So many light and dark memories of Provence
IT’S the light I remember most about Provence, the grey-blue of a permanent heat haze that had slowly baked the colour from the landscape in summer, leaving pale scorched skies and terracotta earth in autumn.
In the mornings, I lay stretched like a cat in the sun in the garden of my French villa, exhausted after a period of working intensely.
In the years that followed my return home, I lay in the perfection of that sun in my imagination many times, the mesh of the lounger still imprinted on my back, the taste of bitter French coffee and chocolate truffles lingering in my mouth and memory.
I stayed near Aix-en-Provence and it was the grittiness of nearby Marseille which drew me.
The Old Port is lined with cafes, bars and restaurants on the sea front, outdoor tables with chequered cloths and bowls of fresh seafood – bouillabaisse and mussels.
This is the driest, sunniest city in France with October temperatures averaging a high of 20 degrees.
But there are shadows in Marseille, a seedy danger that not even the towering presence of the basilica of Notre-Dame de la Garde can counteract.
Perched high above the city, it is topped by a 37-foot statue of the Madonna and child, made of copper gilded with gold leaf which glows in the darkness of Marseille evenings.
Years later, when I came to write a novel combining dark turmoil and human struggle, the south of France seemed an appropriate setting.
Despite the intervening years, the menace of Marseille had lingered, as had the beauty of the university town of Avignon with its golden Palais des Papes, a legacy of the years when Avignon, rather than Rome, was the seat of Catholic popes.
Still enclosed by medieval ramparts, the ancient city is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Dark, light, ugly and beautiful, there is something about Provence that curls like the smoke from a Gitane cigarette round memory and imagination.
I know I will return.