The shooting season was here – and no rabbit (or rambler) was safe from pastis-soaked huntsmen!

PETER MAYLE, who died last week, brilliantly captured the comedy of moving to France with his wife in his book A Year In Provence. In tribute to him, we are serialising the bestseller and its follow-ups Toujour Provence and Encore Provence. Today, he tells of the perils of encountering a heavily armed local hunting party . . .

SEPTEMBER

THERE is one September weekend when the countryside sounds as though rehearsals are being held for World War III. It is the official start of the hunting season, and every red-blooded Frenchman takes his gun, his dog and his murderous inclinations into the hills in search of sport. My wife Jennie and I had both been surprised at the French fondness for guns. Twice we had visited the homes of outwardly mild and unwarlike men, and twice we had been shown the vast family arsenals. How could anyone need so many guns? How would you know which one to take with you? Or did you take them all, like a bag of golf clubs, selecting the .44 Magnum for leopard or moose and the Baby Bretton for rabbit?

After a while, we came to realise that the gun mania was only part of a national fascination with outfits and accoutrements, a passion for looking like an expert. When a Frenchman takes up cycling or tennis or skiing, the last thing he wants is to be mistaken for the novice that he is, and so he accessorises himself up to professional standard.

In the case of la chasse, the accessories are almost limitless, and they have the added attraction of being deeply masculine and dangerous in their appearance.

Apart from a rack of weaponry, what every self-respecting French huntsman needs for his confrontation with the untamed beasts of the forest is that indispensable accessory with four legs and a nose like radar, the hunting dog.

Every hunter considers his dog to be uniquely gifted, and he will have at least one implausible story of stamina and prowess to tell you. To hear the owners talk, you would think that these dogs were supernaturally intelligent creatures, trained to a hair, and faithful unto death. Each one wore a bell, to identify it in heavy undergrowth as canine and not to be used for target practice.

We looked forward with interest to seeing these dogs perform. Perhaps their example would inspire our own pets to do something more useful than stalk lizards and attack old tennis balls.

HunTIng in our part of the valley started shortly after seven o’clock one Sunday morning, with salvoes coming from either side of the house and from the mountains behind. It sounded as though anything that moved would be at risk, and when I went out for a walk with the dogs I took the biggest white handkerchief I could find, in case I needed to surrender.

The hunters would be well refreshed with pastis, and any rustle in the bushes might be too much to resist. I thought about wearing a bell, just to be on the safe side.

I found enough hunters and dogs and weaponry to wipe out the entire thrush and rabbit population of southern France.

Knots of them were gathered in the clearings, laughing, smoking, taking nips from their khakipainted flasks and cutting slices of saucisson, but of active hunting — man versus rabbit in a battle of wits — there was no sign.

They must have used up their ration of shells during the early morning fusillade.

Just before noon, camouflageclad figures started to make their way to the vans parked at the side of the road. A few had dogs with them. The rest were whistling and shouting for theirs to return with increasing irritation.

Response was patchy. The shouts became more bad-tempered, degenerating into bellows and curses. After a few minutes the hunters gave up and went home, most of them dogless.

We were joined a little later for lunch by three abandoned hounds who came down to drink the swimming pool. They were greatly admired by our two bitches for their devil-may-care manner and exotic aroma, and we penned them all in the courtyard while we wondered how we could get them back to their owners.

We consulted our neighbour, Faustin. ‘Don’t bother,’ he said. ‘Let them go. The hunters will be back in the evening. If they don’t find their dogs, they’ll leave a cushion.’ It always worked, so Faustin said.

One simply left something with the scent of the kennel on it — a cushion or, more likely, a scrap of sacking. The dog would find it and wait to be collected.

We let the three hounds out, and they loped off, baying with excitement. Faustin shook his head. ‘They’ll be gone for days.’ He didn’t hunt, and regarded hunters and their dogs as intruders who had no right to be anywhere near his precious vines. On the subject of vines, he told us, it was time that we picked the table grapes from ours. One early morning not long after, his old truck gasped up the drive, loaded with shallow wooden grape trays. Stacks of these trays were placed along each line of our vines and, with his wife and daughter, Faustin took his scissors and set to work.

We joined in. It was a slow and physically uncomfortable business. Every bunch had to be examined, every bruised or wrinkled grape snipped off. The bunches grew low, and the pickers’ progress was in yards per hour — squatting down, cutting, standing up, inspecting, snipping, packing.

The heat was fierce, coming up from the ground as well as beating down on the necks and shoulders. no shade, no breeze, no relief in the course of a ten-hour day except the break for lunch. never again would I look at a bunch of grapes in a bowl without thinking of backache and sunstroke.

OCTOBER

WEARIng one green rubber wader up to his thigh, a man was lunging forward and stamping like a fencer in the autumn woodland. The object of his attack seemed to be an old scrub oak tree. With a stick, he plunged into the vegetation around its roots, and drew back before doing it again: en

garde, thrust, withdraw, thrust. One of my dogs went up behind him and gave his trailing leg an exploratory sniff. He jumped —

merde! — and then saw the dog, and me, and looked embarrassed.

‘For a moment,’ he said, ‘I thought I was being attacked. Les serpents, they are preparing for winter. If you disturb them — ssst! They attack.’

I asked what he was looking for and he showed me the contents of his shopping basket, snatched from the forest at the risk of life and limb. To me, they looked highly poisonous, varying in colour from blue-black to rust to violent orange, not at all like the civilised white mushrooms sold in the markets.

He held the basket under my nose, and I breathed in what he called the essence of the mountains. To my surprise, it was good — earthy, rich, slightly nutty — and I looked at the mushrooms more closely. I had seen them in the forest, in evil-looking clusters under the trees, and had assumed that they were instant death.

My booted friend assured me that they were not only safe, but delicious.

‘But,’ he said, ‘you must know the deadly species. There are two or three. If you’re not sure, take them to the pharmacy.’

It had never occurred to me that a mushroom could be clinically tested before being permitted to enter an omelette but, since the stomach is by far the most influential organ in France, it made perfect sense.

The next time I went into town, I toured the pharmacies. Sure enough, they had been converted into mushroom guidance centres.

The window displays, normally devoted to surgical trusses and pictures of young women reducing the cellulite on their slim bronzed thighs, now featured large mushroom identification charts.

I saw people going into the pharmacies with grubby bags which they presented at the counter rather anxiously, as though they were undergoing tests for a rare disease.

The small, muddy objects in the bags were solemnly inspected by the resident white-coated expert, and a verdict was pronounced.

I found it so distracting that I almost forgot why I had come to town — not to loiter around

pharmacies but to shop for bread. Living in France had turned us into bakery addicts, and the business of choosing and buying our daily bread was a recurring pleasure.

In Provence, the baking and eating of breads and pastries is a minor religion. We tried the chewy loaves from Lumières, fatter and flatter than the ordinary baguette, and the dark-crusted boules, as big as squashed footballs.

One establishment, Chez Auzet, has published a comprehensive bread menu. With seafood, I must eat only thinly-sliced rye. With crudités, there are four possible: onion bread, garlic bread, olive bread or roquefort bread.

And so it goes on, listing with uncompromising brevity what I should eat with charcuterie, foie gras, soup, red and white meat, game with feathers and game with fur, smoked meats, mixed salads (not to be confused with green salads) and three different consistencies of cheese.

I counted 18 varieties of bread, from thyme to pepper, from nut to bran. In a fog of indecision, I went inside Chez Auzet and consulted Madame. What would she recommend with calves’ liver?

She set off on a short tour of the shelves, and then selected a stubby brown banette. While she was counting out my change, she told me about a restaurant where the chef serves a different bread with each of the five courses on his menu. ‘There’s a man who understands bread,’ she said.

I was beginning to understand it, too, just as I was beginning to understand mushrooms.

NOVEMBER

There comes a time in the restoration of an old house when the desire to see it finished threatens all those noble aesthetic intentions to see it finished properly.

The temptation to settle for the short cut nags away as the delays add up and the excuses multiply: the carpenter has severed a fingertip, the mason’s truck has been stolen, the painter has la

grippe, fittings ordered in May and promised for June don’t arrive until September, and all the time the concrete-mixer and the rubble and the shovels become more and more like permanent fixtures.

We PLeAded with the architect overseeing our project to summon the workforce and, one by one, they came at odd times to the house: the builder didier and his dog at seven in the morning, the electrician at lunchtime, ramon the plasterer for an evening drink.

They came, not to work, but to look at the work that had to be done. They were all astonished that it had taken so long, as though people other than themselves had been responsible. each of them told us, confidentially, that the problem was always that one had to wait for the other fellow to finish before one could start.

But, when we mentioned Christmas, they roared with laughter. Christmas was months away; they could almost build a complete house by Christmas. There was, however, a common reluctance to name a day. ‘When can you come?’ we asked. ‘Soon, soon,’ they said.

We arrived back at the house after lunch one day to find that its appearance had changed; there was an unfamiliar tidiness in front of the steps which led up to the door. The cement-mixer, which had for months been an integral part of the façade of the house, was no longer there.

It was an ominous sign. As much as we disliked having its hulk parked outside, it was at least a guarantee that didier and his men would return.

Now they had crept in and taken it — our cement-mixer — probably to use on a six-month job somewhere the other side of Carpentras. Our hopes of having a finished house by Christmas suddenly seemed like a bad attack of misplaced optimism.

My wife suggested kidnapping didier’s cocker spaniel, closer to his heart even than the cementmixer, and keeping it as a hostage.

It was a fine, bold scheme, except that the dog never left didier’s side. Well, if not his dog, maybe his wife. We were prepared to consider almost anything.

Meanwhile, the hunting season continued, and Monsieur dufour, the village grocer, was as usual proving himself the scourge of the Lubéron’s sanglier population.

We’d seen the heads of sangliers, or wild boars, mounted on the walls of butchers’ shops, and had paid no more attention to them than to any other of the strange rustic decorations that we saw from time to time.

But once or twice during the summer the sangliers had come down from the dry upper slopes of the mountain to drink from the swimming pool and steal melons, and we could never look a stuffed head in the eye again after seeing the living animals.

They were black and stout and longer in the leg than a conventional pig, with worried, whiskery faces. We loved our rare glimpses of them, and wished that the hunters would leave them alone.

Unfortunately, sangliers taste like venison, and are consequently chased from one end of the Lubéron to the other.

I said to our neighbour Massot that I thought it was a shame the sangliers were hunted quite so relentlessly by so many hunters. ‘But they taste delicious,’ he said. ‘Specially the young ones, the marcassins. And besides, it’s natural. The english are too sentimental about animals — except those men who chase foxes, and they are mad.’

DECEMBER

The postman drove at high speed up to the parking area behind the house and reversed with great élan into the garage wall, crushing a set of rear lights.

he didn’t appear to have noticed the damage as he came into the courtyard, smiling broadly and waving a large envelope.

he went straight to the bar, planted his elbow and looked expectant. ‘Bonjour, jeune homme!’ I hadn’t been called young man for years, and it wasn’t the postman’s normal habit to bring the mail into the house. Slightly puzzled, I offered him the drink that he was waiting for.

The pastis disappeared — it wasn’t, I realised, his first of the morning — and a refill accepted. Then he got down to business. ‘I have brought you the official post office calendar,’ said the postman. ‘It shows all the saints’ days, and there are some agreeable pictures of young ladies.’

he took the calendar from its envelope and leafed through the pages until he found a photograph of a girl wearing a pair of coconut shells. ‘Voilà! It’s free,’ he said. ‘Or you can buy it if you want to.’

he winked again, and I finally understood the purpose of the visit. he was collecting his Christmas tip, but since it would be undignified simply to arrive at the front door with an outstretched hand, we had to observe the ritual of the calendar. Apart from that, Christmas might have been months away. We did not have a television, and so we were spared the sight of those stupefyingly jolly commercials. There were no carol singers, no office parties, no strident countdowns of the remaining shopping days. I loved it.

My wife was not so sure; something was missing. Where was my Christmas spirit? Where was the mistletoe? Where was the Christmas tree? We decided to go into Cavaillon to find them.

We were rewarded at once by the sight of Santa Claus weaving down the high Street. dressed in baggy red bouclé trousers, a rolling Stones T-shirt and red fur-trimmed pixie hat, it looked from a distance as though his beard was on fire. As he came closer we saw the stub of a Gauloise among the whiskers.

Somehow, this sight inspired my wife with an idea that only a woman could have had. If we wanted the work on our house to be finished by Christmas, we should invite

the builders to a party to celebrate the end of the job. But not just the builders; their wives must come, too. The cunning of this suggestion was based on two assumptions. First, that the wives, who never saw the work that their husbands did in other people’s houses, would be so curious they would find the invitation irresistible. And second, that no wife would want her husband to be the one not to have finished his part of the work.

We sent out the invitations for the last Sunday before Christmas: champagne from 11 o’clock onwards. Two days later, the cement-mixer was back. Didier and his assistants, cheerful and noisy, resumed where they had left off as though there had never been a three-month hiatus. No excuses were made, and no explanation given for the sudden return to work.

But within a few days, Didier was squatting on his haunches with a dustpan and brush, sweeping crumbs of cement out of a corner. It was heartening to see this human machine of destruction engaged in such delicate chores; it meant that his work was over.

On the day of the party, Didier turned up in his truck: on the back, in the space usually reserved for the mixer, was an antique jardinière, a massive circular tub cut by hand from a single block of stone long before the days of cutting machines. It had been filled with earth and planted with primulas.

Eight tipsy men in their Sunday clothes somehow managed to avoid being maimed as the lethal mass was manoeuvred down two sagging planks and on to the ground.

Next morning we looked through the window at the old stone tub, bright with flowers. It would take at least four men to move it away from the garage and into the garden, and organising four men in Provence was, as we knew, not something that could be arranged overnight. There would be visits of inspection, drinks, heated arguments. Dates would be fixed, and then forgotten. Shoulders would be shrugged and time would pass by.

Perhaps by next spring we would see the tub in its proper place. We were learning to think in seasons instead of days or weeks. Provence wasn’t going to change its tempo for us.

A Year In Provence by Peter Mayle is published by Penguin Books at £9.99. To order a copy for £7.99, visit mailshop.co.uk/ books or call 0844 571 0640. P&P is free on orders over £15. Offer valid until February 5.