An Autumnal Visit to Château Montus and Château Bouscassé

Friends from Toulouse had recommended a vineyard visit and lunch chez Alain Brumont, the visionary proprietor of both Château Montus and Château Bouscassé. We began at Chateau Montus,le roi de Madiran, whose wines, made from Tannat grapes, have won many prestigious prizes. The distinctive Tannat grape variety now rivals Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot in Bordeaux, Pinot in Burgundy and Syrah in the Côtes du Rhône. It produces very dark wines with a subtle, powerful fruitiness and high levels of tannin, which give them an exceptional capacity to age. They are deep and well balanced, the perfect complement to the rich food of the region.

When Alain Brumont bought Château Montus in 1980, on the basis of the terroir's reputation in the eighteenth century, he recognised that he could restore the reputation of the Madiran region and create a world class wine. With its steep slopes and fully south facing, sunny slopes, it was a labour of love. He invested vast sums in both the château and the caves, as well as state of the art technology. The caves, designed by renowned architect Edmond Lay, and including the first underground cellar in the south-west, are a sight to behold. I particularly loved the beautiful mosaic of Bacchus on the floor.

From there, we drove up to the vineyard of La Tyre, the highest point of the appellation. Here the slope is at a gradient of 20%-40% and a cooling breeze blows through the vines, ventilating the grapes when, in summer, most of the leaves are removed. Its terroir consists of large pebbles, one of the last traces of the Pyrénées dating back forty million years, on yellow and red clay subsoil. The La Tyre vineyard produces the finest, and most expensive, wines from the Brumont estate. Made from 100% Tannat grapes, the 2010 vintage is priced at a hefty 150€ a bottle in their shop.

It was a bitterly cold day, so we were grateful for a respite in the tree house at the top of the slope, where Thomas, our guide, produced a 2014 Château Bouscassé white wine, called Les Jardins Philosophiques, made from Petit Courbu and Petit Manseng grapes, which we sampled with delicious morceaux of Noir de Bigorre jambon, the local speciality ham. It's cured from the naturally fed black pigs of the Pyrénées, whose history dates back to Benedictine monks of the XI century. The recent revival by a small group of enthusiasts over the last thirty years has made it a serious rival to the highly prized Spanish Jamón Pata Negra.

We finished at Chateau Bouscassé, the thriving hub of the Brumont enterprise, where we were led into the cosy staff dining room full of long tables bedecked with blue and white checked tablecloths. The wood burner was much appreciated. We were taken to a table at the far end, where our personalised menu awaited us, each dish prepared by their Alsatian chef, Loïc Ripamonti, who each day prepares lunch for thirty to forty people. It was the best meal we've eaten all year, all beautifully prepared from the best local produce and based around Noir de Bigorre and the chateau's own Poule Noire,washed down with a carefully chosen selection of wines from Montus and Bouscassé [list can be provided]. It was the perfect end to a wonderful visit.....and, of course, we left with four cases of wine, including the Château Montus 2016, for our Christmas guests!

When You Have Time On Your Hands

We arrived at Bardies on the Ides of March. All was quiet, not a car on the road, no planes in the sky, not even the ubiquitous Airbus test flight circling overhead. The molecules in the air had changed. None of us knew how the Covid 19 virus circulated. We were afraid of what we didn't understand. The images from northern Italy distressed us all, so much closer to home than faraway China, whose 2014 SARS outbreak had barely touched Europe. Now bodies were being carried out of hospitals in towns close to familiar ski resorts, places we had been to in more carefree days. Tens of thousands of skiers returned home after holidays high in the Alps with no idea they were carrying a deadly new virus. One of them, a close friend, came down with it a week later. She was one of the lucky ones. Her symptoms were mild. 'It's very strange,' she said, 'but I can't smell or taste anything.' We didn't know then that this was a primary symptom.

We hunkered down, glad to be in the depths of La France profonde . The house soon warmed up with the woodburner on the go. The winter is long in Ariège. With no television, we avoided the worst of the TV images, though Radio 4 reports of care home deaths were deeply distressing. We didn't exactly feel safe, because we didn't know much about the transmission of Covid 19, but we didn't feel as exposed as we'd have been in Brighton. French confinement rules limited us to exercise no more than half a kilometre from our house, and we had to carry a written attestation. We were allowed to shop, also with said attestation, but our kind neighbours volunteered to do it for us, which they did for the eight consecutive weeks before quarantine was lifted. Between times, they brought us fresh bread and milk, and eggs from their relations. Never had we appreciated so much the French notion of commune, not so much a geographical area as a state of mind.

We were strangely content. The weather was glorious; time took on a whole new meaning. When you have time on your hands, your head clears and you live in the present. It was a new experience for both of us. The first thing we did was to turn the salon into an office for Peter. If he was to be working from home, he needed his own space, something it was impossible to have in our spatially challenged Brighton flat, where we all fought for space on the kitchen table. I emptied all the ancient china from the built in armoires on either side of the fireplace and Peter arranged our CD and vinyl collection into genres, in alphabetical order. Stuck indoors, we needed music to lift our spirits. His guitars could finally be stored in one room, where there was also an electric piano. He would work all morning, then spend his afternoons, if he wasn't still working, playing the piano or guitar, or gardening. As the descendant of a Flemish gardyner, he was in his natural habitat.

We evolved a routine that worked for us, a rhythm of life that suited both of us. I would do an hour's yoga first thing to keep my aging muscles from deteriorating further, then do some research or write. Between times I set myself the task of learning to play the Bach C Major partita, the first and easiest piece from 'The Well Tempered Clavier'. Pretentious, moi? My aplologies for sounding smug when many were numb. For me, it was therapeutic. I loved the progressions, which were like practising scales, only more tuneful. I loved the rhythm of the piece. I loved having a project that totally focussed my cluttered brain. It was a time of gifts, to quote the title of Patrick Leigh Fermor's book, especially as I hadn't played the piano since my son was tiny. When I found my old practice pieces under the lid of the piano stool, I took to playing nursery rhymes as a respite from concentrating. It was fun and brought back memories of being a new mother. He's thirty now, so I don't suppose I'll be playing them for him again.

I made soup for lunch every day, something I wouldn't have done in Brighton. 'For better, for worse, but not for lunch' had been my mantra throughout our married life. Now, I had all the time in the world. A weekly shop makes for a very inventive cook, especially towards the end of the week. No running to the Co-op for missing ingredients. I'd make new dishes, and dishes I hadn't made for years, scouring cookery books for inspiration. When you live somewhere with proximity to good, seasonal produce, what you eat is part of the rhythm of life. I discovered that the essence of being a good cook is time. So often we rush. We skip essential stages or take shortcuts, or, worst of all, misread the recipe because we're hurried. When time isn't your enemy, cooking is a joy, something to be savoured as much as the end result.

We ate asparagus until it came out of our proverbial ears; steamed asparagus with homemade Hollandaise sauce, creamy, eggy tarts topped with Parmesan, the perfect spring lunch fayre for a lazy Saturday afternoon, as well as omelettes, risottos, soups and salads. Before I moved here, I never understood why the French preferred the white variety over the more earthy green asparagus. I've become a convert. I love the subtle flavour of white asparagus. Now I enjoy nothing more than it simply steamed, with a glug of good olive oil, salt and freshly ground black pepper. Bliss. Then, as quickly as it came, the season ended and asparagus was no more. It's a salutory lesson for a pandemic. Nothing lasts forever.

Back at Bardies, permanently

Blog at Bardies is back! I decided to stop writing my blog in July 2014 because I thought people were bored with the prevalence of blog posts about life in France. Then last Sunday I woke up thinking of the numerous things that have changed for us in the last nine years; how our journey may be of interest to others in a similar situation, or to those catapulted through circumsatnce into rethinking their post-Brexit lives. [There, I've said it! I've got the 'B' word out after just three sentences.] I cannot think of another event in my life that has so changed all our hopes, dreams and plans.

Like many people, I thought that David Cameron was playing to his own gallery when he called for a referendum on our membership of the European Union. How wrong I was. In the face of heated debates about sovereignity, immigration and the accession of Turkey, facts and figures became irrelevant. It was impossible to argue with raw emotion. And the rest, as they say, is history. Having had a house in France for over twenty years, it felt as though a limb was being amputated.

At first, numb with shock, we struggled with definitions: hard/ soft Brexit, Withdrawal Agreement, Article 50, customs union, single market, Northern Ireland protocol, free trade agreement, passporting, to name a few. More significantly, we needed to understand the implications of the 'Third Country Status' 90/ 180 rule. Who knew about or understood these terms? As the possessor of a red passport with 'European Union' boldly embossed on its front cover, I never questioned my status as a European. Now, in the final week of June 2016, I decided to apply for an Irish passport, not realising until then that, because I had an Irish mother born on the island of Ireland, I was already an Irish citizen by birth. Not so, my children, for whom I needed to register their foreign births in the UK with Ireland's Department of Foreign Affairs, before being able to apply for theirs. Sadly, my husband, as a Brit, did not have the luxury of either option.

We waited, and waited, because the Irish Embassy was inundated with millions of applications. Inevitably, I failed to accrue all the necessary certificates, which caused months of additional delay. I then spent months chasing elusive birth, marriage and death certificates. Because my father died when I was seven and my mother married again, her Irish birth certificate bore no relation to my birth name, nor to the name on her death certificate. In all, I needed my mother's birth, marriage and death certificates, my father's birth, marriage and death certificates, my stepfather's marriage and death certificates, as well as my birth and marriage certificates and my children's birth certificates. All these original and certified copies had to be sent to Ireland's Department of Foreign Affairs before I could register my children as Irish by foreign birth.

Meanwhile, we continued with life in the UK, glued to rolling news and Parliament Live. We scoured the newspapers, including the Daily Telegraph, always a good source of Tory Party thinking. We went on marches. We retweeted posts from people like us, to no avail. The dastardly deal was done, destined, however flawed, to be written into law. All around us people seemed increasingly agitated. Our lovely Italian waitress in the coffee shop at the bottom of our road was verbally abused on a bus. A German acquaintance, a professor at a London university, was tiraded on Twitter for being a foreigner. At a drinks party, when I mentioned the fact that I was lucky to be an Irish citizen, I was told to 'fuck off back to Ireland then' by a man, a Brexiter, who should have known better. I was deeply shocked at the hostlity to anyone who claimed a part European heritage. I didn't recognise what was happening to the country I had lived in all my life.

The reverse was true in France. All our French friends were incredibly supportive, sad that the UK had opted to leave the European Union. Not a single one passed a negative comment. 'Move here, permanently,' they said. 'You'll be welcomed with open arms.' At the occasional lunch party with Brits, I was surprised to meet home owners, some with businesses, who eulogised about the benefits of Brexit. For the life of me, I couldn't understand how leaving the EU could be anything but negative for them, until it gradually dawned on me that they viewed themselves as untouchable. Somewhere, etched deeply below three layers of thick skin, they saw themselves as superior, part of a select tribe of 'ex-pats' whose position anywhere in the world was unassailable. The DNA of all those doughty army officers and their memsahibs carries on, despite the collapse of Empire and the nation's lost industrial preeminence.

'Get Brexit Done' provided the death knoll for us pro-Europeans. We were adrift, let down by the Liberal Democrats, lost in an anti-Bremoaner culture war. The new Tory cabinet, led by a man with the moral integrity of a tomcat, was stuffed full of braying Brexiters. If you weren't one of them, you were the target of abuse and vitriole. Dominic Grieve, Ken Clarke and nineteen fellow Tories had the whip withdrawn from the party they had served all their lives for daring to oppose the potential catastrophe of a no-deal Brexit. A truncated Labour Party was cut off at the knees. There would be no attempt to reconcile, to find a way through the complexities of over forty years of integration with Europe. You were either with them, or against them. There was no middle ground. Never, since the Cavaliers and the Roundheads, had the country been so divided.

Still, we may not have packed a pile of stuff into our old Volvo Estate and hightailed it to Bardies if it wasn't for the pandemic. We were due to go to Austria for a week in the mountains when the email telling us the country was going into lockdown arrived. That was on Thursday 12th March 2020. By lunchtime on Saturday 14th, we were through the Channel Tunnel. That night, at our stopover hotel, the proprietor informed us that the hotel was closing at midnight and that all shops, hotels, bars, restaurants and retail outlets were to be closed forthwith. France was officially in lockdown. There was some doubt as to whether we'd get breakfast, which we fortunately did, which was just as well because everything was closed en route. Fortunately, I'd packed the remnants of our fridge to take with us so we could cook ourselves dinner on arrival. We lit the woodburner and opened a bottle of Madiran.

'So what do we do now?' I asked.

This Long Journey

The celebrations for the 70th anniversary for D-Day have come and gone, as has the wonderful Chalke Valley History Festival, where I successfully submitted my pitch to the Penguin Historical Fiction Writer's Workshop. It doesn't mean much other than as an introduction and a boost to my confidence, but at least it tells me that the story is a good one and that I am on the right track. There's still a fair amount of editing to do but in the peace and tranquility that is daily life at Bardies, I'm determined to get to the end of this long journey.

When I started, I envisaged a non-fiction book about the brave and largely unrecognised women of the French Resistance. It angered me that General Charles de Gaulle, a military man who loathed the irregular forces of the FFIs [the Forces Francaises de l'Interieure formed at the beginning of 1944 from the various armed resistance groups inside France] awarded only six Croix de la Liberation to women, out of a total of 1,061. He hated the communists so the brave women, and most of the men too, of 'red Toulouse' and Ariege, especially those of Spanish Republican origin, were relegated to the footnotes of history. Military hierarchy had no place for women.

There are a number of reasons for this, not least the reluctance of the women themselves to talk about their wartime experiences. It was not just the war that they wished to forget. It was also the horrors of l'epuration in the immediate aftermath. No one knows exactly how many people were killed but estimates range upwards of 10,000, an enormous number by any measure. There was also a high degree of sexual retribution, as if the cowardly and politically impotent men of Vichy could only exonerate themselves by turning on the women that they labelled les collabos horizontales. A schoolteacher resister noted that 'in the shaving of heads and so on...we touched rock bottom'. It is estimated that 20,000 women were publicly brutalised.

In the women's accounts, in the main, there was a desire to move on, to rebuild what had been broken. So many people were displaced, so many families were fractured and so many graves were in need of tending; France had paid a high price. There was also the urgent need for reconstruction. France received seven times the tonnage of bombs that the UK received during the Blitz. It was not just the towns of Northern France. Biarritz, Nice, Marseilles and many other cities experienced the effects of Allied bombing. Fifty-seven thousand French people lost their lives after D-Day.

Seventy years on, a more nuanced history has emerged from the oral testimonies of resisters, particularly the women. These accounts give us a flavour of the time. While they do not tell the full story, they help us to comprehend that resistance takes many forms. So why a fictional story, I am asked? The answer is a simple one. I want to give them a voice. There are few contemporaneous oral testimonies from the women of Ariege and Haute-Garonne. I can guess at the thoughts and words of these brave women but I cannot know what they actually said. In a work of fiction, one has the freedom to generate meaningful dialogue and to attempt to recreate the landscape of the time, both physical and emotional.

I am lucky to live close to the town of St Girons, from where a number of evasion lines over the Pyrenees operated, including the O'Leary line. Many accounts can be read in Ed Stourton's Cruel Crossing: Escaping Hitler Across the Pyrenees, which has stimulated a great deal of interest in our little piece of la France profonde. In his introduction, Ed writes of the genius loci of the place, the spirit that makes its story so special. Unsurprisingly, Ariege is called la terre courage on quaint roadside tourist signs. Napoleon Bonaparte designated it le pays du fer et des hommes. Life has always been hard here.

After the fall of Barcelona in January 1939, almost 500,000 desperate men, women and children of the Retirada walked over the mountains in brutal conditions to seek safety in France. Many died, either on the mountains or in the terrible concentration camps that were thrown together to greet them. A large number of them joined the Resistance. Others acted as passeurs, taking Jews, downed Allied airmen and other evaders over the smuggler's paths into neutral Spain, helped by a small secret army of women in safe houses who provided a hot meal and a bed for the night at tremendous personal risk to themselves and their families.

I hope that I can do these women justice. I dedicate my story to them. Now, as I work towards the final chapters, I have decided to use this blog to tell the stories of some of the real women of the Resistance. It seemed to me to be one way to resolve my dilemma about fact and fiction, and that difficult historical middle ground that Anthony Beevor desultorily designates as faction. One day, perhaps, I shall write that history but in the meantime I hope to pay tribute to their courage, their resolve and cunning, but most of all, their generosity of spirit.

Freddie Knoller: Living With the Enemy

Last week I drove almost a hundred miles to see someone special at the Chalke Valley History Festival. His name is Freddie Knoller and he is a spritely ninety-three year old Auschwitz survivor. He was born on 17 April 1921 in Vienna, the youngest of three sons born to Marja and David Knoller. His parents were born in Galicia, then part of Austria-Hungary but part of what became Poland after the First World War. The three brothers were musicians, the eldest brother, Otto, a pianist and the middle one, Erich, a violinist. Fredl, Freddie, was a cellist.

After the Anschluss and Kristallnacht, David Knoller was determined that his three sons had to leave Nazi controlled Austria, by whatever means. Freddie left for Belgium via Cologne and Aachen at the end of November 1938, entered the country illegally and made his way first to Antwerp, then Eskaarde, near Ghent. When l'exode began, with the German invasion of Belgium on 10 May 1940, Freddie found himself walking to France on roads crammed with refugees. In Lille, he came upon a solid blue cordon of French police. He was taken to a police station, forced to show his penis to prove he was a Jew, and put in a cattle wagon to the internment camp of St Cyprien, near Perpignan. He remains angry with the French for their treatment of foreign Jews fleeing Hitler.

Three months later he escaped under the barbed wire and made his way to Gaillac, in the Tarn, deep in Vichy France. There, he purchased false papers and returned to Brussels to rescue his cello and take the bus to Antwerp to find out what had happened to his friends. When he could find neither his cello nor his friends, he decided to head for Occupied Paris where he lived amongst the Paris demi-monde under the false identity of Robert Metzner, born in Metz in Alsace. In July 1943 he was picked up by the Gestapo for procuring girls for German soldiers. He blagged his way out of Gestapo HQ and hightailed it from the Gare d'Austerlitz to the village of Cardaillac, in the Lot, not far from Figeac.

Freddie was arrested by the French Milice on a train en route from Figeac to Bergerac on 5 August 1943. He was probably denounced by his angry, jilted ex-girlfriend, Jacqueline, to whom he had confided both his Resistance activities and his false, non-Jewish identity. He was an agent de liaison, a courrier who ran messages from one Resistance cell to another. 'I am not a terrorist!' he shouted under interrogation. 'I am an Austrian Jew from Vienna called Alfred Knoller. I am hiding from the Germans and have nothing to do with any Resistance group.'

His decision to betray his origins rather than his colleagues resulted in him being taken to Gestapo headquarters, put under armed guard and taken by train back to Paris. From there, he was taken by the French Garde Mobile to Drancy, in the quiet suburb of Bobigny, the assembly camp for deportation to the East. On 6 October he was put in a cattle wagon to Auschwitz. There, he was reduced to a mere number, 157103. Aided by his friend Professor Waitz who managed to get him extra food, he avoided the selections. In January 1945, as Russian artillery approached, he survived the death marches in temperatures of -20 degrees. He was liberated at Bergen-Belsen in April 1945, weighing just forty-one kilograms.

'Every event in my story leads up to Auschwitz and no subsequent thought or action in my life is untouched by the memory of Auschwitz.....The person who stumbled into the cattle truck at Drancy lost once and for all his youthfulness, if not all his naivety.' The man on the stage, charming, amusing, witty and self-deprecating, was a careful observer filled with the will to live. His book, Living With the Enemy: My Secret Life on the Run from the Nazis details his story with no hint of self-pity, just an effusive love of life born of tremendous optimism. With each year that passes, there are fewer survivors like him to tell the story of what happens when a society loses its moral compass.

Freddie's story is one of many which concern the role of the French police and SNCF, France's railway provider. As Leo Bretholz, Freddie's friend and fellow raconteur, says, 'Wartime France was the most important and very venal cog in the wheel of Hitler's co-conspirators.' Undoubtedly, France is coming to terms with Vichy's complicity in the deportation of its own Jews. This process has been slow and painful. Where I live in Ariege, many local people are still unaware of the existence of the Le Vernet camp, the Drancy of the south, as well as the many other camps.

Perhaps they do not wish to remember. Many deportees were not Jewish and they struggled to be remembered too. One of them was Charlotte Delbo, in whose memory a conference which I attended was held at the Institut Francais on 18 March, the centenary of her birth. Charlotte's story, and that of the 229 other women of Le Convoi des 31000, is told by Caroline Moorehead in her book, A Train in Winter. I drove back to the Chalke Valley History Festival two days later to hear Caroline recount their tale, as well as the story of the villages around Chambon-sur-Lignon in the Auvergne which hid thousands of Jews. That story, however, is another blog.

Books, Barbed Wire and One of the Most Beautiful Towns in France

What has happened to the months since January? Despite trips to Chartres and Orleans, Paris and Compiegne, Biarritz and St Jean-de-Luz, and further afield, too, I have resisted the temptation to blog. I have, for once, turned off the Internet until dinnertime and put my expanding bottom firmly onto my chair at my desk, where I have written and rewritten 80,000 words of text for my book. Apart from a major hiccup with Dropbox, which left 20,000 of said, slightly different words, floating in cyberspace, I’m now on the downhill run towards my end of November deadline.

Nowadays, it takes a lot to get me away from my beloved Bardies. So when an email arrived from a friend in the Quercy telling me about a fledgling literary festival in the Tarn-et-Garonne, I thought for approximately five minutes before jumping at the chance to go and listen to other writers speak of their experiences and challenges. With a change in the weather, it provided just the ticket, metaphorically speaking because all the events were free. The lovely Occitan village of Parisot is home to a thriving community of readers and writers and a committee of five, French and English, put together a festival to compete with many a more illustrious rival. I gather that it is the only one south of Paris.

The festival opened on Friday evening with a musical and literary soiree, which, sadly, I missed. An absentee friend had kindly lent me her lovely house in Puylaroque for the weekend and I miscalculated the extent of Friday night’s traffic on the Toulouse Peripherique in a downpour. Saturday morning dawned even wetter, so I arrived at the salle des fetes in Parisot via a muddy and circuitous back route at 10.31 am, soggy, late and flustered. Straight away, my mood lifted with the warm and welcome atmosphere. Maree Gilles, an Australian survivor of the forced care system, kicked the day off with a harrowing account of her experiences as a sixteen-year old. A few years ago, Maree published a debut novel, a fictional account of the pain and trauma of her time in care. Its impact proved so devastating that it contributed to a class apology from the Australian government. We were off to a great start. Over the years, I’ve been to many literary festivals where I’ve squinted over the shoulders of someone a foot taller than me and wished I had better glasses and an electronic hearing aid. Oh, the pleasure in a small festival with no ubiquitous video screen!

After a splendid lunch with the invited authors, we continued with a session from Amanda Hodgkinson about her award winning bestseller, 22 Britannia Road. It was a privilege to hear her read in the three voices from her beautifully written book. I was minded of the great Edna O’Brien’s remonstrance that when writers have chosen their words so very carefully, the obligation is upon us, the reader, to absorb and savour them. Such it was with a true poet and wordsmith like Amanda. I am now the owner of two copies of her marvelous book, one for me, and one for my daughter who is following in the footsteps of our great Irish writers reading English at Trinity College, Dublin.

Afterwards, in complete contrast, the urbane, dapper and witty Guardian journalist, Martin Walker, spoke about his marvelous fictional creation, Bruno, Chief of Police. Also, dear to my heart, Martin talked about the riven history of France, as well as his passion for all things French, especially its food and wine. We await the forthcoming Bruno cookery book with relish. As someone who tends to avoid crime fiction, I am about to become a convert to Martin’s Gallic detective and his gentle portrayals of French village life. As this is France, his talk was followed by aperitifs and dinner at the l'Auberge de la Castille, to which everyone was invited. With Charlie, my Jack Russell champing at the bit in the car, it was with great regret that I had to wend a wet and weary way back to Puylaroque. Next time, I shall send him to the kennels.

Sunday brought a complete change of genre with a cookery demonstration by Anne Dyson of the Greedy Goose Cookery School in Ambeyrac, in the Aveyron. The delicious canapés and appetizers that Anne so effortlessly prepared were testament to her culinary talents. Her beautiful Green Goose cookery book has provided a fitting thank you present for my friend who so generously lent me her house to be here.

After lunch by the lake in Parisot, ex-pat, humour-writer, Victoria Corby delighted us with her de la coeur account of her literary family and how she managed to gain the confidence to become a professional writer, despite the little voice over her shoulder telling her that she wouldn't be good enough. With three books published over a decade ago, Victoria has now ventured into the burgeoning ebook market by republishing them on Kindle. As she gets a significantly higher percentage of the revenue this way, I’m happy to say that all three are now downloaded to my Kindle Homepage. I look forward to them with great pleasure.

My final session at the festival was with the formidable Colette Barthes, a journalist with La Depeche du Midi and a committed human rights activist with Lutte pour la Justice, which fights for the abolition of the death penalty in the United States. Colette is one of those rare women who change the air in the molecules around them, strong, vibrant, fiercely political and an inspiration to all women, young and old alike. She writes in many genres, including the novel, but she is most well known for her research into the plight of the Spanish refugees of the Retirada and the European Jews who were brutally interned in the camp of Septfonds, not far from Parisot. Her book, L’exil et les Barbeles, is a work of great historical importance. Hers was an inspiring session.

After two stimulating days of literature, it was with some sadness that I packed my car to drive southwards back to St Girons. They always say that a change is as good as a rest, and what a glorious change it's been. I am so full of admiration for the committee of the Festival Litteraire de Parisot. They have achieved something very special and I know that it can only go from strength to strength. Who knows, one day Parisot may be mentioned in the same breath as Hay? Actually, maybe no. Small is beautiful and I would hate it to become just another commercial event hijacked by publishers and PR professionals. It's perfect as it is - name me another literary festival where you get tea and home made cakes thrown in, and all for nothing? Name me another festival, too, where you get to have lunch and dinner with the writers, like members of one big happy family? With so many new found friends, I feel like I've become part of this warm, welcoming literary family of Parisot and it's a real joy. My warmest thanks go to everybody involved. Bravo tous!

I knew, though, that I couldn’t leave this lovely region of France without visiting Septfonds. I wanted to pay tribute to the eighty-one Spaniards who lie in the Spanish cemetery there and also to visit the memorial at the Camp de Judes, in the nearby hameau of La Lande. I was moved to tears. These were young men who did not deserve to die on this side of the Pyrenees, buried in lines in numbered graves, like sardines in a tin. They had lost everything fighting Franco and now France, to its shame, took the only thing that they had left.

Septfonds is not far from St Antonin, where Charlotte Gray was partly filmed. I have always wanted to see the ancient bridge over the Aveyron over which the tanks rolled in on 11 November 1942. There is something special about great movie moments, as if they fill the space in our heads where words once were.

Reading the plaque by the bridge, I discovered that St Antonin hailed from Pamiers, in Ariege. When he tried to convert the heathens of our disorderly part of France, they chopped his head off and threw him unceremoniously into the River Ariege, from whence he was borne by angels to the Tarn, before being deposited, miraculously reassembled, here in the Aveyron. The town that takes his name has indeed been blessed. St Antonin is the most beautiful intact medieval village I have seen since visiting Verona last year. I know that it’s a cliché but it really is as though time has stood still.

I scuttled around its tiny streets like a detective on the prowl. Some of them were so narrow, if I spread my arms wide, I could have touched the walls on either side. Around every corner, in tiny passages and courtyards as well as on the main streets, there were grand portals and corbels and carved coats of arms. I am sure that these fine architectural details were only added once the Catholic zealots of St Antonin had prized the vast Cathar and Protestant wealth from the heretics in their midst. The town was rewarded with the grand title of St Antonin Noble Val, which just goes to show that you only have to scratch the surface in even the most picturesque French town to find a history of bitter conflict.

And with that thought in mind, I climbed back into my car and headed back to my work on the Resistance. Enough of books, barbed wire and beautiful places, I’ve spent too much time on blogging. Again! I don't know what other bloggers think but this new format drives me nuts. Sorry for the whinge but editing a blog post is now more time consuming than writing one, so it may be a while before I'm back. It’s time to get back to the grindstone at Bardies before the autumn runs away with me and my deadline disappears. How many days is it to Christmas? A bientot.

Jean Moulin - A Hero's Hero

Seventy years ago, on 14 February 1943, Jean Moulin landed from France at RAF Tangmere, near Chichester, in a Lysander from 161 'Special Duties' Squadron. This was not his first visit. He had previously impressed the aloof and distant de Gaulle when he visited him during the general's darkest days, on 25 October 1941. As a man of some stature the ex-Prefet of Chartres not only provided information about resistance in France, he also offered him a means to exploit and rally these diverse and relatively isolated resistants to his cause. At that time, a small minority of French people, anti-Nazis, Jews, Communists and anti-Petainistes amongst others, were creating their own resistance but they had no leader on the ground in France. De Gaulle, tucked away in London's Carlton Gardens, was an ethereal voice on the radio with pre-determined views about invading France with his Free French army. Moulin single-handedly convinced him that he had tens of thousands of parachutistes sur place ready to serve him but that if he didn't take the leadership reins, then the communists would. He was successful in his mission and when he returned to France as the official 'Delegate of the French National Committee to the Unoccupied Zone' his real work began.

The second time he came to visit General de Gaulle, a great deal had changed. The Germans had invaded the southern zone, the so-called zone libre, on 11 November 1942 and the mountainous and wooded areas of the south, perfectly suited to guerilla warfare, were now firmly under German military control. Jean Moulin flew into RAF Tangmere with a strategy to unite the disparate elements of the newly emergent Resistance movement and rehabilitate the political parties around de Gaulle. This was no mean task after the attentisme that had followed the Armistice Agreement of July 1940 and the rewriting of the immediate past and the jockeying for position that was now, inevitably, taking place. De Gaulle's relationship with the Resistance was further compromised by the Allies' support for General Darlan in North Africa after the Allied landings in November 1942. With Petain in Vichy, Darlan in North Africa and a sulking de Gaulle in London, it was not at all clear who was to be crowned the sovereign leader of the French. When Darlan was assassinated, the USA and Roosevelt replaced him with General Giraud, a man untainted by even the slightest whiff of collaboration. De Gaulle's future depended on proving that Roosevelt's support for the newly appointed Giraud was misplaced and that only he, General de Gaulle, could speak for the whole of la belle France.

Fired up with the powerful notion of a united Resistance under the ex patriot general's leadership directed from London, Moulin and de Gaulle hammered out the idea of a single Resistance council. On 21 February Jean Moulin drafted the proposal for the new body, a Resistance council, which would encompass both zones and incorporate representatives from the different Resistance movements and the  estranged political parties. His first attempt to return to France with these precious instructions, took place on 24 February 1943. Due to fog, the Lysander, flown by Squadron Leader Hugh Verity, had to return to Tangmere, where it crash landed spectacularly. Miraculously, neither man was hurt despite the severity of the impact in a pea soup of a fog. A second attempt on 26 February also failed. It was not until 20 March that Moulin was finally set down near Roanne by 161 Squadron's Flight Lieutenant Bridger. Within weeks Moulin established the Conseil National de la Resistance.

It was a thankless task amongst the rivalries, vanities and hostilities of the different competing groups but it is a credit to Moulin that he was able to exploit all of these things to achieve his, and de Gaulle's, primary objective. The first meeting of the National Council of the Resistance [CNR] was held on 27 May 1943. His personal success was to be short lived. Less than a month later, Jean Moulin was arrested and brutally tortured by the notorious Klaus Barbie, dying shortly afterwards in a deportation car. The power struggles between the competing groups did not end with Moulin's death but de Gaulle's determination to shape France in his own image was given great credence by his sacrifice. When Andre Malraux spoke of him as being le chef d'un peuple de la nuit at the consecration ceremony for him at the Pantheon in December 1964, Moulin's legend, like the wily general's himself, was indelibly etched in the minds of all patriotic French men and women. On that bitterly cold winter's morning in Paris, he became a hero's hero. Vested in his bodily sacrifice was the resurrection of a nation. Despite Marcel Orphul's seminal film, 'Le Chagrin et la Pitie', which showed the ugly underbelly of Resistance mythology, France has not looked back since and Moulin's legend lives on.

I was privileged last weekend, on the seventieth anniversary of Moulin's first attempt to return to France, to be invited to a commemoration of Jean Moulin's secret flights to and from RAF Tangmere,  by the Friends of Chartres, Les Amis des Jumelages de Chartres and Tangmere Military Aviation Museum. A moving Service of Remembrance was led by the Rev Canon Tim Schofield in the Museum Memorial Garden, attended by many with connections to SOE, the Resistance and 161 Squadron, as well as the Deputy Mayor of Chartres and the Mayor of Chichester. It was followed by a tour of the museum and later, an RAF Operations Room Re-enactment at the Bishop Otter Campus at the University of Chichester, where the actual centre of operations for RAF Tangmere had taken place during the war.

This was followed by an enlightening film made by Martyn Cox, who interviewed Jean Moulin's first pilot, the redoubtable Squadron Leader, Hugh Verity, in 2001, not long before his death. Martyn, who lives in France near Saint-Antonin, where Charlotte Gray was filmed, has interviewed many SOE agents, including the women who were the real 'Charlotte Grays'. Afterwards we had an extremely entertaining and enjoyable illustrated talk by Pete Pitman of the Tangmere Military Aviation Museum entitled 'A Day in the Life of a Pick-Up Pilot'. Remarkably, out of 410 Lysander sorties and 218 Hudson ones, they lost only six pilots and thirteen aircraft. Two of the pilots died trying to land in severe fog at Tangmere, which makes Hugh Verity's crash landing with Jean Moulin on the 24 February 1943 even more significant. Who knows what the history of the Resistance might have been had Verity not got his plane down eventually?

The afternoon finished with a superb panel of experts discussing both Moulin and the Resistance: Julian Jackson, Professor of History at Queen Mary's College, University of London, and the author of 'France, The Dark Years'; Pete Pitman of RAF Tangmere; Harry Roderick "Rod" Kedward, Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Sussex and author of 'Resistance in France' and 'In Search of the Maquis' amongst many others, and Mathew Cobb, Professor of Zoology at the University of Manchester and the author of 'Resistance'. The day finished with a showing of that great Resistance film from 1969, directed by Jean-Pierre Melville, 'L'Armee des Ombres', starring the phenomenal Simone Signoret as the compromised resistant, Mathilde. The choice of film, which included a Lysander drop-off and pick-up, was a fitting tribute to a great Resistance hero and the men of the RAF who aided them. 

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