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Visitors to La Borne, a tiny pottery village in the department of the Cher, can often be heard exclaiming, ‘Quelle vie dure et difficile!’ when they see how primitive and uncomfortable some of the potteries are. One or two of them still have beaten earth floors and only cold water. How much more ‘hard and difficult’ life must have been for the ouvrier potters of past centuries, those poorly paid throwers and kiln men. The 19th Century was an especially productive period in the potteries of La Borne with almost every man, as well as many women, employed to make an immense range of articles, from drainpipes, bricks and tiles to wine cups, ink wells and tableware. Hours were long and they were poorly paid but they had a great capacity for enjoyment and for the pleasures of feast days.

   The great day of La Fête de Saint Jean - or la jouanée - began at dawn on 24th June for the girls and women of the village - some of them herbalists or guérisseuses (healers) - when they went out to search the hedges and hayfields for the five flowers which made up a bouquet called les cinq herbes de la Saint Jean or sometimes le chasse-diable. In order to ‘chase away the devil’, the flowers and leaves were gathered while the dew was still lying and they had to be cut with a wooden-bladed knife to preserve their precious qualities. The women picked mugwort, vervain, hawkweed, perforate St John’s wort and the leaves of the walnut tree. Some old books tell us that there could be as many as 25 plant species under the Saint Jean heading but St John’s wort was the most valuable: it helps scars to form and brings down inflammation, as well as being an astringent and anti-depressant.

   Mass was held in the morning and it was on this special day that men and women available for work were inspected and chosen by employers to help in the fields, the vineyards and the potteries. Those taken on would have no written contracts but their word and their handshakes would be respected. Following the hiring, the men were free to make the rounds of the many bistros and cafés. At one time there were 16 places in La Borne where a drink could be bought.

   Each patron potier invited his employees to a splendid meal, prepared by the women of his family. By midday the feast was ready. Madame la patronne would be wearing earrings and an exquisite embroidered cap instead of the cotton piqué bonnet she wore on work days. The ouvriers and their wives and children were invited to sit at long tables set outside.

   Two typical Berrichon dishes were served, pâté de viande (cold meat pie) and pâté Berrichon (pastry filled with potato and onion); lapin au sang (rabbit cooked in its own blood); roast chicken and tête de veau (calf’s head). Large salad bowls were brought out filled with vanilla cream, strawberries in wine and île flottante: fluffy heaps of meringue floating on creamy custard, a dessert still found on the menu at most French family restaurants today. And of course there was wine and more wine...

   At four or five o’clock it was time to walk - or stagger - up to La Borne d’en Haut, the higher part of the village, to play skittles and another special game called pièce piquée. A spike was driven into a ware board (used in the workshops for carrying pots); silver coins, kept specially for the day, were thrown as close as possible to the spike from a few metres away and the winner would keep the coins.

   When night fell a great fire was lit, the custom since pagan times, and the dancing could begin. As the flames leapt higher, the couples grew merrier, waltzing, or dancing the charming Bourrée Berrichonne, wearing their clogs and laughing as they wove through the shadows.

   At midnight, the village people linked hands and danced around the huge bonfire and finally, at the end of the fête, each family would take home a scoop of the remaining braises - embers from the fire for their own hearth which were thought to save them from harm for the rest of the year.

   The day after the fête most of the potters were incapable of working and the 25th was another jour férié (public holiday). The stoneware chopines and pichers would be filled with wine again and the restant (left-over food) eaten. Then, after their two days of freedom, as the potters’ song tells us, ‘faut voir comme on travail.’ They knew very well that if they were to keep their jobs and earn their meagre pay, they must ‘show how well they could work’ for their 2 or 3 francs a day.

   Those ‘hard and difficult times’ are so far in the past that hardly anyone remembers them and the patron potiers have had their day. My elderly neighbour gives a faintly regretful sigh for the camaraderie of the lavoir (the communal covered area, rather like a shallow pond where the public went to do their laundry) when the women knelt at the water’s edge to beat and wring the heavy clothes, but, she tells me, she prefers her washing machine.

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Everything was made from the local stoneware clay, thrown with water from La Borne’s twenty wells and springs, and then fired for days in great kilns using wood from the immense forests that still surround the village. The rich, inexhaustible supplies of these essential elements were used by the Celtic Bituriges people 500 years BC. Later the Romans drove them out and built their town of Avaricum, today called Bourges, our department’s capital. The first traces of potteries as we know them were recorded in 1250 and enchanting examples from every period since then are on show in Bourges at the Musée du Berry.

   I regularly visit La Borne’s own pottery museum, housed in the village’s former chapel, to admire the handsome reproduction work that was made here for eight centuries. The decline began when the First World War took the best workers away to fight and then new, unbreakable enamelled-ware was introduced, replacing many beautiful useful items. On display is a lunch container with a graceful curved carrying handle and a lid that becomes a plate. There are bottles for oil and wine and eau de vie, a powerful alcohol distilled from fruits; roof decorations, called épis de faîtage, in the form of cockerels and monkeys and men; writing stands with amusing finely-detailed human figures; and containers of every size for salting and storing food.

   My favourite piece is an enormous vessel for washing clothes which is not only proof of the skill and strength of 18th Century potters but a clue to the ingenuity brought to everyday life. A drawing shows how water was heated and transferred to the cuveau de lessive, a sturdy stoneware tub a metre wide. The soapy clothes were beaten and then wrung out before being taken by wheelbarrow to be scrubbed and rinsed in the lavoir.

   I marvel at the energy of the village women who had to trundle their barrows down the forest’s sloping paths - although my 80 year old neighbour remembers that her husband would come to help push the wooden barrow back home.

   Washing, cooking and bearing children took up most of the women’s lives but many of them also worked in the potteries as anseuses whose job was to make and apply handles, work that was especially cold and uncomfortable in winter.

   The men threw large pieces standing astride a wood-topped wheel which they set in motion with a long stick; others carried boards of the finished work to the drying sheds and then the kiln rooms. There were specialist packers who stacked the pots so that they would catch the heat and flames to best advantage; kiln firers were employed to feed wood at correct intervals into the kiln; and forestiers supplied the best and most suitable wood for each stage of firing. Firing was exhausting work, shared in relays for several days. And it could be dangerous - it was not unknown for a man (possibly the worse for drink) to fall into the entrance to the kiln and be lost in the flames.

   La Borne has always had its own range of shapes and styles of pottery which are still identifiable today: pitchers and bottles and puzzle pots which have become collectors’ items. What would the ouvriers in the Talbot, Panariou and Bedu workshops have thought, had they known that one of their wine jugs would be so valuable now and that some of their special commissioned pieces are museum
treasures?

   Unlike the self-employed studio potters living in La Borne today, they worked, without holidays or sick-pay, in unheated open ateliers. They kept themselves going with thoughts of the nearby bistros. As they drank their cheap red wine after the long day’s work, and warmed themselves with tiny glasses of goutte (the familiar name for distilled alcohol), they would sing their own special chanson du potier :

Je suis potier de mon état                          I am a potter by trade
et j’habite La Borne.                                   and I live in La Borne.
Je sais tourner un pot, un plat,                   I can throw a pot, or a plate,
et au besoin je l’orne.                                 and if necessary, I decorate it.

J’en fais des grands et des petits                I make big and little ones
de toutes les hauteurs,                               of any height,
de la chopine à la fercelle,                           from a pitcher to a cheese drainer,
tous de la même couleur.                            and all the same colour.

Potier, j’aime ma femme et mes enfants,   I’m a potter. I love my wife and my 
                                                                                                               children.
J’les nourris, j’les élève.                             I feed them and I bring them up.
Plus tard, quand ils seront grands,            Later, when they’re grown,
il leur faudra de la sève.                            they’ll need to be strong.

It comes as no surprise that these hard-working people looked forward to saints’ days and holidays and entered enthusiastically into the spirit of their special fêtes. The best feast day was the 24th June, the longest day of the year and celebrated for other reasons besides the summer solstice. Since pre-Christian times, country people worshipped the sun and the light it brings; they made offerings to their fertility gods hoping that they would bless their crops and animals.

   La Borne is no longer a village of church-goers, although the chapel, now le Musée de La Borne, still has its altar and some religious pottery pieces, including the Stations of the Cross and several touchingly simple holy water stoups in the form of angels. Once long ago, Saint John the Baptist was chosen as the patron saint of potters, partly because his saint’s day fell conveniently on 24th June but for also for another, more chilling reason. When Herodias wanted Saint John killed, his head was brought to her on a platter. A potters’ legend says that the platter was made by the best potter in Jerusalem.

   A special piece of work, made by potters establishing their studio workshops after the war, was blessed at a ceremony in the chapel in 1945. A sculpted head of the saint, lying on a large thrown dish, represents John the Baptist. He looks surprisingly serene, as though he had fallen so soundly asleep that he hadn’t noticed the swordsman. His thick curls are lovingly represented and he is almost smiling.

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La Borne is still France’s oldest and most important pottery village with 25 ateliers and more than 60 potters belonging to its ceramics association. The Bornois, like their predecessors, love to feast and enjoy themselves. For weeks before the fête, contributions of wood and fagots are piled in the open meeting place in front of the Ateliers Talbot, old workshops which an association, formed 20 years ago, rescued from collapse. In 1995, the Association des Ateliers Talbot also took on the responsibility for the St Jean celebrations. Their first bonfire was neatly topped, not with the crown of wild flowers of our ancestors, but with wooden chairs from the disused chapel!

   By 8 o’clock long tables and benches have been set up in the clearing, near - but not too close to - the huge unlit bonfire. The decorated buvette with beer and wine for sale is in place with several helpers already sampling the wine and polishing the glasses. A couple of enthusiasts are bringing the barbecue coals alive.

   Blue dusk makes everything beautiful. There are lamps hanging in the trees and tea candles dotted along the tables. A violin tunes up under the big pine tree, echoed by other members of the band of young musicians who play at local events like this one.

   No one can resist the merry music; couples dance the valse musette, which everyone seems to know, with inventions of their own in the form of joyful hopping and twirling. The rest of us are entertained while we eat our picnics or stand in line by the barbecue waiting for our sizzling suppers.

   Prosper, the village’s historian who records and photographs our celebrations, loves his part in keeping Berrichon traditions alive. With his splendid beard and his strange antique clothing he is reminder of a time here when saints’ days and seasons were loved and respected. When night falls and stars are tangled in the branches of the enormous pine tree which leans over the clearing, Prosper lights the lowest layer of the bonfire. Suddenly something changes in the atmosphere: the children seem especially enchanted by the fierce flames and run in and out of the leaping shadows, excited by the bursts of golden sparks rushing skywards as logs and branches collapse and settle. In silhouette against the enormous bonfire, two flame jugglers with their shining naked torsos look wildly pagan.

   Most people stay for the circle dance, even if the older ones remain only to watch the others join hands and move in the oldest and simplest dance of all. This is the crowning moment of the evening after which it is time to take small children home to their beds.

   When only the smouldering embers remain, young couples jump together across the braise and make a wish that their romance will continue. Some of the potters take small heaps of embers in metal buckets to place in their kilns, a tradition thought to bring good firings through the following year.

   Everything we do to celebrate this longest day, whether we are aware of it or not, is a dedication to the coming year: that our lives may be fulfilled, our crops plentiful and our good health assured. Saint Jean himself is rarely remembered as we feast and dance but the tradition of La Fête de Saint Jean is celebrated in almost every village and town in France.