The Land of the Four Poplars

Just three or four miles down the road from here, as you come out of the pretty village of Magny-lès-Aubigny, a little road leads up and down through a mixture of pasture, cereal and blackcurrant fields, to a little wood. After 400 yards or so you come out of the woods and into beautiful uplands with fields stretching out to left and right and sloping gently down in front of you towards the straggling village of Esbarres. In mid-August, Anne and I stopped off here on our way to see the firework display at the Lac de Chour. It was an exceptionally fine evening and for once we could make out very clearly, not just Mont Blanc (itself a fairly rare occurrence) but also the Swiss Alps to the north. The countryside here never ceases to send a little jolt of happiness through me: the vivid yellow gashes of the rape fields in spring; the fields of wheat swaying in the wind, and then a golden hue after harvest; the rich brown, chocolate colour of the ploughed fields; the blackcurrant bushes covered in frost.

I have long called this country the Land of the Four Poplars for reasons that are rather obscure but which I will nevertheless try to explain here. First, there are – or were – four poplars standing next to the little road at the point where it meets the larger road running between Esbarres and Charrey. They were something of a landmark for me, gradually emerging or disappearing as I cycled along the road between Magny and Esbarres. But why “The Land of the Four Poplars”? Partly because it puts me in mind of the title of a book which my mother was very fond of: The Country of the Pointed Firs. I’ve never quite understood what she liked so much about the book, but the title on its own is infinitely beguiling. And partly because it makes me think of a book you will probably never come across – search as you may in Google!* The book in question is or was called The Black Cat Club and it was published back in the 1960s or 1970s by Heinemann as an “Easy Reader”, i.e. as a specially simplified book for people learning English. I was drawn to this book because, bloodless and two-dimensional as it was, it at least came a little nearer the real world than the soul-destroying “situations” of the language classroom. And also because, set in the hot and dusty world of Egypt and pre civil war Lebanon, it somehow represented the promise, or at least the possibility, of escape from a not very happy life in Lyon at the time.

So imagine my horror and sorrow when I discovered that the tops of these beautiful trees had been removed, leaving four hideous poles pointing towards the skies. Better that they had never been born. As one gets older this sort of thing, not really all that important in the wider scheme of things, is received like a blow to the stomach.

 

*Nothing is sacred in this digital world! Google tells me that the book in question is entitled The Black Cat and not the The Black Cat Club, and was written by John Milne. I was right about Heinemann although it is now published as a Macmillan Guided Reader. The blurb reads:

A modern, action-packed detective story. Salahadin El Nur is an inspector in the Antiquities Department of the Egyptian police. The death of a visiting European archaeologist leads Salahadin to investigate the whereabouts of a priceless statuette. He is soon on the trail of a gang of international smugglers.