The teapot and plate of biscuits in front of me were part of an English ritual that had been noted in France long before the recent waves of incomers. The American Mary Waddington visited the “anglicised town” of Hazebrouck in 1916 and raised her eyebrows at the way that English customs such as church services and afternoon tea rituals had been imposed – as the English “always do”.15 Unlike Dordogneshire, English-style tearooms were not at all a common feature of the Ariège towns, although there was one that I’d come across in the medieval town of Mirepoix. This was perhaps the Ariège town most notorious for its association with the English, and at that time it was undergoing what the Ariège.com tourism website referred to as the “Dordogne phenomenon”. What this meant in tangible terms was the appearance of English estate agencies, English-language menus and the availability of English newspapers and magazines in the town. Mirepoix even had an English church service. The previous week I’d spent a Monday morning wandering around Mirepoix’s market, eavesdropping on the small groups of Brits who were gathered here and there, inviting each other for “Apero evenings”. It did feel that every other voice was English, despite it being at the end of the season, and there would have been many more during the peak summer time. In winter the English voices were greatly diminished, although there’d been a comment on the forum that their continuing presence was a welcome and comforting sound to the year-round residents.
I expect that the British-owned tearoom in the main square was also a haven of comfort, so long as one could make sense of the bizarre mix of English and French chalked onto the A-board. A photograph of the menu was at that time featured on the Mirepoix page of the Ariège.com tourism website, where it was used to illustrate the town’s popularity with the Brits. The menu advertised such things as:
Jambon – omelette Spanish
Salads: thon (tuna)
Scones with jam and cream
Bread pudding
Like me, the website organisers had found the muddle of French and English too funny to ignore, admitting to me that it had made them snigger. I expect they eventually realised that poking fun at the crown jewel of Mirepoix was not the wisest move for a site whose raison d’être was promoting tourism, as the photograph and the references to the “Dordogne phenomenon” have since disappeared from the page. Yet that image of the menu presented a wonderful opportunity to gauge people’s reactions to the English presence in the Ariège. It became a visual stimulus that I whipped out when talking to the incomers.
I had a good idea of what Gerald would say about the menu’s illogical mixing of French and English. ‘What comes to mind when you see that?’ I said as I handed the photo across the tea table. He laughed. ‘It’s a bit of a mess, isn’t it? Put it this way, we’d avoid that unless we were desperate.’ I explained where it was and his tone became more serious. ‘I know the one. That menu. We’re never tempted to go in there. I mean, why would you come to France and eat bread pudding? Come to France and you can eat crème caramel.’ Yet he went on to describe his own visit to the café. ‘The owner was really short and rude. We never went in again.’
Fast-forward to a couple of years later when the café was taken over by an English woman who happened to be a friend of the couple. Gerald’s wife promoted it enthusiastically on one of the Ariège forums as somewhere for the Brits to indulge in familiar treats such as Victoria sponge, English leaf teas and apple crumble with custard. As Sandra said, it was also a way to introduce the French to such delights, although it was not meant to be an English tearoom. Nevertheless, many Britons visiting the town saw it as a slice of England. Reading through its online reviews, I noted how the majority spoke positively about being able to find a full English breakfast among the medieval architecture, as well as the monthly visit of an English fish and chip van. I went out of my way to take a look. It was difficult to imagine how the menu would have met Gerald’s approval, as it had retained its curious Franglais mix. If anything, it had become even more disorderly now it included carrotte cake, sorbets of citron, myrtilles et mangue and a Full English breakfast – All Day! The former French name had also been replaced by one in English: The Mad Hatter. I sat down and ordered in French, which the waitress dismissed with a wave of her hand: ‘It’s ok, I’m English.’
Back in Gerald’s courtyard, I got up to go and mentioned the English-owned bed and breakfast that I’d booked myself into. Gerald immediately launched into a description of the owner and the recent dinner that they’d had together. He waved me off, standing outside his front door that opened directly onto the street. ‘You’ll be fine with Tony, he’ll look after you.’ As I made my way back to the car I wondered how long it would be before that longing for the hundred percent would pull Gerald and his wife back to England.
Muriel’s About
‘One of the things we decided right at the start was just total immersion. If it’s a French system, we’ll have that, thank you very much, and goodbye to the rest.’ Pat and John’s house sat in the centre of their village and our conversation was punctuated by the occasional sounds of traffic. At one point I jumped at the roar of next door’s mower, starting up mere inches away on the other side of the fence.
Pat and John were exceptionally eager to chat with me, interrupting and talking over each other as they recounted everything about their move to this small village and what they got up to now they were here. They’d moved to the Ariège without knowing anything about it before the house purchase – “no history, no background, nothing” – and they’d even decided against the house on its first viewing. It was only a phone call from the estate agent – ‘“You do realise this ticked virtually every single box you’d got?”’ quoted John – that drew them back for another look at it. They’d originally purchased it as a holiday home, but when John was offered early retirement they took the opportunity to make a permanent move, and they were now relieved that they’d chosen something small and manageable. ‘If we’d originally set out looking for somewhere to live, I’d have been ridiculously tempted to buy a very large property with an enormous amount of land,’ said John, ‘but our friends over here already suffer with having houses that are miles too big and gardens that are unmanageable. We know quite a few who’ve had to downsize, both in land and in house.’
Pat nodded. ‘Obviously you can get a lot for your money here, and people are thinking Oh god, you get all that for that! So I’ll have that. But then they realise they can’t manage the land, the habitation tax is quite high on bigger properties, there’s the heating it and all the rest of it, and so they perhaps realise they’ve made a bit of an error.’
They’d both made a valiant effort to learn French, speaking with an accent coloured with a Midlands twang that I found familiar and comforting, although it brought some vowels closer to an English pronunciation. John talked about a week’s holiday down in the cruise being a trigger point for them to think about buying in France. ‘Department twenty-three, that,’ added Pat. ‘We’d originally wanted to live in the Langwydoc,’ said Pat, ‘but we couldn’t find anything, and gradually moved further east to the Ord (Aude). But when the estate agent said there’s a house in the Ari-ayge, we said, Where’s that?’
The conversation came back again and again to how Pat and John weren’t like the other Brits. Just as Gerald had distanced himself from the bread pudding eaters, Pat and John were similarly keen to show me that they weren’t the kind of English incomers who were “really obsessed with buying English foods and things like that, which we find really sad.” I thought back to my recent visits to nearby Mirepoix and the little groups of Brits I’d heard organising their get-togethers. The place had been described as a magnet for the English on the online forum, and it was close enough for me to have cycled there and back this morning after parking my car at their house. I wondered how Pat and John felt about having the “Dordogne phenomenon” on their doorstep and I brought out the photograph of the menu with its untidy Franglais. Pa
t was disdainful, recognising the café and remarking that a lot of people boycott it. ‘I definitely wouldn’t go to a place like that myself, because I feel as if it’s not what I’m here for.’
John came in with a different reason. ‘I’d ignore it on the basis that it’s not a menu du jour or a plat du jour.’
‘Yes,’ said Pat, ‘but we don’t like the whole idea of having to have an English tearoom type of thing. We call this kind of thing Muriel, don’t we?’ she said, turning to John.
‘Muriel?’ I queried.
‘Yes,’ said Pat. ‘We heard this once,’ she said, and then put on a well-to-do voice: ‘Oh Muriel, I’ve found an English tearoom over here, Muriel, come along, and ever since then we say, Oh, Muriel’s about.’
It was true that most of the people I spoke to, when asked about a British community in the Ariège, cited Mirepoix as the place where one was most likely to be found. The town had had a British shop until recently, and Pat and John admitted to having visited it on a couple of occasions. According to Pat, this was only when they’d had English guests. ‘We’ve just been to take visitors who just wanted to have a look or buy a bag of Walker’s crisps.’
Out of everyone I spoke to, Pat and John lived the closest to this English magnet, and perhaps this was why they put so much effort into playing down the idea of living among large numbers of Brits. Going back to my earlier question about the English voices I’d heard, I asked if they knew where they all actually lived. John replied that there were “some in and around Mirror-poix and one or two in other villages around”, making it sound inconsequential.
‘We don’t like it, do we,’ added Pat. ‘But this side, where we are, there’s just three.’ Instead they kept mentioning a village called Léran, where apparently most of the Brits were clustered – “over 60 English people living in Léran” – as well as many more British second home owners. The details became more sensational as they talked over each other, describing Léran as a place where there’d been “a little bit of unrest” in recent years, including a village murder. Pat filled me in. ‘It sounds a bit like it was in the social housing type situation. I go to yoga there and one week the window had been smashed in the village hall. I’ve noticed how many for sale signs have been going up in Léran, because people have had enough now.’ They mentioned one particular bar/restaurant run by English speakers that was the hub of the English activity. ‘It centres around the bar and sometimes there’s 20 people, it’s sort of cliquey. The Brits all meet in the bar and they all get pissed.’
I later realised that this restaurant was the one most regularly mentioned on the online forum, being popular not only for its food but also the regular music nights. Unlike the Mirepoix café it kept its English and French menus separate, and it certainly wasn’t aimed just at the Brits, although it did advertise afternoon tea. The incomers would also have appreciated the English book swaps that took place there. It had an adventurous and experimental menu – Daube de boeuf a la Guinness was a popular dish, as well as Scotch eggs avec confit d’oignons to start and Bakewell tart to finish off. I could see how it had become a go-to place for the English to meet up, without it being a strictly English restaurant. I took the opportunity to eat there one night, taking a seat in front of a bookcase filled with English books and picking up a copy of Hello magazine with the British royal family on the cover. But the place certainly wasn’t bursting with English speakers that night, nor, after wandering around the village, did I feel any sense of being in a place overrun with social problems.
John began to bring in more evidence to show that if the Brits made a nuisance of themselves, it was always elsewhere. ‘There was an incident in the pub by the bridge by Moulin Neuf with one or two English that were getting overly drunk,’ he said, referring to a nearby village.
Pat took up the story. ‘And apparently they sat on someone’s seat that was an old French guy’s or something and it ended up in a fight.’ The Brits clearly had a bit of a reputation in the area, which had made it necessary to steer the conversation away from their own backyard and focus on the issues elsewhere, in order to increase the physical distance between them and the drunken fights of the troublemakers. And at the other end of the social scale were the Muriels, portrayed as different people altogether, with their posh accents and penchant for English tearooms.
Despite all of this, English things continued to play a role. I’d noticed a British-registered 4×4 parked outside the house, yet irritation spilled out of John when he talked about the Brits who still drove a British-registered car. These were all placed into the category of annoying Brits who “don’t really live here”, together with the Brits who don’t pay their French taxes. Lest I get the wrong idea, John went into a long explanation about why he himself still had a British vehicle plate, describing it as a non-option – “we don’t have a choice, we can’t have a French-registered car” – because his former place of work entitled them to a lease car, even during retirement. Due to this they drove back to England every few months to update the car. Moreover, they took the opportunity to fill it with the one food that they missed. ‘We bring lots of bacon back, buying it in big bulk packs from a guy who runs a market stall that we’ve sort of got to know. We’ll tell very close friends we’re going to England and ask if they want anything.’
They also brought back British paint and teabags. John was a keen DIY-er who went into enthusiastic detail about how he’d put right the “horrendous wreck” of the house: he pointed out to me the exterior cladding, double glazing, new kitchen and electrics that he’d done. He also emphasised that the interior decoration had been done using British paint, as the French stuff was “akin to coloured water” as well as being much more expensive than the British brands. I was beginning to see that total immersion was open to interpretation.
One such interpretation related to John’s idea that the English had a requirement, or duty, to share their culture with the French. This helped to justify the different British-themed food nights that they went to in some of the English-speaking restaurants around. Pat described a Welsh bar that started off doing Sunday lunches and moved into fish and chip shop nights, followed by St Patrick’s nights and Robert Burns’ nights. ‘They were inundated. They had a big French following as well so that it was half French and half English. The French loved it and you don’t mind so much then.’
John nodded. ‘There was a lot of integration,’ he said. ‘You can’t spin it the wrong way. There’s an expectation in the minds of the average French person. A large part of them want to understand culturally where you are. So I think there’s a requirement on us to share that culture with the French, in the same way as we want to share theirs.’ I nodded slowly as I tried to get my head around this idea of a French expectation.
Pat expanded on the idea of sharing. ‘It’s as if you’re bringing something, a bit quirky perhaps, to their village. And they’re curious and they’re sort of integrated.’
I could see the point about the quirkiness, and it was an ingenious argument to dispel any contradiction with what they’d said earlier about finding those who obsessed over English food as “really sad”. They saw themselves as participating in an important exchange, just doing their duty to address a French expectation. In this way it was presented as part of the French way of life. You can’t spin it the wrong way. I could imagine the French viewing their English quirkiness with genuine affection.
But both Pat and John had mentioned integration as if it was the French who were “sort of integrated”. Of course integration is a two-way street, where the host is as responsible for accepting the incomers and their quirks as the incomers are responsible for not segregating themselves. Yet the language that they used went beyond the idea of French acceptance, suggesting a degree of responsibility with the French themselves to become integrated into the English social activities. It was an idea that had been raised in some academic circles, that a degree of l
ocal adaptation to the culture of immigrants was a good thing, although it was a controversial idea too.
Today it was an idea that was helping to diminish the responsibility to avoid everything English. It was their way of making it clear to me that they were doing the right thing. After all, they were simply meeting the needs and curiosity of the French, who really do want to understand these quirky English people who have come to live in their town. Not like those stuck-up Muriels.
Guests Of Honour
‘Is any of this any good to you?’ demanded John as we sat around drinking yet more tea. I nodded, feeling an undercurrent of delight that they were so eager to provide me with detailed accounts of their social life.
‘I know we do talk too much,’ said Pat. I reassured them that this wasn’t the case and asked them what came to mind with the words British community in Ariège. I was interested to see how they would avoid reference to nearby magnet-for-the-English Mirepoix. ‘Well, Léran would spring to mind immediately,’ said Pat. ‘I don’t think there’s one here, but we’ve seen it in Léran.’
John came in to water down the idea. ‘But hang on, it’s not Dordogne, so the answer is no, there isn’t a British community here. There are pockets, that’s all.’
Pat persisted. ‘If you spoke to Hannah, the other English person in our village, she would tell you exactly the opposite. She goes to the Women’s Group, she goes to the English service in Mirepoix cathedral, they’ve let them have it there, and there are spin-off church groups, all English. She goes to the book group, and a discussion group; the topics might be anything from euthanasia to gardening in France, but it’s all done in English. It’s all English speakers who go to it.’
A House at the End of the Track Page 5