Life in a Postcard - Escape to the French Pyrenees : Rosemary Bailey

 

4th of 2021, not all might like the book equally; but what made be grab the book last year is the words on the top right hand corner "Book is a dream that you hold in your hand";  the cover picture and the title.

With the view of the sunrise on the new year morning, I could not stop picking this book to read as I could not word my thoughts any better:

'I wake to the sun striking gold on a stone wall. If I lean out of the window I can see Mount Canigou newly iced with snow.   It is wonderful to live in a building with windows all around, to see both sunrise and sunset, to be constantly aware of the passage of the sun and moon.' May be I cannot see Mount Canigou newly iced with snow; but for now it's fine - hope I will someday. 

In 1988, Rosemary Bailey and her husband were travelling in the French Pyrenees when they fell in love with, and subsequently bought, a ruined medieval monastery, surrounded by peach orchards and snow-capped peaks. Traces of the monks were everywhere, in the frescoed 13th century chapel, the buried crypt, the stone arches of the cloister.

For the next few years the couple visited Corbiac whenever they could, until in 1997, they took the plunge and moved from central London to rural France with their six-year-old son. Entirely reliant on their earnings as freelance writers, they put their Apple Macs in the room with the fewest leaks and sent Theo to the village school. With vision and determination they have restored the monastery to its former glory, testing their relationship and resolve to the limit, and finding unexpected inspiration in the place.

Life in a Postcard is not just Rosemary Bailey's enthralling account of the challenges of life in a small mountain community, but also a celebration of the rugged beauty of French Catalonia, the pleasures of Catalan cooking, and an exploration of an alternative, often magical world. 

So say the back cover of the book. 

Monastery is at the centre of the Castellane valley in the foothills of the Pyrenees, and it was the favorite subject for local postcards. 

In the ”location memoir”  Rosemary Bailey gives personal depth and a philosophical twist to her celebration of life in the French Pyrenees.  Their 6 year old son starts the village school with no French at all and Bailey details the struggles they have to adapt to rural mountain life. They not only find a home they also find a supportive community- not traditional hoary French peasants and braying ex-pats, but a microcosm of Europe, a village which boasts 12 different nationalities. Bailey paints amusing and sympathetic portraits of the characters she meets; dairymaids, potters, opera singers, gardeners and painters. Gerard, the heavenly gardener who plants a secret patch of poppies to appear on a green hillside, Albert, the opera director who lost his hearing and turned sculptor, Hans the Dutch careers advisor who advised himself to move to Mosset and run a donkey trekking enterprise, Rose, niece of Sir Anthony Eden, a photographer again at 75, riding camels in Morocco, and revisiting the slums of Jamaica to photograph them after 20 years, Sylvie, the transplanted Parisian horsewoman so devoted to her tranquil life she needs a steak to revive her if she ever has to drive a car, the lesbian olive growers, the Swiss analyst, the Chilean refugees, and the nouveaux paysans carving out simple self-sufficient lives in mountain shacks, growing their own food, and dancing by the light of the moon. There are the traditional peasants too of course, planting by the moon, squabbling over fences and water rights, barbecueing snails, and guarding their secret mushroom locations. Bailey finds her feminist principles get her into serious trouble when she tries to assert herself with Catalan farmers. But she finds an alternative life, the possibility of a quieter, healthier, safer environment, enjoying simple, frugal pleasures, people who have turned their backs on material comforts in favour of living close to nature and animals, treading lightly on the earth.

Woven into the story is the history of the village, the harsh realities of peasant life in the past, the experience of war, the informer priest hung by the maquis. most of all though it is the monastery itself which dominates the book, and Bailey describes the monks, bringing to life their daily rituals and worship, the prayers and chants which filled the building for centuries, the herbs and plants they grew. Through the monks she finds a way to respond to the place, finding in their ability to focus on the moment a way to see beyond her own daily trials and enter fully into the experience. A bittersweet quality overhangs the book as she remembers her brother, the Yorkshire priest who died of AIDS , the subject of her previous book, and in the stones and forgotten prayers of Corbiac she finds a way to resolve his death. 

She discovers, as he did, that to retreat from the world can mean you engage more fully and more profoundly with it. "You only die when you fail to take root in others". Perhaps it is only when you feel ready to relinquish everything, as the monks were, can you fully enter into the moment. 

Another fascinating fact was how the people planted trees instead of walls, as fence - what a brilliant idea.