The Egmont Manor Letters

We were meant to write to you this Sunday about something else entirely. We changed our minds at the start of the week, when the images began coming through from Gironde.

You saw them as we did. That orange sky in the middle of the afternoon. Those queues of cars leaving the villages under evacuation orders. Those pines by the thousand, whole forests that the fire is moving through at a speed nobody seems able to stop. And those firefighters, come from all over France and beyond, fighting for days without sleep.

We couldn't watch these images the way one watches the news. One of our parents lives there, and several of our friends do too. Some were evacuated this weekend.

One thing must be said at the outset, because it matters to us and without it this letter would have no legitimacy.

What we went through in November 2025 is not comparable to what is happening there. We lost a house. Just one. Nobody was inside and none of our loved ones were threatened. What is striking Gironde and the Landes is of another order: families evacuated in the middle of the night, entire villages hanging on the wind, people who, on closing their front door, do not know whether they will ever open it again. We do not pretend to know what they are going through. It would be indecent of us to pretend.

But there are things we recognise.

We recognise the waiting. Those hours when you do not yet know, when you are far away, holding a phone and hoping it will not ring and yet looking at it constantly. We drove five and a half hours in that state. It is perhaps the worst moment of all, because the imagination does more damage than the fire.

We recognise the smell. We wrote a whole letter about it a few weeks ago. That smell of burnt wood that gets into the clothes, into the hair, and will not leave. Those who return home in the coming days will carry it for a long time. They will remember it in ten years' time, standing in front of a fireplace. Nobody will have warned them.

We also recognise that strange moment, in the morning, when you take stock. When you walk around what is left without saying a word, like a stranger in a place you knew by heart.

And above all we recognise what comes after. The tiredness that is not physical. The paperwork, the assessments, the letters. The slowness of others. The world carrying on whilst yours has stopped.

So what can one honestly say to people who are living through this right now?

Nothing that helps them today. There are no useful words whilst it is still burning. Nobody is comforted during the fire, and those who try mostly just make a noise.

But perhaps a few things for later, when the smoke has settled and the silence has returned. So here they are, with no lesson, simply because we learned them at our own expense.

The first: decide nothing straight away, unless your heart decides for you. We decided to rebuild at dawn on the first morning, and it was right for us. Many need weeks, and that is right too. There is no good timeframe. There is no good reaction. Those who collapse three months later are no weaker than those who get back to the fight the next day.

The second: what will save you is not what you think. It is not the insurance, nor the tradesmen, nor courage. It is people. Those who turn up without being asked, who bring a coffee, who take a day off to help you clear the rubble. We did not know, before November, how surrounded we would be. That discovery is worth almost what it cost.

And the third, the most important, the one we are sure of: it grows back.

Not as it was. It is a lie to say it comes back as it was. But it grows back. We learned this year that the Landes forest itself was born of human will, planted in the 19th century on marshland that nobody believed could be cultivated. What was done once can be done again. It will be long, it will be on the scale of a generation, and many of those who replant will not see the trees fully grown. That is exactly what those who built our old houses did: working for a time they would never see.

We have nothing to offer this week, save these few words and our thoughts. To those who have been evacuated and are waiting, to those who have lost a home, a business, a forest, animals. And above all to the firefighters, who for days have stood between the flames and people's homes, and to whom we owe a share of what still stands at ours.

If you are among those the fire has touched this week, write to us. We know a little of what it is, and we will read you.