The Day After

Next day I went for a walk with the dogs and met a lady in the village, she turned out to be the mother of Jean-Marc who we met last night. I was a good hour talking to her or should I say she talked and I listened! Very interesting as she has lived here all her life and knows such a lot about our part of the village. Castandet is split into the areas, our area which is known as Quartier Perron, the main area with the mairie and the village hall which is Rondeboeuf and the area of the church and the school known as Quartier de l'eglise. Mme Gourdon told me that at one time there were almost 500 inhabitants in Perron and 3 bistros, now there are about 50 inhabitants. Until the 1950s it was very rural and a system near to feudalism existed with the land being owned by 3 families and the people who worked the land having to give a tenth of their harvest to the owners of the land. A lot of the land was down to vines as we are in the area known as Bas Armagnac famous, of course, for its production on Armagnac. Unfortunately this was not profitable as the Armagnac has to be stored for a minimum of ten years. Most of the vines were uprooted and the land is now mainly down to maize which feeds the free range ducks and chickens or goes to the vegetable canning factory in nearby Grenade. Many of the villages in the area are twinned with villages in Alsace. At the beginning of the war the whole populations of villages fled their homes and became refugees in this area. Castandet is twinned with Hombourg and the ties between the villages are still strong. There is an exchage of villagers every 2 years and this year it is the turn of the Alsaciennes to visit here. The highlight of their stay here is a choucroute evening in the village hall, choucroute being an Alsacienne dish of frankfurter style sausage and sauerkraut. The Alsaciennes have bought the old presbytery in the village, half of which is rented out and the other half available for anyone from Hombourg who wants to stay here. They also contributed the major amount for the large extension to the village hall. As Mme Gourdon said "They have the money, we have the sun!" I look forward to meeting her again and finding out more about the history of the village.