Mountain Goats

Today I was tasked with reviewing the subtitles for the 2005 film version of Johanna Spryi’s classic children’s tale Heidi. It filled me with nostalgia for the 1978 German-made but British-dubbed TV series that I was addicted to as a child. Oh, grumpy Grandfather with his goat’s cheeses and permanently lit pipe! Oh, poor, blind Grandmamma who so longed for soft, white bread rolls from the city! Oh, evil Fräulein Rottenmeier who so loathed Heidi’s country bumpkin ways and was terrified of kittens! But this new film did little more than remind me how much more I’d enjoyed the original. It told the tale but didn’t make much effort to engage the viewer, and even writing in a narrow-escape-from-death ravine escapade for Heidi towards the end didn’t help. What was rather nice was that it had been filmed largely in Slovenia, with the capital Llubljana taking on the role of bygone-era Frankfurt. Dave and I had the great fortune to spend a week in Slovenia at the end of June and a lovelier, friendlier, cleaner and more beautiful or topographically varied country I think you would be hard-pushed to find on this earth. We stayed in a rustic chalet-style hotel high above glacial Lake Bohinj, overlooking the dizzying Julian Alps soaring ruggedly to the highest peak of Mount Triglav, and spent our days hiking through flower-dotted Alpine meadows to cooling waterfalls or exploring farmland valleys on horseback. It was a blissful, enervating time.

I made my own attempt to be Heidi when I was but 19 years old, when I went to work on a Swiss farm for a couple of months during a gap year. I’d had romantic notions of skipping through grassy pastures with Peter the Goatherd, twirling around like Julie Andrews to the melodies of calmly clanking cowbells, whilst picking flowers and sighing over the views. Instead I ended up stuck indoors, where every Swiss woman apparently belongs (at that time they had only got the vote in certain cantons less than a decade before), vacuuming radiators, scrubbing sinks and floors, peeling potatoes and trying to get a MacGyver-addicted three-year-old boy to stop kicking me. Not a Peter the Goatherd in sight, just a portly cigar-smoking farmer and the occasional visit from soldiers at a nearby army base whom the farm supplied with potatoes and sugar beet. The cows were kept locked up in a barn, bell-free, and the only flowers I picked were a kilo of dandelion petals (which is several fields’ worth) to make jam. The countryside around was flatter than your average lowland country and so the farmyard views were largely of the pig shed next door or the gigantic manure heap on the doorstep. On a clear day, of which there were approximately four during my stay, you could just about make out the snow-capped summit of Mont Blanc shimmering in the haze, and however small Switzerland may be, it felt like it was a million miles away. It can’t have been much fun for the family who had employed me either - as an au pair I was quite spectacularly awful. I had never really spent much time away from home before and therefore (being a thoroughly unhelpful teenager) never had to do much cooking or cleaning. I’d turned up simply wanting to improve my French, whereas every previous jeune fille they’d taken on had been preparing for an apprenticeship à ménage, learning how to keep an orderly, perfect Swiss home. My French skills were found to be sorely lacking in the right vocabulary – after two years of A Levels spent discussing Racine and the greenhouse effect I suddenly needed to find the words for “broom”, “dishcloth” and “Put that knife down, you stupid fucking little shit or there’ll be no MacGyver for you tonight.” The farmer, Pierre, spoke French that was more grammatically incorrect than mine – every noun was masculine in gender and he had a thick Vaud canton accent. He did however like to take me out on Saturday nights to yodelling and Alpine horn concerts so I did get something of an authentic Swiss experience from time to time. Pierre suddenly dropped dead of a heart attack from his tractor while harvesting his potato crop in 1997, but I still swap Christmas cards with Genevieve, his wife, who now has an ever-expanding crew of grandchildren from her three grown-up daughters. Cédric, the little boy, is now, appropriately enough, training to be a butcher. I’ve even met up with Genevieve in London and been back to the farm once during an interrailing trip not long after Pierre died.

But despite my own ill-fated mission to Switzerland, one thing Heidi has left me with is the notion of curative mountain air. After seeing wheelchair-bound Clara learn to walk after a sojourn in Grandfather’s chalet high up in the alps, I have this resolute belief that a mountainous atmosphere is a cure-all for any ill. I have been lucky to have grown up in a family that hails from the Lake District and I spent nearly all my childhood holidays there. Having lived in London for six years now, whenever I go up to Grasmere to visit my staggeringly determined, impossibly resilient, non-stop cake-baking and simply amazing 91-year-old grandmother, I get knocked over sideways by the strength of the air. My body goes into shock at being given so much oxygen in one go and I fall into a stupor in front of the crackling coal fire every evening from which it is virtually impossible to awake the following morning.

Suddenly now I find I want more of this elixir-laden air. I don’t want to die young like Mum did, and whilst you cannot predict the unpredictable, I want to do everything possible to fill my body with goodness and health, from home-baked bread and organic home-grown vegetables to lots and lots of hill-climbing amidst breathtaking scenery. The time has come when I need to stop breathing in this choking, traffic-laden, filthy London smog and find my own little garden in the country. The Lake District is probably too much of an opposite extreme since I probably would spend 85% of my time fast asleep and put on 20 stone in three months with Nanna’s almond slice just so close by. But where our next home will be is now a relevant and pressing issue for us, and there has to be a happy medium. Perhaps we should start learning Slovenian. But wherever we go, we will have to take our beloved Crouch End with us.