Bruno’s cats

Bruno’s cats stalk the grey tits and blackbirds nesting in the ivy-drenched, moss-banked ruins of the grey-stone barn. Blinking, mewing, stretching tiny claws, they shelter under the holly trees, basking in shallow ditches of dry, sun-warmed dirt. Bruno is the only Frenchman in a French hamlet that has been slowly overtaken by the English. The farmhouse, outbuildings and land were handed down to him: the only French population on the increase is in the barn where his cats live.

Bruno spends a lot of time watching, but he doesn’t say very much. Although there is often a smile behind the large, thick glasses that sit heavily on his face, his eyes are vague: his attempts to communicate lost in the complexities of another language, another culture. With each arrival his puzzlement and isolation grows. His cats are a lot less complicated.

Scruffy, muddy sheep graze the old orchard behind Bruno’s house. A dull duck-egg blue Citroen van rusts under the apple trees grown bent by the wind.

Four neat rows of black, stubby trunked, wiry vines are the only order in scrubland bordered by tumble-down stone walls, limp wire fences and oak trees.

Across the farm track that leads up to the woods, there is a new swimming pool and a pergola; a high iron fence with white, concrete squirrels on the concrete gate posts.

The iron gate to Bruno’s yard is wide and rusty. On the other side, the cats prowl the grit and dust, scaling and leaping the walls, challenging passers-by; one-eyed, hissing, protective, scrappy little fighters.

They kept watch from toppled log piles and outbuildings, peeking out from branches of clear, clean pale-pink apple blossom as spring came and Bruno turned the potager’s chocolate-brown soil, leaving neat, moulded furrows for lettuces, potatoes and onions; scoring meticulous trenches for wigwams of beans.

Later, with a cigarette locked between his lips, thumbs jutting from the pockets of his clean work jeans, he silently paced the razor-sharp lines; with each step a satisfied smile and a jerky little nod of his grey, curly head at the fruit of his labours. Then the plantsman toured the hamlet’s lanes, inspecting the ugly new concrete posts that had sprung up to replace the old wooden telegraph poles.

We saw Bruno later, in his yard, short and stocky, with his army of cats. The late-afternoon light made a dusty halo of blue and dark gold around them; their shadows cast large against the ochre-stone walls that line the lane.

The puzzled, serene little man and his companions, calmly watching as the sun went down for another day on a disappearing France.