BATS
 

Nineteen-fifties France; despatched to the valley of the Loire;
to holiday; on my own; to stay with aristocratic hosts;
their château – nowhere near the Loire – loiters by a broad canal.
 

A canal pretending to be the river;
with barges; water-fowl; and anglers – black-berét'd –
relaxing between each cast with yet another reeking Gauloise.

The château four-storied; inverted L's form an open courtyard.
From its wings, shuttered windows overlook a farm and vineyards,
and quietly inhale the subtle, sad intoxicating savours of moulder and decay.

An entrance-hall with staircase, climbing right; 
of stone; and on the wall: a sight to make you pause:
a burst of bullet holes, leading upward.

Preoccupied, a silent child, my place at meal-times was in the kitchen;
summoned by the cook to eat strange, nutritious fare: small dumplings,
to be dipped in onion soup; or jugged rabbit – bony, almost, as the cook.

Sharing, once, the family's meal; proffered wine with water; decanted equally.
Watching with surreptitious fascination as Monsieur le Comte, napkin always
in his hand, dabs with a discreet but frequent delicacy at his moustache; patrician.
    

Sleeping, like a servant in a Dickens novel, in the attics.  Holding, atop the stair,
a twist of candle.  Creeping.  Creeping, with a twist of nerves; creeping through the
extra-dark.  But then unhinged: unhinged by bats, which whirl and rustle in the air.

A long, long corridor to negotiate; the bats and I equally unsettled,
disturbing one another's equilibrium.  But they had never read – nor
heard of – Edgar Allen Poe.  The relief of latching, tight, my garrett door.

Sleep by then an unknown harbour; reading by the candle's light,
eyes narrowing to find the print; glimpsing, on the walls, fearful,
strange imaginings, ears straining to the vacuum of France's rural night.

Morning: snatching at a fresh bread roll; 
spending hours in the château's library; books, accessibly
secure behind tall, heavy, unlocked doors of leaded glass.

On wheels: a library ladder.  Finding English tomes
and lolling, reading.  Titles / authors, long forgotten,
collected by some ancestor of this strange, dessicated family.

Exploring rural France; spending my few centimes on new, unanticipated flavours;
testing my smattered, stuttered phrases on patient, black-clothed shopkeepers,
while their sunlit, shadowed wares attract one more weightless layer of silent, country dust.

Watching a despairing horse plough a furrow in dry, dry earth;
the horse encouraged with no enthusiasm by the farmer; he skinny, stringy as his animal.
I, the blind bystander, unwittingly assimilating all this rural deprivation.

      
A group of Romanies appear from nowhere and settle in the courtyard.
That evening, the air is redolent with their inviting, succulent guitars,
the smoke of fires, the cries of dancing; and – perhaps – a moment's stolen love.

Thereafter, never did it seem as disconcerting – to share,
with bats, those last few steps of evening; to share a silent,
mental pirouette with whirling, rustling – dancing – bats.