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February 8, 2004
REVIEWS: Battling past ghosts
Nature abhors a vacuum, so that as fast as farming pulls back from marginal areas and mechanizes itself in fertile ones, so have townsfolk in various guises moved in to modernize and renovate the vacated farm houses and farm buildings. Many of the in-comers have given up high flying, well-paid jobs to down size or down shift; many are seeking rural bliss for their retirement and a few like Bernard Loughlin are seeking balm to bind terrible wounds which life has inflicted upon them.
Whatever, the move to rural areas seems to resonate with many peoples’ personal fantasies of getting away from it all to live the simple life surrounded by a cast of jolly, eccentric characters. You will remember how Peter Mayle with his iconic Year in Provence tapped so successfully into this vein.
Bernard Loughlin’s book is a variant on this theme. His rural paradise is the Pyrenees — that mighty ridge of mountains, which cuts Spain off from the rest of Europe. Loughlin just happened to be hippying around in Barcelona when the dictator Franco died in the mid seventies. His exultant friends take him to the remote village of Ferrera to celebrate.
He describes very vividly the eight-hour journey through the wonderful scenery: the oak and beech clad foothills with deep cut valleys twisting upwards towards the bare, snow capped peaks above. But best of all he describes the village life of Ferrera where farmers and other original inhabitants are living cheek by jowl with a mixture of young dropouts and would be artists, craftspeople and musicians.
Later he buys in, marries his childhood sweetheart (the first wedding in the area for forty years) and has his first child (the first baby born in the village for thirty years). Then Ireland calls and for eighteen years he and his wife run an artists’ retreat there set up by Tyrone Guthrie. It is here that the unthinkable and horrendous happens: a neighbour’s son abuses both his children. The Loughlins’ subsequent retreat to their Pyrenean hideaway is shot through with pain and anguish, guilt and fear.
His purpose and his prose get sharper at this point in the book. He graphically describes the terrible wreck of their house; the rotting roof, floors and walls infested with vermin and creepers. On his shoulders is the Herculean task of rebuilding it, untangling the bureaucratic red tape to obtain permission and getting together the money to finance the project. Anybody who is moved by the idea of ‘community’ — and who is not nowadays will be enchanted by his description of a four day Festival where people move from house to house singing, dancing, playing music and telling stories.
Loughlin tells us also about the more realistic side of life in his remote Pyrenean village where as he says the mixture of ‘hippie laissez faire of the incomers and the ancestral peasant anarchism of the original inhabitants have miscegenated into a muddle’. He cites the three monthly meetings where local issues far from being amicably resolved are discussed endlessly with considerable acrimony.
Loughlin finally sorted out the vexed question of a decent water supply for the village himself and was surprised when nobody bothered to thank him for his troubles. Rather tellingly he says that you need to practice ‘forbearance, humility, tact and diplomacy’ to live in such a small, remote community. He admits somewhat disarmingly that he is himself quite short on these qualities.
Hopefully those who want to translate their fantasies of rural life into reality have factored in these virtues.
In the High Pyrenees — A New Life in a Mountain Village
By Bernard Loughlin
Penguin Ireland
ISBN 1-844-88031-1
320pp. £16.99
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