Ben David Trigg

[The stories and situations written here record my memories of real events at a particular place and time. All of the names have been altered (or likely misremembered anyway) and no recorded conversations are intended to reflect verbatim what was really said.]

Sitting here with the rain pitter-pattering against the window, drumming on slate roofs and concrete pavements; sitting here under grey skies and grey days, I have to cast my mind back half a life ago to find the sun. Not just the glare, the blast, the weight; but golden sun, radiant glory, lighting up rolling hills and mountains in the valleys of the French Corbiéres; hundreds of miles away from south east London, worlds apart, and half a lifetime ago. Before smartphones.

I arrived at Perpignan airport one mid-September afternoon of 2004, with just a suitcase, hand luggage, and not a little sense of nervousness. I had been apart from my parents before; I was 18 now; I had been to Europe on Concert Band tours with lots of friends and a few grudging music tutors (who I guess didn’t mind too much given the sunshine and the occasional Corona at the beach bar). But this time I was on my own. And flying on your own is a little different; in 2004, we all still had burning towers in our minds. But that was not my only nervousness. I was newly single after a toxic teenage non-romance; I was finding my feet with my faith again; and I was about to move, in another few weeks’ time, a couple of hundred miles north, to study Music at York. In short, I was finally growing up.

No wonder I was nervous.

Marianne greeted me with a big smile and the customary French peck on either cheek. Part-Belgian, part-English, she had indeed lived much of her life in England; but now that she and her husband Mick had been missionaries here for nearly two decades, she felt no qualms about helping a fellow Brit understand the ways of the French, with their customary peck on either cheek. I had other feelings about this benevolent gesture, being 100% British myself. Every time a French woman greeted me with the customary peck on the cheek, I felt they only did it to make me feel awkward; like the whole French project were to make the British feel awkward.

Looking back, I suspect I was wrong. I just don’t think they were so interested in us to begin with, to be bothered about making us feel awkward. Or perhaps I’m just unkind.

Anyway she greeted me with the smile (and in the customary way) and helped me with the bags to the beat-up brown boot of a beat-up brown Volvo, which roared confidently into life on her third try of the key.

‘You’ll find it very different here,’ she said as we drove on the wrong side of the road. ‘Hopefully it will feel like a nice little holiday, away from Forest Hill and Sydenham. Where is it your family moved to?’

‘West Wickham.’ I looked out of the window at the rolling vineyards, misty valleys, and the vastness. ‘I’m lucky enough to have a field opposite my bedroom . . . but it’s not quite this.’

‘You’ll find it’s quieter, and a little slower. And people are often quite stuck in their ways.’ I heard the tiredness in her voice. I cleared my throat to say nothing.

The Volvo took us away from Perpignan, the sun gradually lowering behind us, washing the road red, the road that began to narrow, and to wind, charting a course through vineyards, over streams, round hills, and through shuttered villages. Forty-five minutes or an hour later, we arrived in their home town, the sky darkening, the shutters glowing. The windows on the hillside seemed to dance like fireflies. ‘This is our house,’ Marianne said, showing me in, ‘and you are very welcome. Hopefully this can be like a little holiday,’ she repeated.

Her husband Mick greeted me at the first floor, in the kitchen. ‘We’ll get you working hard Ben, my boy, don’t you worry,’ he winked. For the truth was, I wasn’t here for a little holiday, but to help at that most important time of year for all vintners, the vendange: the grape harvest.

It was hard to imagine that Mick wasn’t French, through-and-through. Except I suppose that he didn’t seem to exist to make me feel awkward – perhaps that was the giveaway. But his easy, sophisticated French with all the right dialectical traits for the region; his bouncy curls of hair cropped atop his head; his big face with a wide smile, red with mirth and wine; a gravelly husk in his voice that made you want to call him papa; that was Mick. His hands bore the same wear and scrape as his old jeans and checked shirt, from thousands of days spent tending vines; and his brow bore the wear of a thousand nights spent as a missionary amongst a people often set in their ways; but the smile never left his face, nor the glint his eye.

He ushered me to the table where was served homemade pizza – baked in a rectangular shape, with a thick dough, with little slices of saucisson – and a glass of Corbiéres wine from a large plastic butt they kept on the shelf.

How shall I describe the red wine of the Corbiéres region? For it is not a Merlot, a Malbec or a Cabernet Sauvignon, or some reduced-price Rioja. Those wines are pleasant enough, but one sip does not awaken a thousand memories for me. When I want to relive this time, I either write about it (apparently), or I buy a bottle of Corbiéres. Perhaps I adopted a taste for it because its spice and warmth reminds one of waking early to the smell of fresh bread; its punchy aroma is of back-breaking labour at the vines, rewarded by views that stunned the senses with orange and gold, the voluptuous mountains throwing about nature’s abundance in sheer delight. It tastes of clear air, and hillside barbecues, and late night conversations. Its lasting pallet brings back slowing down, and breathing, and thankfulness.

Or perhaps I adopted a taste for the wine because it was served at every meal from a large plastic butt they kept on the shelf.

At this inaugural meal were sat the other residents and guests, all here to help pick grapes, all settled and known and familiar to my hosts; all alien to me.

There were two Swiss ladies with two Germanic-sounding names which probably weren’t Gunthe and Grunhilde, but I’ll call them that, who spoke little English, or French, but much Swiss German, and who used it mainly to squabble like sisters. They took charge of most of the cooking, but somehow found the time to pick grapes too.

The rest were Brits. There were two couples. Tony and Margaret: He was a retired banker. She was his wife, demure and quiet. She stayed back at the house to help cook, and clean, and make beds. And there was Charles and Clair, a rosy-cheeked middle-aged couple in love with each other and in love with life.

There was Nadine; guffawing and talking loudly (and often not when spoken to). Unfortunately, she was nearer my age than most, meaning that on the natural social order, more grudging acquaintance had to be made than I might otherwise have allowed.

There were three of Mick and Marianne’s sons: their eldest Isaac (plus his wife Suzanne), Daniel, and their youngest, Jonathan. Judah, between Daniel and Jonathan, had just gone off to university before I arrived.

And in the shadows, a small man, Martin, who didn’t say much, but who took pictures on his old SLR camera out in the hills, or played the flute, who came and went as the wind.

In the half-light, in the tiredness, and in the haze induced by a little wine, I sat quiet, a little overwhelmed at the party, unsure of who to speak to, or how to engage. Instead, I listened in curiously to a debate that had flared between Daniel and his mother.

‘Schisms do not happen on a whim, Mum; rifts can be years in the making. An earthquake starts underground. Surely leaders should be the kinds of people able to see and deal with early warning signs.’

‘Leaders are fallible, Daniel, like the rest of us, but we can’t presume to know everything about how they should lead if we ourselves are not in that position.’

‘And then for the parties to be so intransigent, like they can’t try to get along…’

‘There were a lot of complex issues at stake.’

‘The problem is people!’

‘The problem is spiritual, Daniel.’

At which point the debate took a turn into French and I was completely lost for a while. When it re-emerged into English again, Daniel was saying,

‘Jesus chose twelve disciples so he could start a new nation with them.’

‘Jesus chose twelve disciples, son, most of whom were a ragtag bunch and weren’t much up to what he was trying to teach them. And he knew one of them would betray him. Now if Jesus couldn’t get the perfect leadership team…’

‘He said to beware of wolves in sheep’s clothing. He had some inclination to warn them about schism.’

‘He also said to love your enemies, Daniel, something you may be finding challenging to do.’

At which point it went into French agin, and back and forth for a while, and I was left bemused at the turns of logic. But I thought I knew the situations they were referring to. I kept quiet and did my thinking, until one of the other guests piped my name.

‘How long are you with us for then, Ben?’

I sat up. ‘About twelve days, I think,’ I said in my non-committal late-teenage fashion. (I had a plane booked. It was twelve days.)

‘Have you ever done this before?’ Another voice chimed in.

‘No, you’ll have to help me know what to do, I guess,’ I grinned nervously, peering into the half-light at my interlocutors.

‘Of course. It’s best when it’s done together,’ one kindly female voice said.

Mick stepped into the light cast by the big shade lamp over the table and smiled. ‘We’ll get you working hard, my boy,’ he said again with another wink, and started gathering up the dishes.