John’s insistence that just a few Brits were living in the area was rapidly evaporating. ‘In that case, yes, there are lots of things that the English do,’ he conceded, ‘but it’s not Dordogne, it is the Ariège, and I guess there’s a thin scattering that tend to permeate towards an organised centre. But then it peters out.’
So there were more English incomers and organised social activities than they’d originally implied, but it was also true that Mirepoix was only a shadow of the clichéd little England of the Dordogne, with its Gentlemen’s and Ladies’ clubs as well as cricket clubs. Nor was it like the Brit-populated Aquitaine, where there were associations for veterans of the RAF and the Royal Navy. According to the anthropologist Kate Fox, this ritual of setting up clubs wherever we go reflects more about the social inadequacies of the English as a race than any practical needs; the argument is that we need clubs as a prop to overcome our generally poor ability to engage socially. The English-speaking clubs and groups in and around Mirepoix would certainly provide a means of socialising in a comfortable environment. While each club had a specific named function that was outwardly its sole purpose, they would also have provided a less visible social networking opportunity for the English-speaking incomers, particularly those with less-than-adequate skills in French. Yet I was wary of generalising à la Fox, and Pat went on to describe less formal gatherings, such as a discussion group that took place between the English-speaking incomers and French locals who were keen to improve their English. The group met regularly and took away homework to prepare for the next discussion, which might be on topics related to French literature and radio programmes. This clearly had a practical purpose in improving language skills, but it would also provide a less threatening environment for socialising with the French, who were also working on language skills. Everyone was there to improve in one way or another.
The conversation shifted to the kinds of activities they did, with a focus on the amount of fun that they had because they made an effort to go to every social occasion in the village. At the same time, the moralistic undertones conveyed that they were doing things the right way. ‘We make an effort so that we’re shown to be taking full advantage of the French way of life and not sort of isolating ourselves, which I’d hate to do,’ added Pat. And apparently the French took notice of this and showed their approval; making an effort to go and vote in the local elections had earned them “a round of applause”.
At one point I jumped as the lawnmower started up again – “that’s Bernard mowing his lawn” – which was an opportunity to bring in an anecdote about being invited to his daughter’s wedding where, according to Pat, they were treated “like royalty” simply for being British. ‘Like guests of honour,’ agreed John. ‘Have a photograph taken with the English.’
‘Yeah, it was like we were these freaks,’ added Pat. ‘It was nice because you feel like you are properly being integrated, which is important.’ But to me this conveyed a sense of standing out rather than a sense of integration – as if they were members of an exotic tribe, to be photographed with. Being made to feel like guests of honour, or royalty, conveyed a sense of importance, of celebrity even, simply due to being from England. It also suggested a kind of hierarchy – we’re part of the community, but our Englishness puts us on a different level. The English have a reputation for patronising foreigners for their funny ways, and perhaps this was an example: the French are so funny, making us feel special like this! It had been the same at an international rugby match televised in the village hall. ‘They kept giving us free food and beers because we were like the celebrity guests again,’ said Pat. ‘It was quite funny.’
But the word freaks implied something else, and it wasn’t an image that many would aspire to. It certainly didn’t sit easily with Pat’s claim that it showed they were properly being integrated; if anything, it implied that they stood out and were treated as something abnormal. Maybe the French appreciated their efforts and found their accent rather charming? I was no stranger to standing out due to a Midlands accent; during my first year at university, my insufferably snobbish public school peers would introduce me to their friends, and then – “Listen to this!” – they’d ask me to “say the word bucket”. I suppose it was better than being a Muriel.
A year or so later I gave a talk on this bizarre use of “freaks” and “royalty” at a linguistics conference, where a well-known scholar of the language of tourism was in the audience. During the question session he became animated, objecting to my description of Pat and John as “migrants”. ‘These aren’t migrants! They’re tourists!’ he shrieked. ‘They have the privilege of being able to go home at any time!’ He also found their use of the word freaks bordering on the offensive: it’s fun to be a freak, when you can easily retreat to a safe place.
I didn’t wholly agree with what he was saying. The French, with their invitations and requests for photographs, provided a form of self-gratification for the English couple. Pat and John must have been aware that they could never sink invisibly into French society, but they would have been dismayed if the French had simply ignored all this effort. Some appreciation was necessary, and even being feted as abnormal in some way was evidence that they were being noticed. It would be vastly preferable to receiving the cold shoulder. Like Gerald, they saw the positives in being cultural outsiders, although they interpreted it as an environment of celebrity rather than the freedom to be eccentric and make mistakes.
All of this socialising needed at least a basic level of French language, and Pat had a head start from her long-ago schooldays. John had invested time in language classes before they made the move, and unlike Gerald, for whom being good wasn’t good enough, John showed no frustration and seemed content with his level of basic French. He put this down to being realistic in what was achievable, describing how he built up his vocabulary gradually around his interests of DIY and gardening. ‘I just learn it on a need-to-know basis,’ he said. ‘That’s what they call a saw, that’s what they call a lawnmower.’ But pronunciation was a different matter, and like everyone else they described the Ariège accent as impenetrable at times. Their own Midlands-infused pronunciation must have caused the odd difficulty too. They recounted a tale of a Toulouse shopkeeper not understanding their pronunciation of pain au raisins, and while Pat admitted that she’d probably not got the pronunciation quite right, John shifted the blame to the shopkeeper’s intellect. ‘We’d have got more sense out of that wall,’ he said, gesturing towards the edge of the courtyard.
I asked about their use of the online forums and Pat described how she liked to help where she could, admitting that she also found them interesting to read. I asked what I thought was a fairly neutral question. ‘Can you tell much about people from what they write on the forum?’
‘Absolutely,’ jumped in John. ‘Idiots jumping out off the page.’
Pat nodded. ‘Some of them, you think, please don’t come and live in France.’
John was even blunter. ‘Most of them I look at and say, please go home. They go on about inane things, which simply explain that they don’t understand the French system and they don’t have the savvy to go out and get what they need.’
Pat admitted feeling sorry for some of the new arrivals. ‘Those who really haven’t got a clue and I don’t know whether they’ll last. They’re going to be looking for work but there’s a lot of unemployment here and you’re going to be at the bottom of the list.’ Her tone became more scornful. ‘People thinking they can come and run a gîte or a bar, all this sort of dreamland.’
John put it down to basic economics. ‘There’s an awful lot of books written about living in France but not one that I’ve read sets out the real basics about income versus expenditure. Someone needs to be a bit more protective towards some of the souls that plan on coming over.’
He was also scathing about people who chose this part of France for the weather. ‘If you come with a view that you�
��re actually just moving for the climate, then forget it, because you don’t get the climate without the culture. It’s the culture that, for me, drives the French way of life. The importance of food, the importance of family.’
As the weeks went on I heard others talk about the importance of family here in France. Hardly anyone acknowledged how it contradicted their decision to move away from their own family members back in the UK, although almost everyone talked about someone they knew going back because they were too far away from family. According to Pat, the other English person in their village, a single female, had planned to return, since she missed spending time with her daughter.
‘That’s all gone on the back burner now she’s got a dog,’ said Pat. ‘She’s not selling her house anymore. But there’s a lot of women who live on their own here, women who perhaps think, oh, you know, perhaps I should be there for them, say if their daughter’s ill, or the grandchildren.’
It was an ethical dilemma for many, but Pat and John were adamant that they had the solution. ‘I do genuinely feel I’m missing out with the grandchildren, but if they come here and spend a holiday with us, you’re with them 24/7. That’s more like quality time than if I was rushing from house to house back in England,’ said Pat. ‘But I don’t feel guilty about it ’cause I’ve done my bit in life, I’ve had kids. I’ve worked hard.’
John jumped in to reinforce the logic of their way of thinking. ‘It is a difficult balance and you can interpret it as selfishness or you can interpret it on the basis that I’ve done my bit, I’ve done 42 years, I’ve done on average 50–60 hours a week, and by the way, I just reckon I deserve a bit of time as well. But there are people with a completely different view that will exclusively fixate around the family and the children. Well, they can carry on, but don’t criticise or don’t believe that there isn’t another way.’ Each to his own, then.
As the conversation drew to a close, John added a point that must have been developing in his mind over the course of the afternoon, something about exactly why they were living in France. ‘The biggest thing that France presents for me on a daily basis is a challenge. It’s something I’ve got to get to grips with and work at. A lot of people don’t get to enjoy their retirement because they become introverted and they just disappear. Being here gives me something to focus on and work at.’ It was a sentiment that I was to hear often over the next few weeks, as an important push factor for the move among people close to retirement. The right house, a slower pace of life, the climate and the uncrowdedness were all pull factors that drew people to France, but some incomers were set on escaping not just England itself, but an uneventful and predictable way of life that stretched into the horizon.
Life in the Ariège was summed up by Pat as one that offered people more freedom. She compared it with England. ‘There it seems to be rules, rules, rules, rules, rules. Here you can just go for a swim in the lake and that’s lovely, it’s much more a sort of laid-back, hippy lifestyle.’ It was true that there were no rules against swimming in some of the mountain lakes, the étangs, and many a time I’d toiled uphill for two to three hours, to find the clear water gently rippled by a swimmer doing breaststroke. But not all of the lakes allowed swimming.
I thanked them and stood up to go, casually mentioning that I’d be calling into the nearby DIY centre. John’s eyes lit up. ‘What are you going to buy?’ I replied that I was just going to get a replacement tin of paint, expecting him to shake his head at the idea of French paint. He asked what the brand was and then nodded his approval. ‘Yes, that’s the best one out here. It’s the only French brand worth buying.’ I felt that I’d gone up in his estimation now, showing my colours as a true Brit DIYer and, moreover, able to tell good paint from bad. ‘It’s a good place, the Brico centre,’ he nodded. ‘We go down there pretty much every day.’
A More Human Sort Of Acceptance
Pleased that I’d managed to find the right shade of eau de nil, I left the Brico centre and headed for a hamlet that was not even marked on my map. The approach roads were barely discernible on paper, but I did notice that there was a voie verte – a traffic-free greenway for cyclists – that passed close to their hamlet. I was glad that I still had the bike in the car, feeling more confident negotiating the narrow roads on two wheels rather than four. Arriving by bike turned out to be a good strategy for breaking the ice during that late summer wave of heat that was increasing in its ferocity. People were expecting something else – a car and clipboard? – rather than a red-faced perspiring cyclist, and once they’d got over their surprise, they invariably sat me down in the shade and rushed away to fetch me a cold drink, perhaps worried that I was going to succumb to a heart attack or a stroke in their garden.
Like almost every other English incomer I spoke to, Gail and Mike were welcoming and spoke effusively about their life in the foothills of the Pyrenees. Mike knew the general area from when he’d studied in France in his youth, and they’d looked for a house that was within driving distance of the sea as well as the mountains. Aged in their 40s, Gail and Mike were renovating an enormous country house that in the past had been the home to over thirty families who laboured in a nearby factory. The factory itself lay derelict close by. For the meantime the couple were concentrating on getting just half of the house habitable. Mike also did odd-jobbing as a builder, which put him in demand with the English incomers who wanted to be sure of what they were getting in their renovations.
Their garden was as large as a small park, crowned at one end by the forested foothills of the Pyrenees, and by the enormous house in its half-and-half state at the other. It was difficult to drag my eyes away from the gaping hole in the roof of the untouched section. We sat around a table while Gail served tea and talked about the kind of life they had here in the Ariège countryside.
‘I shop at Aldi and Lidl, which I’d never have done in England, not because we’re poor or on a budget, but because we don’t live like we did in England.’
‘That’s living like the French do,’ said Mike. ‘We’re not consumerist like we would have been in England.’
‘They just don’t do the consumerism thing here. We’ve completely changed in that respect.’ This didn’t mean that they lived rustically. I felt scruffy and damp sitting next to elegant Gail and a later tour of the good half of the house revealed a stylish French eau de nil colour scheme that made me realise that my own DIY attempts hadn’t quite got it right.
Nor did it mean that France was a cheaper place to live. During the 19th century, Britons had made their way to France for a less expensive way of life, and they’d continued to do so even when the comparative cost of living was no longer lower than in Britain. France had been a place where the English upper classes could live more economically, with fewer or no servants and less expensive entertaining, in a way that might cause an embarrassing loss of face back in England. There were still some parallels to be seen in the current day influxes, and one of these was the purchase of a home. Certainly the English were finding that their money went further in the Ariège, even if they’d originally wanted to live further east. Mike and Gail’s purchase of a mansion was an extreme example of this. And although there was less pressure nowadays to adhere to the expectations of one’s social class, the less commercialised Ariège made it easier to resist the relentless temptations of consumerism.
Mike was a competent French speaker, which led Gail, who had missed out on learning the language at school, to rely on him. ‘I mostly pick it up and I know a lot but I’m not good enough at putting it together quick enough to say something.’ I asked if this made her feel like an outsider at times. ‘Maybe just with the language frustration, and then I think, oh God, they could be thinking stupid English woman.’ It was the complete opposite to John’s idea that a miscommunication might be down to the French not being clever enough to understand them. Over the next few weeks I began to notice how common it was for females to talk about themse
lves rather negatively when they saw themselves from a French perspective. Elaine, whose French was basic, explained how she tried to make sure that the French didn’t dismiss her as ‘just that silly English woman who’s an immigrant. And why’s she here? She can’t even speak our language, you know.’ But such feelings weren’t confined to those with limited French. Rosie, a French speaker, also sensed the negative gaze of the locals: ‘as soon as anyone slightly doesn’t like me because I’m a foreigner or something, then I start stammering and stuttering all over the place, which is crazy.’ It wasn’t just the language-related limitations in dealing with returning faulty shop items or querying a telecoms bill. Feeling like an outsider could make an incomer feel foolish, particularly when they imagined themselves seen through the eyes of the French.
It’s easy to underestimate the importance of language when caught up with the excitement of finding a wonderful house in which to spend the rest of your days, especially when the property magazines and television programmes focus on getting the most for your money at the expense of more practical day-to-day issues. Newcomers on the Ariège forum talked about learning French as if it was a simple case of opening one’s mouth and being fed the language. And for those who’d read Peter Mayle, it was probably reassuring that his narrative began with “an almost total lack of comprehension” during their first dinner with neighbours at the start of the Provençal year, but by the autumn appeared to have progressed to an ability to make complicated phone calls. Gail was an example of how it really wasn’t that simple, having given up on a beginner’s Open University course that was pitched more at intermediates. She was now relying on the radio and language tapes to improve, whilst Mike was left to sort out situations.
A House at the End of the Track Page 6