Last summer, my partner Charlotte and I quit our jobs and went to work on a farm, leaving our flat of five years and giving our cat to an unwilling friend. We told everyone we didn’t know if we’d ever come back, which would have sounded hollow had it not been for the other people already sleeping in our bedroom.
Even so a French friend was sceptical of our plans. She was raised on a farm and my relaxed attitude to gruelling physical labour irked her. “Have you ever woken up at 3am to walk through shit and vaccinate 200 geese?” she asked. I hadn’t, and it dawned on me suddenly that I was about to become a middle-class cliché – idealistically labouring with my too-soft hands, willing the experience to end so I could write it up for the Observer.
My grandfather died just before we left, and we delayed our trip for the funeral: the first time in two years I’d seen many members of my family. Last time I’d been doing well in the traditional sense – good job, nice flat, long-term partner – so I was hesitant to tell my older, more conservative, relatives that we no longer had a fixed address and had just given all our money to a used-car dealer in exchange for a decrepit van. What could be more indulgent than ditching a responsible, stable existence to go and fanny about on a farm?
The term “Wwoofing” was coined in the 1970s by a London secretary, Sue Coppard, frustrated by her desk job. She proposed Working Weekends On Organic Farms (now World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms, or Wwoof) to give urbanites the opportunity to engage with the nascent organic movement. Volunteers offer their time to farmers and smallholders in exchange for bed and board. No money changes hands at any point and opportunities range from harvesting hops in the pissing rain in Kent to stamping grapes into Pinot Noir in the warmth of the Napa Valley.
We go to Wwoof in the northern Ardèche, on an old silk farm just outside a small rural town. The property sprawls over a couple of acres, with sheltered terraces adorned with passionflowers, ruined outbuildings where we will sometimes eat supper, and a walled vegetable garden that’s wilting in the hot summer sun. There are chickens, three cats, two goats and a dog – ironically named Hippy. The goats are just there for show as they’re male and everyone’s vegetarian.
Our Dutch hosts, Jan and Inge, met 15 years ago in France, where they both went in search of a quieter pace of life, and their seven children (both were married before) drift in and out of the property during the month of our stay. Before Jan moved from the Netherlands he ran his own tapas restaurant, which is evident in the incredible meals he produces from nowhere, three times daily. Now he’s a full-time stonemason. He is quiet and measured but endlessly warm, and punctuates his only slightly broken English with abrupt, staccato laughter.
Jan’s pet project is a ruined farmhouse in a nearby pine woodland that he’s two years into restoring. He came across the structure quite by accident, hidden among overgrown vegetation in the middle of a plot purchased for reasons that never quite become clear. It’s the farmhouse that we are principally there to help with, as his intention is to move there some time in the next five years and live completely sustainably. The structure has to be reinforced and revamped, walls built, dry toilets installed, showers fitted, vegetable gardens planted, compost made, trees felled, logs stacked, and all manner of other tasks that support an off-grid lifestyle. He seems undeterred by the possibility that this may take the rest of his life to complete – finishing appears not to be the objective.
The work is hard. Apart from some fleeting stints on building sites, manual labour is new to me. I spend the first week digging out an old cellar with a pickaxe and shovel. In the 35C heat the sweat on my back mingles with filth until I’m perpetually caked in clay. At times my hands are so sodden that the pickaxe slides from my grip mid-swing. My T-shirt takes alternating roles as a bandana and towel.
Charlotte is set the intimidating task of clearing woodland down on old terraces earmarked for vegetables. I can’t imagine how such a small person will make a dent in this dense vegetation, but she has far more experience of manual labour than me – she’s a year into working on ecological and conservation projects, has her own overalls and can lay a hedge in an afternoon.
By the end of the week the land is clear and a monumental pile of felled trees and bushes heaped in its place, rendering my poky little cellar immediately less impressive. Then she shows Jan how to create dead hedges with the waste material. This seems to have implications for my manhood in rural France.
We try everything. We become builders, painters, carpenters and plumbers, gardeners, woodsmen, goat-herds and poultry farmers – all at the most amateur level. We pull apart rotten masonry from stonework and re-pack it with cement, watching the walls of the old house begin to look strong again. Each morning I worry that this will be the day when the job becomes tedious, but I slowly become accustomed to the work and the heat and time moves liquid fast. I get really, really good with the pickaxe.
Jan never leaves more than two hours between breaks, a habit he says he picked up from the French. There is always fresh coffee to drink, snacks to be eaten, and our mid-morning repose becomes one of my favourite times of the day. We sit in the sunshine gulping down mouthfuls of syrupy espresso, recharging and feeling smugly content about the jobs already done.
He tells us about the history of the area: how none of the trees around us is native to France, but were planted for use in the silver-mining industry, how the silk farms that used to exist all over were crippled overnight by the arrival of synthetic fabrics, how the hippies came down from Paris one summer in the 60s and never left. We imagine ourselves, like them, settling here permanently.
We’ve become comfortable living without the commute, the endless emails, deadlines and meetings, targets and business buzzwords. But then I’m offered a job in New York and we’re forced to abandon peasant life for a while. I accept the job with mixed feelings and we resignedly plan our departure, feeling a hell of a lot less confident about crossing the Atlantic than we did the Channel. Still, I fancy myself as a mason now. I’ve learned how to handle tools and I like it. I know we’ll be back.
