The amount of work that needed organising threatened to overwhelm her a few times, there was so much. Her to-do list was endless: organise five or six local women to clean the cabins, the café and the manager’s house; a team of men to pressure-wash the shower and toilet blocks before painting. Alain took over the job of organising the outdoor teams of workers, leaving Belinda to deal with the teams working inside. In addition, there was the website to bring up to date, pods for the glamping area to source, lots of new equipment to order, not to mention finding staff for the season.

A routine established itself over the course of that week and the days continued to fly by. Every morning, she left the auberge just before eight o’clock, stopped in the village for a couple of croissants and a salad baguette for her lunch. Fern had lent her a cafetière and she’d stocked up on ground coffee from the village shop, instant coffee being one of her personal bêtes noires. By the time Alain strolled in at about ten past eight the coffee was ready. Over a quick coffee and croissant, they caught each other up on how things were progressing and what their individual plans were for the day. At midday Alain disappeared for lunch, leaving Belinda to eat her baguette and deal with her emails. The afternoons followed a similar pattern with them both concentrating on their allotted tasks. Belinda shut down her laptop around four thirty most days, said goodbye to Alain and made her way back to the auberge.

Although there was so much to do, the campsite was definitely beginning to respond to all of the noisy cutting down, pruning back and mowing work that had happened over the last few days.

One lunchtime after everyone including Alain had disappeared for an hour or two, Belinda decided to eat outside in the sunshine. The only noise she heard as she made her way along the path towards the river was the tweeting of various birds. Belinda recognised the call of a blackbird, pigeons cooing away in the tall pines and a chaffinch singing perched amongst the burgeoning branches of an oak tree before hearing a noise that stopped her in her tracks. The whrrr-tapping sound of a nearby woodpecker. A sound she hadn’t heard in years. A sound that took her right back to her childhood home, where it had been a noise that was taken for granted in the background of life.