Saintes Maries de la Mer

 Last week we sallied forth to a tourist town, but one that is worth the candle. For starters, the seafood at Saintes Maries de la Mer, is exceptional. A bare bones, paper-plate outdoor café named La Cabane aux Coquilles had been recommended to us, and we all agreed that it exceeded our expectations of excellence.

No sooner had a plate of tellines, one of calamari and one of prawns been plunked down in front of us, along with the usual bread and a carafe of Rose, than we were well on our way to a sustained bout of finger sucking bliss.

Tellines

The tellines, which are a clam no bigger than a fingernail, were steamed with nothing more than garlic and herbs. Texturally, they come with a hint of grit, which may sound unpleasant but it acts as a counterpoint that awakens the palate. The calamari, served complete, were the smallest that I have ever encountered, not much larger than the shells of the tellines. Cooked quickly at high heat, the batter was crisp, while the inside remained tender and fragrant with a hint of intertidal air.

From there we threaded our way through the side streets bustling with vendors left, right and centre until we arrived at a counterpoint of coolness and quiet. In a nearby square is a church with a sanctuary honoring Sainte Sara, the patron saint of the Roma. 

Inside the shrine.

The many legends of Sante Sara shape shift with such regularity that it is likely that they are rooted in one if not more of the polytheistic religions that were folded into the early versions of Christian mythology. In one version, she was of noble birth and chief of a tribe of Roma people who lived on the banks of the Rhone. She was not only well off, and a leader, but also known as a healer. Another version says that was born in Egypt into the family of Mary Magdalene, and was even present at the opening of the tomb of Christ.

Regardless of where she hailed from, or whether she even existed, one of the most visually interesting stories claims that she had a vision that the three Marys who had been present at Jesus’ death were approaching land and needed her help. One of them, Mary Salome, cast her cloak on the waves to use as a raft. Sara, who in some versions had also been a maid to one of the three Marys, possibly even to Mary Magdalene, stepped on the cloak and prayed both fervently- and also obviously effectively - resulting in the fact that all three Marys made land.

Be this as it may, she was adopted as a patron saint of the Roma, although never accepted officially by the Catholic Church. Perhaps she missed out on canonization because she was black, or perhaps because there were so many versions of her history that they didn’t quite jell – not that the lack of jelling has stood in the way of some of the canonizations of white males.

Unfortunately, a half dozen Roma women descended upon us as we both entered and left the church. I had been forewarned. As they do, they tried to pin a Sante Sara pin on me, so that they could then hit me up for money. They descended like pigeons on a crust of bread. Non, I said in my most crusty voice (bad pun, I know), Non. Obviously, I was insistent enough. They withdrew, but they clustered and clucked and mocked me: Non, non. they laughed amongst themselves, while glancing sideways at me as if I were trash.

When I had been inside the church, I had been enveloped by the scent of incense and candle wax, and the echoes of centuries of time, and I had felt totally blessed. Afterwards, the feeling evaporated. These women may not have taken my money, which perhaps they needed, but they did sully my sense of sanctity. I wonder what Sante Sara in any of her incarnations would have thought. On their part, or mine. After all, we all have choices, and for my part I can at least reframe this experience, even though I am not that enlightened yet. Not yet.

The woman pinned Colleen, but the pin fell into her bag, and although Colleen was a model of charm, it got a bit dicey for a few tense moments.

Still life at Beauvoisin #2

Back to back reading.

 I started reading Bring up the Bodies while I was on my way to join friends in the south of France. Choosing this much acclaimed follow up to Wolf Hall was a total no-brainer. Hilary Mantel’s previous novel, which also explored the inner and outer lives of Thomas Cromwell, was a total slam dunk. Pitch perfect. I loved it. The opening of her sequel confirmed that I was once again in trusty hands.

Falcons Wiltshire, September 1535

His children are falling from the sky. He watches from horseback, acres of England stretching behind him; they drop, gilt-winged, each with a blood-filled gaze. Grace Cromwell hovers in thin air. She is silent when he takes her prey, silent as she glides to his fist. But the sounds she makes then, the rustle of feathers and the creak, the sigh and riffle of pinion, the small cluck-cluck from her throat, these are sounds of recognition, intimate, daughterly, almost disproving. Her breast is gore-streaked and flesh clings to her claws

While still on the train down to Nimes, I finished it, wishing it were even longer, and then immediately started  Eric Enno Tamm’s: The Horse that Leaps Through Clouds. His opening is no less assured than Mantel’s. It opens with the arrival of an unlikely visitor – at least unlikely to me - arriving for the 75^th birthday of Baron Gustaf Mannerheim, Commander-in-Chief and Marshal of Finland,

On June 4, 1942, Adolph Hitler’s private plane, a Focke-Wulf Fw 200 Condor, dropped out of a stormy sky on its descent to an airstrip in Imatra, a picturesque Finnnish town about two hundred kilometers from Leningrad, where Nazi troops were laying siege to the beleaguered Soviet city. 

As Tamm recounts, Mannerheim had been given a name during his 1906 trip through Northern China which translates as: The Horse that Leaps Through Clouds. Mannerheim did effectively leap through clouds in misty mountain passes, but straddling the geopolitical divides of his time took much more of his time and attention and is of more consequence. Not that I would have a clue what the Chinese characters for Man Who Is Not What He Seems might be.

In the art of painting, the painter David Milne talks about the dazzle spot, a place that the eye keeps returning to, and in the process of doing so unifies and makes sense of the whole. Mannerheim, in the hands of Tamm, is such a dazzle spot, a place for us to keep returning to as we explore the contested lands that he and Tamm explored, each in their own way and each for their own purposes.

Because I read Mantel and Tamm in such close succession, I found the two books started to talk to each other as I surfed the ups and downs of the aftermath of jet lag. The central characters in the two books could not have been more different in some ways, yet at the same time more similar. Thomas Cromwell, who came to be appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer to King Henry VIII had been born as a son of a blacksmith while Baron Gustaf Mannerheim, who had been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, held on to the silver but had to continually shape-shift the appearance of who he was depending on the ever shifting intentions of the rulers of Russia, Germany and Finland. In spite of the four centuries that separated these two men, I suspect that they would have recognized each other had they met in the flesh, and each would have had the measure of the other in the wink of an eye.

The phrase The Great Game, popularized by Kipling, was coined to describe the political rivalry between the British and Russian Empires in the 19^th century but it is an equally apt fit as a description of the political intrigues of Europe in the mid-1500s. Like the falcons of Thomas Cromwell, any game was fair game to the rulers of the day, and like them, although remnants of flesh may have clung to their talons when they returned to their roosts after a day of conquests, a moment’s worth of preening put all to rights.

As for the outcomes of rule by fear described by Tamm, the still unfolding tragedies of the region include not only the deaths of hundreds of thousands but the death of a landscape. A mere hundred years after Mannerheim’s journey, the Silk Road has become so contaminated that Tamm notes that it could more aptly be named The Soot Road.  Not only has the land been so thoughly blackened and blighted, but the rampant unchecked development is messing with the DNA of future generations. 

In comparison, the outcomes of the mercenary acts of Cromwell and his falcon-like henchmen are small beer.Sad, but true.

MY RECOMMENDATION? 

Read Wolf Hall first, and then read Bring up the Bodies. When you read The Horse that Leaps Through Clouds do check out the accompanying web site for photos maps and much more. SEE: http://horsethatleaps.com/

Still Life at Beauvoisin #1

Life is easy when the right ingredients are at hand.

Yesterday, the friends who are hosting us at Beauvoisin left to celebrate a birthday with a brief holiday within a holiday. For the next couple of days Himself and The Moi are par nous-mêmes. At least, I think this is how to say this en francais. My French from forty years ago is beyond rusty. Actually, it is an absolute embarrassment. Big time.

Even so, since our friends had already tuned me up on the art of local shopping, I sauntered off the next morning with no lack of confidence.

Sauntering, I should point out, was the operative verb. No brisk walking required. In fact, any striding of that ilk would be entirely out of place in Beauvoisin. Colleen, who like Himself and The Moi is no slouch in the go-go-go department, describes the slowed down demands of their typical day here: Each day we pick up our food for that evening’s dinner and then spend the night cooking, eating and drinking local wine. 

The first few days after we arrived, I tagged along with her and Kevin to markets at Nimes, Arles, and Générac, and saw what she meant. After planning the evening menu for that particular day, shopping for food and deliberating over suitable wine pairings – will this particular Gigondas go with tonight’s duck confit, or …? - , and then actually preparing the meal, there was barely enough time to fit in a mid-day nap. Arduous, is all I can say. And that was with three cooks on board who know their way around a cutting board and stove, as well as one dishwasher who mans a mean rag.

For me, one of the allures of staying here, aside from quality time with good friends, is the fact that all essential needs can be met within a five minute stroll. The sausages made by the local butcher are the best I have ever had the joy of cooking, and that is going some. They rank right up there with ones made by my brother Struan. In order to fully appreciate this compliment, what you have to know about Struan’s sausages, is that he grows, hunts or fishes for all his ingredients. These ones from the local charcuterie were that good.

A few buildings past the butcher is the local green grocer. Here, the selection of fruits and vegetables are grouped according to whether they are local, regional, or sourced from further afield. How can you go wrong? All the apricots are local. They are the same ones that I had already seen hanging off the branches in local orchards, and trust me: they are gobsmackingly full of flavour. The only downside is that they need to be eaten over something that can catch errant juices – a plate, a sink, the cobbled courtyard. Not your white slacks.

For our evening meal, using the ingredients shown above, I didn’t do anything complicated. I simply tossed together a ratatouille adding fresh basil, garlic, onion and a splash of rosé. While it was cooking down, I boiled the spuds, fried the sausages, and then deglazed the pan with some of the ratatouille juices, and then poured that over the entire assemblage.

One more thing. Normally, I would salt the water for spuds, but this time I didn’t even bother and none was needed. For me, not even butter was required, although on that score, Himself and The Moi would beg to differ.

So, there we were. Add to this a couple of glasses of Cahors Carte Noir 2009 (bought for a song), and a few fistfuls of baguette to mop up the plate, and there we were. Heaven. Total heaven.

Cavananore – unearthing the tale.

Photo of Cavananore House taken in 1985,

Cavananore, a townland of some 219 acres in Co. Louth, was occupied at least as early as the late 1600s by a Presbyterian family named Coulter. They were supposedly awarded the land for their valour at the Battle of the Boyne on the side of King William. The land stayed in my family thanks to the will of an Andrew Coulter of Cavananore who died in 1775. His sister, Barbara Coulter (1721-1795), married John Bradford (1705-1789) and their twin sons were executors of Andrew’s will. This is the easy part to follow.

The complicated parts came after Andrew’s death when the initial seeds of a multi-generational family feud were sown. It seems to have started with a land division between John & Barbara’s twin sons: Thomas Bradford (1739-1790) & Samuel Bradford (1739-1818). In the generations that succeeded them, the feud between the two branches of the family became almost biblical. 

An early complication was the untimely death of Thomas Bradford in 1790. He mucked things up, as my ancestors often did, by dying before he got his affairs in order. In his case,  he died intestate, five days before Christmas. His only son and youngest child, Andrew Coulter Bradford, was just 2 years old., and Andrew’s older sister, Elizabeth - my g-g-g grandmother, would have been about 4 or 5 years old. Elizabeth, their mother, was 32 years old when she was widowed, and had five young children clinging to her skirts. The eldest child was only 8 years old.

Nine years after the death of Thomas Bradford, an agreement defined what portion was due to his widow; how much to the widow of Thomas’ brother-in-law, John Coulter (d. 1774); and also how much of the land and rents were to go to Thomas’ surviving twin, Samuel. In this agreement, rents were to be divvied up when they became due in November, as was the custom. Robert Dickie & John Bailie, a couple of neighbours who were probably also trustees , were to oversee the distribution. However, in such legal matters, the devil is often in the details.

Even though it would be way more fun to let my imagination run riot over all this, I should be careful not to overstate the consequences. At least no one was killed in this dispute, at least as far as I know. For example, it wasn’t as bad as the feuds between the daughters of King Lear, a play about land division and lousy governance if there ever was one. What it did share with the plot of King Lear was the entanglement of countless plots, subplots and counter-plots.

I suspect that envy first divided the two branches of the family when the relative values of the lands on either side of the dividing line became uneven, probably as a result of the hard work and skills of Andrew Coulter Bradford (1788-1847).  Andrew was the only son of Thomas, and therefore had inherited the land on the easterly side of the boundary after the death of his father in 1790.

A couple of decades later, in 1809, the main residence on Andrew’s side of the townland was the style of house common to farmers in the area, and was probably the one he was born in. It was a thatched single story bungalow. We know this because he signed an agreement, presumably because he had just turned 21, to take care of his mother and the unmarried sisters who lived with them. This included the helpful description of their home: The House to be Thatched, Tuff coated and white washed and kept as to its outside wants & repair by him.

An 1827 letter from Capt. Eliezer Birch Gilmore (1762-1834) to his half sister, Elizabeth Bradford (1758-1844) the widow of Thomas alludes to the discord that had already deepened in the following couple of decades:

On the other side [of this letter] you have a copy of Andy’s agreement . As I have a great deal of conversation with him on family matters he can give you every information on that subject. So soon as I get matters settled respecting this place I will then be able to determine on our further settlement, at present we are quite undetermined. That gives me real pleasure to learn that Tom McCullagh has at last settled all matters with his Brother in an amicable manner.

A decade after this, in 1837, the Field Book surveys and valuations reveal that the differences between the two halves of the estate had become considerable.

• On the western side of the boundary, John Bradford (?-1ft 1837), who was the eldest son of Samuel Bradford (1739-1818) & Margaret Henry (1774-1846), had a house & farm buildings worth £7.5.0.
• On the eastern side, Andrew Coulter Bradford, the only son of Thomas Bradford shared with his widowed mother and his sisters a house worth £4.14.0 as well as a house & offices worth £26.2.0.

Already by this time, Andrew’s valuation is close to four times the value of the houses on his cousin’s side of the divide.

When Andrew died in 1847, never having married, one portion of his estate went to his niece Eliza Jackson, the mother of Sir Thomas Jackson. The land was favourably described in the lawyer’s notes of January 16, 1850:

Cavanore & Anahavackey contain jointly about 100 acres & was considered quite a model farm so admirably had it been managed by Mr. Bradford & it was provided with a very fine residence & every article of the best & most improved description necessary for its management.

It is hard to say with absolute certainty, at least based on records found so far, when the current Cavananore House was actually completed. It was at very least occupied before 1847. A inventory done in 1850 as part of the probate of Andrew Coulter Bradford’s will describes the contents of a breakfast parlour, dining room, a drawing room, hallway, 4 bedrooms, a kitchen & pantry. The 22 stair rods indicate a second story. It would have been considered a substantial house for that time and place. Most other houses, even those of reasonably prosperous farmers, were still single story with thatched roofs.

What was it like to be living there at this time? Unsettled, at best. According to the 1841 census there were 13 houses and 63 people residing in Cavananore, but in the decade that followed the population dropped by more than 50%. The 1847 famine came between the two census dates. Not only were lives and livelihoods lost during the famine, but rents dropped in the aftermath, and many previously productive farmers could not hold on to their title. With respect to Cavananore, it was clear there was no longer enough rental income to pay out the bequests of Andrew Coulter Bradford’s will, at least not in the way that they had been stipulated and then interpreted by his trustees.

The front part of the original house remains high on a hill with a commanding view of the countryside. At some point, at least by 1854, it was an L-shaped structure with five windows on one side, and 6 windows on the other.

This is where it gets fun to compare contemporary pictures with old maps. Here is a sketch I did of the outline of the house and outbuildings as compiled from a range of estate maps from the time of Griffiths Valuation in 1854. The house is in red, the enclosed garden in light green, farm buildings in yellow.  The portion that I have coloured in brown was where I suspect that the original thatched bungalow stood:

Here is a sketch where I try to imagine the shape of the house, based on merging the look of the contemporary photo of the house with the mid-1850s maps, coupled with information in the 1901 census (as you can see, my artistic talents did not progress past elementary school):

Two events, one of destruction and one of construction, explain why the 1854 map shows the house to be L-shaped while the 1985 picture (at the top of this page) shows a T-shaped house. The destructive event was an extensive fire started by the IRA which destroyed the back section on the right hand side. They set the fire because there was a rumour that the Black and Tans, their arch foes, were about to set up camp there, and they sought to pre-empt this. According to some accounts, the Black and Tans had no such plan. For now, I cannot verify either account. Later, what remained of the house did end up being a place used by the  IRA, another one of those twists of fate particular to this region.

The addition that looks like a stub of the T at the back of the house in the 1985 photograph was added in the early 1950s when amenities such as running water, electricity and indoor toilets were added. Before then, Annie Lynch, the widow who lived there with her four boys, had to go to the village for batteries to run the radio. Everything else was run by people power. Her son has told me that the water was pumped, and the lavatory was outside the house in a stone walled structure known as The Sugar House. Clearly the connotation is different than what it would be in Canada where a sugar shack is where maple sugar is made.

If we could time travel back a 150 years or so, we would see Andrew Coulter Bradford’s widowed mother and maiden sisters and nieces living out their natural days. We would see the frequent visitors from Urker and Liscalgot and Shortstone and other nearby townlands who stayed overnight. We would also see the grief in 1874 of Thomas Jackson, the yet-to-be-knighted HSBC banker based in Hong Kong, when his infant daughter died unexpectedly. She died when he and his young wife were enjoying their first visit to Ireland since he had left more than a decade earlier. They were proud to be showing off their young family to their various relations. Baby Edith Bradford Jackson was only four months old when she died. Her memorial in the family grave site at Creggan Church is the only Jackson family memorial that is still legible.

Understanding all of these family dynamics and experiences goes some distance to explaining why Sir Thomas Jackson retained such a keen interest in Cavananore well into the 20^th Century. It was one of the many properties in the area adding up to more than 800 acres that he purchased in his later life and held until his death in 1915. He never returned to live in Ireland, dying at his desk on Lombard Street in London, but a significant part of his heart remained with this land and these people - his people. This was clear right up to the time of his very last posted letter.

SOURCES: There are dozens of sources that buttress the facts in this story. Rather than listing them all, here is a link to a page on my website that I will keep updating: Cavananore