A Vineyard in the Dordogne - How an English Family Made Their Dream of Wine, Good Food and Sunshine Come True. Jeremy Josephs
off his clothes, stretched his slim six-foot frame, and prepared to relax mind and body alike. As he luxuriated in his bathtub he could see that there were few exit routes available to him. On the one hand he appeared to be entirely isolated – the only member of either Ryman family manifestly malcontent with his lot. Yet at the same time he was far from alone, for any decision he might wish to take was inextricably bound up with Desmond’s intentions and vision of the future. There was clearly only one road to salvation, Nick concluded, pulling the plug from his bath, and that was for an outside purchaser suddenly to present himself, unexpected and unannounced, and offer a hugely inflated sum for the business which, by common consent, it would be sheer folly to refuse. Pure fantasy, of course, for, despite its success, there was no queue of prospective purchasers jostling with one another to acquire the stationery empire. Not that this meant that Nick’s earlier dreams had been extinguished. He recalls his thoughts, as he contemplated the London weather in the autumn of 1968.
‘Outside the sky is grey and bleak. A brief flash of Indian summer came and went a week or so ago. Today it can’t make up its mind whether to rain or not and I can’t make up my mind whether I need to turn the central heating on. “Why don’t I go and live where it is warm?” I say to myself. “Why don’t I go and live in the country, where life is quieter, where one can get away from sweating humanity? Why indeed don’t I go and live in France? Surely life would be somehow more exotic, more colourful, more romantic? After all they take food and wine seriously, the French. And if I owned my own vineyard and grew a few vegetables, I’d be more or less self-sufficient before I began.”’
But so far the nearest Nick had ever got to making this vision become a reality was in building up his interest in wine. As the years went by he managed to establish a first-class collection. He was only too well aware though that a cellar in Moor Park, however well stocked, was a far cry from owning a vineyard in the Médoc or Provence.
His son Hugh, however, was more than happy with what his father had to offer. He would sometimes go down to the cellar merely to inhale the smell of the wooden cases and bottles of wine lying there gathering dust. And whenever his father organized a dinner or luncheon, it was only a matter of time before young Hugh would appear on the scene, politely asking for the cork and bottle, whose label he would carefully soak off and add to his considerable collection.
Sometimes, however, he would show less respect for his father’s liquid treasures, quietly slipping down to the cellar with his sister Corinne as his partner in crime. They knew exactly what they were heading for – the bottles of champagne. Their hearts pounding for fear of being caught, they would play out the scene again and again, allowing themselves just enough time to take one or two sips before effecting a hasty escape. But then drinking had never been the primary purpose of their clandestine visits. Their aim was altogether more straightforward: having given the bottle of champagne a most vigorous shaking, they would risk everything to see how far they could get its cork to fly through the air, driven on by the lure of records crying out to be broken.
Hugh’s antics might not have given the impression of a shy and sensitive boy, singularly ill at ease with his father. Yet Hugh was always treated strictly and was often at the receiving end of Nick’s sharp tongue. He came to hear one particular message so many times that it took on the air of an all too familiar refrain. ‘What you need, my boy, is two years in the army.’
However, Hugh was not yet old enough for national service, which had, in any case, as his father knew full well, long since been abolished. Nick turned his attentions to boarding school, the time honoured means to a rigorous education favoured by the English middle classes. Not that Nick had himself been sent away from home as a child. Nor did he apparently consider it as an option for either of his daughters.
In some respects whether or not Nick was happy with what he had achieved was irrelevant, for his business now seemed to possess an unstoppable momentum of its own. Together the brothers had succeeded in transforming eleven retail units into no fewer than eighty-four. Thanks to their efforts and enterprise the firm had become the biggest commercial stationers in the land. Nick thus had every reason to remain confident that sooner or later these rather flattering figures would indeed arouse the interest of an outside buyer, setting him free at last.
It was Spain, though, not France, which for Nick had become synonymous with freedom, at least for a few weeks of the year. However, holidaying on the Costa Brava during the summer of 1969, Anne Ryman walked into the family’s farmhouse kitchen one morning to prepare lunch, only to find her husband collapsed on the floor and unconscious. Nick had been in a rather spectacular waterskiing accident the previous day, but since he had managed to clamber back on to the speedboat, no one had given the incident any more thought. Anne, however, struggling to remain calm and in control, had immediately summoned assistance and driven Nick to the local clinic, from where a specialist was contacted.
The doctor wasted little time in deciding on the appropriate course of action. ‘We are going to have to operate straight away,’ he declared. ‘It’s imperative that we relieve the pressure on the brain.’ And to drive his point home to Anne he sketched out a picture of her husband’s head on an adjacent wall. He repeated that the problem had to be tackled by surgery as a matter of the utmost urgency.
‘No, you’re not going to do that. Absolutely not,’ Anne Ryman replied.
‘You do realize then, I hope,’ the doctor continued, ‘that you are taking your husband’s life in your own hands.’
But Anne was adamant, refusing to be hurried into agreeing to an extremely delicate exploratory operation. On the contrary, she insisted, the most satisfactory solution was for her husband to be flown back to England. She hurried off to find a telephone in order to contact Desmond at the firm’s headquarters in London. Within an hour he had organized everything.
‘I hired a jet from Luton airport and managed to get one of the leading brain specialists from St Thomas’ Hospital to agree to come out on the plane with us, together with Nick’s GP. When we got out there we met this little chap who said that he wanted to drill a hole in Nick’s head in order to have a look. I told him that we weren’t going to have anything like that happen in Spain.’
The local specialist had no intention of arguing with the growing Ryman entourage now at his hospital. He knew perfectly well what was going to happen if his advice was not acted upon within a matter of hours. And with that in mind, he sent for a priest, who, on being advised of Nick’s critical condition, proceeded to administer the last rites.
For Nick, still in a coma as his plane climbed into the skies above Spain, the prognosis was very grim indeed. The fight was on for his life – not his dreams.
IT WAS A spring to remember. At the Nanterre campus on the outskirts of Paris students had been protesting both about the shortcomings of the educational system and the practices of the international capitalist order, whose fundamental immorality seemed to be all too clearly illustrated by American policy in Vietnam. A combination of police brutality and ineptitude on the part of the University of Paris authorities ensured that a normally marginal group of Trotskyists, anarchists and Maoists were able to successfully stir up public discontent. During the afternoon of Friday, 10 May 1968 huge crowds began to assemble in the capital. The CRS (Compagnie Républicaine de Sécurité), the French riot police, were likewise out in force. As they donned protective clothing and braced themselves for action, students in the Latin Quarter’s fifth arrondissement were urgently erecting the first barricade in the rue Le Goff. The stand-off did not last long, with paving stones soon being ripped up and cars turned over as violent confrontations erupted and continued throughout the early part of the night.
By the following morning the world’s most beautiful city more closely resembled a battleground. Three hundred and sixty-seven people had been wounded, four hundred and sixty students arrested for riotous behaviour and one hundred and