The drive from Basel to Gryon is about three hours. We didn’t get lost once, well, except when we were trying to get out of Basel, but that doesn’t count.

 The roads and towns are so well sign posted in Switzerland that it’s difficult even for navigators like me to get lost. The fact that Pete had already been to Switzerland several times and stayed at the chalet we were heading to, did, of course help.

 

The valley at the base of the mountain, which we would be climbing to reach the chalet, was wide and flat with huge power lines running down the middle of it. It was also dotted with several tall chimneys, white smoke puffing out the top of them into the cold air, oil refineries. Their petrol fed to them by train. On our right we could see the Alps of France, straight ahead the famous La Dents de Midi (the broken teeth range) and on the left the Swiss alps where we would be spending Christmas.

 

 

 

We stopped at a petrol station before we started the climb up the mountain. Our new car didn’t have snow tyres on yet, so chains were essential. The kids, who were squashed into the back of the car with two of our suitcases, started up a chant of ‘Let us out! Let us out!’ as if they were prisoners locked in some long forgotten dark cell. Our new car had nowhere near as much room as the box van we’d driven around Italy. All the same though we didn’t let them out, we were nearly there. There was no point in un buckling, treading on someone’s finger, accidentally kicking someone else in the head and then buckling up again when we were so close. They were easily convinced by a packet of chips to stay put while Pete bought chains.

 

With the chains neatly squeezed into the back of the car we started our climb up the mountain. Pete had been talking a lot about the chalet, telling us what it was like, saying we were going to love it. He’d told me it was like something you’d find in a storybook.

 

As we started on the bends that were going to take us to the top of the mountain Jack called out from the back seat where he couldn’t even wiggle his big toe.

 

‘You’d better be right Dad?’

 

‘What do you mean?’ Pete said.

 

‘The chalet, better be good, I can’t breathe back here and somebody just farted.’

 

We saw the first evidence of fresh snow half way up. Snow covered pine trees, grass that was no longer there but covered in blankets of white, snow on rooftops and iceless hanging from gutters. It looked like we were driving on the top of a Christmas cake. The kids were the quietest they’d been since we left Basel, a silent wow coming from the back seat, as they stared out the window not quite believing.

 

As we climbed higher the road got narrower and steeper, the bends sharper. The valley we’d driven through below now looked more like something out of a toy train set. My eyes though were glued to the road in front of us searching for ice. There was a fine white dust sprinkled like icing sugar all over all over the road. I held the bar above my head and every few minutes asked Pete if we should put chains on and every time got the same answer, ‘no, we’re fine.’

 

When we got to Gryon, Pete’s good memory for where we were going stopped. We drove up and down the road that he knew the chalet was on twice, but he couldn’t figure out which one it was. The second time we decided we’d have to call Christine, Pete’s cousin for instructions, the only problem was that she didn’t speak English, and our French dictionaries were tucked away tight in the bottom of our bags. We decided that the best thing would be to go to the Post office. Post Office couldn’t be that different in French could it?

 

First things first though, we had to turn the car around. There was ankle deep snow covering the edge of the road.

 

‘Time for chains now?’ I asked, my fear of sliding on the road worse than my fear of being called a nag.

 

‘No, we’ll be fine.’

 

And we would have been except a car came up the narrow road towards us. We had to back onto a snow covered driveway with just the slightest of slopes to get out of its way.

 

The car went past the driver in the front of the car waving his thanks,

 

‘Yeah, no worries mate,’ Pete said as he put his foot on the accelerator. The tyres spun but the car didn’t move, he put his foot down again but nothing accept maybe a slight sideways movement.

 

‘Great.’ Pete turned and looked at me. ‘You’re going to have to push. Jack and Noah you help too.’

 

The driveway we’d backed onto was actually made out of wood; the wood was covered with ice. At the bottom of the very short driveway was a wooden garage built into the hill. So it was all looking good, underneath our terrible traction of snow we had worse traction and then behind us there was a garage ready for us to slam into.

 

Pete wound down his window, ‘OK, when I say push, push.’

 

He revved the car and then called out, ‘Push!’

 

Jack and Noah were at the side of the car so they could jump out of the way easily if they had to, leaving only me in the middle to be squashed. They pushed until their little faces went red. I pushed too finding grip somewhere underneath the snow for my sneakers that had holes in the bottom of them. The engine stopped revving and the red light of the break lights shone in our face.

 

Pete stuck his head out the window, ‘We’ll try again except this time I’m going to turn the wheels to the right so we start to go downhill,’ he neglected to mention the fact that we would have to up over a slight rise first, ‘so Sarah you move more over to Jack’s side, Noah you stay where you are.’

 

‘Chains?’ I asked in a hopeful prayer type of way.

 

‘Impossible to get them on here. OK ready, here we go.’

 

Pete’s foot went back down on the accelerator and we all started pushing again, our fingers starting to feel like they were glued to the car. The wheels spun obediently underneath the car searching for something that might let them move forward. I pushed and pushed convinced that at any moment someone was going to come along who had lived in the snow all their lives and gives us the strangest look, but then the weight in front of my hands eased and then disappeared all together.

Jack and Noah cheered and threw their arms up in the air as if they’d just scored a soccer goal and then they started making muscle men poses to show us all how strong they were.

 

‘Chains?’ I said again as I got back in the car.

 

‘Yeah, lets go and ring Christine first.’

 

When we got back down to the bottom of the road I pulled out the mobile and started to search for Christine’s phone number but then I stopped.

 

‘How do you say lost in French? We’re lost?’

 

Pete thought for a minute and then said, ‘Don’t know.’

 

‘What’ll I say then?’ At least when you’re face to face with someone you can use hand signals, point at things or even pull things out of cupboards if you can’t remember the name of them, but the phone was a whole different ball game.

 

‘Rendezvous,’ Pete said in a rush, very proud of himself. ‘Tell her rendez-vous la Post.’

 

The mobile felt hot in my hand while I was listening to it ring at the other end. Then I heard Christine’s smiley voice, ‘Bonjour?’

 

‘Bonjour Christine, it’s Sarah,’ two words in and I was already talking English. Then Christine spoke, it sounded like one long word sung over a few breaths.

 

‘We’re lost,’ English again, it was amazing how much you had to say things even though you knew the other person couldn’t understand. ‘Rendez-vous la Post?’

 

‘Oui, Oui. I come now, a bientot.’ I come now? Christine’s English had improved since I’d seen her in Australia last year, it was possible we could be running on par, her three words of English, mine of French. I hung up feeling unreasonably exhausted.

 

Pete drove us down to the Post office and we sat there looking up the hill towards where the chalet we couldn’t find was. We sat there for a good five minutes or so before Pete said, ‘Do you think she understood you?’

 

I knew my accent was bad but rendezvous couldn’t be that hard to get across could it? And the yellow building we were sitting out the front of had the words ‘La Post’ scrawled across it, so we hadn’t got that wrong.

 

‘Yeah I think so. Maybe she’s walking.’

 

‘Yeah maybe, but it’s not that far.’

 

Just as someone let another fart off in the back seat I saw Christine walking down the path towards us.

 

‘Who was that?’ I said to the back seat while I was waving and smiling out the windscreen.

 

‘What?’

 

‘Who farted?’

 

‘Yeah who farted?’ Jack said.

 

‘Jaaack, it must have been you, whoever smelt it dealt it.’ Noah said. ‘Aw, it stinks, ponga donga, it stinks back here.’

 

‘Get the windows down and move the air around,’ I opened my door.

 

‘I’m gunna vomit, I can’t breathe, I’m being gassed,’ Noah said winding his window down and sticking his head out. Jack was holding his nose and laughing while Poppy and Kai climbed over each other to try and get their heads out the window.

 

‘Christine’s getting in the car with us and I’ll start naming names if you don’t get that stink out of the car now,’ I hissed

 

Christine’s a small lady who wears shoes that are the right size for Kai, she comes up to about the height of my boobs or perhaps just a bit higher but she has an energy, that you can see bouncing in her when she walks, big enough to field a whole football team. I got out of the car and gave her a hug and the three kisses, said ‘Bonjour’ about twenty times and then ‘Tres bon,’ about ten, pointing at the snow, the chalets and the blue sky.

 

Christine was grinning, ‘Pour toi,’ she said, smiling at everything I was pointing to. Like me, she repeated what she was saying, in the hope, I guess, that it would all of a sudden magically making sense to me. I knew the word ‘pour’ was for but I was lost on the ‘toi’. I was already starting to draft a complaint letter in my head to the people who made the French cd’s I’d been listening to.

 

I held the front door of the car open for Christine. After a small argument in which neither us understood what the other was saying but knew exactly what each other meant - I was telling her to have the front seat and she was saying no it was fine, she’d sit in the back, only she had no idea of what awaited her in the back - Christine climbed in to the car. I clambered into the back putting Poppy on my lap, relieved that there was only a hint of the fart smell left lingering in the thick air of the car.

 

‘A droit,’ Christine said pointing to the right.

 

We drove back up past the driveway we had got stuck on, down a small hill and then were faced with a much steeper ice covered hill.

 

‘Two,’ Christine said, another word she’d learnt in English since I’d last seen her, and pointed at the gear stick, ‘C’est bien, two.’ She nodded at Pete who was looking doubtful but put his foot on the accelerator all the same. I closed my eyes and held on tight to Poppy. I felt the car lurch go up and up, lurch, slide and then jolt to a stop. When I opened my eyes I saw that we were half way up the hill, skewed slightly to the side not yet wedged between two walls of snow on either side of us.

 

‘I think we need chains,’ Pete said to Christine.

 

Christine, who obviously had the English word for chains sorted, said ‘Non, Non, juste,’ and then she pushed her hand down as if it was a foot on an accelerator, slamming down to the floor. ‘Numero two, OK? Two.’ She said again, pointing to the gear stick.

 

‘OK.’ Pete said, ‘but everyone out first.’

 

We climbed out squeezing past the stopped car, both Poppy and Kai slipped on the ice and fell with a thud, but didn’t hurt themselves. Pete waited until we’d walked to the top of the hill, then, turning his head to look out the back windscreen, he let the breaks go. Christine and I watched as the car slid, smacked up against one wall of ice and snow, bounced off it, then slammed into the opposite wall building up enough momentum in its weaving pattern to launch itself half way up the snow wall it had first hit. Both Christine and I stood at the top of the hill, our hands over our mouths, eyes wide and bulging, we held our breath. I thought for sure the car was going to flip and land on its roof, but by some miracle, (Pete’s convinced it was his driving), the car straightened, lined itself back up on the road, and finished the rest of the descent in an orderly fashion.

 

‘O la la,’ Christine said when Pete stopped. Then, seeing Pete getting ready to come up again, she put both her hands on an imaginary steering wheel, stuck her foot out in front, as if she was driving a car, and slammed her foot to the ground.

 

Pete put his foot down, the car revved along the flat before the start of the hill, first gear, second gear, then he was on the icy slope again. This time the car was moving fast. I was sure it was going to skid again, only this time get wedged tight or worse, flip. But it didn’t. It made it all the way the top and neatly turned into Christine’s cars pace and stopped.

 

My legs felt like jelly standing there in the snow. Wet pools of sweat had gathered on my shirt under my arms. I expected Pete to collapse on the steering wheel but he was fine, he hopped out of the car without a detectable wobble. We’d made it without any fatal injuries to report. The chalet stood above us on the hill, snow on the roof, icicles hanging from the gutters. It was made of dark timber and had all of the traditional carved trimming on the fascia boards and verandah. The white Christmas which I’d dreamt about for so long, all of a sudden look like a possibility, we’d driven into, well skidded and slipped into, our own winter wonderland.

 

That night at dinner, Pete and I sat and watched as Christine told Jean-Paul about our near escape from death as we tried to drive up the quiet road out the front of their chalet. Jean-Paul, a retired mechanic, not much taller than Christine, slapped his hand across his forehead every time Christine took a breath, saying ‘O, non’ in his heavy French accent. ‘Non, non, Christine!’

 

After a lot of hand signals, drawings and use of the three dictionaries that were sitting on the table between us, we discovered that Christine had thought we had snow tyres on already. That was why she hadn’t thought it was necessary to put the chains on. Chains, at least to get up and down the hill in front of the chalet, weren’t a question anymore, and snow tyres, which we always knew were a must, were planned for Tuesday. The same day that we would drive into Yverdon to see the house where we were going to be living for the next six months, meet the kid’s teachers and see where they’d be going to school. We’d also pick up our skiies and the two other suitcases which we couldn’t squeeze in the car.

 

The next morning we went for a walk around Gryon. I strapped rubber grips to the bottom of my sandshoes so I wouldn’t slide on the ice. It was one of those clear blue-sky days not a puff of wind. There was blue and white everywhere and the snow with the sun on it was sparkling as if someone had got up early and carefully sprinkled silver glitter everywhere. The town itself was like something out of a kids Christmas storybook. There was an outside skating rink, with fairy lights for nighttime and Christmas carols playing, the Perry Como type. A telecabin that left almost from our front doorstep and took you up to the top of the slopes, a Swiss patisserie with buttery croissants that you could smell as you walked past and chalets with their intricate wood carving and snow covered rooves that dated back hundreds of centuries, I think the oldest one we saw was dated in the thirteen hundreds. The best part though that first morning was the snow. Not the snow on the ground or the rooftops, or the snow that the kids had to push off the slide so they could slide down, but the snow that was falling from the blue sky. It wasn’t white snow; there weren’t big flakes, just tiny flecks of gold floating in the air. It was as if we were walking in our own snow dome and it had just been shaken. Our whole world shimmered.

 

‘Tres bon,’ I said to Christine spreading my arms wide and smiling at the world around me, and then, very inadequately, ‘tres, tres, tres bon.’ Even if she’d understood English, I don’t think I could have found the words to describe how beautiful what we were walking through was. Despite my inadequate French, Christine knew what I was trying to say. She could tell by the way I was giggling and wiping tears from my eyes. Christine explained to me, in stilted French, with hand signals and a couple English words thrown in, that she’d never seen the snow glitter either. That night with the help of three dictionaries, we worked out that the reason for the glittering snow was a fine fog with the sun filtering through it, so fine that you couldn’t even see it.

 

The novelty for the kids of building snowmen and sliding down the snow-covered slopes on their bums, wore out by the end of the first day. They wanted to ski. They’d been patient for almost a month now, with the promise of skiing always just around the corner. It was too much to have to wait another three days, for Jack in particular. He told me in no uncertain terms that he’d walked through enough churches and art galleries, and sat still for long enough in a car. He said if he wasn’t allowed to do something, (meaning race, jump and tumble down a snow covered hill) he was going to find his own way back to Australia and to the surf.

 

Unfortunately for Jack though he had no choice, he had to wait out the three days, there was no way of getting to Yverdon earlier. That was when Spikey Doodle first appeared in our lives. We all have our own ways of coping and Jack tends to find ways that most of us would never think of. He simply said to Noah one night, just before bed, ‘Lets pretend I’m a dog and you’re my owner,’ then he stuck out his tongue and panted, resting his head on Noah’s shoulder. ‘You can call me Spike, Spikey or just plain old Spikey Doodle.’ Noah patted him on the head obligingly and Jack panted in his ear. ‘And lets pretend you’re my owner.’

‘Sure Spikey Doodle.’ Noah said, ‘Good dog Spikey Doodle. You sit and stay, stay there in the corner like a good boy.’ And Jack did.

 

Poppy of course was thrilled, she’d been convinced for a long time that she was a dog called Rex and now, here in the middle of the snow, was another dog she could play fetch with.

 

Spikey almost disappeared when the skiies arrived but not quite.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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