Short course in French food and art.

Phil in Golfe Juan in Autumn 1974

I have big hair because I never went to the barber's at my Quaker boarding school in Great Ayton. I am 14, standing next to the stone commemorating the return of Napoleon from his exile in Elba. Grandpa was an admirer of Napoleon and this was partly why he chose to live in Golfe Juan. The other reason they both chose to live there was because they had gone on honeymoon to Cannes and Nice in 1935.

Granny and Mom on the walk to Vallouris, photo by Grandpa

We had visited them Majorca, in Meudon-la-Foret, and in 1972 in Munich. I think I was the first or second to visit them in Golfe Juan. Mom insisted that she was the first. Perhaps she was. Perhaps she visited them on her way to Maharashtra. They were her parents after all and it was her scene. I was there, I think, in October 1974, for a week at half term - or was it October 1973?

Granny and Grandpa (Lisa and Richard Steinhardt) in Vence

When I arrived there were no buildings at the front or the back of the block. You could see the hills at the back and the sea directly in front. Grandpa had bought his flat on the strict promise from the local government that there would be no further construction to obscure the view. Of course that promise was broken by the mayor. A Communist. Grandpa said he hated Communists and liked the books of Don Camillo by Giovannino Guarseschi.

We went to all the galleries arm in arm.

The priest, in the books of Don Camilo, was based a partisan Catholic priest, Don Camilo Valota, who was a detainee in Dachau and Mauthausen. Don Camilo in the stories was involved in a comical war in his Italian town, with the local Communist mayor. 

View from the veranda in 1975

The funny thing about the apartment was that it was built right by a busy railway line and so all conversation halted while trains rushed through at high speed hooting.

Grandpa's favourite activity was watching TV. He particularly liked Chifres y Letres and the football and he hated Mitterrand because he was a duplicitous socialist. And he was, we now know. Mitterand worked for the Vichy government during the war.

Grandpa also loved Columbo with David Faulks. Colombo smoked a cigar too and he wore a gabardine coat like Grandpa's. He liked Colombo's humility and how Columbo would turn around, just as he was about to leave and say:'

Just one more little thing.

He decided I needed a little culture and gave me a tour. He took me to all their favourite restaurants along the coast. We went from Juan les Pins to Antibes to Monaco, Nice and Vingtemille to the east. From Cannes to St Tropez in the west. We walked up to Vallouris past all the pretty villas and ate buttery almond Picasso pastries at little cafe at the top.

The highlight of my culinary education was fish soup; a revelation to me after a year or so in Great Ayton.

Soup de Poissons, from Wikimedia Commons

Hard dry French bread scrubbed with garlic and placed at the bottom of a wide bowl. A dollop of piquant home made rouille on each crust, Gruyere cheese sprinkled over the rouille, and, finally, two large aromatic ladles full of fish soup made with every part of the restaurant's left over fish, even some of their softer bones.

I was served some wine with it. But it was the garlic that gave me a high almighty. Eating fish soup, day after day untiringly in Provence is one of my all time culinary epiphanies. It was also very healthy.

And Grandpa and Granny combined my tour with art. Picasso had died the year before - another Communist. He had lived just up the road in Vallouris. Graham Greene still lived nearby in Juan les Pins. That was another walk. All along the coast past the little restaurants. Large sharp, triangular concrete tank traps still there, laid to prevent allied landings during the second World war.

Grandpa exchanged letters with Graham Greene. He wrote proudly of Mom's activism in South Africa. Now that Mom was safe he could freely boast about her courage. But his reaction at the time was not to be supportive, he feared for her safety and disagreed with her politics. In a letter in 1963 Dad puts him firmly in his place and he never criticised Mom again for her activism. In fact he was secretly very proud of her.

Chapelle Matisse, photo from That's How the Light Get's in 

Grandpa hated modern art, but felt that I should learn of it. So he took me to the Fondation Maeght and the Picasso museum in Antibes in the castle and the Picasso pottery museum in Vallouris and Chapelle Matisse.

Granny accompanied me everywhere, while Grandpa sat outside, and we looked at the sculptures of Giacometti, and the work of artists like Leger and Picasso and Matisse, and we speculated together on what it meant. Granny let me speak and I found I could make up stories about the art as I went along.

Giacometti sculpture in the Picasso Museum in Antibes

I particularly remember Picasso's bold pottery designs. Giacometti's pinched figures, but the highlight for me was Chapelle Matisse. Painting on white tiles, light staining glass windows. Black broad brush strokes free and full of emotion. I can smell the concrete of the church, the damp grout. It was quiet and the Provence light penetrated the space mysteriously, strong and sweet.

Grandpa was determined I would go everywhere and do everything. I fell ill on the last day of my visit with tonsillitis and couldn't appreciate things as much as he would have liked me to. He took us across the border, past Nice, to Italy for a meal. But I was feeling too miserable and all the way back he puffed on his cigar inside the little Peugeot 204 with the sun roof open and he berated me for missing a marvellous opportunity. Looking back, I think he was right.  

One morning Grandpa took me with him to the Cannes market to buy fruit and vegetables. It was fun to watch him discuss the quality of the food with the stall holders. They respected him.

Best of all was to wake up and sit on the veranda with Granny and Grandpa and eat eat pink grapefruit segments and then fresh lacy croissant spread with French President butter and good jam. To drink hot chocolate from wide brimmed cups. Sometimes milky filter coffee, as the light slowly warmed us all up.