This story is part of our Your First Published Article series. A traveller trades Australia for a dilapidated barn in rural France, finding community around a central communal bread oven as neighbours visit to swap slices of pizza, glasses of wine, and a few stories.
It is a towering arch of a double wooden gate, dressed in rusting iron hardware that bolts tight and hinges shut. Beyond it, sitting back and waiting, is a wonderful wreck, perfection dilapidated, drawn tired by age, absence, and indifference. Anticipating, alive, and ours.
My eyes were everywhere all at once. The house was a masterpiece, a perfectly formed Charentaise farmhouse. Long and narrow with several rooms in a walk-right-through curved line, each one a perfect side-squared replica of the other. Here was the classic we had dreamed about. A farmhouse, once central to an old and constant cycle of production; grapes for Cognac, apples, and vegetables for market, was now simply lazing with wine tanks empty and the yard overgrown. There were trees that echoed an old and determined self-sufficiency. Three bay, two fig, one each of walnut, cherry, pear, and a ragged lawn sown with marjoram. 1791 is carved deep into the stone above the kitchen fireplace.
The selling agent was persistent. “If you love the look of the house, Madame, look here. This run of barns is a masterpiece.” He was right. The furthest was for goats, he said. Girth-of-a-man beams held a roof over narrow stone stalls. The other barns were for cattle, with old mangers for feeding and upper floors stacked with hay. One barn stood open, made for tools, vehicles, and firewood. Inside another, braced with wood and once horse-drawn, was a drum, set sideways. It was piped for spraying, for pest control, or for fertilizer. “It’s copper,” said the neighbours, “… an antique!” It’s a vintage marvel and a great talking point. A beauty!
But I was captivated by the little barn that headed the run! It formed a perfect juxtaposition of loveliness and utility. Up high above the door were two pigeon-sized arches of stone that led to a raftered and planked pigeon refuge. The reality for these birds is grim. Cleverly tempted in and offered food, warmth, and a space to breed, they provide eggs and meat for the farmhouse table, their droppings shovelled away as fertiliser for the fields. It is a cruel cycle. A gnarly, ancient pale pink rose climbs in neglected tendrils around the door. Inside was a communal laundry with a wooden chute leading to concrete tubs, a fireplace serving ancient copper boilers, long disappeared, with a chimney in carved stone. The floor was pounded dirt.
Integrated deep into the structure was the old communal bread oven. Holding its ground at the front gate, it anchored our house to the village it had served. Inside its old rusty door, the oven was shadowy and oddly cool. We peered in, astounded by the size, the craftsmanship, the simple beauty of this shallow inverted dome. Hundreds of hand-hewn stone bricks formed a gravity-defying mosaic above the oven floor. It was oozing with tales of bounty, ceremony, and feasting, of community. Baking bread, a shared table, a new circle, and new chances in a faraway place. This was why we had come.
It had been punt, gamble, and blind leap all at once. Could we? Was it too much to trade the wilds of remote East Arnhemland in Australia’s Northern Territory for a romantic rural idyll in France? Did we have the nerve, the skills, the resources? Twelve years later, the answer is yes. It was a reckless, long-distance love affair, and we were caught!
Our neighbour, Roget was the first to bid welcome. He was an ancient, diminutive bachelor, bent in the middle! He came through the gate one morning, holding a just-picked bunch of crimson peonies, and stayed for over an hour, wandering through a house he had known well and forever, sharing his memories in a rapid-fire local dialect. We fossicked through the conversation for meaning and muddled through. The warmth that he brought, his nodding approval, was like a golden permission. He paused at the bread oven barn as I walked him home, turned to me and smiled, but he had no words left. He would hold the stories until next time.
The vulnerability of these roadside barns had always niggled. The goat barn was the first to go. We were grabbing a quick breakfast before a day trip to the salt citadel at Brouage, on the Atlantic coast. There was a simple whoosh, but it was definitive. What was left by the time we rushed outside was a pile of tiles, ancient stone, and massive wooden beams, settling slowly in a dirty cloud of black dust. That waist-width beam of ancient oak had threatened to split for years! By mid-afternoon, the rubble had settled, the dust had cleared, and we had a brand-new countryside view!
The bread oven barn was the second casualty. The road through our tiny village had become a temporary diversion, and trucks were rumbling through in a constant thrum. Our external wall hugged a tight corner, and the bread oven barn was hit. It split down a craggy row of stone and scattered the laundry chimney across the dirt floor. We shut the barn door tight until restlessness and retirement spurred us on, and the revival of the oven, the barn, and our faith in them became the priority.
Patric, the local expert, was positive enough. He had managed the central commune oven for decades, pumping out 40 perfect loaves every July 14th, and hundreds more for a raft of local celebrations. Our little corner barn was nothing in comparison!
“Heat it to 400 degrees. Keep it hot. If it stays intact, I’ll help.”
“Quatre cent!! Celsius?! Mon Dieu!”
“Oui! Until the bricks are glowing white!”
Our neighbour, Jean-Pierre, taught us about the essential skinny tinder gathered from the woods, tied in bundles. “Beaucoup! Beaucoup!” We needed a lot! The neighbourhood chanted from the sidelines and planned the menu for this inevitable feast.
Icy wines and beers filled the laundry tubs. Patric had set the fire and then carefully managed it for hours–monitor, head chef, and keen tutor. Two long tables, one for preparation and one for feasting, were set. And they came, laden.
“A hot oven must not sit idle!” declared Martine, our friend, providore, and neighbour. She was proud of us, and it shimmered! She brought loaves, and a fougasse loaded with caramelised shallots for baking, a quiche chock full of leeks, harvested from her potager that morning, an apricot tart, and a flan, with a custardy wobble! Pizzas were assembled, evaluated, and approved. Home-smoked meats, onions, cheese, and sauce made from the tomato harvest had been gathered from secret larders to top the dough! My chicken casserole, spiked with rosemary stalks and chunks of lemon, met the high benchmark. So did my mulberry crumble, buttery dough soaking up the deep purple juice from fruit grown right there on our very own tree.
Glasses clinked and bubbly corks leapt. There was laughter and shouted welcomes and kisses on both cheeks. Patric and Andy worked as master and apprentice inside the barn, with a pizza paddle and a couple of shovels, weaving like conductors’ batons to shunt the trays and bases around from cool spot to hot spot and back again! It is an exhausting art form and great fun to watch.
I stood speechless just inside the door, just for a moment, marvelling at the sweat, the urgency, the heady smells, and the wonderful sense of purpose. Patric called for Martine to come and make a judgement call on that delicate flan! “Superb! Superb!” she said. “Très Bon, Chef!” Here was a blessing indeed. My giggles bubbled and my silence was short-lived! “Come and look! Can you believe it? It’s … it’s like a symphony.”
And it was! The oven was still hot the next day. The news had echoed around the commune, and we were on for game two. The apprentice nurtured the fire carefully all day. The master popped in to check the progress. The spare chairs were dusted off. It was opening night all over again as the tables stretched to make room. The bread oven made up for those lost decades, and the joy was bubbly and loud, leading us into the moody twilight.
The sunset brought fresh faces, lesser known to us but still our neighbours. Until now, we had waved or nodded as their tractors bounced past the gate, and accepted their gruffness as a wariness, a reluctance as their tiny village, their home of generations, began to play host to antipodean retirees whose purpose was less firm and intention less familiar. But here they were, and Jean-Luc sought us out to share a simple story–that the wedding feast for his great-grandparents had been cooked right here in our oven when they married in 1930.
It was a disjointed conversation, lively with translation and interjection of memories from others. “Mais oui! Je me souviens!” There was a rapid-fire, convoluted chorus of links made, and old village characters remembered.
It all translated perfectly to me. We were stoking more than fires.
