My Good Life in France

by Janine Marsh

  We drove up more of a dirt track than a road and stopped outside a broken gate. This place was not remotely attractive: it had a distinct whiff of abandonment. We couldn’t see a lot of the house thanks to the ugly concrete wall that enclosed the front garden, and what we could glimpse certainly wasn’t enough to tempt any of us out of the car. But I hesitated. It was sufficient to infuriate Dad, who by this time had had more than enough.

  ‘Can we not just get back to Calais and go home? I’m cold, I’m hungry, I’m bored.’

  He was right, we were just wasting time. At least back in Calais town or at the port we could get a cup of hot coffee, and plenty of restaurants were open all day, catering to tourists.

  Mark turned the key in the ignition, ready to go and, at that very moment, the door of the house opened, a man emerged and waved at us.

  ‘Hold on a minute,’ I said. ‘I’ll just let him know we don’t need anything and then we can be off.’

  I spoke a bit of French and I was pretty sure I could explain that we weren’t loitering with intent to rob the house, in case the man was wondering why we were sitting outside staring in. I got out of the car and walked up to the gate. The road was muddy and water was gushing down it to the drains at the bottom of the hill. My heels stuck in the soft earth that pretended to be a path to the gate. I heard the door of the car open behind me; Dad got out to have a smoke. The man from the house had walked to the gate by now and, smiling, stuck his hand over the top to shake mine. ‘Can I help you?’ he said, in an English accent. Here in the middle of nowhere, France.

  At that precise moment the rain stopped, just like that. A beam from the setting sun broke through the dull heavy clouds; I felt bathed in a ray of glowing sunlight.

  At the bottom of the mucky hill, ducks in someone’s garden started quacking, the joyous clamour echoing around the valley like laughter.

  Somewhere close by I heard a sheep baa gently – it was like a welcome.

  The rhythmic, melodious and soothing sound of distant church bells pealed.

  It sounded like fate.

  ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘We’ve been given these house details by an estate agent in Hesdin and we just thought we’d have a drive by and a quick peek.’

  ‘Blimey, we only put it on the market yesterday,’ spluttered the man. ‘It’s not been dressed up or anything. In fact, my daughter who lives here hasn’t even cleaned it and I’ve just popped in to mop up the leaks and make sure the wind hasn’t blown the doors off.’

  I heard my dad sniggering behind me.

  ‘Want a cup of tea?’ asked the man.

  ‘Yes. Please,’ I said, not daring to turn to ask my fellow passengers. ‘We would love that.’ Even now, I don’t know what made me accept the invitation; somehow it just felt right, despite the withering looks I got from Mark and Dad.

  CHAPTER 2

  C’est la vie

  I AM A Londoner, a cockney, which is the term given to someone born within earshot of the bells of the church of St Mary-le-Bow, Cheapside, central London. I like to think my journey to France was fate, that it began the day that I was born. Firstly, St Mary-le-Bow has a French connection: the land that the church was built on was given to a bishop by William the Conqueror in return for support for his expedition to England in 1066. And we all know how that turned out.

  Secondly, my name is French. I was supposed to be Ethel, but fate intervened.

  My mother had already decided that if I was a girl I would be named after her favourite aunt, who lived three doors down from the house where my parents had lived in Bermondsey, south-east London, in the 1960s, when they were first married. Ultrasound scans weren’t that common when I was born; having a baby was like opening a party bag – whatever turned up was a surprise.

  The day I was born, the midwife arrived on her bike and decided Mum needed to go to hospital rather than stay at home as planned. My mum was very petite and Sister Cassidy, the midwife who delivered all the babies in that area, was a bit worried about a home birth for such a skinny woman who seemed very stressed about the whole process. My mother was transported to a hospital, within the sounds of those bells at St Mary-le-Bow. My dad saw nothing to be worried or panicked about and decided to spend the day betting on horses.

  In those days men didn’t like to get involved in the nitty-gritty of marital partnerships and my father couldn’t see what responsibility it was of his to help out. So, while my mother was sweating and shrieking in hospital, my father was sweating and shrieking over the 3.45 horse race at Brighton. Both had a great result.

  Mum gave birth to me.

  Dad won £50 on a French horse called Janine.

  Arriving at the hospital with a bunch of flowers and a packet of Turkish Delight for Mum to ‘help her get her strength back’, he took one look at me and apparently declared I looked like Winston Churchill and the Michelin Man’s very fat, ugly love child. He did, however, win my undying gratitude for insisting I be called Janine after his winning horse (a bit of a rarity for him) rather than Ethel. His argument was that I would be a ‘lucky filly’ – incidentally, the word comes from the French ‘fille’, meaning girl.

  Dad was a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde character, the life and soul of the party one moment, the moaniest old man you could ever meet the next. He would listen to Duke Ellington followed by the Sex Pistols. He drank the finest wines and the cheapest whisky. He was a bridge master and could outplay almost anyone; other bridge players offered him money to be their partner at tournaments. He could do complicated maths in his head, like a human calculator. He was really smart, could be deeply moody and, if you crossed him, he never forgave you.

  My mum passed away a few years before that fateful day trip to France. Her death broke my dad’s heart and left a gaping hole in my life and that of my siblings. Dad kept going thanks largely to his love of betting: he was a compulsive gambler who could not resist a wager. As a kid I remember him betting me he could get more chocolate in his mouth than me, or he would challenge me to play cards for my pocket money. We would sit at the table for the chocolate contest; Mum would be tutting in disapproval and trying not to smile. Dad would pick up a chocolate, then I would. It was like a scene from a Western, narrowed eyes, breathing through our noses as our mouths filled with sweet, sickly chocolate.

  I always lost.

  A ‘lesson in life’ Dad called it. He studied the racing papers every day from the age of nine to the day he died and was addicted to betting on horses and dogs and just about anything else. With Italian ancestry, he was a slim, dapper man, always impeccably dressed and looked a little like Al Pacino.

  Utterly desolate at losing my mum, he started drinking a bit more whisky than was good for him. Remonstrating with him didn’t work: he was a rebel all his life and never did what he ought to or what you wanted him to. You either had to trick or tempt him to do what you wanted.

  Mum argued with him over the choice of Janine as my name, rather than Ethel, but he was adamant and since she was weak with the efforts of bringing me into the world she gave in. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with the name Ethel, it’s just that it wasn’t really me.

  My earliest memories are of being told my name was French. I was entranced by the notion that this somehow made me a bit different, that I had achieved a coup in the name stakes. Most girls at school were named after their aunties – Brenda and Betty were popular names. For many years I never met anyone else called Janine.

  Unfortunately, being called something that was a bit different didn’t hold much sway with school kids. ‘Janine cleans the latrines’ was the best they could come up with, but it was better than what they did to a poor kid with the surname Pritt. Later, when everyone realized that I was growing very slowly and was always going to be short, I was called Mushroom.

  Growing up, it was rare for our family to go on holiday; extra money for luxuries was scarce. If we did go away, it was to caravan parks on the English coast. My memories are of rain falling on the pla
stic roof window, a very bad band trying to play the music of Donny Osmond or Michael Jackson, and a beach on which the sand mingled with silt and looked and felt like you were paddling in … well, you can imagine. Times were hard, and we were poor. So how, you might well ask, did I end up living in rural bliss in France?

  Well, it took a few years and a lot of hard work, but the real journey started on that cold, wet, dismal day.

  CHAPTER 3

  Un coup de foudre

  ‘COME IN, DON’T worry about the mud on your shoes,’ said the man beckoning us into the house.

  It felt a bit like entering Narnia, as we had to go through a small wardrobe-like wooden box that had been erected just inside the doorway. It wasn’t unlike a coffin from a Hammer horror movie. Cobwebs floated from the ceiling, torn strips of floral wallpaper with a 1950s vibe limped down the walls; it was a DIY porch job of the very worst kind. Did it ring alarm bells? Yes, it did. Each of us could only enter once the person in front had squeezed through the ‘porch’ (box) and further on through a tiny door into the main hall.

  Much to my surprise, Dad was smiling broadly when we all eventually converged on the other side. I caught his eye and saw a look I knew well. Dad found this all highly entertaining. An ex-builder, he was really going to enjoy tearing this place to pieces. Mark just looked bemused. He is a man who likes things to be clean and tidy; an ex-policeman (he’s had many jobs) who likes order, he seemed overwhelmed by the clutter and multiple colours of the room we found ourselves in.

  The hall had a sticky carpet with a hideous black and orange pattern; it was a sickening configuration that wasn’t unlike the vomit-inducing lino we’d seen in the previous house. Our shoes made sucking noises as the carpeted floor was so damp. The walls were a mix of dull grey concrete blocks, the sort that has little holes, perfect for bugs to live in, and off-white chalk blocks and chipboard. A faded lamp in the corner of the dreary and dingy hall revealed that, when we breathed out, it was so cold our breath froze and hung on the air.

  There were three doors leading off the hall: one was a hobbit-sized glass door at the top of a step that was almost half a metre high. The other two doors were wooden with frosted amber glass panels that cast a strange orange glow in the room. Next to one of the doors there was a set of stairs. An old-looking dark wood cabinet leaned along one wall and even in the lacklustre light you could see it was riddled with woodworm: every inch of it was covered in oddly sized cups and china items. A small, square, dark wooden table and four chairs were in the centre of the hall, which was also, it seemed, the dining room.

  ‘I’ll make a pot of tea,’ said the man. ‘But do you want to look around first?’

  I knew that I ought to say, ‘No, thanks, this house looks like it contravenes the Sale of Goods Act by pretending to be somewhere that people can live. I am not sure that I would let a goat dwell here, let alone me.’

  But what I actually said, and even I noticed the air of surprise in my voice, was, ‘Yes, please, that would be lovely. I’m Janine, this is my dad Frank and my husband Mark.’

  Mark looked at me as if he had no idea who I was. Our house in London was neat, tidy, clean, warm and comfortable. We were city folk; mud didn’t enter our lives – ever. We once went to Cornwall for a weekend to stay at a farm B&B and we came home early because we didn’t like the smell of the country. We woke up on the second morning and I said, ‘Can you smell cows?’ And Mark said with relief, ‘I thought it was me – not smelling like a cow, but, you know.’ So we returned to the civilization of city life knowing that living in the country would never be for us.

  The man introduced himself as William, and he explained that he checked on the house for his daughter, who was in the navy. She was engaged to a Frenchman from the area and had bought the house to be near him, but as he was moving south because of his job as an engineer, his daughter was selling up. ‘So we’ll start upstairs, shall we? You’ll have to mind the steps, they’re a bit narrow.’

  A bit narrow? This staircase was not meant for humans – pixies and elves, maybe. At over 6 feet tall Mark had to go up on all fours like an ape. The steps were high, and as wide as a drawer in a kitchen cabinet. The stairs wove round and up through a trapdoor on to the floor above. I went up first, and at under 5 feet tall even I had to stoop. I watched as Mark emerged – he looked like a giant angry rabbit popping up through a hole.

  Dad came up the stairs gingerly, followed by William, and the four of us stood on a sheet of plywood thrown across very warped floor joists. The walls were made of concrete blocks; it looked like a building site, one that had been abandoned many years ago. The upstairs basically formed one room, which ran almost the entire length of this very long narrow house. It was dark; a lone light bulb cast a faint yellow glow over the filth. Cobwebs were everywhere, attaching themselves to our clothes and Mark’s head – being the tallest, he was in the firing line. The loft smelled of animal urine and something else I couldn’t identify. The wind howled through a gaping hole in the roof.

  There was a large wooden box in the corner by the stairs. It looked a bit like the porch-cupboard downstairs but this one had a sliding door: it was clearly the work of the same builder/bodger.

  ‘This is the salle de bain,’ said William, gesturing at the box.

  The floor bounced ominously under our feet as we made our way over to the so-called bathroom, essentially a wooden crate with a vibrant turquoise-coloured sink that clashed with a lemon-coloured shower unit. A lonely ‘Save the Wildlife’ sticker clung to the grubby, definitely-seen-better-days (many years ago) shower base. The chipboard walls had nails tacked in to act as pegs to hold the towels. A bare bulb hung down, its wires tangled.

  ‘That’s dangerous, that is.’

  At last someone had broken the silence. It was hard to know what to say that wouldn’t offend but Dad wasn’t worried about that.

  ‘That bulb,’ he went on. ‘If you got water on that … BANG,’ he shouted, making everyone jump and the floor move up and down wildly. It was like standing on a trampoline and I felt as though the four of us could fall through to the floor below at any time.

  ‘Well,’ said William reasonably, ‘no one showers much in this house … too cold!’

  I couldn’t look at my dad.

  We made our way carefully down the stairs, across the hall and into another tiny concrete room. There was a rusty washing machine and a few pastel pink metal shelf units, the last resting place of several enormous spiders. William kicked the carcass of a long departed bird out of the way and announced, ‘This is the utility room.’

  Above my head an open pipe jutted into the room, over the end of which was an old wire basket – to stop the rats getting in, explained William, as if it was the most normal thing in the world. The smell of damp was overwhelming. Bad everywhere in the house, in here it reached a peak. The floor oozed with liquid that dripped out of the walls. This surely had to be the worst room in the house.

  ‘The bedroom,’ said William as he led us through a doorway that Mark had to stoop under to get through. At this point even William seemed to find it hard to drum up any enthusiasm.

  Possibly inspired by a sort of French chalet look, almost the entire room from top to bottom was covered with aged, orange-coloured tongue-and-groove wooden planks.

  It was dark, grim, dirty and dank. The word hideous was invented for this house.

  There was, though, a flicker of hope. One wall was made from huge chunks of flint stone. It was, among the squalor, quite beautiful.

  ‘Did you do that?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ said William. ‘Parts of the house are hundreds of years old. This room would have been where people lived, while their animals would have been in the room adjoining.’

  Ah, that’s what the smell was that I couldn’t identify earlier. Damp animal.

  The flint stone wall had wooden beams embedded into it and two small windows that looked on to outbuildings in a narrow courtyard. I could see that darkness was f
alling – as was the rain. I knew we really ought to get a move on and get back to Calais to go home.

  We went rapidly through the remaining rooms, each one terrible – not one was habitable, at least not to our standards, and it wasn’t possible to call any of them attractive.

  ‘We have to go,’ said Mark. ‘We need to get back to Calais to catch the ferry.’ He had a note of desperation in his voice.

  ‘Yes,’ said my dad, ‘and I want a fag.’

  ‘Just one more room,’ said William. ‘The kitchen is right through here and then I can make that pot of tea.’

  It was long and very yellow, with a sad old coal oven attempting, not very successfully, to give out some heat. There was a chipped sink, the cheapest of cheap kitchen units, a filthy floor and a door at the other end leading to who knew what. On one wall was the hobbit door that led back into the hall. Opposite that, an enormous picture window that overlooked the garden took up half of the entire wall.

  And that is when it happened.

  I stood there peering out into the gloom and experienced what the French call un coup de foudre, a lightning bolt, love at first sight.

  I fell head over heels in love. Completely and utterly bowled over. You’re thinking that the garden must have been like Claude Monet’s garden in Giverny, aren’t you? A picture of lush beauty. Fountains and flora to fall in love with. It wasn’t. It was basically two fields with a few trees and a sheep wandering around. It was very green and very big. That was it. Even now I don’t know what happened to me that day.

  Into my head, entirely uninvited, popped an image of a beautiful vegetable garden and me with a basket full of tomatoes wandering into a kitchen where my beloved would have a glass of red wine awaiting me after my green-fingered efforts.