Trying to conceal your bacon-buying or your socialising with other English incomers were really quite minor issues that were mostly about what kind of person you wanted to be seen as. But the gap between appreciating French family culture and moving away from your own was one that I was finding it difficult to get my head around. Pat and John had justified it in terms of having “done their bit”; after years of working and bringing up children, now the focus was on time for themselves. For Tina, with a teenage daughter in the UK, she’d pointed out the difference between the perceived ease of getting a quick flight back and the actual reality of coping with airports, flight schedules and time off work. Bringing children over to the Ariège didn’t always work out either; I’d heard over and over about one particular family with teenage girls who’d recently returned to the UK after two years of “roughing it” in the middle of nowhere. A key factor seemed to be the unhappiness of one daughter; a teenager who “hated it and made their life a living hell”, according to the gossip. Even Lynn had come across the family during her first few months in the Ariège, describing them as “normal, down-to-earth people” whom she’d have enjoyed spending time with if only they’d stayed. She filled me in with the details as we sat next to the house foundations. ‘They took on such a huge project, to build a house with a gîte. The parents loved it but the eldest girl struggled like mad to a point where she was desperately unhappy.’ But that wasn’t all. ‘The two adults were living in a tent and the two girls were in a bit of a ramshackle place, to be honest, which was dirty and awful. And then the land they were building on had a landslide.’ It sounded badly planned. Lynn nodded. ‘They did it on a whim apparently. They came out, they loved it, they sold up and then bought the land after they’d moved here. They just decided let’s go, and that was it.’
I got ready to leave. ‘Come back one evening,’ she said, ‘I do a great spaghetti Bolognese.’ I thanked her, privately hoping that I’d been placed into the category of “normal, down-to-earth people” rather than that of the pretentious la-di-das.
Lynn and Steve eventually returned to the UK, although, as is often the case in the Ariège, the house took a few years to sell. Some two years after Lynn told me that the house was going on the market I happened to have lunch with the estate agent handling the sale. Janneke, an English-speaking agent favoured by many of the Brits, told me that she was shifting plenty of lower-priced houses, but that beautiful detached house in the sunny valley had received hardly any viewers to date. It seemed a shame, as in some respects Lynn and Steve had achieved what others craved; a spacious house that wasn’t a money pit, and employment with the French. But it wasn’t enough to keep them there.
Swimming In Arsenic
On the way back I decided to cool off by doing what I’d seen others do and plunged into the transparent waters of the river Salat, at a point downstream of the rapids where the river bed dropped low enough to be able to swim. The previous week I’d stopped the bike to sit on a low wall overlooking the river and watch a couple in the water, shifting my gaze slightly when I realised that they were swimming naked. Today I’d come prepared to test the water and had followed a track on the opposite bank that led to a flat rocky platform, perfect for lowering oneself into the water. Just one other bather was there today, a solitary woman who lay reading in a bathing suit. We nodded at each other as I positioned myself at a tactful distance. The peace was momentarily broken by a line of mules who stepped past, laden with the baggage of a party of children who were following noisily behind. The young woman leading the mules stopped right in front of me to cup her hands and drink from the clear water, and when they’d all moved on I lowered myself in, trying not to gasp too loudly at the temperature. The Salat flows down from the heights of Mont Rouch above Salau, and is later joined by others such as the Garbet, the Arac and the Lez before they all go on to feed the Garonne further north. As I swam, the numbing sensation of glacial cold was broken by the gentle push of the current as it massaged my arms and legs. It would have been easy to give in to it and be carried downstream towards Seix.
As with any other river fed by vast uplands, the Salat can change dramatically in a short time. Further upstream was the village of Salau, the site of a former tungsten mine that had closed in 1986. One July I’d walked past the old mine workings on my way up to a vast ice cave that nestled in a glacial corrie, or cirque, above Salau. The old mine buildings were still there, empty and graffitied, and I’d dashed into one of them to shelter when a particularly violent storm had appeared out of nowhere. The skies lashed down so much rain that I watched in some alarm as the Cougnets, a tributary that fed the Salat, changed to a frighteningly angry torrent of brown that threatened to spill over the banks. I later read that this was exactly what had happened back in 1982, causing half of Salau to be destroyed with the force of the water.
There’s currently a push to reopen the tungsten mines, with an Australian company, Apollo Minerals, coming in as a partner to help fund the feasibility study. Besides the financial attractiveness of extracting the tungsten deposits, the mines were also known to contain copper and gold. I don’t suppose I was the only one alarmed at the idea of commercial vehicles trundling their way up and down the narrow valley road, but the local community had focused on a more sinister factor: the known presence of asbestos in the mines. This was casting the darkest shadow of all over the scheme. Local inhabitants felt that they’d been left out of any consultations within a project where too much had gone on without official authorisation. And if the threat of asbestos wasn’t enough, there was a perceived risk of pollution to the environment from the existing PCBs left behind in the original mine galleries, not to mention the use of cyanide to extract gold.
Thirty or so protestors at the demonstrations might sound as if locals weren’t particularly bothered about the issue, but the commune itself had fewer than a hundred inhabitants, and something like 80% of its houses were secondary residences. The original mine employees had largely moved away after the mine closed, leaving just ten inhabitants in the village at that time. More recent incomers had chosen the valley for the particular lifestyle and “protected environment” that it offered, which all seemed rather vulnerable now. The usual mantra about development bringing employment opportunities was completely pointless here, as everyone knew that mining experts from elsewhere would be brought in to work the deposits. It had come as a shock to some of the incomers that they’d moved close to somewhere with a hidden cocktail of arsenic, asbestos, cadmium, zinc and hydrocarbons, and naturally they worried that reopening it would endanger the Salat watershed. Yet, as someone commented ironically, hikers have long been drinking from the river and its tributaries, totally unaware of what might be invisible within that clear glacial water. Yes, I thought, and they swim in it, too.
A Past Encounter
The van was old, with a British registration plate, and some part of its suspension had collapsed, causing it to lean alarmingly towards the edge of the road that fell away down the slope. The road itself was so narrow that the lurching van blocked it, and a gathering of impatient people and their vehicles had built up to the front and rear. I recognised some locals, such as the forest ranger in his waders, on his way out for a fishing trip, but I had never before seen the tattooed lady in a black hat and heels, who was raging about being late for her rendez-vous. A young, scruffy Irishman rifling through the chaos inside the van turned out to be the owner, Dylan, urgently searching for his insurance details. It turned out that Dylan and his South American girlfriend Anna had purchased some land complete with tumbledown barns with the idea of setting up an eco-camp. They were in the process of building a couple of yurts to rent out to people who would appreciate the tranquillity of staying miles away from anywhere. Unfortunately they’d failed to take into account that the land had no road access to it, apart from a private road owned and built by a man known locally as L’Ours (The Bear). The Bear didn’t see why he should let scruffy new
comers benefit from his hard labour, and so Dylan and Anna were left to carry everything, including two large wood-burning stoves, up a steep track, accompanied by their three-year-old toddler. It didn’t seem to have occurred to them that paying visitors might find the whole access thing a bit awkward.
Dylan and Anna seemed as curious about us as we were about them, and after my partner Terry helped to nudge the van over so that the other cars could get past, they invited us up to see their place that night. Their land turned out to be almost vertically above my own house, and Dylan had begun improving the access by tying a muddy rope to a tree, which made it only slightly easier to haul oneself up onto a track that was littered with boulders from the collapsing terrace walls on either side. The track soon became a strenuous climb past a few derelict barns, and all I could think of was how on Earth Dylan had managed to haul log burners up here. After twenty minutes or so we finally came out into a small clearing and saw the randomly painted woodwork of their barn and the beginnings of a yurt that were emerging from a wooden platform close by.
Dylan showed us around his land, which was extensive but steep and forested. It included a second building much further up the hillside, another barn that was ostensibly a more habitable structure than the one they were living in, but unfortunately graced with a large bulge in one of the exterior corners where the mortar-less stones had moved outwards. ‘I never noticed that when the estate agent showed us round,’ admitted Dylan, ‘but it should be easy enough to fix with acros.’ That was true, but the manner of getting acros up to that spot was another matter. I felt a bit vulnerable with the weight of the entire house above my head and was relieved when Dylan led us out, locking the door with an ancient and enormous key.
We skidded back down the hillside to the barn where we sat on an old car seat in their “living room”, breathing in the fumes from one of the wood-burning stoves close by. Dylan’s attempt to install a dormer window was pointed out with good humour, as something they were learning to do as they went along. All the time the lights flickered on and off, as they were powered by car batteries and it was easy to accidentally nudge the wires. Up a ladder we went to see the bedroom, which was a tent inside the roof space, the tent offering essential protection from an existing family of loirs, or edible dormice, who had taken residence in the upper rafters. These original occupants harassed the human family all night long, screeching and throwing nuts at them as they tried to sleep. As Juliette said, it was understandable because the loirs had been there first and would resent the humans moving in to their territory. She also implied that the creatures would know the difference between a house, which was meant for human habitation, and a barn.
Running water was a permanently open tap fixed to the end of a hose that dangled in a stream, powered by nothing more than gravity. I was impressed by their attempts to make the camp homely, and Anna had been busy putting colourful paint onto the exterior woodwork, but everything seemed to be done in the wrong order; aesthetics before essentials. In the twilight the enormous trees that overshadowed the clearing made it seem a gloomy place, and it was plagued by mosquitoes. We left Dylan sitting staring into the flames of the second log burner that had been installed outside the house like a patio heater. ‘I’ll sit here and watch “television” for a bit,’ he said, ‘but come back tomorrow evening and we’ll have something to eat.’
Thank You For The Food
Another couple were visiting the following evening, although they’d chosen to sleep in their van, parked below, blaming the unbearable mosquitoes that were “eating them alive”. It was Anna’s childhood friend Maria, here with her partner, a silent man in a hat who mostly stared into a nettle salad without eating or drinking anything. Our offering of cooked pasta and a bottle of wine were viewed with what looked like suspicion. ‘I only drink water,’ said Anna, but she went to fetch us a couple of jam jars for the wine. Anna admitted that they hadn’t yet sought permission to convert the barn into something that was officially habitable. ‘We don’t really know what we’re doing,’ she laughed. ‘We’re like children, you know?’ I wondered how long before it would end in tears or worse; the attempt at constructing a dormer window was one thing but the amateurish installation of a wood stove was a bit worrying.
We stood up to go back down before it got too dark to negotiate the path and the rope. The silent man looked up and nodded goodbye with a “thank you for the food”.
‘You’re welcome,’ I smiled, fully aware that he hadn’t touched any of it.
I’d wondered how Dylan and Anna had found this obscure piece of real estate, and it turned out to be quite simple. They’d bought it from my next-door neighbours, Claude and Sandrine, who’d advertised it with the local estate agents as a way to fund the renovations of their semi-derelict holiday home. Claude, from Toulouse, had inherited a percentage of the property, along with a number of other relatives, when the previous elderly occupant had died. Claude was so keen to revisit the childhood holidays he’d spent here that he bought out the other inheritors and then sold off the less accessible land and barns to Dylan and Anna. He then set about making his own house more habitable. This involved finding a home for the vast amount of artefacts that his grandfather had collected over his lifetime on this hillside; the house was littered with cow bells of all sizes, a seated contraption for shaping wooden staffs and an ancient radio that blew up with a bang and a puff of smoke when Claude switched it on for us. He then pulled one of the wormy old chairs in front of the vast inglenook fireplace and sat on it, arms folded, to show us how the old man had spent his later years. The house put me in mind of a cave; the bare rock floor was uneven but polished from a hundred and fifty years of humans and cattle walking back and forth, and the bare stone walls glistened with damp that seeped through from the hillside.
Claude spent the next few years banging and cursing his way through the renovations, much of which looked fine to my ignorant eye, but which alarmed Juliette and Vincent, who tut-tutted at the new floor beams and the way he’d repaired the old wooden stairs with concrete. Claude insisted on doing everything himself, but it was a huge undertaking. One weekend he got close to seriously injuring himself when he threw the unwanted stuff into a bonfire that exploded, blackening his face and arms all over.
I noticed that Sandrine began to come down less and less often. According to Juliette she was uneasy in the mountains, disliking the roads and fearful of wildlife such as the adder that often bedded down in my stopcock pit. It was no great surprise when the house was put up for sale halfway through the renovations. Juliette shook her head. ‘Whoever buys it will need to rip it out and start over again. It’s all been done wrong.’
Dinner For Eleven
The next time I saw Dylan was during that sweltering late summer when I arrived back in the Ariège to travel around talking to the English incomers. I’d been hearing about the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, which were all over the news, and it had got me thinking about Dylan and his desire to escape the stress and consumerism of London by living out here in the wilds. It was thus a coincidence to see his battered old van parked at the end of the track, but there was another vehicle parked in my usual spot, a smaller white van that had its driver door left wide open, with no sign of the driver. Dylan walked over, dwarfed by a lanky, sunburned man whose long red hair was en route to dreadlocks. Dylan introduced him apologetically as the van owner, hoping that I wouldn’t mind him using my space, and explaining that parking the car with the door ajar was a deliberate strategy to deter thieves from breaking in. ‘They can see there’s nothing to steal, so they won’t bother to break in,’ explained the newcomer, a Dutch man who introduced himself then laughed. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘no one can pronounce my name.’ I tried it but he winced and Dylan laughed.
‘We don’t know what to call him!’ he said. ‘How about we give you an English name, something similar like Gerald or Graham?’
But the Dutch man f
rowned, shaking his head. ‘Those are not nice names.’ I found out that Vincent openly referred to him as Carotte, which seemed mean, and over the next few days I began to think of him as Stig, inspired by his story of building a house in the Netherlands using “everyone else’s rubbish”. He must have meant that he’d built it from recycling old building materials, but I’d naively envisioned a house constructed from landfill, stinking and lumpy with walls of rotting cartons and containers. That vision, plus his long straggly hair, had put me in mind of the childhood classic Stig of the Dump, and so to me, he privately became Stig.
Stig and Dylan had met at a festival somewhere and, as became apparent, Dylan had a tendency to invite everyone to his place here in the Ariège. Stig had been spending time in the neighbouring Aude, and after meeting Dylan he’d become excited by the description of the secluded hillside in a valley that had a reputation for live and let live. He’d arrived on the lookout for something more permanent in the area and joked about building up his property portfolio. At first I genuinely thought he was looking to buy something cheap, like Dylan and Anna, and I’d offered to introduce him to the Dutch estate agent who lived nearby, but this received only a blank expression. Eventually I clocked on to the fact that these “properties” were largely uninhabitable barns that he used as squats. He was looking for something a bit more comfortable than his Aude “house”, which lacked a full roof and running water.
More people turned up over the next few days, as Dylan and Anna became the Pied Pipers of Massat. Their followers were mostly young travellers they’d met at festivals as well as random people they met in car parks. I met a stream of Italians, Israelis and French, all welcomed as labour to help erect the yurt that was taking shape on a wooden platform. I walked up there one evening to find most of them crammed into a gloomy makeshift kitchen inside the barn, elbowing each other and squinting as they concocted a dinner from what they’d salvaged from a supermarket skip that day. Early every evening they would cram into Dylan’s van and head for one of Saint-Girons’ supermarkets to rifle in the skips behind the store; an activity they referred to as “skipping”. One of them would keep a lookout while the others rummaged for what they fancied taking. Most evenings as I returned home from interviewing the English, I would pass the van going the other way on its evening ritual. Tonight they proudly showed off the smoked salmon from that day’s trip, and the girls swirled like dervishes in brightly coloured silk dresses that had also, unbelievably, been retrieved from a skip. I half imagined myself tagging along one evening, bumping around in the back of the van and doubling over to lean into the skips and pick out whatever took my fancy. But I knew I wouldn’t be taken seriously and I didn’t want to come across as self-indulgent, a voyeur playing at it. For them it was a way of life.
A House at the End of the Track Page 9