a hard pew)

The swimming pool (half an hour in the water, weaving between the Scylla and Charybdis of child-topped lilos, is about my limit)

The library (where the knitting club had a particularly good turnout both weeks I went for this very reason!)

And...drum roll...The "Abyss of Fage", which is a steady 10-13C all year round. I went there yesterday, and overheard visitors saying it would be heaving today, as the temperature was going to be even higher. Down there you actually need a jacket!, but the cold was frankly delicious after the stifling heat above ground.

Howls

The village where my house is has an ever-changing cast of feral cats. There are two main cats on the block at the moment: a shy, and rather beaten up tabby and white that I call "Bruiser Truffle", and a mottled grey cat, who is known amongst English-speaking locals as "The Yowler". 

The Yowler is emaciated and suspected to have worms, but whatever the cause of his extreme vocalising, that cat can howl! It is piercing to the point of ear splitting, and might even be a yowling howling contender for the Guinness Book of Records, like Bella, the cat with the loudest purr.

Same feeding station, different cat

Hydrangeas

I have always been partial to hydrangeas, but on this visit I was struck by how many there are everywhere, and with such enormous blooms! Apparently they have done so well on account of the rain they've had in France - and in England. I have seen every shade of hydrangea on the acidic to ericaceous spectrum, and a friend in the village is kindly keeping me supplied with a single (topheavy!) bloom for my vase.

I also noticed on my sightseeing travels that many of the religious statues were similarly equipped. "What are we going to do with all these hydrangeas??" I can imagine the verger saying, before thinking: "Let's give them to all the Virgin Marys, and the saints if they have room in their niches."

"Oh go on, the cherubs can have one too..."

Walking around the village, there were clumps literally at every turn! Even the dying mop heads had a certain faded beauty to them.

Do you prefer pink? You are never far from the colour of your choice. ;)

Hunting Hidden Hughes Houses

On this holiday I have been reading "An Unauthorised Life" by Jonathan Bate, an absorbing literary biography of the poet Ted Hughes, whose violent, sensual and mythic poems are inextricable from his tempestuous and tragic private life. To lose not one but two wives or girlfriends to suicide on your account - by the same means, even - looks like much more than carelessness, to not quite quote Oscar Wilde. 

Book also accessorised with obligatory hydrangeas

On P175 Bate mentions that Hughes and his wife Sylvia Plath had stayed in a house belonging to American Poet Laureate William Merwin, in Lacam near Loubressac in the Lot. I love houses associated with literary figures, and immediately hatched a plan to seek it out on a circuit of the Dordogne and Lot that also took in Beaulieu and Turenne.

Although I had found a photograph of the Merwin house on the Internet before setting off, I noted in the book that it was well hidden, plus the photo was taken from down the valley looking up at it, rather than from the roadside, so I knew I might have to do some asking around to find the place. The first old honey coloured house I saw in the immediate vicinity of the destination dot on my satnav - which was a bit thrown by the extremely rural nature of the area, and the general lack of buildings of any kind - was perched on a hilltop and reached by a long narrow track. I identified it as some kind of Manoir, and managed to find a phone number, which I duly rang. Turns out that I was in the hamlet before Lacam, but only about 800m away. I was to look out for a house with pale blue shutters, and irises at the front.

No one mentioned the rather distinctive barns!

Five minutes later I was parked up in Lacam and made a beeline for the first house with pale blue shutters, in which a family was having a lazy Sunday lunch with the door open. The wife came out and said I was mistaken - the Merwin house was further along - and immediately abandoned her meal and walked me round the corner to it. More pale blue shutters awaited me, and a flowerbed full of green spears of vegetation that may have been irises once before they died in the heat. ;) No one was in residence, so I had a good nosey round and even stole some string as a trophy(!) that was serving absolutely no purpose on a gate. 

Having successfully found one hidden Hughes house - or "Hughes-related" house to be more exact, as Ted Hughes was only a guest there - I felt I was on a roll, so when neighbours in the village, a couple also called Hughes, suggested that I might care to take a look at a couple of houses they had once owned, I leapt at the chance. The first was an old watermill between Martel and Creysse in the Lot again (The Moulin de Cacrey), which has its own entry in Wikipedia, with the Hughes actually named as past owners; the second was a town house in Creysse itself.

I had been warned that House No 1 was very off the beaten track, and so it proved...the satnav directed me down a gravel path which I decided to walk along in case there was no room to turn round again in the car when the track emerged from the forest. I finally coincided with the red blob on my phone, and found myself staring at a set of wrought iron gates, firmly padlocked. On an adjacent tree was a sign saying: "Beware, guard dog, do not enter!" I consulted my verbal instructions from the Hughes again, and found to my great delight - having feared for a moment that I had come all that way in vain - that I needed to turn left and follow the gravel track up the hill, before cutting through the woods (ignoring the "dead end" sign!) and stepping over a fallen fence at the end of the trail. (I got rather extensively stung by nettles in the process, but considered the collateral damage well worth it as my sense of anticipation mounted.)

Having followed the instructions to the letter, I was rewarded with the sight of a Narnia-like faerie kingdom of dilapidation and disrepair, that nonetheless had a magical charm to it. The Hughes assured me that they had kept the place in good nick in their day. 

The highlight was the mill pond and cliffs behind.

There's a Japanese quality to that picture...

Give those cherubs some hydrangeas! 

There was also a waterfall (former mill race?) and secret streams running beneath stone bridges.

NB I have since learnt that the Moulin de Cacrey was rented for a few summers before the Hughes bought it by Caroline Conran, longtime wife of Terence Conran (of Habitat fame), and stepmother to Jasper, Terence's son by his previous - and arguably more famous - wife Shirley. Had I known this interesting connection in time, I would have brought out my Jasper Conran Woman perfume to France to wear on the day. ;) Here is my mini-review of the perfume (my fifth post on Bonkers from 2009!).

So from the watermill it was on to Creysse itself, and House No 2, known as The Conciergerie. My instructions said it was near the Mairie (town hall) and a tower, and in fact I went straight to it (also with pale blue shutters, as it turned out). However, I wasn't sure I had definitely got the right place, because I had missed the photographs my friends had sent of it in Messenger(!), so I popped up to the Mairie to double check. The Mairie was only open two half days a week, and not on a Tuesday. 

I asked a neighbour, and she wasn't sure, so knocked on the door of the Dutch couple next door, who weren't in. Then she walked me down the hill to the house of an elderly lady who could be seen having her lunch through an open window. Perhaps surprisingly, she didn't know, and sent me to the village's one hotel to ask the woman with glasses (and only her). I spied the bespectacled woman in a back office and summoned her out, and sure enough she knew exactly where I meant and confirmed that I had been right all along...

I had now run out of Hughes houses, however tightly or tenuously construed, but picking up the earlier theme of dwellings connected with writers, I drove on to the village of Saint-Sozy, where I had read that Virginia Woolf (to whom I am very, very distantly related) had once stayed in the Chateau there in 1937. To my consternation, part of the Chateau complex was on fire when I arrived, and fire engines from all over the region were in attendance. 

A great deal of damage was done to the interiors of two towers and their roofs, and it was completely inappropriate to go wandering up there, picking my way over the firemen's hoses which snaked across the road. 

I contented myself instead with a photograph from a distance, a chat with two ladies who lived opposite and were quite traumatised by the incident, and a white Magnum ice cream, which I ate in the village square with this view.

More blue shutters!

Editor's note: I hesitated about whether to add an apostrophe to "Hughes' Houses" and decided not to in the end. But if anyone would like to put me straight on this point of grammar, I would be glad to have it clarified!