thomas m wilson

I’m in Fecamp and the air feels fresh and the gulls are crying. I wish Australian sea gulls sounded so nice.

Sitting up on the cliffs just outside Fecamp a couple of nights ago… It was like the allied forces were just over the water, and could disembark on the pebble beach sixty metres below our feet at any moment.

With the white cliffs of Dover not far away France and England will stand forever face to face against each other. The gulls banked and slid across the upwellings of air. One sat a few metres from me on the precipitous ledge of white chalky rock. Below the gulls the odd bit of grass clinging to a hollow or dimple in the sheer surface. It was good to sit up there and eat baguette with pate and salad, and enjoy the feeling of height above Fecamp away to the east and the sun dazzled Atlantic below to the left. Those are wind turbines on the far horizon.  I really don’t think that they ‘spoil the view’.

Fecamp is known in France as the home of the liquor Benedictine.  This horror movie style bit of Rennaisance Gothic architecture contains the distillery, and the big boxes of spices from all around the world that go into the drink.

Speaking of drinks, last night I sat in a creperie by the port, looking out on all bobbing masts, ate sea food galletes, and drank local cidre Normande, apple cider, from ceramic bowls, and spoke French.  I talked with my mum on the phone recently and she told me that my English grandfather once drank plenty of cider in Normandy in this region, along with a fair amount of Calvados, and danced with street signs on his merry way home.  Those are tall precedents to live up to!

I recently visited a chateau in Normandy from the late medieval period, apparently a classic instance of the military architecture of the era. My visit lead to this little poem:

The Unguided Tour of Chateau Rambure

Chateau Rambure,
a place where the recreated castle atmosphere evoked the epoch of French chevaliers to all of us on our guided tour,
but made me imagine the explorations that were still waiting to be made in jungles and deserts all over the planet,
as a French lord sat down to eat dinner in the dining room,
or a nineteenth century gentleman padded down the stairwell with pigeons cooing outside,
then the lady in her long dress going down the wide stone stair case past the worthy oil ancestors while the sun fell outside,
as it did year after year on the villages of Normandy in summer,
the immemorial peace of the oak leaves still there to the east, century after century.

And the still mysterious Amazon standing entire,
the unphotographed highlands of Papua New Guinea, still bursting with tongues,
the massive shoals of cod still swimming off the coast of Canada,
the thylacine savaging a frog on the bank of a Tasmanian marsh,
the albatross sailing and falling, unthreatened through the smooth blues of the South Pacific,
blank spaces on the map,
dark spaces in the mind of a chevalier.

A rustle of breeze in the green oak leaves beyond the window,
the murmur of Europe’s twenty-first century as I turn and rejoin my companions on our guided tour.

We also visited the Chateau de Digeon, a much smaller nineteenth century chateau. My friend’s cousin has ownership of this place. We stopped and talked with them. Both in their sixties, grey hair, animated and friendly. Bruno Goisque-Thienpont showed us his gardin potager. It is a formal garden in the Italian style, but with a very important twist: all of the formal hedges are there to accentuate the beauty of the flourishing vegetable garden that lies within the borders. Bruno talked of how vegetables are beautiful plants, and how he likes to display them, having cucumbers climbing along a little fence on the borders for example, or laying down seeds in horizontal lines. He and his family eat mainly vegetables, and little meat. It was refreshing to find the owner of such an apparently aristocratic house so in touch with the earth. Beneath his finger nails was a thick layer of black soil, and beneath his ownership of part of Frances cultural patrimony lay a green political agenda. They actually have a couple of rooms for people to stay in a bed and breakfast setting, and I’m going to recommend to my friends to stay at this place. If William Morris’s dictum to have nothing in your house which isn’t beautiful or necessary is true indoors, then Bruno has shown how to take this idea into the garden. The ‘jardin potager’ (kitchen garden) is a masterpiece, constantly maintained by Bruno and his wife, a masterpiece of garden design. Beauty for the eye and nourishment for the body sit quietly and synonymously within the old garden walls. In a well looked after garden in the middle of the Normandy countryside grow tastes for the plate and the gourmet’s palette and pleasing shapes for the aesthetic idler. That evening we ate salad leaves and beans and other produce from the garden for dinner around a long table in the kitchen, and drank a kind of pear cider Bruno’s son had brewed in an old wooden cider press earlier in the year from pear trees in the garden. Slow food movement devotees eat your heart out. What is more, these guys have been doing a kind of French aristocratic permaculture from before Bill Morrison even published a handbook. Not much English here – to hear Bruno talk about it in his enthusiast and articulate French you’ll have to learn a decent amount of the native tongue.

Here is Bruno searching for something he was going to show me.

Beauty and utility…

This is not a photo of Normandy.

I have started an entry on Normandy with a picture of the opulent shadows of the inside of Opera Garnier in the middle of Paris as I want to highlight the difference between city and country. The zenith of traditional European architectural grandeur: red velvet, towering statues and candelabras. Then I stepped off the train into the countryside of Normandy…

Paris is not all beautiful interiors. All of a sudden I’ve left the heat and the noise and the tourists of the streets of Paris behind.

Fagus silvatica, or the European Beech tree. It has been interesting to see the same symmetrical veins on beech leaves on species in New York, Canada, England, France, New Zealand and Tasmania. Veins of continuity which cross the planet, as I travel eastwards. Beech leaves linking the continents with their slanted striations.

This is Eu, a small town in the north of Normandy. Half-timbered houses are common  around here, with their black beams and wattle and daub walls painted white.  Many of the coastal towns with their old stone buildings, gulls crying, green and rolling hills around and cool and often rainy sky remind me that I am in the France that is so well known and evoked by English literature over the decades and the centuries. This is the France that is just on the other side of the channel from England, a big stone’s throw away. So the landscape is just the same. It is the first foreign bit of land generations of English men and women have seen down through history. Julian Barnes’ ‘Flaubert’s Parrot’ springs to mind. It is much easier to feel at home here than if you were English and you’d gone down to Avignon or the south of Europe.

Just outside of Eu…

The first couple of nights I stayed at the house of the parents of a friend. It was an old farm house in a valley with green woods and fields around. Lovely. Waking in the morning and sticking my head out of the window it was beautiful to be surrounded by green hills and forests and fields and no other houses or people. I’d look out after having just woken up, still feeling groggy, and have the invigorating vista of green and outdoor life below and before me, with Austan the Breton Spaniel running across some field to the right, and the cool air brushing against my face. The house still has its exposed oak beams, hundreds of years old, in the kitchen.