Less happens in this episode than in any other, in that the only exploration will be a short walk upstairs, but it tells a very human story. The radiant good cheer of the first half of the vineyard serial continues for a while, but a sadness seeps in, all the more poignant because of its very human scale. They aren’t safe here. It isn’t going to be their family after all.

Even the opening tableau is a little troubled, a beautifully composed frame of the Vichots on their harvest-cart as a Tripod passes by. Lucie is scared of the monster, and her sisters give her the rag doll for comfort. But then, for a while, things are all right again. We see our first goats of the series. Henry and Kirsty go on trampling grapes and singing, while Beanpole and Helen work a traditional wooden wine-press. In their bedroom, seen for once in daylight, the trio is indecisive: take a chance, and winter out here? Mme Vichot hears them talk of the White Mountains, but once again surprises them, leading them up to a hitherto concealed attic room (note the tight eaves): it holds her precious miscellany of souvenirs, something which no Capped person should possess. Note the

  • model Air France Concorde,
  • the adding machine,
  • the very early-80s circuitboard with its ranks of RAM chips,
  • several model cars (one, a silver rally car with a number 7, looks oddly like James Bond’s Aston Martin),
  • an amplifier,
  • a nautilus shell,
  • a globe,
  • what might be a portable television,
  • a framed photograph of a woman (just possibly Edith Piaf?),
  • an oriental figurine,
  • a colourful Mickey Mouse,
  • a Dutch portrait which I ought to recognise and don’t, though it slightly resembles Franz Hals’s of Réné Descartes,
  • a lurid poster for the boxing bout on 17 June 1972, at the Stade Olympique Yves-du-Manoir, in Colombes, when French hero Jean Claude Bouttier tried for the world middleweight title, but was knocked out by the Argentinian Carlos Monzon,
  • a pushbutton telephone,
  • a gramophone,
  • a street sign for the Rue Jeanne d’Arc (going by its colour, the Paris street, not the one in Beirut), and, further along the mantelpiece,
  • a NASA portrait of the crew of an Apollo mission.

Will picks up a model Eiffel Tower and shows it to Henry because, of course, they recognise it: they were there just two months ago. Mme Vichot explains that she is a part-Vagrant, an intriguing idea not found anywhere in the books, and a nice shot shows a pensive Beanpole realising that she is, or could have been, a kindred spirit. Though not a subversive as such, Mme Vichot shows her collection to her girls in much the way that Jean Brodie has Italian posters on her Edinburgh schoolroom wall.

All of this is good character stuff, but are we getting anywhere with the plot? It turns out that we are, just a little: the travellers, having long lost their original map (it was taken by the Vagrants in Paris), are headed only for “the White Mountains”, and it is Mme Vichot who tells them they surely mean Mont Blanc, giving them a specific destination.

Back at the grape-treading, the work song has moved on to a nursery rhyme with a nonsense refrain — it’s because Lucie is also in the barrel; we heard her sing the same rhyme to herself early in episode 9 — and it’s sufficiently talked over that I can’t make out many of the words: we’re off to play in some sort of woods, dum de dum de dum. Everyone’s pitching in now, and we run into a flimsy subplot in which Will rebuffs one of the Vichot daughters who has taken a shine to him. The actual content of the scene is a little exchange between Henry and Kirsty, over in one corner of the barn where heavy rope hangs from a hook on a stone column, in which they establish that he has to leave, and that she can’t come with him. Jeannie, the older and wiser sister, shakes her head kindly; and Beanpole bangs the gong. They gather for a lunch of bread, cheese and salad, crowded onto cane chairs and dark wooden benches under a pergola which is superbly lit from above, with shadows filtering the supposed Mediterranean sunlight.

Then Daniel arrives, and negotiates with Vichot — not Vichot’s wife — to question the boys. Cut to a form of interrogation across the indoor table, an hour later. Note the vines seen on the hillside outside the kitchen door and window: one of the very few uses of studio backcloths in the show, which had been common practice in 60s and 70s television, but was by this point a last resort. Mme Vichot sits in as a sort of referee, and has served red wine in straight glasses in an evidently doomed attempt to turn this into a social occasion. Daniel is not one of the obligingly English-speaking locals, and insists that they have no papers. He must register them. Afterwards, it falls to Will to draw the obvious conclusion, which he does without any unkindness to Henry: “We’ve got to leave.” We see a touching inter-scene of Henry and Kirsty just looking at each other as Kirsty pours water from the pump, which the music does much to enlarge: really, the whole episode is summed up by this moment. It’s stronger for its wordlessness. Then we see Beanpole and Helen, up in the attic of secrets. Improbably, they speak in English, but then I suppose they are the two intellectuals of the house. Their time together is limited, they conclude. “Then let us lose none.” The sudden cut after they move towards each other is not what you could call racy, and maybe they’re just going to chastely repair a gramophone, but if there is any consummated tryst to be seen in series 1, this is it. Completing our survey of the love lives of the boys, we have Will once again spurning the flaxen-haired Sheila, with her apron and seashell necklace. He’s now physically healed and stomping crossly about the farmhouse in puttee socks and reddish shoes. Henry, washing dishes, looks on sideways in another rather good reaction-shot facilitated by the versatile studio plan.

Sheila was barely a character at all, so this scene exists only for the sake of an interaction between Will and his actual partner in the episode, Mme Vichot, which enlarges on the business of her half-Vagrancy. We’re up in the bedroom, and once again the lighting designer finds a new way to present the set, by showing twilight this time: a murky view of the farm through the window, an oil lamp being lit by matches. Mme Vichot finds Will looking at Guernichet’s locket, then gives him a motherly dressing-down about being kinder to Sheila. But it launches her into a long soliloquy remarkably like one of Jean Brodie’s classroom monologues, in this case about the love of individuals versus the love of mankind, which transitions into talk of the failure of her own Capping:

Sometimes I dream, Will. I dream of that time before the Tripods, when men and women were masters of their fates. And then there are regrets. I come, and I look at my treasures. Oh, that mankind could have made such things… My girls will be Capped, Jeannie is already. They will lose their sense of wonder. But there will be gains. Peace of mind - do not underestimate the gift of peace of mind. I shall never have that entirely.

Having said too much she slips nimbly away, to leave Will looking ashen. The scene is, to this episode, just what this episode is to the show as a whole - superfluous and advancing nothing by way of plot, or arguably the point of the whole thing.

In spite of the risk, our heroes do not slip away like thieves in the night, but stay for a proper farewell. We merge to two days later. The harvest is all done and the Vichots are throwing a ceilidh in the barn to celebrate, shot rather endearingly through roof-beams, past ladders and around barrels. Exactly how long we have spent chez Vichot is unclear — today a vineyard this size is typically harvested over a fortnight, but with everything done by hand, and given the deep attachment which has set in, four or five weeks seems more plausible. That would make today about 17 October. Food is laid out, and we get, incredibly, a dance number — a medley of patterns, accompanied by Vichot at his accordion again. He gradually accelerates through the fiddler’s classic “The Devil’s Dream”, c. 1800, an English (or some say American) number, popular with Scottish dance societies even today. Beanpole and Helen slip inconspicuously away, and we have a shot of the vineyard by night: they return with the wind-up 78 gramophone, tinny through its humungous horn, but working. Happily, the platter in question is another danceable number in spite of the awful acoustics and we start into a second barn dance. But this is cut short by the arrival of Daniel, in uniform as he invariably is, who comes in from the black night like a bat. As he issues the boys with travel permits, the party mood snuffs out like a candle. The girls have tears in their eyes. Mme Vichot raises a glass and recites a traditional Scots farewell:

All men must take their separate ways
And though these partings grieve us
The memory of your friendship stays
And this will never leave us.

We wish you joy, we wish you health
Pray in your hearts receive us
Good fellowship is more than wealth
And that will never leave us.

This sounds as if it just has to be by Robbie Burns, but if it is then I can’t find the reference: it may just be anonymous.

And so now it’s morning on the 18th, and the travellers find they’ve been made parting gifts of cold weather gear, which they’ll wear for the rest of the series: Beanpole in brown (with a knitted balaclava), Will in dark green, Henry in an Alpine hunter’s hat and a sheepskin jacket. Also a handmade chart of the trail to Mont Blanc, their final map of the series. “Come on,” Henry says, wanting to get it over with, and they leave the bedroom for the last time, down the stairs, where they’re much kissed and given food and wine to carry. The six-shot of the Vichot girls all in a line is rather poignant. “Remember us,” Mme Vichot says, her last words, and the music slowly swells to a gentle lament.

Even the camera can’t bear to part from this most beautiful of studio sets, and takes a lingering final pan around the table of the now-empty kitchen. And so outside, the travellers are finally on their way again, by Vichot’s horse and cart: but it’s cliff-hanger time, and through the trees we see the concealed figure of Daniel, on his horse, watching them.

Next: Aside — Where Are We Going? ● Prev: Aside — Fair Stood the Farmhouse Kitchen