French Thoughts

In a month we go to France om holiday, something I have been looking forward to for some time.  But moments of Frenchness seem to have slipped into my summer thoughts.  A bottle of wine and some cheese to finish the meal tonight, a bunch of meadow flowers in a glass on the table; there is a simple, country way of life that the English associate with the French, that northern Europe associates with Gallic Europe; the hope of long sunny days and wine and good food.  A stereotype, of course, a myth, but a powerful one.  All countries' myths are powerful to outsiders.  

But then I found a copy of RH Mottram's The Spanish Farm Trilogy, three novels and short stories about a French farm during the Great War.  The war itself seemed replete with summer; one character after the war remembers birdsong in June 1916, and an image remains of wild flowers and wild birds on the Somme before the stalemate offensive of July 1916.  This is an image of the war itself, connected to innocence lost, peaceful fields before they were blasted to mud and dead trees.  I had never associated the Great War with the summer, always with November.  But then today on a quiet road near Ludlow the wheatfield seemed infested with blood-red poppies, and I realised that I had been seeing them for some time.