Jean Falla knew every rock between the Hanois and the Amfroques. One fine morning he sailed out alone from his moorings at Les Pecqueries, cast his lines, anchored to wait for the tide, and fell asleep in the sun. He could never say how long he slept, but it felt like only a quarter of an hour before a violent storm woke him. The boat was rolling badly and filling with water. As he raised a sail and turned for land he heard a peal of laughter above his head, and looking up he saw, in the flying scud, an old woman he knew perfectly well, with a crowd of others he did not know. She was their leader, and his fright was their entertainment.
He got the boat home, ran it up the beach and set off across the fields as a short cut. Jumping a hedge, he landed astride a cow on the other side. The cow bolted across the field with him on her back and pitched him headfirst into one of the deep drainage ditches that cut through the marshy land there. The laughter went up again. He crawled out, reached his cottage, shut the door and collapsed on the floor, and heard the laughter fade away outside. He would never say who the woman was. MacCulloch thought this was sensible, and noted that from then on Falla treated every old woman with great respect.
The stories MacCulloch set around it show how ordinary these ideas were among fishermen. Collette Salmon was said to have raised a storm that drowned a whole crew because one of them asked too much for three dogfish. When the notorious witch Marie Mouton was banished and landed at Southampton, the cutter that took her met a gale on the way back, and the captain and crew were ready to swear they had seen her sitting on the masthead and astride the jib-boom, tearing the sails to pieces. The map point marks the Pecqueries coast.
Comments