La Noiraude. A funny word not to say “black”. This is the title of his second novel. It is also the name of its heroine. A heroine who is only a child and who will carve out a path for herself, she who was born just after the Second World War. A very small path, should we say, in a minefield covered with brambles. But clearing a bramble to see a piece of blue sky and a 30 cm horizon was enough to move forward throughout his childhood, throughout his adolescence.
A duty of memory for women
She was not Causette in the Teynardier family but with her sisters, everything was strangely similar. A miserable family, a beggarly father, a real beggar father-in-law too. Nothing that makes you dream. This was also what Nadine Bellard wanted to describe in her novel: “We don’t remember that in the 1950s, life was difficult. Years without resources. » Even worse. She writes in her 200-page novel: “In 1960, the woman was always at fault when she left the marital home. The hell she experiences and which is due to the man’s attitude is not taken into account. It’s the “good” era of patriarchy where the man is always right,” she quips.
This is a photo from 1939 which illustrates the cover of Nadine Bellard’s book where we can see a class of students and her uncle in a tie.
© (Photo NR)
“This novel is fiction”, she continues, but not that much. She does not hide having experienced certain things and if she has not experienced everything that is told, she has seen them next to her. This was the daily life of some students in the classes she attended in Périgord.
Noiraude’s father is an alcoholic and works as a mason. He drinks his salary and has children like changing shirts. A life where some men give no affection: “He never looked at his children.” Even more so the dark one who was a child of a slightly darker color than the others and who was not his. But since he didn’t look at his children, he didn’t know anything…
The author, who lived for eleven years in Lizeray in an old farm, had previously been a French and history-geography teacher and was used to taking notes.
Arriving in Indre, she was a volunteer with Secours catholique for years and was particularly in charge of the Côté coeur boutique, on the clothing side, located in Issoudun.
A work written in four months
In 2017, she chose to leave France with her husband, Christian, who is also responsible for the Issoudun-Reuilly-Vatan sector within the same association: “Since then, we have lived in Portugal because I had family ties. My health required sunshine and that’s when I started writing. This is my second novel and I have two more waiting to be published. »
Written in four months, what she considers “a psychological novel” has the merit of recalling life in the countryside in these post-war years, these years of boarding school run by religious people and where the schoolchildren must have struggled to flourish, let us put it in an understatement.
“Women were not allowed to have a job without their husband’s permission. It was a daily struggle. There is a duty of memory for women. At that time, there was no contraception, no abortion…”
Blackness fights with its weapons which are above all a few encounters and the culture that it was able to acquire at school. It is an iron will in a bronze universe that can give rise to hope. The dark one is this little girl.
“La Noiraude” by Nadine Bellard, Éditions du Lys bleu. €20.80.
