Postcard from paradise
Fed up with the drizzle and gloom at home? Warm your spirits with this sun-kissed ode to summer from a best-selling author who found a new life (and love) in the South of France
ONE morning this week, we enjoyed the first of this year’s squashy black figs, picked by my husband, Michel, from the elephantine tree by the pool while I brewed the breakfast coffee.
As we sip our coffee, I casually remark on the arrival of another cruiser down in the harbour, visible from our upper terrace. Staring at that boat is the closest we’ll come today to negotiating rush-hour traffic.
After all the figs have fully ripened on our farm overlooking the Bay of Cannes, we’ll start collecting grapes — if the birds haven’t nabbed them first — and then comes the olive harvest, our most precious comestible commodity.
Figs arrive mid-August; olives, half way though October. Ruby-red cherries the size of miniature golf balls greet the guests who stay with us in May for the Cannes Film Festival.
You see, we mark time, the shifting seasons, by the fruits offered to us by the land. By the fresh produce on sale in the colourful food markets. Nature’s clock.
Our shopping excursions take us across the border into Italy, to the open markets of Ventimiglia or Bordighera, where we load up the car before heading off for pasta on the beach.
In my childhood dreams, I pictured Italy as paradise. I longed to be the next Sophia Loren, living in a village with winding cobbled streets where washing hung from windows and everybody gesticulated and shouted amicably. Ah, but life surprises.
Instead, I married a Frenchman and live with him on an olive farm. Although I still think of myself as an actress, most of my time is spent writing novels or memoirs about my adventures and travels.
Michel recently celebrated a birthday with a large ‘0’ in it. It was all the more cause for champagne because, two years ago, he was diagnosed with a heart condition. A change of pace was prescribed. Time to slow down.
We bought the olive farm when it was a ruin, when my French was faltering and Michel’s twin daughters from his first marriage were adolescents and refused to exchange a single word with me in English. If I wanted to communicate with them, it had to be in French, so I enrolled on a course at Nice University.
Those girls are now mothers, with five offspring between them, including twins. Several broken relationships trail behind them, too. The same had been true of me when I first settled here; the scores of life.
Michel’s daughters — grown into beautiful women and now two of my dearest friends — helped with the preparations for their father’s bash. He is not a man who enjoys ‘fuss’. He likes quiet and reflection when he is away from the world of film production, his métier.
Still, surprisingly, he requested a party to celebrate his new decade. The girls and I had the best time putting it all together: pressing mounds of home-grown lemons for lemonade, stringing lights through the trees, snaking the outline of the drystone walls with candles, erecting furniture in the leafy shade, to protect against the heat of the midday, mid-year sun.
Lunches were taken beneath the spreading magnolia, evening meals under the stars on a higher terrace from where the Mediterranean and Lérins Islands are visible.
The party continued for five days; friends and close family flying in from points across Europe.
When it was over, and the plates and extra chairs had been stored, and Michel and I were alone again, unwinding, we gazed out at the remarkable view. Another moment in our years here had been joyously achieved.
I have lived in the South of France — think cobalt skies, lapping waves, rocky bays — for almost 35 years. I came here as a thirtysomething actress, having fallen in love with a French producer who proposed to me in Sydney, Australia, on our first date.
I did not immediately accept Michel’s offer but, back in Europe, we embarked on a wonderfully extravagant love affair that was played out across the Channel. One weekend in Paris; the next in my scruffy flat in Kentish Town in North-West London.
I have written about this heady romance, which resulted in our marriage and a dramatic sea-change for me, in my series of memoirs, The Olive Farm collection of books.
NO NEEd to go over that ground again here. Suffice to say that within months of our first meeting, we were in Cannes for the film festival and found ourselves — recklessly, imprudently — putting in an offer on this abandoned olive farm with its crumbling villa and ivy-infested, sinking swimming pool.
A property we could neither afford nor had we the means or skills to resuscitate. At that stage, I dreamed of renovating it as a holiday home in a land of forever blue skies, where I could relax in between film and TV commitments. Never, in my wildest dreams, was I thinking of relocation. However, love, landscape, destiny, fate (or maybe the wine!) — call it what you will — had other plans for me.
Once purchased, not a centime remained to invest in our charming ruin. Stony broke, we stared at an empty pool while scorching in high summer temperatures. We cooked on the cheapest barbecue, one that Michel had spotted for 25 francs at a local hypermarché.
Still, here we were, happy-go-lucky, in this glorious overgrown kingdom of ours. Aside from enjoying the pleasures of being insanely in love — afternoons out of the heat in a bedroom cooled by shuttered windows — what else was there to do but to discover the indigenous plants and the history of the region.
I read, I wrote, I went walking, we visited museums. I hiked to the beach for swims — and to use the municipality’s free showers.
At that stage, we had no water nor electricity. A state of affairs that might have proved frustrating, instead
became daily adventures. Hour after hour of new discoveries.
Who knew that it is the law here in France for every village to supply at least one source of free drinking water? We availed ourselves liberally of this national hospitality. Every morning, we descended on foot to fill two 20-litre canisters from the village’s flowing fountain, and then hauled them back up the mountainside to provide us with water for cooking and washing.
We painted the shutters of our dilapidated villa in blue and turquoise, echoes of the sea and sky. I was learning to see colours, to appreciate the nuances; to take photographs. To look at the world through unfiltered eyes. Until I moved here, I never appreciated that green was such a wondrously diverse colour; that leaves could display so many different shades.
After almost three years of proprietorship, Michel and I had earned sufficient funds to cut back our ten acres of impenetrable jungle. I will never forget the day we stood at the foot of our hillside, side by side, in awed silence, staring up at a parcel of steep land that had not seen sunlight in more than a decade.
The earth was laid bare; the many features of the hill exposed. Sixtyeight olive trees, several of them
centuries old, had been unveiled, growing in statuesque glory — even though they were in desperate need of pruning — along a layered hillside of dry-stone walled terraces. En restanque is the term for such terracing here in Provence. Today, I know that it is the oldest form of Mediterranean irrigation.
That image of those venerable trees was a turning point for me in more ways than one. Later, I was to circumnavigate the entire Mediterranean — eastern basin followed by western — in my quest for the history and long-buried secrets of the olive tree.
Olive oil is the cornerstone of Mediterranean cuisine. This tree is the thread from which the tapestry of the Med has been woven. But that was all still to come.
What that April morning, standing alongside the man who had become my partner, revealed to me was that I had come home. Not simply to the house we were intent upon restoring, but I had found a spot where I could be at peace. I think I can safely claim that, until I met Michel, until I embarked on this new direction in my life — which did not exclude past chapters but wove them into the fabric of what was becoming a new Carol — until then, in spite of a certain degree of success and fame as an actress, I had been a lost, bruised soul.
Insanity, you might cry, to claim that a species of tree, a patch of land, a few balustrades, bricks and mortar, could effectively give back to a damaged heart a signpost, a direction for survival.
But I stand by this. The healing power of the natural world. Everything I have written since is imbued with the scents, the textures, the colours, the tastes, the history of the Mediterranean. And, of course, the redeeming power of love.
On that sunny, spring morning years ago, I gazed upon this magical house set within its limestone rocks and semiarid landscape, lapped by distant waves, and, without understanding how it could come to pass, I grasped that a core place within me — long-buried to better
protect myself against hurt — had been touched. A knot was beginning to unfasten.
I was standing face-to-face with an unruly yet lyrical beauty. My emotions were complicated, unclear, but the moment lit me up and imprinted itself on my memory, as though the nature around me was bidding me stay, offering to heal me.
In my Mediterranean travels, I have encountered olive trees that have been scientifically dated at 6,000 to 7,000 years of age. They are still fruiting and the fruits are still being pressed to produce the finest of golden olive oils.
To stand within the hollowed-out trunk of a tree that boasts one millennium, never mind seven, is a humbling experience.
Between our farm and the Italian border, on the outskirts of the medieval village of RoquebruneCap-Martin, high on the cliffs above the sea, grows a magnificent olive tree that was planted between 1,800 and 2,200 years ago by the Romans.
It’s a mere babe compared with many I have come across in my travels. Still, we frequently take friends to admire its spreading roots clinging to its rocky lane-side enclave; to marvel at its longevity.
I find it utterly mind-blowing; its monumental presence. In the early 20th century, its owner wanted to cut it down. Fortunately, a local historian was so incensed at the prospect of the tree’s felling that he purchased the plot and registered the tree, protecting it for future generations.
With the sun beating down on the Riviera, there is no better time to see it than in mid-August.
FOR the Italians, this weekend marks the first since
Ferragosto. This public holiday — on August 15 — has been celebrated since the reign of Augustus Caesar, the first Emperor of the Roman Empire, while for the French and Catholics elsewhere, it’s the feast of the Assumption of Mary into Heaven.
This weekend is the midway point in the summer holidays. The beaches are heaving with families, the restaurants are serving flat out. Scents waft from burning coals on barbecues, herbs on cinders, the sardines marinated and sizzling. The corks pulled on the chilled wines. Glasses clinking. Rosé is the region’s speciality.
The world is on holiday, relishing carefree days, content within the
company of loved ones; profiting from sea-salted air, ball games on the beach, splashing about in the waves and scrumptious food.
Autumn will be here all too soon and, along with it, olives — oleaginous fruits to harvest in the company of friends, who have flown in specially to lend a hand, to celebrate with us one of the oldest of Mediterranean traditions.
Shadows will lengthen, the newly pressed oil will be settling in canisters in cool dark corners.
And then comes Christmas, the time of oranges, ripening like baubles on leathery-leaved evergreens. Darkening evenings, robins on the oleanders. Then, before you know it, pale pink blossoms are bursting open on the almond trees, the first flower of spring, new year nectar for the honeybees.
But, one day at a time. This evening, we’re preparing delicious sausages made by the wife of our local butcher. We’ll grill them with fennel and rosemary and watch the stars in the night sky.
Life on our olive farm, halcyon days. Each is precious, a cause for delight. We cherish every one of them; they are merely loaned to us for a brief period.
THE house On The Edge Of The Cliff is published by Penguin, £7.99.