For the Time Being (5 page)

And then came the toads.

They arrived in the second year as one pair. Locked together in ugly rapture, struggling valiantly up the steep hill. After some days of violent and uncontrolled waltzing together, the hen toad industriously laid her eggs, ropes of glossy black pearls strung and looped among the pondweed. In May I had two million tadpoles bustling through the water. I was enraptured. Each year more and more pairs arrived, locked together in a ghastly embrace of lust and determination, humping slowly over the land from God only knew where, through the thyme and broom over the rocks and straight into my pond. The water became ebony with billions of tadpoles:
all summer we slid and skidded on the squashed bodies of tiny toads who seethed like boiling black rice beneath our feet.

Rapture turned to wrath. Plants were uprooted everywhere by large toads desperate for cool and damp in the blazing sun. They crawled and hopped into the tiled sitting room, clambered ponderously up the stairs, hid behind doors, crouched in the woodshed. And every season others arrived from every nook and cranny in Provence, lumbering determinedly towards their breeding ground. In desperation, I erected a high wire fence around my once so natural English pond and caught them up in their dozens before they could clamber over, or dig under, and reach the water. Now it is my job, morning and evening in the spring, to bundle them, writhing, into a large plastic dustbin and cart them down to a stream some miles away in the valley below.

The ‘catch' varies. Sometimes it can be as little as three pairs, sometimes twenty. Often more. What happens to them when they reach the stream I do not know: I am told that they will all make their way back to me, since I started the whole damned business in the first place.

But I am gradually winning the ecological war. So far this season only two pairs have managed to get over the wire. I managed to scoop them up just before the waltzing commenced. There will not be a single tadpole in the pond this May if I can help it. But I am still carting and dumping these toads in their hundreds.

I knew there would be a great many strange changes in my life when I came here to live ten years ago, but lugging dustbins filled with furious mating toads was not one of my expectations. Entirely my own fault, I know that. As far as I remember there was not a single toad in sight here then. In my opinion it is very foolhardy indeed to try to alter the ecology – even for a small, pleasant, English country pond. I may be winning my battle up here, but what of the unfortunate people who live in the valley near the Dustbin Stream? Already I have carted hundreds down there. They will be swamped. Will they sue?

Weekend Telegraph Magazine,
3 June 1979

They'll tell you that it is ruined: and they'll be right. They'll tell you that it is solid concrete from St Tropez to Monte Carlo; and that's nearly right. They'll tell you that it is a wild mixture of Blackpool and Atlantic City, and they aren't far off; and they'll also tell you that the people who throng the artificial beaches (the sand is brought down every winter from distant quarries and never gets near the cleansing of a tide: there
is
no tide in the Mediterranean) are pretty grim.

I find it hard to fault that as well, sadly. The glamorous people, under the onslaught of coach tours from everywhere in Europe and beyond, have long since relinquished their places in the sun and hurried off to start another life in the Caribbean.

There is a blue haze of petrol all along the coast. The pervading smells are of fried chips and hamburgers, melting tar and the paraffin which pours from the jets screaming down on Nice Airport (bringing yet more property developers and their women, Arabs, and haggard-looking American widows with plastic pixie-hoods and expert face-fixes).

All this is so. It cannot be denied. I have known the Riviera for more than forty years and lived on its fringes for nearly twenty. Certainly the place is a ruin now: there
is
a sea of concrete, there
are
ribbons of
autoroute.
Hideous little villas scab what was once sweet and gentle land with its ancient farms and noble pinewoods, and the people who go there, by and large, aren't much cop. You won't go a bundle on the cast even if you still quite like the scenery.

But. And this is a big BUT. The
magic
is still there as it always has been. Still there if you really want to see it and if you manage to keep away from the more obvious bits of desecration and greed. Still there for you to catch and to hold, to leave you breathless
when you find the little corners which Progress has not yet managed to ‘improve'. Try the view of the Esterel and the Baie des Anges, from the top step of the terrace of the Hôtel du Cap. If
that
doesn't leave you breathless you don't deserve to breathe anyway.

Whatever happens, the contours remain: the hills covered with tacky little villas still melt into the purple dusk, and the villas are drowned in deep colour so that all one can see is the hard outline of the hills against the sky. The hills don't change – though they did remove one, just above Nice, to use as an in-fill for a new airport runway. But that was just one pointed little mount among many: you'd hardly know it had gone. Hardly. Only if you remembered where it had been.

The Riviera was invented in 1925, so the legend has it, by a very rich, erudite, glamorous and civilized young American couple called Sara and Gerald Murphy. They arrived one day from Paris and fell in love with the little walled town of Antibes, which then sat in a quilt of rose and carnation farms, jasmine fields and cane breaks, its ramparts caressed by an as yet unpolluted sea. Enraptured, they rented a small house in a pinewood just above the empty beach known as La Garoupe. Patriotically, they renamed the house Villa America and invited their host of American friends from Paris, who would arrive on the night train in the golden dawn, fall under the spell and linger on and on. In time they all became a little too much. People had to be fed and wined; the picnics on La Garoupe had to be devised and catered for, and Sara's cast list was mostly very distinguished. And demanding, as holiday guests so often are.

The Fitzgeralds, Picasso and his monumental Mamma dressed, as always, in the deepest black plus high hat, Hemingway and whoever he brought with him, and a list of others all equally brilliant, glowing and glamorous: writers, painters, musicians and players. The Murphys asked the owners of the local hotel along the beach to stay open one summer to accommodate their guests. Normally the winter season finished at about the end of April, for no one wanted the heat and the blazing summer sunlight. The hotels would close until the cooler weather returned in September or October. The owners were somewhat astonished by the Murphys'
suggestion, not believing that they would be filled, but they agreed to remain open for ‘just one summer'. The trains brought, and continued to bring, the glittering crowds from Paris, the Hôtel du Cap remained open ever afterwards, and thus was ‘the Riviera' born.

That is the story I have been told, that is the story I have read, and I'm staying with it. It suits me, and it's probably true.

By the time I first hit the Riviera, in 1948, it was a going concern of the greatest elegance and beauty – a mixture of extreme sophistication and the simplest peasant existence. Rolls-Royces inched politely past meandering hay-carts pulled by oxen; the air was sweet and calm, no one hurried and there was not a sodium lamp in miles. Cicadas sawed in every rough-barked tree in the heat of the afternoon, and down at Vallauris Picasso was working away at a rich seam of clay which he found suited his new bowls, plates and jugs, while Chagall mixed his colours up at Saint-Paul, where the village weaver made his rugs and shawls on an olivewood loom.

Aeroplanes did land at Nice, but on a grass strip. The departure lounge was a trellised terrace smothered with honeysuckle; the arrival lounge next door was drenched in a vicious Dorothy Perkins rose. The really glamorous people came down overnight on the Blue Train – or, better yet, by boat from New York to lie off in the bay of Cannes. Life was easier, simple, ordered: the rough-and-tumble of tourism had not yet fully struck, and the land lay serenely unaware of impending disaster; magical.

Magic has its components, and the most important of them here is the Light. Without the Light it is fair to say that the Riviera would not exist. In spite of the ruin and the greed along the coastal strip, the Light (and it deserves its capital letter) has not altered. The petrol haze on the seafront has merely dimmed it slightly. It still glows down, sparkling in sequinned disarray upon the deceptively clear sea; still scorches the pale bodies unwisely ignoring its power along the artificial beaches full of vermin. It exaggerates light and shade (shadows here are blacker than pitch) and enhances colour – fierce, harsh almost, brilliantly exploding colour that one
never suspected could exist in nature, so that pink is suddenly carmine, the soft green of the maritime pines is viridian, tiled roofs burst with orange fire, and the dust under one's feet is a rich copper.

This of course is why Bonnard and Braque, Monet and Renoir and all the others came here, determined to ‘capture the Light' and set it for all time on canvas. My own father was driven to desperation as a painter trying to catch the elusive colour of the olive trees. Was it green or was it silver? Was it blue or a mixture of the three? No two painters ever agreed, and my father, alas!, never caught it at all. For ever his olive trees were the sorry product of the sodden skies of his native England. They never lost the boiled green of broccoli and were a continuing disappointment to him.

The Paris painters were here long, long before Sara and Gerald Murphy ‘discovered' the Riviera, pinning its magic on canvas. Van Gogh caught it earlier, and perhaps even better, than most of the others. At any rate he caught the violence of the mistral, that strange wind which hurls and screams down the Rhône valley, bending the cypresses and canes, then turns left above the Camargue to wrestle and rage its way along the coast. It blows itself finally into the sea, ragged and exhausted, somewhere in the direction of Cap Ferrat. And when it does that,
then
watch the light! Watch the clarity of the sky and the landscape scoured by the tearing wind: the brilliance is very nearly blinding. Every root, every tile; every rock and scrubby bush; every tree and church-tower; every clustered village high on its hill – all are startlingly cleansed of dust and haze. So sharp, so outlined, so pristine and clear does it appear that it's almost too much for the eye to take in.

Go into Cannes one morning early. Early like seven o'clock when the beaches are still deserted save for a lone swimmer or two, when the streets are silent except for a shopkeeper sleepily washing down his section of the pavement, and for the fishermen down by the old port hosing down the cobbles under the tables of the fish restaurants which line the quay. This is when you will discover the ‘old Riviera' beneath the modern ruin.

Watch the big boxes of mussels, the tubs of oysters, pink prawns
and jumping grey shrimps as they are swung off the lorries from the station, straight off the night train from Dieppe and the colder seas of the north. Follow rue Meynadier into the gigantic vaults of the Marché Forville, a tremendous concrete cathedral of aisled trestles piled high with every sort of fruit or vegetable you can imagine; and many you cannot. In season there are pyramids of peaches and nectarines, great green apples, oranges and lemons with the acid leaves still attached, potatoes and plums (the former as small as quail's eggs and golden in the morning light; the latter larger than hen's eggs and velvet blue). Early peas spill in glistening drifts and lettuce is piled in translucent tumbles of jade. Hens and rabbits, alive in small coops, cluck and rustle at one's feet among the cabbage stalks and fallen parsley.

It's not just fruit, vegetables and livestock that you'll find in the Marché. Cheese, too. Round and oblong, square and half-moon; some wrapped in vine leaves, others in the faded leaves of last autumn's Spanish chestnut; some tied in ribbons, others black with charcoal. It is said that the French produce more than 300 kinds of cheese. If that is so, you'll find them all here – plus a few others which have just been invented. And if you still don't fancy anything you see, go on back up rue d'Antibes to a tiny shop on the right hand side where Madame Agnèse has a few more for you to choose from.

Just aside from the flower-market is the fish – slithery spills gleaming fresh from the boats, the scent of brine mixing very pleasantly with the neighbouring roses and carnations. Not
just
with roses and carnations, but the humble marigold, lilies in armfuls, tuberoses, sweet william, mimosa and, in the early days of spring, huge sprays of almond or early cherry.

On the first of May there is lily of the valley – as pungent as cheap soap, as simple, clean and fresh as a mountain brook, yours only for a day or so before it crumples and fades.

Overlying all this is the pungency of roasting coffee, for the market has been open since 5 a.m. when the first trucks rumbled in and a thousand willing, gnarled and chapped hands began the setting up. By noon all this will have been swept away. Nothing
will remain to remind you that a vast market has taken place: perhaps just a small pile of rotting peaches, a scatter of spinach, a fallen potato. For the rest of the day the Marché Forville is a car-park for the ruined Riviera.

Back, then, to your hotel – ideally one of the modest ones off the Croisette. The Savoy, the Victoria or the Swiss will do you very well: no sea view, but pleasant little gardens and always a tree to cast speckled shade where it is most needed. You'll eat well here, not over-decorated designer meals but good simple produce such as you have seen at the Marché.

Naturally a visit to the Riviera must include a beach, and there are plenty along the curve of the Croisette and away down the coast past La Bocca. Unfortunately I cannot recommend any, for I have not set foot on a beach for thirty years; but most people find them fun and if you select one of the private concessions, paying a bit for the privilege of clean mattresses and bright umbrellas, you'll doubtless enjoy yourself even though your pockets may be quite a bit lighter by the end of the day.