I soon discovered that the days followed a very simple routine and I loved that after the uncertainty of life at home with Ted. Madame Lesert and Philippe were always up before it was light, because that was when the pickers came chattering down the track to the fields. Once the sun had heated up and the jasmine’s unearthly perfume began to fade, they gathered at rough tables under a sun awning. Philippe and Madame weighed each picker’s sack and wrote the figures down in a notebook. Afterwards Philippe carried out jugs of coffee and unmarked bottles of red wine, and Madame and I brought baskets of bread and tomatoes and cheese. I listened to the incomprehensible chatter and the laughter that went with it as the women ate and drank. I used to wonder how such brown, gnarled fingers could be so dextrous and quick with the tiny stars of flowers. The women who had babies with them unhooked their aprons and calmly breast-fed in the shelter of a folded shawl.

After the pickers had streamed away again down the track, Philippe loaded the morning’s harvest into a little grey three-wheeled truck and drove the sacks away to the perfume house up in Grasse. While Madame frowned over her figures and accounts, I cleared the remains of the pickers’ breakfast and attended to the chores she had shown me how to do. I swept the stone floors and sprinkled them with water to keep the dust down, and washed and dried dishes. I fed the hens and brought in the eggs, and watered the herb garden. None of this felt remotely like work, here in this sun-washed, cheerful place. I felt as though I had walked into a book, one that I might have found in the school library and sighed over for a life that was so picturesquely different from my own.

Later in the day there was cooking. I watched Madame making bread and chopping vegetables for soup, and putting a chicken in a pot to cook slowly for the evening meal. She taught me how to knead bread dough, how to slice onions with my fingertips folded out of the way of the sharp blade, how many handfuls of rice and dried pasta would make enough for our dinner, and which herbs to pick to flavour which dishes. I watched and listened, greedy for her company and approval as much as for her delicious food. She noticed my interest and responded by teaching me new tricks; under her supervision I made a thick vinaigrette dressing that glossed the salad leaves, an omelette from our own eggs that puffed golden on the outside and melted within.