A kilometre or so up the road is another hotel, walled off from public view and equipped with a helicopter landing pad. The building restrictions in the garrigue have been relaxed and an enormous sign, subtitled in English, advertises luxury villas with electronic security entrance and fully fitted bathrooms at prices from 2,500,000 francs.

  So far, there are no signs to indicate where Vogue's often famous people have their country homes, so passengers in the procession of huge coaches on their way to the twelfth-century Abbaye de Sénanque are left to speculate whose half-hidden house they're looking at. One day, someone of enterprise and vision will produce a map similar to those Hollywood guides to the houses of the stars, and then we shall feel even closer to California. Meanwhile, jacuzzis and joggers are no longer sufficiently exotic to attract any attention, and the hills are alive with the thwack of tennis balls and the drowsy hum of the cement-mixer.

  It has often happened before, in many other parts of the world. People are attracted to an area because of its beauty and its promise of peace, and then they transform it into a high-rent suburb complete with cocktail parties, burglar alarm systems, four-wheel-drive recreational vehicles and other essential trappings of la vie rustique.

  I don't think the locals mind. Why should they? Barren patches of land that couldn't support a herd of goats are suddenly worth millions of francs. Shops and restaurants and hotels prosper. The maçons, the carpenters, the landscape gardeners and the tennis court builders have bulging order books, and everyone benefits from le bourn. Cultivating tourists is much more rewarding than growing grapes.

  It hasn't yet affected Ménerbes too much; not, at least, in an obviously visible way. The Café du Progrès is still resolutely unchic. The small, smart restaurant that opened two years ago has closed, and apart from a small, smart estate agent's office, the centre of the village looks much the same as it did when we first saw it several years ago.

  But change is in the air. Ménerbes has been awarded a sign, Un des plus beaux villages de France, and some of the inhabitants seem to have developed a sudden awareness of the media.

  My wife came across three venerable ladies sitting in a row on a stone wall, their three dogs sitting in a row in front of them. It made a nice picture, and my wife asked if she could take a photograph.

  The senior old lady looked at her and thought for a moment. ‘What's it for?’ she said. Obviously, Vogue had been there first.

  12

  Mainly Dry Periods, with Scattered Fires

  Like some of our agricultural neighbours in the valley, we subscribe to a service provided by the meteorological station at Carpentras. Twice a week, we receive detailed weather forecasts on mimeographed sheets. They predict, usually very accurately, our ration of sun and rain, the likelihood of storms and Mistral and the temperature ranges throughout the Vaucluse.

  As the early weeks of 1989 went by, the forecasts and statistics began to show ominous signs that the weather was not behaving as it should. There was not enough rain; not nearly enough.

  The previous winter had been mild, with so little snow in the mountains that the torrents of spring would be no more than dribbles. Winter had also been dry. January's rainfall was 9.5 millimetres; normally it is just over 60 millimetres. February's rainfall was down. The same in March. Summer fire regulations – no burning in the fields – were put into effect early. The traditionally wet Vaucluse spring was only moist, and early summer wasn't even moist. Cavaillon's May rainfall was 1 millimetre, compared with the average

  54.6; 7 millimetres in June, compared with the average 44. Wells were going dry, and there was a significant drop in the water level of the Fontaine de Vaucluse.

  Drought in the Lubéron hangs over the farmers like an overdue debt. Conversations in the fields and in the village streets are gloomy as the crops bake and the earth turns brittle and crusty. And there is always the risk of fire, terrible to think about but impossible to forget.

  All it takes is a spark in the forest – a carelessly dropped cigarette end, a smouldering match – and the Mistral will do the rest, turning a flicker into a fire, and then into an explosion of flame that rips through the trees faster than a running man. We had heard about a young pompier who died in the spring, near Murs. He had been facing the flames when a flying spark, maybe from a pine cone that had burst into red-hot fragments, had landed in the trees behind him, cutting him off. It had happened in seconds.

  That is tragic enough when the cause of the fire is accidental, but sickening when it is deliberate. Sadly, it often is. Droughts attract pyromaniacs, and they could hardly have asked for better conditions than the summer of 1989. One man had been caught in the spring setting fire to the garrigue. He was young, and he wanted to be a pompier, but the fire service had turned him down. He was taking his revenge with a box of matches.

  Our first sight of smoke was on the hot, windy evening of the 14th of July. Overhead was cloudless, the clean, burnished blue sky that the Mistral often brings, and it accentuated the black stain that was spreading above Roussillon, a few miles away across the valley. As we watched it from the path above the house, we heard the drone of engines, and a formation of Canadair planes flew low over the Lubéron, ponderous with their cargoes of water. Then helicopters, the bombardiers d'eau. From Bonnieux came the insistent, panicky blare of a fire siren, and we both looked nervously behind us. Less than 100 yards separates our house from the tree-line, and 100 yards is nothing to a well-stoked fire with a gale force wind at its back.

  That evening, as the Canadairs, heavy-bellied and slow, ferried between the fire and the sea, we had to face the possibility that the next stretch of forest to go up in flames might be closer to home. The pompiers who had come with their calendars at Christmas had told us what we were supposed to do: cut off the electricity, close the wooden shutters, hose them down, stay in the house. We had joked about taking refuge in the wine cellar with a couple of glasses and a corkscrew – better to be roasted drunk than sober. It no longer seemed funny.

  The wind dropped as night came, and the glow over Roussillon might have been no more than floodlights on the village boules court. We checked on the weather forecast before going to bed. It was not good: beau temps très chaud et ensoleillé, Mistral fort.

  The next day's copy of Le Provençal carried details of the Roussillon fire. It had destroyed more than 100 acres of the pine woods around the village before 400 pompiers, ten aircraft and the soldats du feu from the army had put it out. There were photographs of horses and a herd of goats being led to safety, and of a solitary pompier silhouetted against a wall of flame. Three smaller fires were reported in the same article. It would probably have made the front page except for the arrival of the Tour de France in Marseille.

  We drove across to Roussillon a few days later. What had been pine-green and beautiful was now desolate – charred, ugly tree-stumps jutting like rotten teeth from the ochre-red earth of the hillsides. Miraculously, some of the houses seemed untouched despite the devastation that surrounded them. We wondered if the owners had stayed inside or run, and tried to imagine what it must have been like to sit in a dark house listening to the fire coming closer and closer, feeling its heat through the walls.

  July's rainfall was 5 millimetres, but the wise men of the café told us that the storms of August would soak the Lubéron and allow the pompiers to relax. Always, we were told, le quinze août brought a downpour, swilling campers out of their tents, flooding roads, drenching the forest and, with luck, drowning the pyromaniacs.

  Day after day we looked for rain, and day after day we saw nothing but sun. Lavender that we had planted in the spring died. The patch of grass in front of the house abandoned its ambitions to become a lawn and turned the dirty yellow of poor straw. The earth shrank, revealing its knuckles and bones, rocks and roots that had been invisible before. The luckier peasants who had powerful irrigation systems began to water their vines. Our vines drooped. Faustin, on his tours of inspection in the vineyard, drooped also.

  The pool was as warm as soup, but at least it was wet, and one evening the scent of water attracted a tribe of sangliers. Eleven of them came out of the forest and stopped fifty yards from the house. One boar took advantage of the halt and mounted his mate, and Boy, showing uncharacteristic bravado, went dancing towards the happy couple, his bark soprano with excitement. Still joined together like competitors in a wheelbarrow race, they chased him off, and he returned to the door of the courtyard where he could be noisy and brave in safety. The sangliers changed their minds about the pool, and filed away through the vines to eat Jacky's melons in the field on the other side of the road.

  Le quinze août was as dry as the first half of the month had been, and every time the Mistral blew we waited for the sound of the sirens and the Canadairs. A pyromaniac had actually telephoned the pompiers, promising another fire as soon as there was enough wind, and there were daily helicopter patrols over the valley.

  But they didn't see him when he did it again, this time near Cabrières. Ashes carried by the wind fell in the courtyard, and the sun was blotted out by smoke. The smell of it spooked the dogs, who paced and whined and barked at gusts of wind. The red and pink evening sky was hidden behind a smear of grey, faintly luminous, sombre and frightening.

  A friend who was staying in Cabrières came over to see us that night. Some houses on the edge of the village had been evacuated. She had brought her passport with her, and a spare pair of knickers.

  We saw no fires after that, although the pyromaniac had made more phone calls, always threatening the Lubéron. August ended. The rainfall reported for our area was 0.0, compared with the average of 52. When a half-hearted shower came in September, we stood out in it and took great breaths of cool, damp air. For the first time in weeks, the forest smelt fresh.

  With the immediate danger of fire behind them, the local inhabitants felt sufficiently relieved to complain about the effects of the drought on their stomachs. With the exception of the year's wine, which in Châteauneuf was announced as spectacularly good, the gastronomic news was disastrous. The lack of rain in July would mean a miserable truffle crop in the winter, few in number and small in size. Hunters would have to shoot each other for sport; game that had left the parched Lubéron to look for water further north was unlikely to come back. Autumn at the table would not be the same, pas du tout normal.

  Our education suffered. Monsieur Menicucci, whose many talents included an ability to detect and identify the wild mushrooms in the forest, had promised to take us on an expedition – kilos of mushrooms, he said, would be there for the taking. He would instruct us, and supervise afterwards in the kitchen, assisted by a bottle of Cairanne,

  But October came and the hunt had to be cancelled. For the first time in Menicucci' memory, the forest was bare. He came to the house one morning, knife, stick and basket at the ready, snakeproof boots tightly laced, and spent a fruitless hour poking among the trees before giving up. We would have to try again next year. Madame his wife would be disappointed, and so would his friend's cat, who was a great amateur of wild mushrooms.

  A cat?

  Beh oui, but a cat with an extraordinary nose, able to pick out dangerous or deadly mushrooms. Nature is mysterious and wonderful, said Menicucci, and often cannot be explained in a scientific manner.

  I asked what the cat did with edible mushrooms. He eats them, said Menicucci, but not raw. They must be cooked in olive oil and sprinkled with chopped parsley. That is his little weakness. C'est bizarre, non?

  The forest was officially recognized as a tinder-box in November, when it was invaded by the Office National des Forêts. One dark, overcast morning I was about two miles from the house when I saw a billow of smoke and heard the rasp of brushcutters. In a clearing at the end of the track, army trucks were parked next to an enormous yellow machine, perhaps ten feet high, a cross between a bulldozer and a mammoth tractor. Men in olive-drab fatigue uniforms-moved through the trees, sinister in their goggles and helmets, hacking away the undergrowth and throwing it on the fire that hissed with sizzling sap from the green wood.

  An officer, hard-faced and lean, looked at me as though I was trespassing and barely nodded when I said bonjour. A bloody civilian, and a foreigner as well.

  I turned to go home, and stopped to look at the yellow monster. The driver, a fellow civilian from the look of his cracked leather waistcoat and non-regulation checked cap, was cursing as he tried to loosen a tight nut. He exchanged his spanner for a mallet – the all-purpose Provencal remedy for obstinate mechanical equipment – which made me sure he wasn't an army man. I tried another bonjour, and this time it was more amiably received.

  He could have been Santa Claus's younger brother; without the beard, but with ruddy round cheeks and bright eyes and a moustache that was flecked with the sawdust that was blowing in the wind. He waved his mallet in the direction of the extermination squad in the trees. ‘C'est comme la guerre, eh?’

  He called it, in correct military style, opération débroussaill-age. Twenty metres on either side of the track that led towards Ménerbes were to be cleared of undergrowth and thinned out to reduce the risk of fire. His job was to follow the men in his machine and shred everything they hadn't burned. He banged its yellow side with the flat of his hand. ‘This will eat a tree trunk and spit it out as twigs.’

  It took the men a week to cover the distance to the house. They left the edge of the forest shorn, the clearings smudged with pools of ashes. And following on, chewing and spitting a few hundred metres each day, came the yellow monster with its relentless, grinding appetite.

  The driver came down to see us one evening, asking for a glass of water, easily persuaded into a glass of pastis. He apologized for parking at the top of the garden. Parking was a daily problem, he said; with a top speed of ten kilometres an hour he could hardly take what he described as his little toy back home to Apt each night.

  He took off his cap for the second glass of pastis. It was good to have someone to talk to, he said, after a day on his own with nothing to listen to but the racket of his machine. But it was necessary work. The forest had been left untended too long. It was choked with dead wood, and if there was another drought next year… pof!

  We asked him if the pyromaniac had ever been caught, and he shook his head. The madman with the briquet, he called him. Let's hope he spends his holidays in the Cévennes next year.

  The driver of the yellow monster came again the following evening and brought us a Camembert, which he told us how to cook – the way he did when he was in the forest during the winter and needed something to keep out the cold.

  ‘You make a fire,’ he said, arranging imaginary branches on the table in front of him, ‘and you take the cheese from the box and remove the paper wrapping. And then you put it back, d'accord?’ To make sure we had understood, he held up the Camembert and tapped its thin wooden box.

  ‘Bon. Now you put the box in the embers of the fire: The box burns. The rind of the cheese turns black. The cheese melts, but…’ an instructive finger was raised for emphasis ‘… he is sealed inside the rind. He cannot escape into the fire.’

  A swig of pastis, the moustache wiped with the back of the hand.

  ‘Alors, you take your baguette and split it all the way down. Now – attention aux doigts – you take the cheese from the fire, you make a hole in the rind, and you pour the melted cheese into the bread. Et voilà!’

  He grinned, his red cheeks bunching under his eyes, and patted his stomach. Sooner or later, as we now expected, every conversation in Provence seems to turn to food or drink.

  At the beginning of 1990, we were sent the weather statistics for the previous year. Despite an unusually wet November, our annual rainfall was less than half the normal amount.

  There has been another mild winter. The water levels are still below what they should be, and it is estimated that as much as 30 per cent of the undergrowth in the forest is dead, and therefore dry. The first big fire of summer destroyed more than 6,000 acres near Marseille, cutting off the autoroute in two places. And the madman with the briquet is still at large; probably, like us, taking a keen interest in the weather forecasts.

  We have bought a heavy-gauge tin box to hold all those pieces of paper – passports, attestations, birth certificates, contrats, permis, old electricity bills – that are essential in France to prove your existence. To lose the house in a fire would be a disaster, but to lose our identities at the same time would make life impossible. The tin box is going in the farthest corner of the cave, next to the Châteauneuf.

  Every time it rains we're delighted, which Faustin takes as a promising sign that we are becoming less English.

  13

  No Spitting in Châteauneuf-du-Pape

  August in Provence is a time to lie low, to seek shade, to move slowly and to limit your excursions to very short distances. Lizards know best, and I should have known better.

  It was in the high eighties by 9.30, and when I got into the car I immediately felt like a piece of chicken about to be sautéed. I looked at the map to find roads that would keep me away from the tourist traffic and heat-maddened truck drivers, and a bead of sweat dropped from my nose to score a direct hit on my destination – Châteauneuf-du-Pape, the small town with the big wine.

  Months before, in the winter, I had met a man called Michel at a dinner to celebrate the engagement of two friends of ours. The first bottles of wine came. Toasts were proposed. But I noticed that while the rest of us were merely drinking, Michel was conducting a personal, very intense ritual.

  He stared into his glass before picking it up, then cupped it in the palm of his hand and swirled it gently three or four times. Raising the glass to eye level, he peered at the traces of wine that his swirling had caused to trickle down the inner sides. His nose, with nostrils alert and flared, was presented to the wine and made a thorough investigation. Deep sniffing. One final swirl, and he took the first mouthful, but only on trial.