On the trail of the fritillary

Vita Sackville West called it ‘a sinister little flower, in the mournful colour of decay’. The poet and botanist Geoffrey Grigson referred to them as ‘snaky, deadly beauties’. Anne Ridler described it as ‘delicate’ and ‘rare’: ‘You enter creeping, like the snake / You’re named for . . . ‘. Denise Levertov would have it as ‘our talisman in sorrow’. It has been called the Leper Lily, Lazarus Bell, Drooping Tulip, Bloody Warrior, Turk’s Head and the Mournful Bell of Sodom. It’s dramatic, with its curved amethyst hood, like a fin de siècle heroine. And poisonous, the Lucrezia Borgia of the flower world. 

During our week in the Dordogne, as the guests of Anne Berkeley, Sue Rose and I were treated to the sight of a field dotted with snakes head fritillaries. Even there, where they are more abundant than at home (introduced into the English garden sometime in the eighteenth century) we had to search, skirting the paths along the Dronne, attempting to spot bright dashes of purple, like rare jewels in the grass. But there was a satisfaction in the hunt; eventually spotting them, flamboyant and shy at the same time, in the early April sun. We had missed their full blooming, caught them as they were on their way out, not to come again until next spring. Poisonous, beautiful and fleeting.

It’s a bit like writing, which we had assembled to do together (this activity we normally practice in isolation). Somehow going away with other writers provides a kind of team spirit – there is nothing so inspiring (and daunting) as the sight of another writer getting down to business, happily tapping away on her laptop. But maybe not so odd – after all, the poem is something you create for yourself first, but then you are encouraged to share it, to allow the reader to become part of the bargain you strike when you first put pen to paper (or fingers to laptop).

I have spoken here before about the freedom of writing away from home, how the anxieties and tasks of every day life are briefly forgotten when you are somewhere else. The joy of writing is that you need very little in the way of equipment to engage in it, and you can easily move from one place to another where there are fewer distractions (apart from the noisy nightingale, who seemed to be at it for much of the day as well).

Back home, it seemed I wasn’t quite finished with my fritillary spotting. As they had already departed my garden (where I’ve planted a small pot of them – not quite as exciting as finding them in the wild), I was thrilled to find a lone one among the cowslips in the churchyard at Tudeley in Kent. And here, another curious transplant – stained glass windows by Chagall in the medieval church. My friend Lynne Rees and I had made an excursion to see them, and the sun shone on our efforts.

Chagall was initially commissioned to design a window in memory of Sarah D'Avigdor-Goldsmid, who died in a boating accident in 1963. He subsequently designed the rest, making it the only church in the world to have all its windows by Chagall; the final one was installed in 1985, the year the artist died at the age of 98.

They are perfect in their surprising setting; exuberant, bright, but also somberly moving. It seemed appropriate to be there, back in my adopted country, looking at the work of a fellow Russian Jewish émigré, who made his home in France, where I’d just been.

And so we bloom where we are planted …

Carving mountains

We arrived in the village of Aubeterre on a Monday afternoon, the place pretty much empty, even of tourists. Aubeterre is one of Les Plus Beaux Villages de France, which is a not a value judgment so much as a brand, with strict regulations the local Town Council must adhere to. To be considered for this esteemed title, the population of a village must not exceed 2000 inhabitants, and it must have at least two protected areas (picturesque or legendary sites, or sites of scientific, artistic or historic interest). Apart from its cobbled streets, its restored public lavoir, its pristine white houses and hanging baskets of flowers, it boasts one of the most remarkable churches I have ever seen. The monolithic Église Saint Jean was carved out the limestone hills that surround the village. It dates to the twelfth century, on the site of an earlier burial chamber. You enter the church along a wooden gangplank which brings you into the nave, a cave-like chamber 20 meters high, and then ascend along a spiral staircase to a horseshoe-shaped walkway along its upper ridge (for someone who is prone to vertigo, like me, the walk along the top is spectacular but terrifying). The floor of the nave is honeycombed with tombs, like an elaborate maze. Pilgrims would stop here (and still do) en route to Santiago de Compostela – walls throughout the village are studded with scallop shells, the symbol of the pilgrimage. It is an austere and imposing place, in odd contrast to the bright and postcard-perfect village.

It was my first visit to the Dordogne, and although I was assured that the region is heaving in peak season, it seemed sleepy, cut off. An ideal place to spend a week writing – as readers of Invective will know, I’ve made a recent decision to revisit the novel I started last summer. Although writing prose is a slow business for me, my new setting perhaps enabled a sort of release. I found myself typing quickly to keep up with my pace of thought. I sat on the terrace, under a vine humming with wasps and hornets, overlooking the field beyond the house, where a kestrel hovered, wings fluttering. The air was still – warm, but with that slight edge that signals shorter days, long cool evenings. Everything felt suspended, including my usual life back in London. Place has always had a profound effect on my writing, and so it might have been expected that the landscape would enter my narrative. But I found that I was reaching back, writing about an entirely different place – the manicured lawns and strip malls of my childhood.

I have a difficult relationship with the place where I grew up, which is perhaps reflected in the novel I’m writing. I have chosen to live in another country, thousands of miles away. I feel at home in my adopted city in a way I could never now feel at home in the place I left. How was I able to conjure that place so vividly while situated in a place so vastly and wholly different? Perhaps that difference, that alien quality, was what freed me; a place that has no associations can act as neutral ground. It takes me a long time to assimilate a new landscape; I have only recently starting writing poems set in Suffolk although I’ve been spending extended time there for the past seven years. So perhaps my poem set in the Dordogne will arrive in about seven years …

I was pleased not only that I could reconstruct that landscape from memory, but that it felt, for once, relatively easy. There are lots of analogies for the process of writing, often borrowing metaphors from hard labour; I like Seamus Heaney’s comparison of writing to digging, the ‘squat pen’ like a spade, the earth yielding words (and of course Heaney found all those early poems through archaeological excavations, resurrecting bog men and their ancient tongue). And that makes me go back to that monolithic church, the sheer impossibility of the feat, overcome perhaps through the devotion to complete it. I am lazy, I don’t have that sort of faith, and I punish myself for my various shortcomings constantly. I have no stamina, no staying power; that’s what I tell myself each time I pick up and then put down something I have not succeeded in finishing. But I have come back feeling quite positive; in my small way I’ve set myself a task, a little space that I must not so much ‘carve’ out as ‘fill’.