(From recordings made in Encausse of Yvonne Maurens’ life in post-war Gers)

Maman’s voice whispers softly in my ear, ‘Lucille, it is time’, and my eyes open I am lying curled on my side, my right hand under my cheek. From my bed, I see a bar of white light shine under the door, feel my sister’s warmth on my back, hear the blackbird call: ‘It is time to get up. Lucille’, he chirps, ‘Lu-lu-lucille’.
The flagstones are cool beneath my feet. Maman has heated the water in my basin. 
I stand quite still for a moment, my hands on the warm porcelain, the smells and sounds of the farm settling around me, the scent of wood wafting in from the kitchen, the chickens squawking as Grand-Père gives the morning feed. We always keep them the peelings from our evening supper. I don’t want to pull my white nightgown over my head just yet, or feel the roughness of the cold wash-cloth on my skin, or catch sight of my thin body in the little mirror on the commode, or see my whiteness, with the strange dark hairs newly growing on my private parts, my breasts becoming uncomfortable bumps, so unfamiliar on my chest. Shocked by the sight of them, as always, I pull on my thick grey tights and black skirt as quickly as possible. Yolande stirs behind me: she has been watching, I know. I can feel. She is two years younger and always spies on me.
The blue bowl stands on the table in the kitchen: warm milk and maize bread which Maman makes each week. By Friday it is so hard you must break it into pieces and soak it in the milk. The cat sits on my knee as I eat, and slowly light fills the silent kitchen. A ray of sun catches on the basket of herbs and illuminates it. I know there is a kind of beauty there, in the room, but I have no words to describe it.
Later on today the other girls will sit at the on the school benches, pen in hand, purple ink darkening their fingers: Bernadette, Franchette, Camille. Their parents run the chemist, the village baker and Camille’s father is the doctor. I am a bright girl. I know this because I sat in the front row and Mlle Bézières patted my head and smiled. I got the Certificat d’Etudes at thirteen and could have gone on to study in town. The nuns offered Maman a job in the school laundry in exchange for giving us an education. But our grand-parents needed us and Maman couldn’t leave the farm. We have seven hectares and there are only Maman and us two girls to help run the farm. 
Our Papa died two years ago. Maman does everything: she toils in the fields and cooks, finds the money to mend our boots and buy a fresh apron once a year. She is very clever, Maman. She makes us each a change of clothing in September so we don’t need to wash our clothes every evening and dry them in front of the fire, as the people next door must do, a family of Spaniards who have fallen on bad times. They are so poor the little ones are sent out at five years old to weed the rich people’s courtyards. In exchange they are given un sou: they run to the shop to buy a hot roll, which they share with their siblings.
Maman is magnificent. She worked first as a scullery maid in the Château when she was twelve years old. Before her marriage she toiled as a young seamstress in a local atelier. 
They treated her very roughly, Grand-Père told me. One year she made us two new coats with some blue cloth Grand-Mère found in a trunk. The coats had three little pleats down the back and little gold buttons all the way down the front with collars, they were… so beautiful. Fabienne, who runs the grocery said, ‘You look like two princesses’.  
She only has a nephew, Fabienne, no children. She is kind: sometimes she gives Yolande and me a small present from her shop, but not as big as her nephew’s. Sometimes we can choose a pencil, or a rubber, or share a bille de chocolat, but the nephew must always have the best. 
When we are tired and sad, sitting round the table, Maman jumps up, puts her hands on her hips and says, ‘Listen: Yolande, Lucille, there is no going back. Only forwards’. 
With that she quickly does up the buttons of her black house-coat, tucks a strand of hair behind her ear and bends to lace up her worn leather boots; then she strides out to pick the ‘haricots’, which we sell at the market each Saturday. 
We must pick them early in the morning, often it is my job, before the burgeoning heat makes them burst open, and then you might as well throw them out to the pig.
I hate the earth. I hate the land, the farm, hate the howling wind, the curves of the low hills that cut us off, hem us in, imprison us. The land is a monster, it devours everything: our Papa, my time at school, our dreams. The farm pushes you forwards with your nose down, always down, towards the earth. Plants never stop growing, crops always need cutting, animals get hungry, there is never a pause. The earth pulls Yolande and me out of our warm bed at dawn, it forces us to labour all day until the evening: stooping, crouching, scrubbing, raking, sweeping, pouring, cleaning out the animals and feeding them. 
No moment to lift up your head and linger, and look with wonder at the horizon. 
I hate our cow because twice a day I must milk her. 
I hate the rabbits, because I must clean out their stinking cages.
Most of all it’s the ducks I loathe, because I must cook the maize and help Maman stuff it down their throats.
‘Lucille is a sullen one’, they say. It’s true I rarely smile.
I got home the other day, and Grand-Maman asked me what our neighbour’s wife gave me to eat for helping to strip their garlic. She knew it would be cabbage soup with a potato. 
It always is.
‘Rat’, I shouted, ‘She cooked us a rat’. 
And then I laughed.

PhR March 2023