I asked about the English people that they knew. Gail remarked how they didn’t really know people of their own age, being in between the younger families who were moving out and those of retirement age. ‘I tend not to enjoy the company of English people when I’m in France,’ Mike added, although it was noticeable that they avoided the rants and clichés about the “other” Brits that I’d been hearing up till now. Mike admitted that he’d come across some who seemed unprepared, but it was a refreshing change to hear incomers described more in terms of personality, rather than the clichés of nationality. Mike described “the sort of people who just go, like, here we go, life experience, and blunder through life, unaware of the chaos”. And rather than mindlessly repeating the mantra to speak French and integrate, Mike became pragmatic and honest when he acknowledged that different versions of the dream existed. For some it could mean living in the mountains and having “absolutely nothing to do with anybody, French or English”.
It was quite a contrast to Pat and John’s insistence on being seen to “take advantage” of every opportunity to socialise because they were afraid of how the French might categorise them. Mike’s vision was more about being accepted for what you are, rather than whether you did or didn’t fit into the national stereotype. ‘It’s more about how you are… it’s a more human sort of acceptance; the country doesn’t really have any relevance.’ It certainly made sense when considering the people living quietly in the higher Pyrenees, who were often French themselves.
Out came the photo of the café menu. Mike laughed. ‘That menu says to me I’m not going in there.’
Gail nodded. ‘Mike wouldn’t want to go in there, but I’m a foodie so I’ll try anything. But from an aesthetic point of view, it’s a mess.’
Mike zoomed in on the language. ‘Why translate tuna and not jambon? It’s unnatural, isn’t it? Strange.’ What was also surprising was that they both knew enough about the place to comment on the staff serving there, despite Mike’s insistence that he would avoid it at all cost.
As I switched off my recorder I asked if they had any questions. ‘Would you like another cup of tea?’ asked Mike.
‘And a tour of the house,’ added Gail. An hour later I got back on the bike feeling like I’d spent an afternoon with friends, and I rode away with an invitation to return for dinner some time.
Coq Au Vin À Deux
Back at the car, I peeled off my cycling shorts and used them as a barrier against the unbearably hot steering wheel as I headed for that night’s accommodation. Naturally, I’d looked for an English-run B&B where I might continue my observations. It turned out that Tony was running the place solo, as his wife Debbie was on a visit to the UK. As with Gerald’s wife, it was a visit that she would prefer to be permanent, and because of that, the guest house was up for sale. It was too much of a tie, one that negatively affected their social life. Moreover, Debbie missed their daughter, who’d stayed behind in England when the couple had decided to move to the Ariège.
Although I’d been told that evening meals were not provided, Tony immediately asked me if I would like to eat with him, since there were no restaurants around and he had nothing else to do. It was all very casual; when I went to pay the following morning, he merely shrugged his shoulders when I asked how much extra for the coq au vin. I had to estimate what I thought was a fair price. I sensed that Tony was a bit lonely, and as the sole guest I sat through a detailed description of his former life in England, where he had earned lots of money but had been permanently stressed. He gestured his hand towards the deserted road beyond the kitchen window: ‘This is our rush hour.’ But he went on to describe their Ariège summers as one long frenzied treadmill, when they were “too busy with guests to even make a cup of tea.” His main complaint was that guests wouldn’t leave them alone, yet here he was following me around and even setting the breakfast table for two so that he could sit opposite me and continue to provide what he called “fodder” for my research. Despite the non-stop whirl of the summer season, its shortness meant that they “didn’t make much” from the business, and most of the off-season was spent doing odd jobs for the local Brits, such as painting shutters and organising holiday home changeovers. Even this off-season fill-in work was described as a never-ending race from property to property, one that took up all of his time so that he never even got to use the season’s ski pass he’d invested in. He made it sound as if the Brits needed their shutters painting every single year.
I asked Tony if he socialised with other English people, but he claimed not to; he was especially keen to shun British social gatherings in what he called “a pub-type setting”. Yet he lived in a hamlet where half a dozen other English incomers were living, and it sounded as if he mixed with them. He also knew many of the other incomers with whom I was meeting up, even those from much further afield, partly because they’d hosted lunches for the Ariège English Speaking Women’s Group. The tales of his former life and the British gossip might have carried on until the early hours if I hadn’t made my excuses and left.
When I asked Tony for his thoughts on why people might be moving to the Ariège, he was adamant that the Dutch were the most obvious and numerous incomers. The Dutch, he stated, were completely taking over certain villages – “far more than the English do” – driving down with their cars stuffed full of Dutch food and contributing nothing locally, in his view. It was apparently all down to the relative height of the Ariège above sea level. The Dutch were naturally alarmed at the prospect of further sea level rises as the Earth continued to warm up, and the Ariège had been noted as somewhere where sustainable living would be possible in the event of environmental collapse. ‘It’s high, it’s south and it’s wooded. People are moving here with their children’s futures in mind.’
It wasn’t just something that individuals were considering for themselves. Flying back to the Ariège from the UK recently, Tony had got talking to some people who were taking the interest in self-sufficiency even further, as a business opportunity. They told him that they were coming to the Ariège with the aim of looking to buy an entire hamlet, in order to set up an eco-business, bringing in people to teach others how to live a self-sufficient life. ‘Were they like the alternative types around here?’ I asked.
‘No,’ said Tony. ‘They were business people. They were honest in admitting that they weren’t particularly alternative themselves. They just saw it as an opportunity to make money out of those who were. There are people out there who are worried enough to want to escape but they don’t know how to go about it.’ So it was a kind of free-market exploitation, of people and their fears, and of the Ariège landscape too. Perhaps it would work, but the underlying capitalist motivation seemed to jar with what they proclaimed to be promoting. There were plenty of opportunities around for volunteers to join eco-projects where they would help with various tasks such as market gardening and dry stone walling, and at the same time develop their own knowledge of sustainable living. I’d picked up hitchhiking student architects who were volunteering at one such eco-enterprise near Massat; they were learning about traditional roofing and they received free accommodation in return for their labour. But there was no exchange of money.
Seeing the Ariège as a way to exploit people’s anxieties about the future seemed an undesirable concept, but why? It’s a packaging and marketing of the land in a way that’s capitalising on people’s desire to live a simpler life, but was it really that different from the way that some estate agents sell property with an accompanying concept of a way of life, filling the property magazines or the exhibition halls in London with glossy images to entice buyers to purchase a lifestyle? Perhaps it was. A fair portion of the Ariège was up for sale to individuals enticed by the glorious isolation of a converted barn far from any other habitation, but the incomers would need to adapt to the land; taming it into submission as necessary, but also adapting their way of life to whatever the land inflicted on them. Bu
t this purchase of an entire village to exploit a gap in the market seemed to be the other way round. Here were business-minded incomers imposing a way of life on the land where the original knowledge was long gone. The buyers would bring in others to reinvent something that was similar but superficial, designed for profit, rather than something they really believed was the right thing to do. It felt like an unwelcome exploitation of the wild and free Ariège and it made me uneasy.
2
We Did It All Wrong
Sometimes I Think I Should Have Moved To Cumbria
‘I don’t rave about France itself. I like this area for what it is, but if it gets too overpopulated then I would go. Sometimes I think I should have just moved up north, it wouldn’t be very much different than if I’d moved to Cumbria.’ Tina and I were behind the counter in a shop in a small Ariège town, surrounded by English food items for sale: baked beans, ketchup, custard and mustard. There was also a wall shelved with used English language paperbacks, available to buy for a couple of euros. Tina, perched on the counter in her jeans, jumped up every now and then to serve the people coming into the shop: the odd English incomer wanting a chat, a few French customers buying teabags and an American woman who lived nearby and was down on her luck. She would have talked at us for the entire afternoon if Tina hadn’t made a gentle hint.
Tina admitted that the decision to move here had been totally spur of the moment. They’d taken a wrong turn whilst on holiday, and had ended up buying a holiday home after casually looking in an estate agent’s window. It didn’t take long for them to decide to leave England behind for good, although at times it sounded as if they’d swapped their English stress for an Ariège version. ‘I had a career and a nice job and a nice house and lots of money and then you come here and it’s completely different. I suppose, if you like, I ran away.’ Despite an early claim that “we wouldn’t go back now”, Tina steered the conversation through numerous disappointments and pitfalls, all of which were painstakingly detailed. If any visitors had come into the shop with the idea of moving here, as they often did, they would probably have left the shop shaking their head and feeling relieved to have had a lucky escape.
Although Tina went on to mention what she called the “Peter Mayle factor”, she began by articulating the push factors for the move much more strongly than the pull of France itself. Demanding jobs, stress-related illness and the process of “becoming your own person” after divorce were all given as factors that drove the couple to start living permanently over here, despite Tina’s nine-year-old daughter choosing to stay behind at the last minute. ‘To be honest I thought it’d be much easier to pop back, but it’s not just popping back. Flights not running in the winter, two hours to the airport, you know, and you can’t just take time off work so I don’t see her as much as I’d like.’ On the other hand, Tina acknowledged that the area wasn’t ideal for an English teenager. ‘In hindsight, for her, definitely I wouldn’t have brought her here.’
The couple had initially struggled to find work in the Ariège, with Tina doing odd cleaning jobs for other English-speaking incomers until she’d recently been taken on to run the shop full time. Despite the obvious enjoyment she got from the job, and from her relationship with the owner – “she’s like our family now” – Tina radiated disappointment rather than smugness about the new life. ‘I don’t like it when the English come over here and say how fantastic it is compared to England, because I don’t think it is when you work here.’ She also exuded anxiety about the approaching winter. Having lived through four Ariège winters, she talked about getting really depressed at night because of the impending end of summer. ‘I haven’t worked in the winter yet but I don’t think it’s going to be much fun. I think January’s going to be very quiet here, but also getting home at half six, seven o’clock at night is going to be quite depressing.’
It illustrated the difference between the imagined life and reality. The cliché of the rural idyll had been a pull for Tina, who referred to it as the “Peter Mayle factor” within “that little French dream”. ‘We’re not pottering up and walking around the market with your wicker basket and all that,’ she laughed. ‘I bought the basket and everything, but I’m never there on market days as I’m working. One of the first things we did was get bikes because it’s the whole A Year in Provence thing, isn’t it, that we’re going to do. We go mushroom picking every year just so that we can go and make idiots of ourselves at the chemist. I remember getting that from Peter Mayle’s book, but you go to the chemist and they go Non, non, non. I’ve never picked a good mushroom yet.’
Living in Ariège wasn’t entirely a disappointment. For Tina, life here was still relaxed compared with the way things had been in England. ‘I completely lived off stress. Completely and utterly. It was 14-hour days, you know, to the childminder’s, 8 o’clock in the morning, pick up 7 o’clock at night, go go go,’ she rattled off. ‘I had to have medication so I could actually go to sleep because you couldn’t switch off.’ But as the afternoon drew on, she became ever less enthusiastic in her descriptions of Ariège life, sharing her irritations about absolutely everything but in a fairly good-natured way. I guessed that she probably enjoyed having a moan to a sympathetic stranger in order to balance out the hours spent with the eager customers who came in to ask her advice about moving here.
I brought up the questions brought up by newcomers on the forum and received a hollow laugh. ‘They’re so enthusiastic and so excited about it and on a high, you know, it’s all so fantastic.’ But according to Tina, what they would find when they got here was that the social charges were horrendous, the tax system was a minefield and a so-called fantastic health cover system that ‘horrified’ her. The latter was given as the ultimate reason for the return of no less than three retired couples to the UK. Everyday living was made difficult by the price of electricity, petrol, meat and road tolls, and there were no affordable clothes shops in the town. The local weather wasn’t acquitted either; according to Tina it rained every day in July but it was really, really hot in August, when you just want it to rain. Even “going to the doctors is quite hard, you just think, oh, can’t be bothered”. It all made me wonder why there wasn’t a mass exodus of people leaving the country, including the French.
Like most of the other English incomers I met, Tina set herself apart from the other incomers, although she saw them less in terms of the stereotypes, and more as falling into one of two camps: the wealthier, older Brits and the younger alternative families. She seemed keen to avoid coming across within either category, describing herself as between the two. She described being invited for pre-dinner drinks and sitting looking over the pool of the wealthier incomers, whilst feeling a world apart. ‘We’re younger, got no pensions, no property in England, nothing like that.’ Yet this was also cited as a positive factor in that it helped them to integrate. ‘So many of the others don’t have to work and they stay within their little community, so they aren’t accepted like we are.’ Apparently even the French had assumed that they were wealthy early-retirees, and Tina felt that they’d had to work really hard at dispelling that initial assumption among the locals. They’d done this, she said, by visiting the local bar every night to explain how they’d come to work, that they hadn’t come with money to live on.
At the other end of the lifestyle-and-wealth spectrum were people that Tina felt were “like us but quite alternative”. She’d been invited to music evenings and vegan barbeques, where Steiner school children ran around the “wooden shack” that was their home, one without television or washing machine and having only a compost toilet. ‘Lovely if you can do it, but I can’t,’ she laughed. ‘I don’t dislike them and I’ve been to one or two gatherings and just thought, I really just don’t feel like I should be here. You have a glass of wine and you’re sort of looked at… they don’t normally drink, they’re just on the wacky, so yes, I think we’re sort of not quite the norm here, if you like.’ Even socialis
ing after work with the local French was not the same as going out with English friends back in England. ‘I think it can be quite lonely sometimes.’
Language learning doesn’t come easy to everyone, and Tina felt she moved “backwards” when she first came to live here. As with many others, it was a case of bringing back to life the French learned some twenty, thirty or forty years ago in school. Apart from the discussion group used by Pat and John, I heard of only one formal opportunity to learn the language, some laughably poor classes that had taken place in Saint-Girons. Almost everyone I spoke to had attended them, but they all found it ludicrous that one teacher had to cope with a class of 30 odd people of different levels and nationalities – English, Dutch, Tahitian and Indian, to list a few. The English apparently nicknamed it “The Comedy Club” before they all gave it up as a waste of time.
The village of Léran had been on my mind since talking to Pat and John, and I wondered if Tina knew much about it. ‘I heard there are a large number of English people in a place called Léran?’ I asked.
Tina became animated, nodding. ‘Yes, massive, huge, huge.’
‘About 60 English people, so I was told?’
‘Is it north, south of Carcassonne?’ she asked.
‘It’s west,’ I replied, wondering whether it had just been an automatic reaction to agree with me. Nothing more was offered and Tina moved on to what was going on in the neighbouring Aude département, in which she was an expert. She brought in an English character known as Little Fat Norman, who operates a business out of the neighbouring Aude département. I must have sounded sceptical that anyone would choose to operate under such a name, as Tina insisted on bringing up his website to prove the existence of the business.
A House at the End of the Track Page 7