A House in the Sunflowers by Ruth Silvestre

her semi-paralysed, reclusive and elderly son. I had the photograph copied and now they hang beside the sideboard where I feel they belong. After all, Anaïs lived at Bel-Air for over fifty years.
    As I now turned on my tap for unlimited hot water I thought about the tiny water compartment in Anaïs’s stove that we had removed. I imagined her chopping the sticks to light it, as my own Mother had done on those far off Monday wash-days of my childhood. (I remembered too the mad scrambles to unpeg everything when the first shout of ‘raining’ was heard across the back gardens.) Here the washing dries so quickly. I stretched a line from Raymond’s barn to the ash tree and nothing smells sweeter than clothes dried in a hotsun and a strong wind blowing across flower-filled meadows.
    Of course, it does rain here. On such a day when I had been finally driven from the garden by heavy squalls at twenty minute intervals, I remembered Anaïs’s battered cardboard hat box which we had found in the attic. It seemed a good moment to take a closer look at the contents. My French was improving for I had found a course at Morley College and had gone right back to the beginning with a very young and equally fierce Mme Rousseau whose teaching methods were, to me, a revelation. Simple but amusing texts, the dramatising of scenes transposed from one tense to another, extracts from current magazines and newspapers, poems by Prévert and songs by Brassens, and the severity with which she corrected us in the language laboratory kept me enthralled. It is due to her hard work and the later inspiration of Madeleine Enright and Georgette Butler, also at Morley, that I have at last progressed to the joys of Flaubert and Victor Hugo, Molière and Anouilh. But I still make idiotic mistakes and would dearly love to be truly bilingual.
    Almost the first thing I opened, after I had dusted everything in the box and shaken out the mouse droppings and dehydrated spiders, was Anaïs’s school reader. A ‘new’ edition of
La Petite Jeanne
published in 1876 with her maiden name ‘Anaïs Mauriac’laboriously written inside. Although tattered it had not actually been chewed by mice as had so many of the letters beneath it. Blessed and approved by no less than a cardinal, an archbishop and three bishops it is, as one might expect, the most moral of tales and yet has a simplicity that reminded me of Flaubert’s
Un Coeur Simple
. It is Jeanne’s story from early childhood to the grave and the four sections into which it is divided, childhood, in service, wife and mother, and widowhood, prophetically chart the life of Anaïs herself and, I imagine a great many other girls of that time.
    It is illustrated with charming engravings, and Anaïs had clearly read and re-read it, absorbing its moral and practical precepts. She had glued a strip of flannelette down the spine to hold the fragile, muchfingered pages together. As I began to read I was amazed by the scores of household hints woven into the story and the tips on animal husbandry and crop rotation. There is a passage describing the astonishment of the village women at the way Jeanne looks after her children; ‘
Comme s’ils étaient les enfants de bourgeois!
’ Because they are peasants should they be dirty? is her reply, explaining that each night she folds their clothes before laying them in a chest and at mealtimes ties a napkin round their necks. Growing flax she spins cloth which, in hard times, keeps her out of debt. On the last page of the wife and mother section, are the words with which the Curé tries to comfort Jeanneon the sudden death of her husband. ‘
Ma fille, comme c’est la volonté de Dieu que vous soyez séparés, il faut bien s’y soumettre
.’ There was something written in the margin in faint pencil and I moved to the window to try to decipher it. I felt her presence very close at that moment as I read what Anaïs, a widow at fortyseven, had written in her school reader which