A Short Walk from Harrods by Dirk Bogarde

Author:Dirk Bogarde
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 1993-10-15T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

Occupied, as I was in the last chapter, in rounding up metaphorical sheep, I now realize that I quite forgot to round up the real ones: the ones on the hoof. They did, in fact, inhabit the land for a while.

Madame Meil got her way in the end, and I got her old friend the shepherd Labiche from Feyance. Plus flock. No longer young, he was a tall, stooped man, in a ragged overcoat, a frayed tweed cap, heavy, cracked calloused hands clasped over his blackthorn crook, polished and shining as a liquorice stick. His flock amounted to about 250 beasts: I never managed to count them truthfully, but they were pretty mouldy looking, and when I first set eyes on their scrawny bodies skittering about beneath my lovingly tended olives I confess that I was mildly alarmed. I suppose that I was thinking of the fat roly-poly sheep with which I had become familiar in childhood on the South Downs: fat, complacent, trim and woolly. Not a whit like these wretched mountain creatures, lean to the point of famine, long of knobbly leg, wild of yellow-orbed eye, feeding frantically on my lush spring grass, then starred all about with wild anemones and crocuses.

The land, as Madame Meil said, had always carried sheep in the old days, and now she had seen to it that it was carrying sheep once again. It was obvious really that it should: it was well watered and grew an abundant crop of excellent green fodder, the best on the hill, and for a time I was persuaded that the scraggy flock saved me an immense amount of toil. They cropped close to the root. Every fragment of moss or lichen went down, each stunted myrtle, broom or box-bush was cropped to the very stumps. The entire area looked as if a great blanket of green baize, undulating over the bumps and humps, had been thrown for approval before my apprehensive eyes. So far, so good. Clean the land they did and all was perfectly acceptable – if you didn’t count the outraged screams and howls coming from the dogs locked in their kennels and the massive quantity of ticks they released liberally over the entire area. Not to mention the fact that the only things permitted actually to grow were the olives: and as they were as old as the land itself, and as tough, they remained. Lesser vegetation went swiftly.

But sometimes, I confess, it gave me intense pleasure to sit and watch this biblical scene being played before me on my own fragment of France. Olive trees of great age, silence, green terraces, lambs gambolling, or whatever the things do, the pleasing wrenching sound of grass and herb being devoured by gentle creatures, skinny but none the less charming to look at, with only the tonkle-tonkle of their bells to break the serenity.

However, there were some alarming problems connected with all this serenity. The dogs worked themselves into hysterical frenzies from which I sometimes thought that they would never recover.

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