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THE LANDS LEFT BEHIND TALES

In my youth, the world I travelled in was funny and fabulous. Phantoms lurked round every devastated corner or grinned fleetingly through ruined windows; weird and wonderful shadows slithered along crowded, uncomfortable trains; grotesque shapes whirled round muddy puddles and foul smells squatted on ugly platforms.

In the brave, glorious years following the second world war, anything seemed possible: the good, the bad, and the dreadful. I took it all as it came; more, being “groumande coumo uno padero”, as Mémé Catherine would say, I grabbed much that was dangled before my hungry lips, hook line and bewitching sinker. It was all one to me: the plain and the obscure blended together in an exciting mixture served to surprise or sicken those who had eyes to see. So many impressions, so many lessons to be learnt, so much to adapt to in differing societies where rules, habits and conventions were constantly being turned inside out. Most intriguing of all were the contrast: the laughing, recreating brigade and its corresponding opposites kept popping up, each in turn, like battling children who struggle to be on the rising end of the see-saw. And so they went, hand in glove, these apparently unfitting and absurd companions of everyday life: poppies and bread; smog and vineyards; irregular verbs and paper boats; rabbit stew and magicians; car engines and glow worms; visions and cricket bats; detention and fancy dress; fairy princes and grandmothers; nursery lullabies and rowdy demonstrations; the obscene and the magnanimous.

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Now that nonsense and the paradoxical are barely tolerated outside well defined limits such as in fiction or loony bins, it may not be to my advantage to confess that mysteries seemed quite normal to me. The stuff of life was made of dreams, play and grim faced teachers, each one as unavoidable and evident as the nose in the middle of the man in the moon’s changeable face.

Unfortunately, as civilised man rolls relentlessly forward, the infinite variety of his shimmering soul is being reduced and squashed under the heavy tread of his very reasonably shod feet. When faced with the puzzling perplexities of life, death and who on earth can save our goose pimpled skins from acts of God, it is advised to square up the irregular, shut up the politically incorrect and chuck out the irrelevant. Above all you must choose which side you are on. Within the well mapped contours of our criss-crossed planet, you can be either a pundit or a poet; a priest or a seer; an expert or an artist, prudently wise or a foolish outcast, but not both in one and the same person.

The ruling opinions look down full of pity and with the same indulgence they afford to surviving communists, on a humane mystic or a socially engaged pastor. “If only”, they deplore inside their boxed in positions, from which they judge all the impertinent scenes life has the nerve to put on show, “If only such and such a celebrity would get rid of “l’élément qui fâche”.” He or she is truly marvellous except for this lamentable lunacy or that clashing creed which spoils the over all packaging; and so it does, much in the same way that a buffoon upsets a serious banquet by singing silly rhymes, often with good reason.

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I am older now and no longer mind if my extravagant tales are dubbed as dithering doodlebugs. I use that last word wittingly for, although I still maintain that all that happened belonged to a natural order, I must admit to having been not a little shattered on more than one occasion and to have still about me a few indelible scars.

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FIRST TALE

The child walked slowly up the roughly improvised wooden gangplank and stopped abruptly just above the gap that yawned between the ship and the quay side. As she peered down into the oily darkness, it suddenly struck her that, once the chasm crossed, there would be no going back. At three years old and a bit, she was already much travelled, but never before had the feeling of no return been so strong. Head down, she hurried over the last few yards: “No going back,” she repeated to herself and shivered. That was just what she wanted.

The girl’s excitement was short lived. No nonsense sailors herded the sorry looking bunch of passengers as fast as bags, baggage and children allowed, down into a small cheerless lounge well below deck. Few comforts were on offer in those days, since the ferry boats had been used to transport troops across the channel.

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The child was very disappointed: “Shut in… yet again…” she sighed to herself, looking round for a convenient “porte de sortie”. Night was falling fast. They were casting anchor very late due to interminable delays. All the girl wanted was to see the lights. She was often on the look out for a play of lanterns, a shoot of stars, a glory of flaming clouds that transformed the surroundings in which they shone. From the back bedroom window in the “Maison des Grand’mères”, she spent many long evenings waiting for the hills of the “Montagne Noire” to turn a misty blue ,for wolves eyes to glint in the forests and the little black homes begin to send their bright signals as they winked cheerfully one to another. Best of all was the rushing, whistling splendour of the “Port-Bou” train. Where did it came from and where was it off to without stopping to take her along to somewhere else? At last, the evening before, her wish had been about to come true as she stood impatiently waiting on the dreary platform where the smoke blowing monster was expected. Later, squashed up in the stuffy compartment, moodily watching as baskets and bags full of bread, raw onions and garlic, saucisson and wine were promptly unpacked and noisily consumed in order to sustain and bolster tried hearts and tired bodies against the trials of a tediously long train journey, the child scowled and almost cried in despair when a thoughtless hand zipped down the blinds, thereby shutting out all possibility of being surprised by a cavalcade of streaming lamps.

So now, stuck inside the boat, the child was determined to go and find her share of sparkle. As it happened, she got a lot more than she bargained for.

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Stubbornly, she stood as close to the door as possible, refusing to sit down. In a short while, many of the group began to fall prey to sea sickness as the ferry laboured out of the port and, dipping and rising most wonderfully, tackled the unbound waves. There were no stewards then, only overworked sailors who had to run back and forth, escorting groggy passengers to the toilets or handing out basins to those who couldn’t make it in time. The much awaited opportunity came when the girl’s mother was helped out of the room. Being already well practised in the art of dodging keepers, the child, having followed some way behind, managed to slip by unnoticed and run up those same stairs she had so reluctantly descended not long before.

Breathing in great gulps of salty dampness, the fleeing girl found her way up to the top deck only to be flung right back by a contrary wind. This constituted a new problem to puzzle over. Changing tactics, she went on all fours and carefully made for the opposite opening. Eventually, she reached what she called the front of the boat. It took a while and a lot of awkward slipping and sliding, before she gripped the comforting bulk of a lifeboat fixed near the railings. With the stable craft shielding her back from the worst of the wind and her short arms wound tightly round a post in front, the child sighed contentedly and set about looking out as far as possible. If she leant forward a little, she could just see the spurts of frothy foam that sprayed upwards from the gash made by the ships hull as it cut its way through the heaving mass of dark water. She savoured the briny droplets, the thrill of on going speed that carried

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her over the sea to an unseen country. Darkness reigned above, below and all around: “So this is it!” she nodded to herself, “we are in the middle of nowhere… no lights… no land…”. Then she thought she heard voices and shrunk down, afraid that they were already out on her trail. After a moment, ears flapping, the child began to hear a kind of singing, quite different from the gale’s wailing and whistling. Now and again, words she couldn’t understand wafted on the wind. Some were repeated over and over again, like a refrain:

“Stellanueva…… palmanueva….”

Suddenly there was a long, raucous laugh and a loud voice called out a phrase the child had already heard uttered by “Lous Vèilhos” :

“Fai petar lou fouet, macarel!”

And that’s when the fun really started. Some distance away, the waves parted to let pass a flashing globe of light. At first, it was just a pulsating blur. The girl realized immediately that it wasn’t another ship. Then, rapidly, the ball doubled, tripled and kept on multiplying its incandescent volume, until a fair sized island blazed ardently like a huge many coloured carbuncle plucked from the black pits of the bottomless sea.

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There was no time to get used to this startling apparition for, almost simultaneously dozens of smaller blobs popped up like luminous peas out of a giant pod, and began to dance merrily round their big sister. Overwhelmed the child cried out: “Estela!.. The stars... fallen!.. tombées du ciel... into the sea!”

She stared on for quite a while and wondered: “What were they made of?” All she could make out was some sort of gelatinous matter that glowed silently but also seemed so very soft and raw. It reminded her of the fragile flimsiness of an emerging butterfly or the shy grace of a new rose. Once she had tried to make a tent out of Madame Grosjean’s new kitchen curtains, in order to protect the flower petals from a threatening storm. It had ended badly for them both. She hadn’t understood then and she didn’t know why she now felt sorry for the lovely islands. Their delicate virginity felt vulnerable and likely to be hurt or damaged. That’s when she heard her name called. It sounded like one of the sailors. The child glanced over her shoulder. They were almost upon her. Even before looking back towards the sea, she knew that the quick waters had already drowned the lights and drawn a grey-green coverlet over the shy, out of reach kingdom. And so it was: all had become dark and ship shape again. The child got up and turned to face a different kind of music.