Perfectly Ordinary People(82)

And how was Christophe’s health? It sounds like the job was quite physical.

His health has always been very on and off. He’d have a couple of good months where he’d think all that was behind him and then suddenly he’d have cramps or bleeding again. He used to get these twinges of pain, deep inside, that were bad enough to make him gasp, but luckily they never lasted for long. But his anaemia went away, and that was the main thing. Within six months he’d stopped fainting.

And what about you? How did you spend your days?

Well, we made a vegetable patch down by the river – everyone had to grow their own vegetables during the war. So we had potatoes and carrots and beans. We planted tomatoes – though they never did very well – and chard, and even rhubarb. Once the initial tilling of the land was done, the vegetable patch was my job. We built a chicken coop too, so we could feed them the peelings and have eggs. Bottling vegetables for winter, cooking, sewing, mending . . . those were all my responsibility. Plus I had a baby to look after, of course, the feeding . . . the nappies . . . All of that is shockingly time-consuming, Well, it was a shock to me, anyway.

But in winter, we’d get snowed under, sometimes for weeks on end. Often we couldn’t even get out the door to go to the toilet without shovelling away the snow first. When it was like that, we couldn’t get to the hamlet, let alone the village. So during those periods, we lived like Canadian trappers: we’d huddle by the stove and read books or listen to the radio. We’d play with Guillaume and talk about our plans for after the war.

That sounds incredibly cosy.

<Laughs> I get that; I really do. I know that’s how it sounds because, though I lived through it, it does sound cosy, even to me. Memory does funny things to the past. It erases a lot of the awful bits and leaves you with pretty memories of reading by a flickering lamp while snowflakes drifted down. But it wasn’t cosy at all. It was absolutely dreadful. Especially that first winter.

Why the first one in particular?

Well, for starters, 1940 was a terribly cold one. They were all cold, those winters: ’39, ’40 and ’41, which was one of the coldest ever recorded, if I’m not mistaken. But on top of that, 1940 was our first winter there and we hadn’t known what to expect. So it was the one for which we were the least prepared.

The hut had been built of local stone and in places the wind whistled through the gaps. The roof, above that upstairs room, had no insulation. We did that the following summer, using straw. So up there it was quite literally freezing.

The temperature outside went as low as minus fifteen Celsius that first winter and I think we had below minus twenty a couple of times in ’41. And when it was that cold outside, you could build the biggest fire the stove would take and still be able to see your breath when you spoke. It really was utterly dreadful.

The baby would scream and scream. When he was teething, he could scream for days on end, and I would panic that I was doing something wrong, or that he was upset because I wasn’t his real mother . . . I definitely remember feeling very scared that I didn’t know what I was doing, and that fear lasted for years, really.

Christophe and I argued a lot, too. The extreme conditions and the screaming baby and the lack of sleep put us both on edge. You have to remember we hadn’t chosen each other. We were best mates, not soulmates, not lovers. So sometimes, especially when we were shut up together in winter, we really didn’t get on at all. Sometimes we’d sulk for days on end.

There was never any romance? Even though I’m assuming you were sharing a bed?

Yes, we were. We only had one mattress. But no. God, no! Christophe liked – likes – men, and I’ve only ever been attracted to women. You know, there were loads of films in the seventies where gay men suddenly fell in love with the women they were hanging out with – quite often because they were forced to share a bed, or because they were drunk or something. And that always struck me as ridiculous. Anyway, it certainly never happened to us. And there were plenty of times when we were drunk. But no, seriously. Never even a hint of a hint. We came close to blows, once or twice, but that was about as physical as things got.

OK! And what about feeding the baby in all of that? You didn’t trek through the snow to Lucienne every day, did you?

Oh golly! I haven’t told you about my miracle, have I?

No, I don’t think you have.

So, as I explained, those first few weeks, I took Guillaume to Lucienne so she could feed him, while in the evenings I gave him goat’s milk.

But he was always demanding my breast. He would never go down unless I’d let him suckle for a bit first. So I got into the habit of doing that every evening. Christophe would put the radio on, I’d read my book, and Guillaume would suck away.

And then one morning over breakfast, Christophe started staring at my chest. When I looked down, I realised I was leaking. The front of my dress was soaked.

At first I assumed it was blood, or even some kind of puss from all that suckling. But it was milk! I’d started to produce my own milk.

I didn’t even know that was possible.

Well, neither did I! Because I’d never been able to tell anyone that Guillaume wasn’t mine, no one had ever explained to me that it was possible to have your milk come on without having been pregnant first. When it first happened, I honestly thought it was a miracle. We both did. We thought it was like the virgin birth or something, and again, because we couldn’t explain to anyone how we believed it shouldn’t have happened, we didn’t discover that it was quite normal for years. I’m sure it will sound silly, but I secretly believed it was because I’d come to love him so much. I thought I’d made a miracle happen out of love.