My Good Life in France

by Janine Marsh

  ‘We really have to go; seriously, don’t worry about the tea, William,’ Mark said as he interrupted my reverie.

  I turned slowly to look at him. Right in the eyes.

  He shuddered and shook his head. He knew that look. He’d seen it before in shops when I wanted to buy something he hated.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No way.’

  I just kept looking at him. I was willing him to feel my passion, a sudden, all-encompassing, engulfing, overwhelming ardour for the smelly house and the bleak garden.

  Dad, meanwhile, oblivious to my seething desire and the paroxysm of doom that had gripped Mark, had got out his front door keys and was jabbing them into an oak beam that ran up one wall.

  ‘It’s rotten that,’ he said. ‘This house will fall down soon.’

  Mark and I continued to stand there looking at each other in silence. It felt as if time was standing still.

  ‘Look at this,’ Dad continued. ‘Dry rot and wet rot in one room.’ He sounded pleased to have made such an interesting and rare discovery.

  ‘This is so shit,’ he went on as he pulled a wire out of the wall. ‘And I really do love this bit: one little tug and the whole lot will come down on top of us.’ He had opened the door at the end of the room to reveal another filthy area, more of a shed, and was pointing to a pole that was in the middle of a doorway without a door. Dad was right: the slim metal bar seemed to be holding up the end of the house.

  I knew nothing about the village, the area, the department (the French word for an administrative area, of which there are currently more than ninety in France) or the region the house was in. We had no money to spare. We had not made plans to own a house in France. We hadn’t discussed it. Yet, I just knew that somehow, for some reason, this house was meant to be mine.

  ‘Thank you so much for your time,’ I said to William as we left. ‘I really like the house.’ Dad snorted loudly and winked at me with exaggeration as we headed out the front door.

  Mark was very quiet all the way home. I said nothing of the fervour that had gripped me. Dad went on and on about how awful the house was.

  The next day I emailed the estate agent to find out if there was room for negotiation.

  CHAPTER 4

  Sign here on the dotted line

  VERY EARLY IN the morning on a Wednesday in late May, three months after we had first seen the house, the sun was shining. It was warm and mellow, the sort of day when you wake up and feel like everything in the world is good. Mark and I were off for yet another day trip to France. But this wasn’t any old day trip. We were going to sign the final pieces of paperwork that would make us the proud owners of a house in France.

  I confess, it was an impulse buy. Not a pair of shoes or a handbag, like most women. It was, in fact, a whole house and an acre of land, and not only that, it came with some extreme building problems that needed sorting out tout de suite.

  It had been surprisingly easy to buy the property once we had made up our minds to do it (well, once I had made up Mark’s mind to do it). I needed to convince Mark that having a second home in France was a good idea. I talked about how a French holiday home would be the perfect getaway, how it might even be somewhere to retire to in the future, many years away. I suggested what we would do to improve things, such as turn the garden from a muddy field into a productive place where we would one day grow vegetables and roses. It didn’t take long until Mark started to get excited about the prospect of transforming the unloved house into a stunning home. He agreed to investigate how much the mortgage would be if we were to seriously consider buying a house we knew we couldn’t really afford. He worked out that if we got a French interest-only mortgage, with the rates the way they were (extremely low) and the exchange rate the way it was (very favourable to us), the monthly cost of two hundred euros wasn’t much more than we paid for our monthly gym membership and dinner with wine in a good restaurant.

  The agent selling the house had told me there wasn’t much room for negotiation, but a week after we first saw the house, I made an offer of 90,000 euros, 10 per cent below the asking price. The estate agent emailed back to accept the offer within minutes. Later, our French neighbours laughed and said, ‘He saw you coming!’

  So, we decided to give up our gym memberships. We accepted that we would need to dismiss all dreams of taking an exotic holiday or going out for dinner ever again. We would need to save all of our money to be able to afford to buy the French house, and pay for the maintenance and the cost of going back and forth to visit it. But we figured that if we made many sacrifices and worked our butts off, it was just about doable and, one day, we would reap the benefits.

  We were required to agree in writing to pay for the house and then had ten days to change our minds. Which I did on an almost hourly basis. Could we afford it? How would we manage two houses? In the end, though, my heart won and, as the deadline approached, my hand stayed steady and away from the computer to send an email to pull out. The estate agent recommended a notaire (the equivalent of a property lawyer) who also worked for the seller – it’s normal in France for both parties to share a single point of administration. We paid a deposit and organized a French mortgage as the interest rate was much lower than anything we could get from a bank in the UK.

  Mark and I collected Dad so he could come with us and be part of the big day. He puffed frantically on his cigarette on the way down the path as he was banned from smoking in the car. A different car from the one we had taken to France three months ago.

  Everything we had earned up to the time we first saw the house went on paying for our home in London, except for one luxury, Mark’s car, a Jaguar, something he had wanted since he was a boy. So, when I suggested to him that he sell his beloved XJ6 British Racing Green pride and joy to help raise the money for a 20 per cent deposit on the house in France, he wasn’t exactly thrilled, but after some (a lot) of discussion he agreed to let it go and share my car.

  It may sound strange but, in all honesty, I didn’t really know Mark that well, even though at this stage we had been together for five years. I had met him when, as a single mum with hardly any money to spare, I had bought an old and decrepit car from a friend of a friend for about the cost of a week’s food shop for a family of four. The friend of a friend dropped off a very run-down vehicle at my house and left with the money, while I was left with a car that I found I couldn’t start and his parting words: ‘It probably needs a tune up: it’s not been run for a while.’

  So, I went through the local free newspaper, the News Shopper, looking for a tune-up company and called the number on the first advert I saw and organized for a mechanic to visit on a Saturday afternoon to take a look.

  I opened the door to a tall, bearded man with mischievous grey eyes and a crooked smile and it was like a bolt out of the blue; the attraction was instant and profound. The mechanic’s name was Mark and mending cars was one of his many skills; he looked at the car I had bought and told me it needed to be scrapped. He was divorced, handsome, funny and passionate. I had been divorced for several years and thought I would never remarry, as I wasn’t particularly good at choosing the right man. Mark basically never left. Within weeks he had given up his rented flat and moved into my house in the suburbs of London (one of his other skills is being very persuasive), and we were married not long after.

  Mark gave up the car mechanic work and trained as a financial consultant, and we both had jobs that meant that we were spending just a few hours a day and most weekends together, rarely experiencing the intense level of closeness that spending hours on end together brings. Of course, this is the same for many couples, but not really knowing each other that well was to have an extreme impact on us later down the line.

  I worried all the way on the drive to Dover, on the train across to Calais, and on the French roads leading to the little town of Fruges where we were headed for a meeting with the notaire. What if it was a mistake? We weren’t rich and we’d have to work hard to pay for the hous
e even though it wasn’t really expensive – certainly not by UK standards. It seemed like a bargain in many ways: even small houses in London were going for five times that amount and this house had the potential for twenty rooms and it came with an enormous garden.

  It was only a year after we bought it that one of my French neighbours told me that the woman who sold it to us had bought it a year before for just 30,000 euros. They had thought she was crazy to pay that much, especially as, two villages along, a house not much smaller was being sold for 5,000 euros. Apparently, the entire village thought we must be very rich to want this rundown dump so much that we would pay, in their opinion, many times what it was worth. For quite a while after that, the farmer who lives at the end of our road slowed down when he saw us and made the ‘loads of money’ hand signal to us.

  Sitting in the waiting room of the notaire’s office, I had a niggling feeling of anxiety eating away at me because I’d only seen the house twice. The first time we’d seen it was on that cold day in February; the second time was in March when Dad and I had gone out to take some measurements. My dad had assured me then, with utmost certainty, that it was a money pit and I would be paying out for the rest of my life.

  It was done now, though.

  While we were in the notaire’s office signing away all thought of any luxury for years to come, I had deposited my dad at the Café Aux Trois Pigeons, which perched at the edge of the main square in the town.

  We were with the notaire for two hours, smiling, initialling what felt like hundreds of bits of paper, nodding and doing as we were told while not really understanding very much at all. The notaire checked the money was where it should be and read things out to us in speedy, incomprehensible French. His assistant came in and photocopied reams of paper, and everything had to have signatures in triplicate.

  In the back of my mind was the thought of Dad in the bar. By now I was sure he would have moved from drinking coffee to beer and chatting to everyone. He hardly spoke a word of French but he thought that by saying words really loudly, everyone in France would somehow understand him better. ‘A BEER, SEE VOO PLAY’ yelled at anyone in any bar in France seemed to my dad to be perfect French. Actually it’s close enough to make sense to most French people, but ‘DO YOU HAVE NUTS?’ not so much. He once shouted ‘DO YOU HAVE A PINT OF THEAKSTON’S OLD PECULIER?’ in a bar in the hilltop town of Montreuil-sur-Mer, which caused the entire place to come to a standstill.

  Eventually, the notaire and his assistant stood up, smiled, advised us we were done and shook hands with us. It was midday and, as I came to know later, everything miraculously gets finished in time for lunch, however long the paperwork or however big the problem.

  ‘Félicitations, Madame Marsh,’ said the notaire. ‘Bienvenue en France.’

  We hurried to the bar, collected Dad, who thankfully had not caused any problems, and made straight for our new home. I had packed a bottle of champagne and a picnic and was looking forward to celebrating. Now that everything was signed there wasn’t much point in worrying and the excitement was building up. Our house is twenty minutes from Fruges, and the drive takes you through beautiful countryside of small woods and fields of cows and wheat, past tiny villages with just a few ancient houses peppered here and there. There are often chickens in the road that scatter when they hear a car approaching, and dogs that run to gates when they hear the chickens clucking.

  We drove into our tiny village, past the town hall, up the dirt track hill and stopped outside the broken gate. My heart was thumping as we walked up the path and put the key in the door, entered the dark, damp, smelly hall, climbed up the enormous step clearly made for a giant, into the kitchen and … it was like when a record screeches then stops dead.

  We hadn’t been out to the house for two months. It was now the end of May and it looked as though the seller had simply abandoned it on hearing that the mad English couple were buying her run-down, rickety old house in the middle of nowhere. There were some things missing and other things had appeared that we had never anticipated.

  What there wasn’t:

  Water

  Electricity

  Light bulbs

  Handles on kitchen cupboards

  Mobile phone signal

  So, we couldn’t call the estate agent to ask why there was no water and no electricity after he had promised that it would be organized. For a 10,000 euro fee (in France the buyer pays it, not the seller) we’d expected him at least to sort that out for us.

  Of course, this prompted my ever helpful father to immediately, absolutely have to have a cup of tea right now.

  What there was:

  Rodent droppings on the kitchen work surfaces

  Waist high grass. We wouldn’t be having a picnic in the garden, then

  A caravan. Now, I wouldn’t mind if it was a half decent one but this was an old wreck with broken windows, missing its door and it had been left in the middle of the garden

  A sheep. A very large, dirty, smelly one. It was eating the grass outside the kitchen window

  ‘Okay,’ I said, taking a deep breath. ‘We knew it wasn’t going to be perfect. We know there’s work to do, but just look at the space out there in the garden. That beautiful willow tree will be perfect to sit under one day. That walnut tree is heavy with luscious fruit. The apple, plum and pear trees are full of deliciousness to come.’

  Mark and Dad looked at me. I gulped and carried on: ‘This house has so much potential. The lovely beams, the amazing flint stone wall in the bedroom …’

  Dad cleared his throat and turned to fix his eyes on me.

  ‘This house,’ he said, ‘is not just a paint-it-and-enjoy-it second home. This house that you’ve bought in France is a lifetime of renovation and maintenance. This house is not just for Christmas, it’s for life.’

  He laughed so much he coughed and then reminded me he couldn’t even have a cup of tea for his throat, which was dry from laughing.

  Not for the first time, I wondered if I had completely lost my mind.

  The euphoria of owning a house in France melted away and I came back down to earth with a thump rather than a bump, and spent the afternoon running up the hill trying to get a signal to contact the estate agent to get him to sort out the missing water and electricity.

  We celebrated with a picnic in the yellow kitchen and toasted our new home with a bottle of water, as it no longer felt like a champagne moment, and then drove back to London as Mark and I had to work the next day.

  It was really only when I went to bed that night back home, and lay awake thinking about the day, that it dawned on me just what an enormous task lay ahead to make that old house even habitable for weekend stays. The argument raged in my mind: I’d bought a massive, unloved barn that had dirt floors, broken windows, doors that didn’t lock, holes in the roof and suffered from a really bad damp problem. No, I’d bought a beautiful French barn with huge potential, part of which dated back hundreds of years and had the most gorgeous beamed ceilings in one or two of the rooms … It had an acre of land that was out of control … No, it had an enormous garden that would look like a country estate one day … It came with a sheep …

  Hang on a minute, it came with a sheep? In all the rushing around trying to sort out utilities, blocking up broken windows, securing doors that could blow open in a gust of wind and be carried away over the hills, I’d forgotten all about the sheep in the garden. Had the previous owner left it behind? Had it escaped from a farm? Had someone dumped it there?

  Unlike most people who count sheep to go to sleep, it was just a single one that instead kept me awake.

  On our next trip we found out that the sheep belonged to an old man in the village. The previous owner of our house had allowed the sheep to be kept in the garden as it kept the grass down. Of course, like everyone else in the village and apparently for villages miles around, the old man knew the house had been sold to a crazy English couple for an outrageous sum of money. One man who came to the door and
introduced himself as Olivier, a local, explained to us that the old man wanted to leave the sheep there as he had a much smaller garden. Since the previous English owner had no objection, Olivier told us that the old man hoped we wouldn’t either. I immediately agreed for three reasons. It would keep the grass down, it would make the villagers happy to know we were willing to be part of the community, and I liked the sheep.

  For two years the woolly creature lived in our garden, eating everything in sight, climbing trees – well, attempting to at any rate; it was a bit confused, I think – and leaving poo everywhere. We called it Trumper on account of the awful smell it gave off.

  The old man who owned it never said a word to us and completely ignored me when I tried to speak to him; not even a smile.

  One weekend we arrived at the house and the sheep was gone. The old man was very sick and had taken ‘the filthy beast’, as the neighbours called it, back into his own garden. He could no longer gather the energy to go and get water for it or check up on his animal, which, in fact, he was very fond of. We too had grown quite attached to Trumper by now, and when it left we would feed it carrots through the gate at the old man’s house. Before he died, the old man stipulated that one of his last wishes was that whoever bought his house must allow the sheep to live in the garden. The unsuspecting family who moved in after his death went along with this strange requirement, feeling sure that it would only be for a short while. After all, the sheep was at least twenty years old if the villagers were to be believed – or about 140 in human years. It lived for a further four years and was known as the oldest sheep in the country, according to Olivier.

  Sometimes when you buy a French house, you get more than bricks and mortar.

  CHAPTER 5

  Summer in the Seven Valleys

  FOR THE REST of that first summer of 2004 when Mark and I became home owners in France, we spent as many weekends as we could in the Seven Valleys. Sometimes we went in the car, taking my dad with us, and sometimes we went alone on our motorbike. We found quick ways to get from London to Dover and from Calais to our village and discovered that we could pretty much do the entire journey in just three hours.