A Short Walk from Harrods by Dirk Bogarde Page A

franc notes (Madame Ranchett had advised me), which she accepted with a cackle and a nod. Then she hitched the child on to her hip and wandered down the stairs singing lightly. At the front door she called out in her rasping voice: ‘
Mañana! Eh!’
And the deal was made.
    She stayed with me faithfully and devotedly, for fifteen years, until the time came for me to leave. By then she spoke fairly reasonable French with a disastrous accent, and ran the house with a rod of iron, washed and cleaned and polished, kicked the dogs, and screamed and laughed and worked like a fiend. And grew, deservedly, rich. Her husband, Manolo, came up at weekends, a pleasant man with a hideous scarred face (carved up in a bar room brawl by broken glass) and a fearful squint so that one spoke to the good eye only, the one on the right. He was a good, kind fellow, useful at the olive harvest, changing plugs, pruning the cypress trees every season, and making himself generally useful. She was alwayscalled just ‘Lady’. Le Pigeonnier functioned smoothly from their arrival onwards.
    However, Lady did not cook. And on one occasion when she brought a dish of some wretched famished chicken smothered in rice and saffron as a gift, one was rather relieved. Everything she did was fine – except the cooking.
    So, back to square one. An agreement was made: I would be the scullion, that is to say I would wash up, scour saucepans, lay tables, prepare vegetables, empty dustbins and so on, and leave Forwood to do the cooking. In time he moved uneasily, but successfully, far from cauliflower cheese and deep into pilaffs, risottos, soupe au pistou, ratatouille and all manner of other Provençal delights. Pots and pans were bought, knives of astonishing sharpness, mixing-machines, mincing-machines – an entire
batterie de cuisine
formed and I did the washing-up. It took me a very considerable time for the simple reason, as he patiently explained, that cooking was not easy, and that he was what is called a ‘messy cook’. That was true. After a simple gigot, flageolet, salad and cheese, it seemed to me that I had to wash up an ironmonger’s. I could never understand really, why? If I made a mild protest it was quietly suggested that I take over. So I shut up … and we managed. But I know, I have always known, that I got the worst part of the bargain. And I had to trail off to the market every morning, sharp at seven, winter and summer, to be sure that only the best was bought for this Escoffier of the hillside. I also had to feed the dogs, but as I have said, this was not difficult, and they got better fed now that there was more variety in the green vegetables, not just bits of old cauliflower bunged in with the biscuits. In time, sadly, cheek became prohibitively expensive, and tinned muck came on themarket. Easier, cheaper, and somehow the dogs seemed less aggressive to strangers now that they were no longer fed raw flesh. Like bromide in the soldiers’ tea, it seemed that tinned food rather took the fizz out of things.
    Emigrating to France does not mean that one hurls about the place looking for a suitable house, buys it, moves in, and lives there happily ever after. There is rather more to it than that. You have to get permission to stay there. At least, you did in my time. France is not just ‘any old place’, it’s not somewhere that you can just dump your belongings and say, ‘Here I am.’ To begin with, they are not all that anxious to have you. Unless, that is, you intend to return to the land you occupy something from which you have taken, like love, care and attention. I was prepared to offer all that, and more.
    But I had chosen to live in a particularly sensitive area, the Alpes Maritimes, bordered with Italy, not far from Switzerland, close to Spain, too close to North Africa. Security was tight. The great hoards of unemployed Arabs from Tunisia and Morocco, the abject poor from