“The Executioner of Lille, the Executioner of Lille!” cried Milady, a prey to insensate terror, and clinging with her hands to the wall to avoid falling.
Dumas
June 2017
Hesdin, pronounced Hey-dun, is a small town that used to lie on the border between France and Wallonia in 1620, when Anne de Brueil was growing up, part of the frontier of the Holy Roman Empire. In The Three Musketeers, Dumas placed Templemars, Bethune, and Lille in France. He was WRONG! What a struggle erupted with this realisation. Should I follow history or Dumas?
Hesdin is in Pas-de-Calais, a region bordered by the Somme and the Nord, and by the English Channel. The Somme, stained with New Zealand blood, echoes still with the battles of Ypres, Arras and Lille. But I was not in Pas-de-Calais for the first World War, although some part of my ancestoral soul trembled when I passed these names on street signs. My great-uncle Bill survived.
My first Workaway hosts, Donna and Nik, lived in a seventeenth-century farmhouse that had captured their passion and energy for years. The area is quiet and rural with a continual procession of combine harvesters. From the street there was a giant gateway easily big enough for a horse and carriage to pass through. I was in a car as I arrived to be greeted by two little dogs, Icon and Enya. There was a willow tree in the middle of the courtyard surrounded by bricks and pieces of patterned terracotta; a tiled fountain shaped like the body of a tree fern gently cascaded into a pond of glass shards.
WorkAway is an online platform where travellers, singles or families, can search for places advertising work in return for food and accommodation. Knowing what weeds look like would come in handy in the gardening stakes but I was assured the work would vary every day - and it did!
Kiwi Donna, IT and language teacher, and Nik, an English/German artist, were both clever and friendly. We enjoyed many interesting chats during one of which Nik told me his theory about nature’s purpose for humans, supposing there is such a thing. He could see humans shift energy around the planet effectively. Is this mixing and blending, chaos and stirring of plant, animal and bacteria, somehow useful for survival in the long term? I’ve written about his theory in my travel blog here.
The dreamy (run-down) farmhouse, a passionate love, and ten years hard work have evolved into a business. A charming garden, an BnB and a gite work together with a catering business plus some pottery and crafts for sale. Donna, charming and generous, and Nik so keen to experience life - raising pigs and chickens and rebuilding this French homestead - all at once and all beautiful.
The courtyard’s drainage system was particularly good. The first winter their lovely lawn turned to bog, so they paved it, and it looks as if it’s always been there. I suppose medieval farmers didn’t have big cars to mush up the mud and paving materials would have been expensive, perhaps better used in fencing for livestock? However, Nik solved the roof run-off by dropping picturesque chains from the gutters and shaped an inclination like a star with slices of slate, sliced terracotta pipes and a pattern of small horseshoes over laid with larger ones, radiating out like a magnet to water.
The rest of the drainage inspection covers are sculpted, molded, and made from fibreglass, but with iron filings in them to make them look like iron. They feature iron handles to give them some heft but the general impression is of weight and solidity. Very impressive things.
On your right, as you enter the property through the horse and carriage gate, there’s a woodworking/builders’ shed, then a pottery with cellar, and then the pig house (luckily they’d already become ham by the time I visited). There’s a little shop over which Donna had a craft workshop. There’s a doorway into the garden leading up to the chickens and bees. On the other side of the doorway was the BnB and at that time Donna and Nik were living in a small gîte, or apartment, they intended to rent out as well. The wood pile was next to the heating system and then, turn around the willow tree to see into the dining room overlooking the courtyard. There would be another bathroom and then the kitchen and then a spare room, where I was, would open onto a living space. There were further plans for other rooms upstairs but goodness, an incredible amount had been achieved. So impressed by this couple’s skill, determination and perseverance!
While a cat called Lemony Snickett caused trouble with my pen I became entranced by a small brown bird clicking with a wooden tongs sound. When she’s perched on the roof or the gutter she clicks and bobs and then flies off with great acrobatics, presumably to get all the insects that come out at dusk. She did some hovering, like a giant hummingbird, near the gutter where perhaps a relative was doing something interesting. There was a friend and the two of them clicked away, with a squeaky tut tut tutting and polite bobbing. They might have been building a nest.
Nik also had a mystery bird - a very strong single note call. He described it as a boring rusty brown bird with a long tail. Not quite a whistle, the song was too long and definite to be a chirp. I thought I’d traced it to a different bird, about the size of a pardalotte, with black and white markings on the wings, a rusty red breast and darker back but no long tail. It was possible these were male and female redstarts.
Donna encouraged me to read about Agnes Humbert, a Resistance Fighter in the second world war. In her prison, she’d been given some Dumas to read and found the books intriguing. That’s what I have to aim for. Intrigue.
I need Milady to be outraged by something the English have done to the French - or intend to do - and she needs to leap to France’s defence - much as her idol, Joan of Arc, would have done.
But back in France again, as I search for Milady’s life, I was reliving part of my own life, that of cleaner. Cleaning up the BnB room brought back those strangled years of university during my father’s slow demise.
Here, near Hesdin, I did my one room with diligence. Cleaning down bathroom, dusting, mopping, vacuuming. There was a weird electric steam mop that had towelling pads that attached to a kind of steam iron. Pulled the trigger, steam came out and I ironed the floor. There must have been a knack to it (I couldn’t find it) and, after I’d finished, I did it the old fashioned way we used to back in Cherry Court Motel, on our hands and knees, backing out the door.
I think that time was as close as I’ve been to a nervous breakdown. The smell of vim. The smell of my father’s geriatric ward. My mother thought I could become a freelance gardener and got me work digging for one of her friends. I couldn’t cope with that and left. I went to bed for months. She thought I was hopeless. These days I would have have been sent to a counsellor. I don’t think there were that many counsellors then.
I watched the chickens have a big old argument next door. Two roosters and a hen were beating up a small hen. She lay prone while the two roosters shouted at her and stalked away. Then the bigger hen jumped on her and proceeded to (as my son called it after he was beaten one day at school) give her a very hard massage. As soon as she could the little one ran away, chased again by one of those roosters, and she ran straight to another, bigger bloke all shiny and colourful. When I last saw her she was still there, under his protection. It would have been a rare female to live without male protection in European cities of the seventeenth century.
The little brown clicking bird might be a black redstart (who comes up with these names?) They are reasonably common in Spain and Italy, rare in England, and they migrate north to breed. The website described the clicking as a sound of concern. The boy has the white and black markings on the wing and is the paler colour so Nik and I are happy that we’ve found our bird.
On my first day in the garden I went at weeding the path like a bull at a matador, raking and weeding as though I was twelve years old. Although it was hard work, my body remembered the actions from our family business, Osborne Galleries in Auckland, New Zealand. It gave me great satisfaction then, fifty odd years ago and today, in the North of France, it gave me a really sore forearm! I suspect the twisting action required to pull weeds and scrape the path somehow intersected with my old typing RSI and I managed to get a great swollen annoyance. That, and I managed to find some stinging nettles for the first time. I didn’t like them. After a dousing with cold water the extraordinary pain faded away. But not the swollen arm. I didn’t want to complain to Nik or Donna so I tried to work left handed and avoid straining the right arm any further. This gave me the sensation of being a complete dolt. I found firm massage, although enlivening, released some of the swelling. Again, this search for Milady has taken me back to my youth. First, those hours spent in the garden of the gallery in New Zealand, and second, those strong physio sessions after hours of express typing story lines for ‘A Country Practice’ in Sydney.
I think I managed to get some work done in wet weather gardening but when it came to painting my arm just wasn’t up to it! When I walked into the paint tray, sending paint flying up the wall, over me, and across the floor, I ran across the courtyard to the hose, trying to contain the spread of paint, washing my feet, crying out to Nik, ‘Emergency! Quickly, come quickly!’
I didn’t, in the end, mark the unfinished floor too badly and after about half the painting was done, Nik came to take over the high parts. I think a combination of sore arm and the travel of the previous few months had caught up with me.
To add insult to injury I was stung by a couple of bees up my trousers. (You could call it upper thigh.) I had to ask Nik if he had any antihistamine as they were swelling something shocking. Poor Nik and Donna. I hope they felt they got some value for my WorkAway time. I was knocked out, foggy and low. All things considered, with arm and bee stings, I was just about healthy by the time I left!
Donna took me to the local medieval faire - and it was inspirational. My second medieval experience was set in a paddock next to a disused nunnery - La Soeurs Noir Convent - surrounded by tall green trees. Plenty of room for stalls all around the area with horses racing through it, witches to be burned at the stake, and a barber shaving people with vigour. High drama when thieves and n’er-do-wells were chased down by outraged victims.
Some of Donna’s friends sold naturally dyed wool and linen, and knitting and weaving machines. They had a tablet weaver, a mini loom, that instead of having the two crossing lines, has the lines crossed by cards. There can be four or five threads that are turned by degrees to make patterns. They include the recipe for various predetermined patterns on numbered cards. The weft stays embedded in the pattern, holding it all together, making flat border braiding. There was another system of a circular notched piece of wood, the example only had two colours, but you could have more and those wove across and created patterns NOT like a knitting Nancy. There was also a two tined wooden fork with which you could (sort of) make macrame - knitting by one thread. My theme for Milady, weaving the yarn.
If Anne learned her braiding trade in the convent, perhaps it would afford her some comfort in a houseful of Abbot men in Guildford. She might even teach the young women of the area? It would be like her directorial days back at the convent. Could she help the Abbott family by braiding the selvedge area at the beginning of the bolt of the woollen fabric?
Pas-de-Calais means ‘not of Calais’. Confusing.
The redstarts’ feathers scattered across the paving.
Face facts, Mr Dumas.
Lemony Snickett did it.
Thank you Victoria. I love your journey.