Wodan's Bathhouse

From the relatively open ground of the col you could see all the way down to the clearing with its collection of cabins and shacks, each unique, each built with the materials that had been available at the time of its construction and each a testament to mountain ingenuity and loving inventiveness.

Some of the structures were clad with boards that had weathered to grey and some had walls of earth packed around cordwood; some had roofs of battered corrugated sheets and some were topped with unruly turf. But in two respects they were all similar: against each stood a lean-to and in every such shelter split logs were stacked tidily to roof level, and every one sported a chimney of some description, although the angles at which they reached for the sky varied wildly and accentuated the sense that they had been built with little or no attention to level or rectitude.

For most of the year the smoke rose from the chimneys against an unbroken backdrop of green. The beech woods pressed in all around the cluster of shacks; the whole valley was wooded in that way and only the high rocky peaks beyond, white with snow as often as not, provided relief from the vista of the vast highland forest.

My earliest memories are of this view of my home. I suppose I will never lose the clarity of this image. The place has changed now beyond recognition, reclaimed by the trees. It is only in hindsight however, that I can appreciate how short lived the little settlement was. For the first part of my life it was everything; for me it had always been there and was as permanent as the mountains all around.

My father, Guillaume, had never had a talent for what they used to call business. I remember him saying that the end of money hadn't come a day too soon for him. Typically, he had at last come up with a scheme to make a little money just as the old world was drawing its last ragged breaths. He had taken the battered old van that would for long years afterwards serve as a chicken house, and he had driven all the way across Spain, all the way to Morocco. Once there he had spent all of his savings on wood-fired water heaters, reserving enough only to buy fuel for his return trip. He had been utterly convinced that he could sell these devices in the Pyrenees, a region that had never been short of folks who wanted to live what in the old days had been called “the simple life”.

That was how it came to happen that he began the new era – the end of the world that had been and the start of the world that I would know – with fifteen copper-tanked boilers to his name, each one equipped with a shiny mixer tap and a shower head.

Later on the collection grew. Even by the time I was nearly grown, people would still bring pieces or occasionally intact but ill-functioning examples of wood-fired boilers for my father to bring back to life. In the end there were both the newer Moroccan boilers and many examples of German-made antiques as well as hybrids cobbled together from all kinds of adapted parts. Several of the tanks sported the name Wodan and my father often told me that he was the last priest of this ancient god. Before the boilers I don't think he had found his metier, afterwards they became his obsession.

'I never managed to sell one boiler' he would say with pride, or, if he was struggling with one, if he could not solve a problem, he might curse and shout 'I should have sold them all, I hate these boilers.' But it was the boilers that brought the people to our home and gave my father his sense of purpose. I know that he loved them.

For every working boiler there was a bath, some metal, some plastic, even some later ones made of wood. For every bath there was a cabin. My father had tried two baths to a shack and even baths outside; I remember travellers bathing under the clear blue sky, smoke rising free from the boilers even as they showered, naked before the mountains. But in the end, despite one or two complaints from the hardened al fresco bathers, all of the baths and boilers had been put inside. Comfort in all seasons became my father's creed. Besides which I don't think he could bear to leave the boilers outside in the elements.

So they came to Guillaume's baths, travellers from all along the mountains as well as the kind of adventurers who still wandered on the plains as far as the ruined cities of Toulouse and St Sebastien. Some became regulars and some learned to love the area and the baths so much that they became locals. 'Witness' my father would say 'the power of hot water and a clean towel.'

The water was always hot and the towels were always clean. My father even made his own soap, but he would never refuse an offer of soap made elsewhere. His own particular favourite, the one he would always use at the end of the day, or after splitting firewood for hours, was a bright yellow lemon soap. I keep a tiny piece in a tin to remind me of him; the scent transports me in an instant, I can almost feel the bathhouse steam on my face.

It is hard to imagine I know, that all those people came there and that there was never any trouble, but whatever the colourful mix of wanderers and neighbours the truce around the baths held strong. My father did not demand payment as such for the use of his facilities; he accepted gifts or happily set people to work in the gardens. I don't remember that anyone ever complained. 'I am glad that they are gone' my father might say after some gang of men who were clearly bandits had gone on their way, but the truth was that they never gave him any problems and he valued the fuel they might bring for his chainsaw too much to turn them away. The truce worked because my father too showed a tolerance that made the little shack-filled valley a special place in uncertain times.

That was the place I grew up; it was an education in itself. It was there that I learned English and Spanish; it was there that I learned what other things than washing grown-ups would do in the warmth of the bathhouses, clothed only in the aromatic steam and free for a little while of the struggle to survive.

Working in and around the bathhouses was quite an experience for a young girl, but I always felt safe. There were times when men might ask my father if there were any services on offer other than hot water and towels, but bathhouse liaisons remained a matter strictly for romance not commerce. 'This is not that kind of bathhouse' my father would say.

It was whilst working one day that I found love for the first time. He had come into the valley with three donkeys, each laden with tobacco and luxuries brought over the mountains from Spain; he was lean and muscular, tanned to the colour of earth. I had not intended to walk in when he was in the bath, but after that there was little cause left for shyness between us.

The second time he came I washed the dirt of the trail from him and the third time we bathed together. I don't know whether my father had any idea of what was going on. At the end of the fourth visit he asked me to go with him. My heart pounding, I told him that I would ask my father.

'He is a good man' my father had said, 'you'll be safe with him. Come back and see me in the spring.'

We both came back in the spring and as often as we could after that. 'Visiting your father's place is one of the better things in life' Mano laughed, 'we'll go there whenever you like.'

Still, we had wandered a long way from my home in those first two years together. We had decided that we would settle down somewhere not too far from my father when a baby came along, somewhere peaceful and as safe as we could make it. 'I'll give up trading' Mano had said, 'it's time to have a house and a garden. Maybe even a bath.'

The baby took its time coming; I've met women who have told me that that's often the way these days. Still I was showing nicely when we came up over the col for the last time.

The valley was a stunning mosaic of autumn colours: yellows and golds, coppers and deep reds as red as blood. The cabins were toppled or burnt to ash and charcoal. The grass had grown too long around father's chicken van and the gardens had surrendered to the fast growing weeds of late summer.

We searched but found no bodies; no signs of survivors either. 'Perhaps Guillaume is not dead' Mano said as I fought to control my sobs, 'we'll ask around the hill country in the spring.' I nodded but held on to no great hope.

Mano did not want to stay in that place too long, 'We're going to higher ground' he said. We left as quickly as we could, Mano, myself and the three donkeys, the last of which carried a distinctive copper cylinder laid along its back, the word Wodan showing through the cord that kept it in place.

When we found somewhere to build our own cabin we installed the last of the Moroccan boilers and although Mano is no plumber, it worked as well from the first time we used it there as it had under my father's loving care in the little clearing below the col. I know that my father would be pleased that we have hot water when we need it and clean towels when I have the time to wash them.