In December Camille began to fatten her ducks and geese for Christmas, and in January the pigs were killed. Their hams and confits would last us through the year. In the biting cold we bathed in a tub by the kitchen fire. After Christmas lunch and the midnight supper on New Year’s Eve came Epiphany, with a bean hidden in the cake and the crowning of kings and queens.
WINTER AT SAINT PUY was a season of silent fields and frozen ponds. Though the winters were cold, we did not often have snow. The colours of the landscape were usually those of black woods, dull green pastures and the brown, lumpy earth of ploughed fields. The smell of wood smoke on a cold afternoon meant that everybody was living and working as much as possible indoors, either round the kitchen fire or inside one of the farm buildings. At the Oratoire, for example, Marcel would probably be in the barn, sawing the big logs which dried there in neat, square stacks, then chopping and splitting them with a heavy long-handled axe. Sitting in the warm kitchen, we could hear the dull thuds of the axe and also my grandfather’s spasmodic commentary of oaths which nearly always accompanied them; or we would listen to the sounds made by his hammer and file as he repaired the haycutter or the harrow or one of the carts.
