Babyhood

Christmas Day at P.’s parents’ house was a very pleasant, relaxing day for me, and Méemée cooked a lovely meal, as usual. For the first time though, the children hardly ate a thing, as they were too busy playing with the new dolls' house and Action Man. The doll who lives in the house is only a babe in nappies, but she owns the most amazing demesne! It’s a two-storey, colonial style mansion with balconies, window boxes and white railings everywhere. The kitchen and bathroom are fully equipped, there’s a mechanical rocking horse, private plane parked on the roof, and even a horse and cow tethered in the garden! Disturbingly though, the children like to put the baby and other dolls behind the balcony railings, saying in a deep, gruff voice “Je suis la police et je te mets en prison!”

We left them to it and ate foie gras, coq au vin, green beans and raspberry roulade in peace and quiet. (In fact, the children were amazingly calm for ages, thanks to the new toys). That night as we drove home a storm struck and it was terrifying driving through the torrential rain and feeling the wind gusts buffet the car. As usual, most of the other drivers didn’t slow down sufficiently on the motorway (have you noticed my favourite gripe often involves French drivers? I’m a careful driver, so why can’t they be the same?), and we passed three nasty accidents in an hour.

But P. got us home safely and we listened to the wind howling for most of the night. The children snored through the whole thing. Next morning when P. went outside and saw so many trees down, roof tiles gone and flying debris, he told me we had to keep all the shutters on the back of the house closed. He was mainly afraid that the huge beech tree in the garden behind us might fall on our house. But it didn’t, and we only lost a few roof tiles, which he fixed the following day, in bright sunshine. The tall trees opposite our house suffered several casualties, about a dozen fell en bloc (some snapped in two and some were completely uprooted), opening up a completely new view to the horizon for us and letting a lot more light into our lounge.

The power was cut off at 8 am, so we breakfasted by candlelight, which was great fun. A week earlier, the children and I had made lamps out of stiff tracing paper and little candles, so they turned out to be even more useful than decorative. The power stayed off all day, but we quite enjoyed it, as we had gas to cook with and plenty of stocks of drinking water in provision for the anticipated Y2K shortages.

We’re eating a lot of canned and frozen food at the moment! However, the power came back on in the evening, so it’s a relief that we didn’t have to manage without it for three whole weeks, like people in some parts of France. That afternoon the weather was beautifully calm and sunny, so we went into the forest to see the damage.

We thought it was pretty dramatic, dozens of trees – the biggest ones - were broken or uprooted, leaving huge craters in the ground. It’s sad, but I found a kind of terrible beauty in it too. An illustration of the force of nature, one might say. You didn’t know I could be so poetic, did you?!

The river Loing down in Moret had flooded in some places, including our favourite tossing-bread-to-the-ducks spot. On the Monday P. saw a car completely crushed by a fallen chimney. Every time we walked anywhere we could see people up on their roofs, fixing tiles and TV aerials.