Memories 3: The end of Old George

[anotherbanana]

Well, le Vieux Georges has left us, and gone to meet his Maker, though quite what He is likely to make of him is another matter for it is doubtful if Georges was what he had in mind on the Sixth Day of Creation, though the catalogue is pretty large.

And we must mourn his passing, if only for a fleeting moment, along with the very large number of people who packed the church and courtyard.

He, his wife and his tribe of squalling, squabbling brats, (some of whom were fathered by an understudy, so the local gossip goes, and to be fair, at least one daughter does not look in the least like any of the others), grand brats, unexpected great grand brats, barking dogs, breeding cats, fleeing rabbits, erring sheep and chickens were my neighbours for close on 10 years.

They subsisted, as far as I could judge, on various pensions, benefits, hand outs and contributions from a very generous French State. Plus a very well run vegetable patch, whatever fell off the tree, could be begged, borrowed and not returned.

During that time our minds never met; we were each as aliens to the other, observing and circling warily, I from an urban, rootless, pseudo-intellectual background, he from the oldest and deepest roots of peasant stock that la France Profonde has to offer.

For most of his 90 years, for which he owed at least 15 to the perseverance of French medicine and its ability to fix his eyes, knees, heart, blood, feet and arms, winter or summer, wet or dry, he greeted the morning, and the whole hamlet by clearing his throat, long and loud and spitting copiously, which act spoiled the coffee and croissants of my frequent visitors, myself being inured to it.

His next task, if it was the weekend or a school holiday, would be to bellow in a deep, rusty voice that carried across ten fields "Loïk, Loïk", which, if he was lucky, was answered by an irritated growl, if at all, from somewhere over yonder where his son was up to no good. The conversation carried on at an equal distance, usually ending up in the boy getting a mouthful of obscenities, of which I picked up quite a few.

Loïk, his son of 45 winters, was a perpetual problem and disappointment to the old man. According to local gossip, and, wow, was there a load of that, the boy was born normal but at about five years old his brain was got by the “worms” which made him a bit abnormal, and, let’s be frank, just plain nasty.

The difficulty was that the manboy had a problem with young girls; he liked them rather too much and had a record for being too attentive to them- and was kept in a special institution during the week, returning to the supervision of his parents at weekends, from which he 'escaped' regularly as they were too old to watch him. And I had daughters and we liked our privacy, so the problem becomes apparent.

Old George had been a domestique de ferme, by which he meant a farm labourer, whose job had been to take care of and drive les boeufs , though when we met he was already 88 and long retired. He spent his time observing the vegetables grow, in wonderfully straight lines, a state achieved by the efforts of his son under the howling supervision of himself, from the comfort of a bench in a warm corner of the garden, a small round man with sharp, searching eyes, wrapped in generous layers of clothing, looking rather like an elderly hobbit.

Our meeting ground was always neutral or indirect and concerned hedges and fruit, for, on these topics we were as chalk and cheese.

Hedges, he believed, should be two feet high and about three inches wide and should be trimmed at least twice a year. This is what he had been trained to do, and whenever he had the chance to cut and cut and cut, usually when I was away, he would send Loïk into my garden with the hedge trimmer to carry out the massacre.

Which meant that he and his tribe could see exactly what we were up to and boy did they watch, but then, everybody watches everybody else in rural France.

Remonstration over this cutting was useless; on other boundaries I grew proper hedges to encourage wildlife, two or more metres high, three or four metres wide, and he offered to cut them. When I showed him a poster from the Mairie advocating my practice, he laughed. I had forgotten that he could neither read not write. When I pointed out that there were pheasants nesting in the hedge, he told his son-in-law, and in appropriate season, shot them.

Now fruit was his other major concern. Not eating it, but getting enough to make gniôle, a brew first fermented at home then distilled in one of the few itinerant stills which the French government has allowed to remain in operation under strict control and paying the appropriate dues and brewing only to 50° proof.

However, control did not extend beyond working hours, by the end of which the still had to be empty and cool. As the customs and excise people who exercised the control left for the day with a very pointed comment that they would not return until 0830hrs the next day, the wood was thrown into the embers and the serious business of brewing 80° proof or better began. This was of course subsequently smuggled away via backroads, and, in my early and gullible days, under a blanket in my car, which, had we been stopped could have been forfeit, with a large fine.

To this was added grape and fruit juice and any other substance which the maker fancied. The subsequent brew was drunk in caves (a cave, in the Vendée, is a men-only drinking den often in the cellar of the house, but it could also be at the back of an outbuilding; any woman entering it would be shouted out). I went to George’s cave only once, and took several days to recover, not from the drunkenness, but from the poor hygiene!

He, his son and his sons-in-law drank copious amounts of the stuff from dawn to dusk, until their health broke, when they merely drank a bit less for a few months, then started again.

To make his litres and litres of hooch Georges needed mainly plums, mirabelles and reine claudes in any condition. Under his trees and those of his neighbours, more often than not without their knowledge, he would have spread enormous sheets of plastic into onto which the fruit would fall, aided by copious shaking of the trees. Where he could not do so, he and his son would be seen at dawn, on their hands and knees, picking up even the slightest remains of soggy, stinking fruit.

We clashed of course because he thought my fruit was his by right, to which I naturally objected. That I wanted to bottle some and turn the rest into jam seemed a sacrilege to the old man.

Many a time I had been away overnight in the picking season to return to denuded trees, and broken branches as the locusts from next door were not over scrupulous. When confronted , he, of course, denied any knowledge and blamed someone else (who, being seriously diabetic, would not have touched the fruit with a bargepole). However, he was concerned about this potential loss of fruit in the future and was quiet, pondering, his little eyes moving about as he thought.

"May I have the fallen fruit then?" To which I agreed immediately, and forgot about it. A while later I was awoken at half past six in the morning (I looked at the clock) by a strange noise in the garden. There was Old Georges shaking my fruit trees with an ardour that almost broke them. Seeing me he stopped immediately and pointed to the ground.

"Look, they have fallen and you said I could have those." I went back to bed.

But there was another man beneath the comic exterior. Towards the end of the war, he once told me, when slogging back my single malt with gusto, he was 'volunteered' to go on the forced labour programme in Germany. He arrived there hungry and with a bad back. Which the Germans operated on and fixed. But he spun it out and never did a day's work. Our George was a one man weapon against Nazism!

Then, when it was all over, in the chaos that ensued, he simply set off in the middle of winter with just what he stood up in, and on frozen canals, broken roads, scrounging cabbages and roots, maybe a bit of bread here and there, sleeping in isolated barns, freezing, he simply walked home to his beloved Vendée and never left it again.

RIP George.

[Lori]

Yikes, what a story !  I can't imagine the state of George's teeth or internal organs.  But, wow, he lived to be 90 !

Also gives new meaning (well maybe not too new) to the word 'neighbor.'

[anotherbanana]

I have not told the full story, Lori, for fear of offending delicate ears!

[Lori]

I kinda figured that.  You must have enough stories to fill a library on this 'family.' 

[betise]

Wonderful story Mr Banana!