Most of the English incomers I met raised their eyebrows when I mentioned that I came from near Massat, probably wondering just to what extent I fit in with the local population. ‘Massat… that’s another strange place.’ ‘Apparently there’s an awful lot of drugs growing in Massat.’ ‘I think over at Massat you have smoking parties, don’t you?’ They visibly relaxed when I positioned myself closer to their social world; this was easily done by referring to the smokers as “them” rather than “we”. To be fair I’d never been offered a smoke of anything, perhaps being seen as too square, although I’d come away from social gatherings feeling the effect of hours of passive inhalation. The closest I got was being offered an absinthe-like spirit from a bottle stuffed with marijuana leaves. The pourer reassured me that it wouldn’t make me high, just happy.
Although I occasionally catch the tang of marijuana whilst wandering around, there are two other particular aromas that I associate with the Ariège. Catching a whiff of either of them brings me sharply into focus on where I am. The first is the scent from the Himalayan balsam (impatiens glandulifera) plant, whose flashes of pink along the verges indicate that water is close by. This invasive plant, native to the Himalayas, has been vigorous in its colonisation of the Couserans verges, often growing to waist height. Walking or cycling around in the summer months, its perfume is almost always there, infusing the air beyond the clusters of trumpet-shaped pink flowers that are distinctively attached by a stem at the top of the “trumpet” rather than the end. The balsam is fond of damp woodland and the banks of watercourses, which is why it has taken root so vigorously along the river valleys. The very fact that it grows close to water facilitates its multiplication, as its explosive pods can shoot seeds up to 7 metres away, meaning that they easily get carried away by the water as well as on the tyres of vehicles.
Before I knew what it was I liked its colour and perfume, and I was right to assume that people had deliberately planted it for aesthetic reasons. But it had turned out to be a pest, not only because of its vigorous seed dispersal, but there is also a worry that it leads to erosion of the riverbanks, due to its flimsy root system that leaves the edges vulnerable over the winter die-back. In ecologically sensitive areas such as riverbanks, its dense growth could easily overwhelm native species, and there is an added danger that the density of growth might impede water flow during high rainfall, leading to increased risk of flooding. I knew that in Devon and other areas they organised “Balsam bashing” days to stem the reproduction. Recommendations and work were taking place in the Ariège to try and eradicate la balsamine de l’Himalaya, but it needed to be carried out extensively and methodically if it was going to work.
The other odour is harder to define, and it’s characterised by the smell of smoke and of things smoked – the tang of the wood fires with their silver plumes curling above heavy stone roofs, as well as the rich odour of smoked meats and the scent of clothes dried in front of the fire. I inhaled it when I got close to people, but I also caught it when walking past an open doorway. I know that Juliette’s daughter had suffered some teasing at school from other girls who told her she “smelled of the fire”. I was pretty certain that I also left a similar trail in my wake. It wasn’t unpleasant, and for me it embodied the Ariège way of life.
This book has grown out of an academic study that began to take shape on that hot day standing at the crossroads, trying to make sense of Gerald’s directions. Yet I knew that these stories would resonate with a much wider audience than the insular world of academia. Much of the existing writing about the Brits in France refers to stereotypes, but I wanted to listen to individual stories and try to work out how these clichés collided with people’s own experiences. Readers will recognise some of the characteristics that are said to typify the Brits in France: the difficulties in speaking French, the hankering after English foods and the reliance on each other. The Brits have been dismissed as a cliquey and dependent bunch, good for little more than mockery. As one angry forum member ranted, you are all lost sheep in a huge field. Yet as time went on I became more and more drawn into the contradiction between their rants against the “other” Brits in France, and the way that they nevertheless relied on each other. The more I listened, the more I understood the conflict between what they said they believed, and what they told me they did. People try to understand their own place here in France, and if their stories sometimes appear hypocritical, then I see that as a symptom of living under the shadow of a stereotype.
The house at the end of the track is both a literal place and a metaphor. The book was written whilst gazing out from a house perched above the end of a dilapidated track with a green stripe of grass running between the potholes. I met others who were also living at the end of a track, enjoying sizeable gardens and privacy that they could never have afforded back in England. But some, like Gerald, deliberately avoided that isolation, choosing to live in a village centre for what it offered in terms of a more active social integration. For them, the end of the track was the metaphorical end of the journey to the Ariège; sometimes planned in detail, more often the result of a whim. And for some it was just one journey before the next one began.
1
Have A Photograph
Taken With The English
An Englishman Abroad
Having finally located Gerald, standing on the pavement outside his small townhouse, we walked though the garage to a courtyard where a table was laid with tea and biscuits. I was glad for the shade provided by the house and the courtyard walls. September was coming to a close but temperatures were still rising, to reach 27 degrees centigrade later that week, followed by an unbroken run of sunshine well into the middle of October. Driving around, visiting the friendly Brits to chat and drink tea in their gardens, it was the easiest thing to agree with them about what a glorious place they’d moved to. Hardly anyone mentioned that July and August had seen more rainy days than dry ones.
‘There’s always this thing about an Englishman abroad. You have a kind of freedom, what the Germans call narrenfreiheit; it means the jester’s freedom to mock the king. I’ve got this freedom as a foreigner, kind of a liberation thing. If you like, I can dip into French society.’ Outwardly, Gerald appeared to have it all. He and his wife Sandra, who was temporarily back in England, were in their sixties and retired. They’d bought a house in the unfamiliar Ariège after visiting a friend in the neighbouring département. He waved his arm around the dappled courtyard of the townhouse, intent on not being seen as a dreamer seeking a Mayle-style rural retreat. ‘Look at this house, it’s not your French idyll is it, the lovely gîte at the end of the track, in the middle of nowhere. It’s not that.’ Choosing a townhouse was all part of the kind of incomer they wanted to be, and to be seen as. The fact that it wasn’t a house at the end of a track was as significant to Gerald as rural idyll was to some of the others. Choosing a townhouse that opened onto the street, in a small town where passers-by would stop and chat, was all part of the story of how he and Sandra found themselves integrated “astonishingly quickly”. Both Gerald and his wife spoke French, the kind learned through formal education. ‘But I speak it like a book, like a Voltaire, you know.’
After talking about dipping into French society, Gerald became more wary of coming across as superficial. He went into detail about his integration, talking about gaining friends for life among the local French, of holding dinner parties, joining clubs and choirs as well as standing in the local election. And all this took place within six months of moving here. ‘Yes, we’ve been really lucky,’ he mused. ‘Except, having said that, we did make an effort. If you expect French people to beat a path to your door, well, you must be barmy. Why would they?’ Anyone reading their way through the relocation-to-France books could well anticipate friendly overtures from the French; you would only have to read Peter Mayle’s account of the ceremonial presentation of an enormous stone-hewn primrose-planted antique jardinière, a Christmas gift f
rom neighbours and acquaintances.
Gerald quashed such unrealistic ideas. ‘I think they’re a little suspicious of the English anyway because, in my experience, most of them don’t speak very good French. In fact some of the English don’t speak any French and it amazes me.’
‘You know of such people, then?’ I asked.
‘Personally, yes,’ he nodded. ‘Why the hell do they come here?’
It was a good question. I’d had an inkling that the media was putting ideas into the heads of people who weren’t that familiar with France, let alone the language, but the finer point about why they ended up in the “back of beyond” Ariège was partly answered with his next comment. ‘Ariège isn’t for the rich,’ he mused, which was another way of saying that it offered value for money for Brits seeking a new life in France but who couldn’t afford the formulaic dreamlands of Provence or Dordogne. Gerald didn’t strike me as the kind of person who’d act on a whim, so I was surprised when he admitted that they’d bought the house on impulse whilst staying with friends near Carcassonne. ‘His wife was an estate agent and so we took the plunge but we didn’t know the Ariège. I’d never been to the south of France. We had no idea about the area, no idea about the town, but as it turned out it’s been lucky.’ After using the house as a holiday home, they’d decided to move permanently a few years ago.
I wondered what else Gerald, with his French dinner parties, his Voltaire-like syntax and his council votes, had to say about the other Brits living around and about. I began by asking if he’d used any of the English speakers who offered services locally, such as building and decorating. He shook his head. ‘We usually ask around our French friends, if they know anybody, and normally they do.’ He did use a nearby English tradesman whose limited French meant that he relied on business from English speakers, but that was because they’d become friends. As the conversation drew on, Gerald became more and more animated about other English incomers. Like many of the English I spoke to out here, Gerald was careful to distance himself from the Brit stereotype. ‘They’re a sore point with us.’ He railed against what he saw as the superficiality of the Brits who come to consume the French way of life, depending on fellow expats for a social life and not giving anything back to the community. ‘It just doesn’t agree with me, this business of I’ll take the climate and the baguette and the coffee and the café.’ Even lower down the hierarchy were those who continued to eat English food. ‘What madness… it’s insane… we saw an advert that said: Stock up your gîte for your English visitors with English food. Baked beans, who the hell wants that when you can go and have cassoulet?’ he said, drawing out the word as if he was about to lift up a spoonful of the thick sauce.
‘But is there much of that kind of thing here in the Ariège, do you think?’ I wondered.
‘I don’t think there is. But perhaps we don’t see them because of our lifestyle.’ He went on to describe how he and Sandra actively participated in local protests against teacher redundancies, sitting on the roundabout to disrupt the traffic on the main road. ‘We meet other Brits who are also into protests and stuff.’ It sounded as if they rarely came across other English incomers, and mostly when they were involved in local protests. Yet as time went on and I moved around talking to the incomers, I came to realise that Gerald and his wife were known to almost all the others whom I met. ‘They’re lovely,’ said Elaine a few weeks later. ‘They speak wonderful French, the two of them.’
Apart from the wonderful French, Gerald was also renowned for his sense of humour. An anecdote was later relayed to me about a type of charades played among an English gathering, where Gerald played a convincingly petulant elderly character. As we chatted he brought up this side of his character as something particularly English. ‘I like trying to amuse the French,’ he admitted, ‘and one of the things about the English is our relative sense of humour. If you can show one, the French like it. I think they expect the English to be eccentric and have a sense of humour.’
Humour and eccentricity as English traits have been singled out by the anthropologist Kate Fox as important aspects of what she calls an English “collective distinctiveness”.14 On reflection it’s a useful way of thinking, because it gives the English in France something more positive to identify with, rather than the usual negative stereotypes. Incomers want to be seen as different, not just mindlessly following the flood of expats over the Channel, but they also want to fit in and be seen as integrated. So if their Englishness stands out in France, that’s all right so long as it’s all down to their funny English traits of being humorous and eccentric. I was also beginning to see how the concept of narrenfreiheit, the ability to get away with things because you’re foreign, might work for someone like Gerald. ‘You’re forgiven because you don’t know any better, do you,’ he said, ‘you don’t have to obey the conventions.’ As an Englishman abroad he couldn’t be blamed for his mistakes, and moreover he could make comedy out of them, as it was all part of his peculiarly English brand of foreignness.
I pondered on what I’d imagined was an air of wistfulness around Gerald, despite the appearance of having everything that would symbolise a successful integration to many other incomers. And despite the positioning of himself as doing things the right way, I wasn’t picking up any sense of smugness, although it would have been understandable if he’d come across as self-congratulatory in how things had turned out. I wondered if there was a sense of something missing, perhaps linked to his wife being back in England. I reached for another biscuit and asked him if there were times when he felt less positive about being an outsider, which drew out some frustrations.
‘I’m English in culture. Things that you grow up with, all that body of culture that we call “English” is accessible to us, but the French one isn’t and that’s what we miss out on,’ he said. Speaking with Voltaire-like syntax was considerably better than a vocabulary limited to a dozen or so French “keywords”, like his English tradesman friend, but it still wasn’t good enough for Gerald. ‘I don’t understand everything and sometimes I get the wrong end of the stick. It’s still a foreign language to me and the culture’s alien, I haven’t grown up with it.’
I was beginning to sense a conflict of emotions. This feeling of otherness didn’t always sit comfortably with the liberating feeling of being a foreigner, and it seems to account for why some Britons entrench themselves within English-speaking networks or eventually return to the UK. If incomers feel out of place and unable to share much with the French, it’s not surprising when they turn towards the more familiar cultural landscape of their compatriots. For Gerald, who seemed settled in many ways, it equated to a feeling of frustration, of something missing. Similar sentiments were expressed when I later met Susan, who was also competent in the language: ‘It’s not having been brought up in the culture, things that in England I take for granted. You can’t take anything for granted anymore and that’s where I feel foreign, I think.’
“Home” was still the north of England, and Gerald’s wife Sandra was currently there to visit family, having taken their French neighbours with her to show them around the English countryside. I’d been so engaged in absorbing the long list of activities symbolising their social integration that it was a jolt when Gerald added that Sandra really wanted to be back home. ‘She said to me the other week, she doesn’t want to stay here. There will be a time when she really wants to be back in the UK and live there permanently.’ It was mostly down to missing family, especially grandchildren, but there were other factors. ‘This feeling of being at ease with the language when you’re at home, that’s something we haven’t got here.’ He admitted that he’d like to keep the house for holidays. ‘I’m happy when I’m here, I’m really happy apart from this worry of not being able to communicate one hundred percent effectively. And while Sandra’s always having fun here, I don’t think I’m misquoting her when I say she doesn’t feel a hundred percent herself here.’
I was grateful to Gerald for opening up to me and I understood what he meant. I’d come away from social gatherings myself, knowing that I’d only said what I’d been able to say in French, which was not at all the same as what I’d have said if I’d had my mother tongue at my disposal. It left a sense that I wouldn’t ever fully know people, nor would people really be able to know me, not in that “hundred percent” way. It’s true that some of the incomers came with barely any command of French and seemed happy to get by at a basic level, relying on others when things got complicated. But not everybody was comfortable with that.
Our chat in the dappled courtyard was also the start of what began to emerge as a kind of inner conflict among some of the incomers. Gerald, with his French dinner parties and his scorn towards English food in France, deriding the “sore point” Brits, was nevertheless known to so many of the English out here, even those living on the other side of the Ariège. ‘He’s brilliant, he’s one of our friends from the group,’ smiled Elaine when I mentioned his name. Yet people were at pains to be seen as doing the right thing: becoming integrated, speaking French and immersing themselves in French social life. And in order to belong to the right side, it was necessary to make it clear what being on the wrong side entailed. Gerald’s version of superficial incomers who couldn’t manage without their baked beans and bread pudding was just the start of what turned out to be an exhaustive account of those vague “other Brits” who lived beyond the pale. Few acknowledged how difficult it might be to abandon everything that one had grown up with and enjoyed.
A House at the End of the Track Page 4