Darnis

If we were to buy a property in France, it made sense to buy it in an area that we knew and loved. But there's a tale to tell...

August/September 1988
Twenty-something years ago (1988 to be exact), we cycled through France, from St Malo in Brittany to the Lot department, south of the the Dordogne river. There, in a tiny hamlet known as Darnis, and in return for board and lodging, we helped with the ongoing renovation project of a 17th Century farmhouse, owned by Christine and Henry Stucke - L'Ancienne Auberge de Darnis.

Darnis 1988

They had put the call out for willing hands to help and when we cycled up to the place one baking afternoon in August, we found a settlement of young people from all over the globe inhabiting every spare corner of the dilapidated farmhouse. At the helm, Christine and Henry ran a tight ship: a good honest day's labour and GBP1 in exchange for a bed, a roof and three square meals a day, made by cordon-bleu Lawrence Stucke, their elder son.

Henry called we itinerant workers the "Mites", as in stalagmites, or "might work; might not"; we called ourselves the "Darnisites".

After weeks of cycling and camping, a change of routine and an excuse to stay still for a while and not spend money was what attracted us in the first place. Also the chance to get to know a little corner of France on an intimate level. What kept us there for 3 weeks was all of this, and more.

We met good, lifelong friends (Martin and Gail) over the huge dining table; we experienced both the satisfaction and mind-numbing boredom of manual labour. We worked hard, listened to loud music (Tracey Chapman's "Fast Car", "Talkin' 'bout a Revolution" and Roxy Music's "Avalon"), got our hands callused and dirty and tanned our limbs golden without meaning to. G was on planing-ancient-oak-beams fatigues; I revarnished a wooden kayak before joining G in the workshop to repair knots on the planks G had planed smooth. Despite rudimentary safety gear, we had sawdust in our eyes, up our noses and in our hair day and night. Hot water didn't exist, so waiting for the shower felt like a punishment. At night, our backs ached and we ate like we were on Death Row. Everything seemed funnier than it really was.

Lunch break

The evening of G's 28th birthday, we whiled away a mellow evening in the upstairs sitting room, with its stone walls and roaring fire. Gale and I made birthday cards for G; he has them still.

Sometimes everyone had to down tools to assist in a major operation, such as the throwing of the vermiculite floor in the upstairs bathroom-to-be. I say "upstairs": in fact, the stairs were unsafe and we learned quickly that treads one through three and eight and ten were rotten through and best avoided. They certainly couldn't take the strain of a chain gang with heavy buckets of wet vermiculite. So we set up a pulley and those at the bottom, in the hall, took turns shovelling vermiculite into the large bucket and hauling it up to those waiting at the top, whose job it was to spread it on the floor. Exhausting, but satisfying.

Some other Mites' names come to mind when I see the old photos: David, Jeandré, Kevin, Bronwyn. And of course, there were the other grown Stucke children - Willem, and Sally, as I recall - who came on brief holidays...

On weekends we got a lift to the market in nearby Gramat, where we could browse the laden stalls, observe locals-with-pastis and scritch the bony heads of goats. G made the uncomfortable connection between the goat-scent on his hand and last night's casserole...We walked home from the market in a noisy, carefree group, the hedgerows tall with wild flowers on either side of the deserted lanes. On Sundays we were given the keys to the Kombi and a vague set of directions to the river - La Dordogne - where we picnicked and swam against the surprising tug of the current to the gravelly opposite shore.

Motley crew

Christine and Henry assigned us each a household chore to do in addition to the renovation work. I loaded the dishwasher from the first meal, and, with Henry, it had to be right! Later, I would be on laundry and kitchen duties. Christine was militant about certain things, and one of them was waste - she would not tolerate it. Under her direction I cut the bruised bits from fruit I would otherwise have spurned and she made jars and jars of jam from it. She could be intimidating, but she made me step out of my comfort zone and she left a lasting impression on me.

Christine insisted on our doing the walk up the river valley to the base of Rocamadour - the famed ancient city built on the steep walls of a gorge on a tributary of La Dordogne and home to the Black Madonna. A group of us did the hike one hot day, very grateful for the shade provided by the overhanging trees and overgrown undergrowth that impeded our path. It was exhausting and much longer than we had anticipated. We didn't carry water (people didn't go everywhere with a bottle of water as they do now) and the going was tough. Much scrambling and climbing as we negotiated the old river bed and the sites of old mills, and I remember the colourful language of certain members of the party when we came across a non-negotiable sheer drop! Arriving at the very base of the Rocamadour cliff, we joined the tourist hordes and plodded upwards to the church of Notre Dame, built in 1479. Unlike the early pilgrims, we declined to make the ascent on our knees.

Rocamadour

The local postman stopped his yellow van in the lane every weekday, mail or shine. He would always have time for a pastis and a chat with Henry in the cool gloom of the dining room before heading off on his rounds. He was the local speleologist and spent his leisure time exploring the labyrinthine limestone caves in the area. Some of the Mites took up the challenge, and returned with hair-raising descriptions of crawling through narrow gaps and wading in thigh-high icy water through subterranean lakes. Not for me.

Although most Mites slept in the attic dormitory, G and I started out sleeping in a private room next to the stairs, above the dining room. Private in the sense that there was a door and no other beds, but there were holes in the floorboards through which we could observe the activity in the room below. After weeks in a tent, a mattress on the floor was bliss. Soon after, perhaps to make room for family members, we were moved to another spot, behind a curtain and closer to the only bathroom, shared by all.

Lawrence did us proud, food-wise, and meals were sumptuous if at times challenging. One memorable night it was calf liver and onions or Cèpe mushroom omelette. (Cèpes - or Porcini mushrooms - are those dinner-plate sized mushrooms that grow beneath the pine needles of the forest floor - a delicacy often sold dried for reconstitution). The quiet stampede of feet to the omelette was matched after midnight by the less quiet stampede of those same feet outside into the night, when the single toilet was quickly overwhelmed by its own popularity and the vomitous were forced to commune with the bushes along the driveway. G and I woke to the distinctive sounds of people throwing up and watched bewildered from the window as figures lined up in the moonlight, Henry among them. One by one, members of the household became violently ill, and only those with little regard for baby cows remained standing. Henry's aged mother were among the fallen, as were most of the Mites. I was fine; G was almost fine as he had eaten only a morsel of omelette. You could say that those who had chosen only the omelette had, well, hedged their bets!

Since I was the unofficial Doctor in residence, I had to organise 3 ambulances (using liver-lover Christine as spokesperson on the phone) and then rush between the ill and the iller-still, ministering liquid and advice. Granny Norwood-Young (Nolonger-Young, at 80), was particularly smitten and lay like a crumpled leaf on her bed, all the feistiness gone out of her. When the ambulances arrived, their distinctive Pim-Pom! Pim-Pom! sirens piercing the pre-dawn quiet, Granny, Henry and the most dehydrated were packed away like submissive sardines into tins, and away they went to Hôpital Louis Conte de Gramat for observation and rehydration. For the Mites, it was a blow to their travel budget, since none of us had travel insurance. Martin, though ill as a snake, refused to go to hospital, preferring to ignore the cramps, ride out the vomiting and rehydrate himself on a shoestring.

On se dirait que the Cèpes had been contaminated with a toxic mushroom...There must be a moral in there somewhere, something to do with liver being good for you?

It's funny now; not so funny then.

After three weeks, we packed our panniers and cycled away up the road, looking forward once again to autonomy, the open road, the wind in our faces, and no particular destination. Once more we would be able to stop at lunch time for a picnic lunch of fresh baguette and camembert, saucisson and water, followed by a snooze in the long grass. We could look forward at supper time to making a meal, literally, of our meagre supplies - packet chicken noodle soup with extra vermicelli and left over bread from lunchtime, lashings of blackcurrant jam on doorsteps of bread and mugs of coffee sweetened with a generous dribble of condensed milk for afters. We could spend the late afternoons - once we'd put up the tent and we'd returned from hot showers - poring over the map and marking up the snail trail we had made in blue biro. G would again keep his meticulous records of our expenses and whittled-down finances. I would make stewed apples from windfall and write in my journal, or try to do justice to a bunch of wildflowers with watercolours.

It would be bliss, and we would know it for what it was.

From Darnis, we headed northeast towards the Massif Central, passing through and camping at St Ceré, Siran and Aurillac...


Twenty two years later we began in earnest our property search in Gramat, and spread our net from there.