My Four Seasons in France

by Janine Marsh

  One morning we dropped in on Monsieur and Madame Pepperpot to see if they needed help to move their cows for the winter. ‘Oui, oui,’ they said, ‘can you come tomorrow morning and have lunch afterwards?’

  When we arrived the next day, the couple were ready, Madame Pepperpot with a thick coat over her housecoat, Monsieur with his cap pulled down against a steady stream of rain. In the field, it was almost as if the cows knew they were going somewhere different. They mooed loudly and started to wander off as the couple gently cajoled them and led them out of their small barn. We found ourselves forming a human passage to keep them on track and managed to get them into the back of a trailer. Monsieur had asked Mark if he could take it on the back of our 4 x 4, only to discover the trailer hitch was too big even for the tank. Monsieur phoned Thierry the farmer, who was providing winter lodging for the beasts. His wife Mathilde told us he was out in the field, but said that if Mark came up to their farm she would lend him a tractor as the cows shouldn’t be left too long out in the cold.

  Mark shot off only to return a while later, squashed into the cab of the tractor, with Mathilde at the wheel. He said he had looked at all the knobs and dials, and muttered something about space shuttles, so Mathilde had dropped off the child she was looking after and come herself to sort them out.

  Inside the toasty farmhouse, which turned us cherry-cheeked, Madame Pepperpot ladled out bowls of scorching-hot cassoulet ‘Toulouse style’, rich with beans and sausage, covered with golden breadcrumbs. Served with hunks of baguette and a glass of red wine, it was enough to spark a love affair with the taste of the south. We felt pleasurably frozen in time and promised to come back and help when the Pepperpots returned from Toulouse after Christmas.

  Although it may seem that we live in another century at times, with our lousy internet, lack of mains drains and no chance of ever being able to use a mobile phone at home, it might surprise you to know that ‘Black Friday’ arrived in middle-of-nowhere France in its own special way.

  The shopping phenomenon that started in the US hasn’t really been a big thing in France before now. The newspapers covered the event with relish ‘C’est Quoi Black Friday?’ (What is Black Friday?) they asked, and then explained to the uninitiated French that it’s the chance to spend loads of money to save loads of money. Retail experts predicted that it would cause an online spending spree in France. Not in our village, it wouldn’t. The thought of all the mobile-phone confirmation codes generated by a consumer frenzy was enough to make us shiver, though I personally must have received about a million emails offering irresistible bargains. In Hucqueliers, however, they embraced the concept at the store where we buy chicken food; the week before Black Friday, after loading the sacks of bird food, dog food, cat food and wild-bird food into the tank (we buy at least 200 kg a month), the patron gave us a paper invitation to an evening of wine and duck sausage tart – plus 15 per cent off everything in the shop. ‘We’re calling it Green Friday on account of the fact that we sell things for the garden and for animals,’ he explained. ‘There’s no obligation, just come and enjoy the tart and the wine, but if you want to buy, you’ll save money – plus we’ve got some new cat treats in.’ Clearly I can add Mad Cat Woman to my reputation as Madame Merde and Pig Lady.

  The Wood Man, Monsieur Lassarat, came at the end of the month to drop off several tons of winter fuel. He’d delayed delivery until we had finished laying a new floor in the woodshed and, though we had a lot of Wood Club wood stacked in the back garden, we wanted to make sure we had enough to get through a long cold winter, just in case Jean-Claude’s predictions were right.

  Monsieur Lassarat is a big man who looks extremely unfit, with deep bags under his eyes and a heart condition. Despite this, he insists he doesn’t want to retire and, though he leaves the heavy lifting to his son, a strapping young man who is as strong as a bull, he does all the deliveries in his old Fiat tipper truck and is the salesman for the firm, sweet-talking all of his customers. Like so many in these parts, he loves a chance to practise his English. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve read that in order to make friends in France you must speak good French. Obviously it helps, and without at least a modicum of French, dealing with the myriad administration departments that rule daily life can be a nightmare. But, on the whole, we have found that the majority of French people, even in the sticks where we are, speak a little English (Jean-Claude only knows swearwords, so he’s not included). If you at least try to speak a little bit of French back, entente cordiale prevails. Just stock up on the bon words and use them a lot – bonjour (to everyone you meet), bon appétit (whenever you eat), bonne journée, bon après-midi, bon soiree, bon dimanche, bon anniversaire, bonnes vacances and bon courage – use these liberally, and you’ll do bon.

  With three vanloads of wood dumped in front of the woodshed, ready for us to stack, the Wood Man came in for a coffee and to write out an invoice. Everything is on paper here – if you go to a market and buy a few bottles of wine, they’ll probably give you an invoice, which will take longer to write than it did for you to choose your wine. When the Septic Tank Man (that’s a highly unlikely name for a superhero) comes around, he too issues a paper invoice, which you are obliged to keep as proof that you’ve disposed of your vile contents responsibly and legally, instead of smearing them over the fields as some people used to do.

  We chatted about the storm, Monsieur Lassarat trying to speak as much English as he could. I replied in French, as I often do, although I’m not sure why as it always results in a very confusing conversation. On the day of our biblical hailstorm, he was, he said, just 3 kilometres away from here and, though the sky darkened, there was not even a drop of rain. He came to look at our village afterwards and was horrified. Even now, it still looked like a disaster zone, but things were improving day by day.

  He told me he had recently read a survey about the happiest places to live in France – we didn’t do so well here in the north, and he wanted to know if I thought this was an unhappy place to live.

  ‘Are you kidding?’ I said. ‘This region is amazing.’

  The French can sometimes seem a morose bunch, and I think they secretly enjoy being miserable, at least in public. It’s true that surveys and polls are always quoting that the French are generally not a happy-clappy crew and, compared to some other countries, they can be downright glum. I too had read about a world happiness index that reported that around 50 per cent of French respondents agreed that they were happy. Dig a little deeper, however, and it also stated that around 10 per cent said they were unhappy and a whopping 40 per cent ticked the ‘neither happy nor unhappy’ box, which definitely says something about the French psyche. My French is pretty good these days but explaining that to Monsieur Lassarat wasn’t easy.

  ‘Are you happy here?’ I asked. He had to think about it. ‘Well, it does rain quite a bit, but I don’t really mind it, and it makes the flowers grow …’ This went on: we don’t have vineyards or make great wine, but we do have great beer. We don’t have the most Michelin-starred restaurants, but we do have great food, amazing boulangeries and the best pâtisseries.

  Monsieur Lassarat is, to me, a true representative of France – a paradox. On the one hand, he can seem full of joie de vivre, on the other, he’s a little critical. And I find here in the north, they are pretty hard on themselves. I’m no scholar but in the majority of books and magazine articles about France, the focus is all on the chateaux of the Loire Valley, the monuments of Paris, the sunny south and its gastronomy, the wines of Burgundy, etc. It’s bound to make you feel a bit like the underdog. The French tend to overthink things and that can make them somewhat gloomy. A frightfully clever French economist called Claudia Senik wrote, ‘The fact of living in France reduces by twenty per cent the probability of declaring oneself very happy.’

  I certainly don’t need to take a survey to tell me whether this is a happy place to live.

  DECEMBER

  Winter isn’t a season, it’s a feeling an
d a feast

  SOMEONE IN A nearby village put their Christmas decorations up three weeks before the big day, which really got everyone talking. Normally you wouldn’t even know it was Christmas here in the middle of nowhere until about three days before Christmas Day. Then people might put a simple, usually homemade holly wreath with bright berries and a sprinkling of mistletoe on the door, and perhaps a few twinkling lights strung around a tree in the garden. In my village, moderation with the decorations is the norm. It’s been that way for centuries and no one is interested in changing it any time soon.

  The offending house in question, two villages away, has multiple coloured lights arrayed around the windows as well as in the trees. There’s even a life-sized inflatable reindeer and sleigh in the front garden, with a strangely out-of-proportion tiny inflatable Father Christmas holding onto the reins, a pained grimace on his painted plastic face. Despite the tendency towards minimal decoration, local people are keen on blow-up Father Christmases. They hang from the windows of houses and look like festive peeping Toms clutching onto windowsills – the plastic Santas, not the locals. They grip ropes tied to gutters and lampposts and swing wildly in the wind. I find it quite sad when I see a punctured Santa, deflated and drooping, the only sign of Christmas reduced to a piece of withered plastic.

  Most of the regulars in one of our favourite local bars, near the little town of Fruges, are in agreement – three weeks before Christmas Day is simply too early for decorations. The bar is like being in someone’s front room. There’s a small gas fire set into a brown-tiled fireplace with a fifties vibe, and the room is lit by a few lamps on shelves. A TV set on a stand high up on the wall plays constantly, showing le trot, horse-and-cart racing, which is wildly popular, or the winning numbers of the lottery draw. It’s rather dark in the bar; the walls are an indeterminate dull brown, and the wooden tables and chairs have seen better days. Madame the proprietor is short with a blonde beehive hairdo, which I suspect she may have had since the sixties. Her little Jack Russell, which is trapped behind a half door, yaps and tries to get out to lick customers and nibble their shoes. She does a brisk business when she’s open, which seems to be at quite random times based on when she feels like it. Apart from being a bar it’s also where you can buy lottery tickets, tobacco products and fishing tackle as well as pocket knives and chewing gum. But what makes it special is Madame and the friendly regulars. When you walk in, even if you are a complete stranger, everyone says hello, many shake your hand and when you leave they all say goodbye. It might not be that glamorous, but it’s cosy and makes you feel like you belong.

  Coming up to Christmas, Madame always announces with great pride that she will be decorating the bar ‘early’ this year – precisely five days before the day itself. No one is particularly excited by this, since her idea of festive embellishment consists of little plastic, movement-activated dancing Father Christmas dolls, which she places on tables and the traditional zinc counter alongside the porcelain beer pumps. When you walk past them, the little Santas twitch as if in the final throes of their existence, accompanied by a faint sound of tinny, washed-out music. We all tiptoe round the bar in an effort not to set them off.

  ‘Well,’ says Monsieur Lafont, who likes to think he is the font of all knowledge, ‘personally I think those people in that village are a bit crazy to have put their decorations up this early. They won’t last. The first gust of strong wind and that reindeer will be over the trees, up the hill and off to Paris!’

  Everyone nods at his sage words; it wouldn’t do to have anything go to Paris, after all. ‘It’s bad enough that the president and his wife have a home in our department,’ he adds. ‘Every time they come to stay, there are traffic jams because of paparazzi. It’s not right, you know.’ This is enough to set everyone off on another discussion topic: is it a good thing to have celebrities living in your area? The consensus is that if Angelina Jolie wants to come and live here in the middle of nowhere now that she and Brad Pitt are no longer together, no one would mind. We are all fairly sure that she would put her Christmas decorations up early, but in her case we would allow it.

  With just over a week until Christmas Day, we were invited to a soirée at the home of Madame Bernadette, who would be spending Christmas in the south of France with some of her family. The invitation said 7 p.m., so naturally we got there for 7.30. There was no sign of Christmas cheer from the outside of her house – of course, there were still several days to go before that could happen.

  In the little farmhouses of my village you generally open the front door and find yourself in the main room of the house, where everyone spends the most time. At Madame Bernadette’s, that’s a large kitchen, the warmest room in the house, heated by a huge coal and wood oven. Coming in from the crisp night air under bright stars sparkling alongside a full moon, walking over ground twinkling with frost – it was sweltering. The wall of heat instantly misted up my glasses, leaving me momentarily disorientated in the steamy haze. Madame Bernadette had the perfect answer to that – a chilled cocktail made with Calvados. If you’ve never had Calvados before, be warned – this apple brandy from Normandy, the region that neighbours mine, can blow your socks off. And, I have to tell you, we were all pretty much sockless after a couple of hours.

  There were about twenty-five of us in total, with Mark and me being the only Brits. Usually we find it hard to keep up with the rapid French conversation of these northerners, but I think the Calvados helped (it may well be the future for language learners). I once went to Caen in Normandy to be a judge of Calvados cocktails for an annual event which sees the top bar staff from around the world gather together to showcase the mixes we’ll all be sipping in the future. I was judging the amateur entries created by international journalists attending the event. We began with a breakfast workshop, tasting different types of Calvados, and in the afternoon I had to taste twenty different cocktails made from Calvados and vegetables, the theme for the year. Let’s just say some concoctions were better than others but an unexpected side effect was that it cured my cold and I seemed to be able to speak French like a native.

  Most of the other guests were from the village. There are fewer than 150 residents in total and we all live within minutes of each other. We pretty much know everyone by sight, if not by name. Even after several years of living here, the older residents still like to be called monsieur or madame instead of by their Christian name. This does not mean you don’t kiss them, though. Puckering up twenty-five times certainly builds up a thirst, which inevitably leads to more Calvados cocktails.

  Four jolly farmers from the next village along arrived after us, stamping their feet on the mat as they entered and rubbing freezing-cold hands together – it’s a brisk fifteen-minute walk from their small hamlet. Soft music played in the background – something very French with a male singer of gravelly voice, perhaps Charles Aznavour (he has never gone out of fashion here). People were talking and laughing, helping themselves to delicious little pastries and canapés that Madame Bernadette had prepared earlier in the day. Delicate little melt-in-your-mouth choux buns filled with fresh, tangy goats cheese from the Goat Lady’s farm. Mini tartelettes filled with smoky lardons and onion confit. Delicate golden gougères like crunchy balloons flavoured with salty and nutty Comté cheese from eastern France. Tender mini-croquettes with silky tomato coulis, saucisson and blue cheese. And, petite foie gras and redcurrant jam lollipops, like miniature shiny crimson works of art. Madame Bernadette beamed as everyone licked their lips in appreciation of her cooking skills.

  Wood Club member Monsieur Rohart risked a risqué joke. It earned him a look from his wife that was probably intended to turn him to stone. But, the Calvados seemed to make him bold, so rather than look contrite, he flashed her a charming smile that would melt the heart of most women. No such luck with Madame Rohart, however – his spouse of thirty years glared and accepted another cocktail from Madame Bernadette without taking her eyes off her errant husband. Twenty-three sets o
f eyebrows were raised, as we all knew that tomorrow one or several of our homes would be sure to get a visit from him, keen to escape his nagging wife.

  Jean-Claude and Bernadette brought with them an enormous bûche de Noël, a Christmas yule-log cake, made by a master pâtissier in Le Touquet, which, though a small town, has half a dozen outstanding cakeshops. Decorated with chocolate to look like a real log, it had sprigs of holly made from marzipan and sugar-crafted miniature champagne bottles spraying tiny sugar bubbles.

  A 1950s drinks cabinet had as its centrepiece a glass bowl of homemade crème de menthe, which nobody touched except Petit Frère. We had all heard the story of the man from a village two miles away who once drank an entire glass of locally made mint-green liqueur and woke up two days later.

  At around midnight people started to go home. We were just about to leave when we heard the sound of a noisy tractor revving up outside. ‘Aha,’ cried the jolly farmers who were rather jollier now than when they had first arrived, ‘Sam is here.’ They pulled on their boots and coats, kissed everyone goodbye and trooped out the door.

  We followed behind and watched as they climbed into the big metal box on the back of the tractor-turned-country-taxi, and Sam, the designated driver, lurched off up the road, smoke belching from the vehicle’s exhaust. The jolly farmers were singing songs and clinging to each other, doing their best not to fall off the back of the tractor. We could just about make out their happy faces in the yellow glow of the moon.

  The party marked the start of the festive season, which is almost entirely centred on food. If you’re on a diet, don’t go to France at Christmas. When it comes to the scrumptious treats, temptation is everywhere. Any time you visit is likely to be the start of a gastronomic affair, to be honest, but in winter even more so. Recipes are shared with fervour and news of the arrival of fresh winter squash at a market travels fast.