A House at the End of the Track

by Michelle Lawson

  Moving to France (or Spain, or the Algarve) for a better life is clearly a different kind of migration compared with those who relocate for better work opportunities or to escape political turmoil. Yet academics, with their fixation on conceptualising everything, have struggled to define it, since surely all migrants are seeking a better life in some way. It’s certainly a relatively privileged kind of shift. What else might distinguish this particular movement is that the incomers have a greater flexibility to choose where to live, without being constrained by looking for the best work opportunities. Some academics have characterised it as a peculiarly middle-class phenomenon, whether it’s the Brits in France or North Americans in Panama.

  I don’t wholly agree with this. The endless re-runs of A Place in the Sun have brought the idea of going abroad into many homes, and it’s not just the middle classes who can act on the dream to sell up and go. The people I met in the Ariège represented a cross-section of British society that could not be lumped en masse into the idea of a financially comfortable, professional, educated middle class. Some were comfortable financially, living off income from rental properties, but others were finding it difficult to manage, complaining to me about having to save up to buy petrol for a day trip to the coast. Some reminisced about former high-flying careers in the UK, while others were glad to no longer be on the till in Tesco. One retired couple complained about the lack of decent Ariège restaurants, yet another couple eked out their inadequate pension by growing vegetables and looking around for cleaning jobs, saving up to eat out occasionally.

  What was common across the different levels was a keenness to show that they were different from the other Brits. Some looked down upon the “sad” Brits who had to have their English biscuits and bread pudding. Others described themselves as down-to-earth people who admitted to missing the fish and chip shops and went on to sneer at the more pretentious Brits with their poolside aperitifs. It worked both ways, giving everyone an opportunity to show that they were different from the rest, whether they were looking up or down the social scale.

  It was the same on the online forum. One of the troublemakers made a derisory comment about hordes of Liverpudlians flying into Carcassonne with Ryanair. Yet at the other end, an angry forum member reminded everyone else that he and his wife, a former cleaner, had worked f***ing hard in France, unlike the other drop-out English who contributed nothing and were just there for the cheaper property. Whether the sneers were directed upwards at the wealthier classes or downwards at the lower-class bargain seekers, the rants brought in the same old stereotypes. Those fixed caricatures of the British abroad were always there in the background, buzzing around our conversations like a possessed fly. They were an irritating and sometimes uncomfortably close reminder of where people had come from, something that had to be swatted away into that vague mass of other Brits elsewhere.

  These caricatures, clichés and stereotypes really are nothing new, harking back to colonial days when the English were renowned for bringing their own customs and clubs into their self-sufficient communities wherever they went. The English were ridiculed by the French for their unintelligible French and their class-based pretentiousness. Referring to the caricatures in today’s contexts simply keeps them alive, to be used when your own position as a Brit in France feels a bit shaky. Fralon gives a variation of the same complaint from most of the English incomers he met in Périgord; that it’s just not the same anymore now the newer arrivals are here. Fralon’s book acknowledges the hypocrisy of the “purist” incomers who want to be “more French than the French”, yet he appears to ignore the irony of a couple who themselves had spoken only English on arrival now complaining about how few of the newcomers speak French.

  Push And Pull

  Ryanair’s fondness for opening up routes to obscure French airports has certainly played a role in encouraging Britons to sell up and move to France, but the endless re-runs of overseas property programmes also promote this idea of an escape from the unaffordable and crowded UK. A friend of mine was chatting to a colleague who admitted that he and his wife had a plan to buy a property in France because they “love France”. ‘Which part of France?’ asked the friend. ‘Oh I’ve no idea, we haven’t ever been there,’ he replied. ‘But we love watching the property programmes.’

  Reasons for coming to live in France are often divided into two camps: the push and pull factors. In reality they are intertwined. Money is one such factor: I met people who had gained enough capital in their UK property to want to do something with it, pushing them to find something else, but the cheaper prices in France were also a pull factor, enabling them to buy what they’d never be able to afford back in the UK. For some people it was an escape from a boring retirement, or they were looking for a fresh start after a divorce, or something to do once the children had left home. I’d heard people say that Britain was now depressing, or they wanted to escape certain aspects of modern life – the 24/7 existence, as one forum member called it. But all of these push factors went hand in hand with an awareness of what was available: the pull factors described within the books they’d read, the television programmes they’d been wowed by and the property adverts. In spite of the Ariège being seen as somewhere to live a simpler, less consumerist life, where the weather was (sometimes) better and life felt safer, in some ways it was just another commodity. Although the people I spoke to had very different reasons for the move, they’d all been swayed by knowing what was available to them out here in France. Just pick up any copy of a publication such as French Property News and the purchase of property is presented as a fantasy, but one that’s nevertheless achievable: Make your dream of buying in France a reality. Beyond the property, the lifestyle itself is presented as a consumer product. The food commodities associated with rural France are shown in glorious colour: a bounty of fresh fruits and vegetables on the markets, rack after rack of wine, all glamorous and plentiful but not too exotic. And there’s the smiling couple raising a glass at the shaded dining table laid with places for visiting family or their new friends. The lifestyle is as tangible a commodity as the properties for sale.

  Then Comes The Book…

  While the popular accounts written by incomers provide fodder for armchair dreamers, there’s no doubt that this relocation genre has also triggered a domino effect among readers who’ve dared to follow suit. Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence is perhaps the most famous of them all, and this book has certainly been responsible for triggering some of the relocations to the Ariège. This is despite the area’s attractions being very different from those of Provence. One woman I spoke to put the entire move down to her husband’s dream ‘to be that man with the millstone’. Another confessed that buying bikes to fetch the daily baguette was the first thing that they did, although they ended up being too busy working to take the time out to cycle to the boulangerie.

  Mayle himself continued to produce a string of follow-ups about life in Provence, shrugging off the accusations of never-ending repetition. As he claimed, the topic is such a rich vein, why stop mining it? And so on it goes. Committing your story to print seems to have become firmly entrenched as the next step after the move itself. Incomers continue to publish their accounts, describing the pleasures, the contrast with the former corporate life, and, just as importantly, the crises suffered along the way. As with more conventional travel books, the Moving to France narrative is often an account of endurance, but rather than focusing on the process of getting there, the relocation genre dramatises the everyday struggles of a whole new life among unfamiliar language and customs.

  Many of these books have a structure that follows broadly similar lines: first the house is found, and then the reader is led through the agonisingly complex bureaucracy of the French purchasing process. This is followed by the renovation of a wreck into a glorious home, and perhaps the stress of running a business such as a vineyard. All of this is moulded into a rollercoaster by adding various debacles, n
ear-catastrophes and the ubiquitous tradesmen who are either too laid-back or incompetent. By including these mishaps, the writer shows how hard they’ve had to work at overcoming the struggles of a new life in a foreign country. The reader can imagine themselves in such a scenario and share the relief when it all works out in the end.

  Some have criticised the genre for a tendency to patronise the French. Mayle himself has been accused of caricaturing them, and it’s true that the French locals are often presented as a kind of alien “other”, to be gently mocked and satirised. Yet the desire to be accepted by them is paramount, so there’s usually an event of some kind that symbolises the eventual embracing of the incomers by the French community.

  These narratives are written from a very individual perspective – the “look at what I did” recount – through which their experiences are filtered and embellished for the reader’s entertainment. They are clearly popular for readers who enjoy living the fantasy in a kind of virtual way, squirming as they read yet again about the roof collapsing or another embarrassing miscommunication.

  Clichés aside, there are some worthy and enjoyable books out there but they nevertheless cast this dream of France in a particular, often predictable, way. Ignoring any references to baguettes, berets or wine, I set out to violate the dream and discover how the English really do manage their new lives in France.

  English or British? These aren’t interchangeable terms, of course, and there are incomers from all over the UK living in France, not just those who came from England. I’ve used the term English when referring specifically to the Ariège dwellers whom I interviewed, because they were all English. No Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish, nor ethnic minorities, happened to present themselves for interview, and I didn’t come across any during the years of my research. This means that the book focuses on a more defined national group – the English – rather than the broader classification of the British. At other times I refer to the British or the Brits, and this is because the book takes account of the Brits in France as a wider phenomenon than just the people I came across in the Ariège. The media articles, the forum posts and the interviewees themselves use these terms, and I quote them as used.

  Ariège, More Houses Than People

  ‘Ariège, une terre sauvage, hein?’ I agreed with the taxi driver that the Ariège is, indeed, a wild place. There had been a slogan used in the past, ‘Ariège, terre courage’, which to me reflected the degree of fortitude needed to live here, as well as the bravery of the Ariégeois in sheltering and leading so many to safety over the Pyrenees in the Second World War. According to the Holocaust Museum in Paris, 446 locals had been deported from the département, which was a significant number when you consider that the pre-war population in 1936 stood at 155,134. It was a ratio of approximately one deportee to every 350 inhabitants.

  That’s not to say that the entire département has yet to be tamed by progress. Driving past the faceless business parks that frame the autoroutes of the northern, flatter Ariège, you could be anywhere at all in France. Over to the east, the towns of Foix, Tarascon and Mirepoix are managing to maintain their individual character, although they remain charmingly small; the population of Foix, the administrative town of the Ariège, has not quite reached the 10,000 mark.

  It’s at the western end of the Ariège where the wildness has stubbornly taken root, in an area still known by its former designation as the Couserans. Although the name no longer has any official or administrative status, it maintains a lingering cultural significance and romantic association with the wilder and depopulated western Ariège. No less than eighteen rivers radiate from the Couserans Pyrenees, their twisting valleys sheltered by thickly forested hills that rise steeply up to the higher mountain areas. Venturing above the tree line brings you to rolling green pastures where, in summer, you step in time to the chime of the bells around the necks of the cattle. These bucolic landscapes eventually give way to vast grey expanses of boulder rubble, where clear water barely ripples as it lies in the hollows gouged by long-ago glaciers, and hundreds of other tiny lakes break up the greyness as they reflect the sky.

  A Couserans builder explained to me why he was so busy by summing it up as a place with more houses than people. Around a quarter of the houses in the Ariège are second homes, although the percentage is much higher in some of the Couserans villages. More than 50% of the houses in communes such as Massat and Seix are holiday residences, but it is more like 80% in Ustou and Couflens. Many of these are occupied during the short summer season by families who have long since moved away but return for weekends and holidays, while others are rented out. Even with relatively low numbers, the summer and winter faces of the villages could differ immensely. I met a number of English incomers who’d settled in and around the small town of Seix, for example, which has a population of just 842, although in summer its narrow lanes are swelled by a further 1200 or so holidaymakers. When the season was over, some of the restaurants stayed closed for more than half of the year.

  These old houses of the Couserans had usually been built at the time of a rapid population increase in the mid 18th century, although it was an expansion that was short-lived, since the area’s resources could not sustain the growing number of inhabitants. There followed a steady population decline, most keenly seen in the mountain areas with their chronic unemployment and associated poverty. There was also loss due to epidemics and the First World War; the latter alone accounted for a decline by 13% of the Ariège population.

  Nevertheless there are people living there today, and they are slowly offsetting the population decline. Despite the continuing haemorrhage of young people to find work, a gentle increase in incomers is cancelling the loss so that, paradoxically, Ariège is now one of the fastest growing départements in France. Much of this demographic recovery is concentrated in the northern, more urbanised areas, although it’s also taking place in some smaller, isolated mountain communities. The effects, however, are very different between the two. The “golden triangle” of the towns of Pamiers, Saverdun and Mazerès is reportedly thriving from the influx of working people, while the arrival of many retirees to the rural south-west seems less sustainable, as it does little to stem the ageing of the population in communes where a third, on average, are past working age.

  Yet not all arrivals are retirees. The Couserans in particular has seen an influx of what the French call the neo-ruraux, or even marginaux; what some still refer to as “hippies”. This incursion began in the late 1960s, with an international mix of incomers who came seeking an alternative way to live. This reputation never really went away, which means that incomers are still arriving in search of a life that’s partly or wholly off-grid. It’s a return to the land, although it results in little outward change on the landscape, since any “farming” remains firmly at subsistence level. At the same time it’s helping to stem the depopulation trend. As the mayor of Massat put it, the original long-haired neo-ruraux may now have succumbed to baldness, but their children continue to enliven the schools.8

  Ariège still lags well behind the more popular areas of Dordogne and Brittany for British incomers, although the arrival d’un grand nombre de Britanniques in the former Midi-Pyrénées region has been noted by French statisticians.9 Thousands arrived in the former Midi-Pyrénées region between 2001 and 2006, but in the Ariège itself they made up less than 30% of the foreign incomers. This is much lower than the Lot and the Gers départements, for example, where the Brits make up over 45% of foreign incomers.10 It’s a growing number of Dutch, Belgian and German incomers who’ve augmented the dwindling Ariège population, yet it’s the British vague, or “wave”, that’s been singled out by the statisticians, particularly around Mirepoix.

  One of the motivations for this book was to question why the English incomers had chosen to settle here. Sometimes the reasons were startling as they reflected a total lack of knowledge of the place. It became common to hear an incomer say that
they had never even heard of the Ariège before they were persuaded by an estate agent to visit the département and view a house that “ticks all of your boxes”. I got the impression that for many people it really was about finding the right house. The specific town, village or region, and sometimes even the actual country, seemed to be low on the list of priorities. Almost everyone I spoke to mentioned property prices, suggesting that the aim of getting the most for your money had led some people to end up in this lesser-known corner of France, rather than the Aude next door that had more sun and less rain. It’s good value for money… our property in the UK bought us a lot more here. But was it a blinkered perspective, fuelled by television programmes that encourage buyers to think only of getting more for their money? These programmes skim over the day-to-day aspects of a new life in a totally unfamiliar area. A detached house that ticks all the boxes, and for less than a pokey terrace in Bolton!

  This isn’t to suggest that finding “the right house” is only based on getting value for money. A French researcher, Aude Etrillard, who was similarly fascinated by the incoming Britons around north-west France, has analysed six books written in this very English relocation to France genre. Etrillard concluded that in all cases, the central character was the house itself, symbolising a strong emotional connection between house and writer. Of course these are books written to entertain, and it’s fun to describe falling in love with a house and the subsequent ups and downs of the relationship. For those who bought the first and only house they viewed, it really was love at first sight, rather than a hard-headed ticking of boxes. Even Peter Mayle described seeing his house in Provence one afternoon and mentally moving in by dinner, with one of its main attractions being its location within a national park that protected it from “the creeping horrors of property development”.