WHEN the familiar diversion sign appears with ‘road blocked’ my heart sinks, for I know that at some point, on following the alternative route, the signs will simply disappear.
Usually one is left at an unsigned crossroads and I swear I can hear the last words of the bored roadworker: "Look I got you to here – now figure it out yourself."
Presumably this is the point every local knows and a turn left will bring you back on route.
I never do for I spend so much time dreaming in the car that it has become a self-taught machine that takes itself, with little input from me, to my destination.
This diversion was taking me away from the Lavit/Castelmayron road as a culvert was being laid. I’d been warned in advance and had added an extra 15 minutes on to the journey to drop César at the groomer.
When on a D road, all diversions wind their way through village and hamlet – sometimes, well always in my case, through farmers’ yards and wagon routes not travelled since the Revolution.
I’m never quite sure which village I’m passing through until I see a name, for they are all much the same, often on a hill looking down to valley or plain.
At the heart is the church; always hugely out of proportion to the houses settled around it and extending outwards. Once the guardian, moral and otherwise of all the souls within its reach, it still has the outward crouch of the big beast it was.
Designed to soar and yes, to intimidate, it’s fierce in its uncompromising outline and from all corners its stone flanks are visible.
Now, no soutaned priests in birettas rush from the porches on business with school or penitent.
No housekeeping nuns; skirts swirling up the dust from the cobbles; beads clacking with each hurried step; marshal crocodiles of children from church to school.
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They are all long gone though their echoes remain for me as I sit outside, pondering my next turn.
These are churches just surviving with their priests on monthly rotas and their doors bolted as the Sacristy light flickers on inside – signifying that God is always here even if nobody comes.
Close to the church will be found the Mairie – its tricolour proud and prominent. Even the tiniest village nabs or builds the best home for its secular glory, although some may open just one afternoon a week.
And close to that, the Salle de Fetes, the scene of all festivities and communal merrymaking. Church, State and People, forever bound even as the power of one has been weakened first by law and by apathy.
None of these villages on this roundabout route to my destination have any great claim to fame in local history. But then if they did, it would be hard to prise out such tales from locals or seek them in the records of the region.
There is a secrecy always in La France Profonde – a seeming determination to let the historical past (never the personal) lie buried in the graves along with the dead.
Yes, villages often hold annual pageants; superb in their costuming and quick tour of the centuries and so seem to grip their past tight in an eternal display.
But try to grasp it and like Will O’the Wisps, the very substantial locals twirl away and out of interrogation. Like Brigadoon, they and their villages only truly rise every century and so cannot be scrutinised or the secret would be no longer.
Clues are given though. In one village where I turned right instead of left, I was on a dead end where the weeds grew in the middle of the track. But there was a sign. It translated as The Old Way of the Romans.
Immediately I saw them marching through, probably from my own village, once a temporary Roman camp.
Other streets and alleyways commemorate the Republic and Revolutionary heroes; philosophers, Jeanne d’Arc of course, and long-gone chateaux and monasteries with names such as The Walk Below the Battlements, or The Walk of the Black Robes.
In a village across the river there is a square of bones…a commemoration of the dead who starved within its walls during the Religious Wars.
The bones were piled up as the flesh rotted.
In Lavit my bank sits on Lovers’ Walk and the other day I noticed for the first time a street near the surgery called: The Cats’ Bridge.
Of course, I saw a procession of cats, tails curved upwards as in a Disney film, strutting in file across a rustic bridge singing La Marseillaise; tricolour sashes across their proud chests.
But there was no bridge, no water. Where? Where did that come from?
It has taken me years to discover that if I wish to seek out the nature of where I live and with whom I live, I must always follow the diversions.
The straight road will only take me to the destination they’ve decided upon.
And once I follow the diversions, when they stop, then I must turn and follow my instincts. Or just stop and seek the clues.
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