Toujours Provence(52)

And then we come to July and August.

We used to treat them as just another two months of the year; hot months, certainly, but nothing that required much adjustment on our part except to make sure that the afternoon included a siesta.

We were wrong. Where we live in July and August is still the Lubéron, but it’s not the same Lubéron. It is the Lubéron en vacances, and our past efforts to live normally during abnormal times have been miserably unsuccessful. So unsuccessful that we once considered cancelling summer altogether and going somewhere grey and cool and peaceful, like the Hebrides.

But if we did, we would probably miss it, all of it, even the days and incidents that have reduced us to sweating, irritated, overtired zombies. So we have decided to come to terms with the Lubéron in the summer, to do our best to join the rest of the world on holiday and, like them, to send postcards telling distant friends about the wonderful times we are having. Here are a few.





Saint-Tropez


Cherchez les nudistes! It is open season for nature lovers, and there is likely to be a sharp increase in the number of applicants wishing to join the Saint-Tropez police force.

The mayor, Monsieur Spada, has flown in the face of years of tradition (Saint-Tropez made public nudity famous, after all) and has decreed that in the name of safety and hygiene there will be no more naked sunbathing on the public beaches. “Le nudisme intégral est interdit,” says Monsieur Spada, and he has empowered the police to seize and arrest any offenders. Well, perhaps not to seize them, but to track them down and fine them 75 francs, or as much as 1500 francs if they have been guilty of creating a public outrage. Exactly where a nudist might keep 1500 francs is a question that is puzzling local residents.

Meanwhile, a defiant group of nudists has set up headquarters in some rocks behind la plage de la Moutte. A spokeswoman for the group has said that under no circumstances would bathing suits be worn. Wish you were here.





The Melon Field


Faustin’s brother Jacky, a wiry little man of sixty or so, grows melons in the field opposite the house. It’s a large field, but he does all the work himself, and by hand. In the spring I have often seen him out there for six or seven hours, back bent like a hinge, his hoe chopping at the weeds that threaten to strangle his crop. He doesn’t spray—who would eat a melon tasting of chemicals?—and I think he must enjoy looking after his land in the traditional way.

Now that the melons are ripening, he comes to the field at 6:00 every morning to pick the ones that are ready. He takes them up to Ménerbes to be packed in shallow wooden crates. From Ménerbes they go to Cavaillon, and from Cavaillon to Avignon, to Paris, everywhere. It amuses Jacky to think of people in smart restaurants paying une petite fortune for a simple thing like a melon.

If I get up early enough I can catch him before he goes to Ménerbes. He always has a couple of melons that are too ripe to travel, and he sells them to me for a few francs.

As I walk back to the house, the sun clears the top of the mountain and it is suddenly hot on my face. The melons, heavy and satisfying in my hands, are still cool from the night air. We have them for breakfast, fresh and sweet, less than ten minutes after they have been picked.





Behind the Bar


There is a point at which a swimming pool ceases to be a luxury and becomes very close to a necessity, and that point is when the temperature hits 100 degrees. Whenever people ask us about renting a house for the summer, we always tell them this, and some of them listen.

Others don’t, and within two days of arriving they are on the phone telling us what we told them months before. It’s so hot, they say. Too hot for tennis, too hot for cycling, too hot for sightseeing, too hot, too hot. Oh, for a pool. You’re so lucky.

There is a hopeful pause. Is it my imagination, or can I actually hear the drops of perspiration falling like summer rain on the pages of the telephone directory?

I suppose the answer is to be callous but helpful. There is a public swimming pool near Apt, if you don’t mind sharing the water with a few hundred small brown dervishes on their school holidays. There is the Mediterranean, only an hour’s drive away; no, with traffic it could take two hours. Make sure you have some bottles of Evian in the car. It wouldn’t do to get dehydrated.

Or you could close the shutters against the sun, spend the day in the house, and spring forth refreshed into the evening air. It would be difficult to acquire the souvenir suntan, but at least there would be no chance of heatstroke.

These brutal and unworthy suggestions barely have time to cross my mind before the voice of despair turns into the voice of relief. Of course! We could come over in the morning for a quick dip without disturbing you. Just a splash. You won’t even know we’ve been.