My Good Life in France

by Janine Marsh

  I also didn’t want to leave my father, so I asked him to come with us and offered to sell the French house and buy another with separate accommodation for him so that he would have his own space. ‘Only if there’s a betting shop nearby,’ was his answer, but he wasn’t serious. By then he was spending more time with his friends and doing voluntary work, playing bridge four times a week, and although he missed my mum, he was getting on with life. We were three hours away from him in France if anything happened, I figured, so the decision was definite: I resolved to take a risk and follow my heart.

  When I resigned, my boss tried to persuade me to stay. I had been approved for a directorship programme that would complete in fifteen months’ time, he said. There would be a great pay rise, a great bonus – all that I’d worked so hard for. The project I’d been working on had a year left to run and apparently I was considered essential to its completion. I thought of my mum sticking it out for a bit more money for this and that. I thought of Loraine and the chances she would never have. I thought of Mark who was so excited about us spending time together and making a new life, who would go to France without me.

  I stuck to my decision, but my boss refused to accept my letter of resignation and said he would talk to me about it later in the day. When he did, I nearly fell off my chair in shock when he proposed to almost double my salary if I stayed. I told him I would think about it.

  That night Mark and I talked again. By now, having decided we did both want to go to France, we were more rational and less emotional about it. We decided that the money was too good to refuse and we should spend time planning properly for a move. I never told Mark how secretly relieved I was to stay; I gracefully accepted my boss’s offer.

  Meanwhile, we put my house up for sale. I have to admit I was heartbroken. I’d worked so hard to buy it and hold on to it when times were hard, but we couldn’t afford to do up the French house without the money from the London house. I’d bought it almost twenty years before and the value had increased substantially. When it sold almost immediately, I cried my eyes out but it meant that we had enough money to renovate in France and live on for a few years while we sorted out a way to earn an income. We moved into Mark’s mum’s house. She had moved out recently, having remarried, and because the rent was low it meant we could save money by living there, so it was a no-brainer.

  It felt like time went by in a flash. We hardly had any opportunity to go out to France as I was working long hours to finish the project, including lots of weekends. We saved every penny we could. I walked to work instead of taking the bus, took packed lunches instead of eating in the staff canteen. We kept a spreadsheet of every penny we spent. We scrimped and scraped like a pair of crazy people.

  When the project at work finished a year later, I handed in my notice again and this time it was accepted. There were just three months to go until I made director and there was a part of me that felt sad and disappointed, but deep down I knew I was doing the right thing. My colleagues threw me a party and gave me presents to remember them by, including an envelope with a picture of a chicken and the words ‘To be opened when you get to France’.

  My friends took bets on how long it would be before I came back. No one, including me, could quite believe what I’d actually done or thought I would last as long as six months away from London or my job.

  CHAPTER 9

  Madame Merde

  FOR MOST PEOPLE starting out on the path to a new life in a new home in a new country, moving-in day is exhilarating.

  More than four years had passed between buying the house in France and moving there permanently, and it was certainly an emotional day, though for a rather different reason than you might expect.

  It was mid-September, the sun was shining, we were filled with a mixture of excitement and anticipation, and for me an element of worry that Mark appeared not to share. For months before, while I’d been working weekends, he had been taking our belongings out to France in boxes and now we were down to the final tranche.

  We towed a huge open trailer behind the car; it was filled to the brim with our possessions, ready to go on the Eurotunnel train. It attracted quite a bit of attention on the way: the UK border control guard told me he liked my armchairs and on the train people came past in a steady stream to look and comment on my belongings, from cupboards to rugs. It’s amazing how cheeky people can be, talking about your precious belongings, and not always in a complimentary way (although absolutely everyone loved the old Windsor chair that had been my mum’s and which would take pride of place in my French kitchen).

  We drove carefully to our little village, especially going up and down the steep hills that run through the Forest of Boulogne and lead to the Seven Valleys. We reached our village and finally made our way up the little hill to our house. By now, instead of feeling excited, I was scared. I still had knawing doubts about moving to rural France. It is very quiet. I had come to love it there and it was more than all right for the weekends and holidays, but for a whole lifetime? I entered the house prepared for the customary sickly smell of damp. I was ready for the spiders’ webs, perhaps a bird or two, a feral cat, rodent droppings.

  What I didn’t expect was the unmistakeable smell of sewage.

  The toilet was basically a boxed-off area (not unlike the coffin-like porch) in a corner off the kitchen, with a loo. A waste pipe led straight out of the wall and into a septic tank. I had never even heard of such a thing before I’d bought this house, but without mains drainage, all the household waste goes into an enormous plastic tank buried in the ground. Bacteria do their thing and get rid of most of the contents, leaving liquid to seep through small holes and into the surrounding earth. Once in a while the whole thing has to be emptied.

  Our septic tank had decided not to wait for someone to come round with all the right equipment to drain. Instead it had decided to discharge itself and was busy making friends with the garden as its repellent contents oozed out of the top of the tank from which the lid had somehow gone missing.

  Any ideas of celebrating our arrival came to an abrupt halt. We had no telephone and no mobile phone signal and, besides, we didn’t know who to ring. We made our way down the road to François the farmer’s house and hoped someone would be able to advise us. His two dogs ran out barking and, as I’ve been afraid of dogs since I was a child, I stood frozen to the spot. Mark found it hilarious and, putting his arm around my shoulders, pulled me forward, assuring me that the boisterous barking and jumping up was a friendly greeting. We had more pressing concerns, anyway.

  François invited us into the kitchen to tell our tale of woe. The kitchen was tiny and yellow. (Apparently yellow is one of the most popular colours for kitchens in France, inspired by Monet’s kitchen at Giverny.) Somehow he had managed to cram in a sink, cupboards, a table and chairs in a space that would fit into a Renault van. On the work surface was a huge hock of ham; flies buzzed around it and on it, and I sat watching them, mesmerized. Mark jabbed me with his elbow as François came over with a small cup of black liquid he called coffee. I can honestly say it was the first time I had ever drunk mud, as I am sure that is what it really was. François had seen me staring at the ham and mistook my amazement for desire. He whipped out his pocketknife and offered to cut me off a lump. As he lunged towards the pink meat with the tip of his blade, the flies buzzed manically.

  ‘Non, merci,’ I assured him with all the emphasis I could muster without sounding too hysterical.

  He shrugged and cut himself a hunk and popped it in his mouth. He listened to us explain the problem with the tank and said, ‘No problem. I, François, shall arrive later and sort it out for you. I have to go and feed the cows now but I will come back before dinner.’

  Our new life was only a couple of hours old and I was already starting to feel queasy about it. Flies, merde, dogs – London life it definitely was not.

  We spent the afternoon dragging boxes and furniture into the house while trying not to breathe in the noxious s
mell that filled the air. We made sure to put beer in the fridge for when François came. We’d learned enough by now to know that when our neighbours visited, they were as disgusted by our coffee as we were by theirs.

  We knew when François had arrived, since he drove his full-sized tractor straight into our garden and past the kitchen window, creating huge craters in the vegetable beds Mark had spent the summer weekends preparing. Behind the tractor was an enormous silver cylinder-shaped storage tank of the sort you usually see carrying milk or oil.

  François was accompanied by his young assistant, Gaetar.

  I didn’t need to show either of them where the septic tank was. François informed me that it had been at least seven years since it had been emptied and he knew this since he himself had been the one to empty it. Seven years. It doesn’t bear thinking about.

  Gaetar proceeded to unwind a massive hosepipe and pull it towards the septic tank. He and François bickered constantly while they worked. I watched apprehensively from the back door as they pushed the end of the pipe into the opening of the septic tank.

  Gaetar climbed into the tractor, François wandered over to the back door to drink a bottle of Page 24, the local beer known in these parts as ‘the blonde who dominates’, with Mark and Jean-Claude, who had just arrived. He has an uncanny knack of knowing when there’s a bottle of beer about and appears as if from nowhere.

  A low hum, building up to a loud mechanical whir, emerged from the tank as Gaetar activated the button to empty the septic tank. Except he didn’t.

  Instead of pushing the button to suck, he pushed expel.

  Rather than the contents of our septic tank being discreetly drawn into the tank, everything started to spread over the garden, and into the craters the tractor had dug.

  François cursed and screamed at Gaetar. ‘Arrêtez-vous, stop, stop … you imbecile,’ or words to that effect.

  Gaetar swore, François swore, reluctantly put his beer down and ran to the tractor, the pair of them shouting and screaming at each other.

  ‘That Gaetar,’ said Jean-Claude, ‘is remarkably idiotic sometimes. I don’t know how François puts up with it. I think this might be la goutte d’eau qui fait déborder le vase.’

  ‘The drop of water that makes the vase overflow?’ said Mark translating it literally from his pocket French–English dictionary.

  ‘It means the final straw that breaks the camel’s back,’ I said. When I told Jean-Claude that that’s how we say it in English he looked at me as if I was possibly madder than Gaetar, and turned back to watch the farce, taking pictures on his phone, presumably to show to his friends later.

  By now several neighbours had come into the garden to see what was going on. The pandemonium of Gaetar and François was echoing around the valley. I was panicking and almost in tears. Mark, always sane and sensible, started handing out beers.

  Eventually, the right buttons were pushed, the job was done and we were left with, I think it is fair to say, quite a bit of hosing down to do. François and Gaetar refused to take any payment for resolving our problem. ‘We are neighbours,’ said François. ‘It’s only right to help each other out.’

  As the sun set on that September night, we stood in the kitchen with our new neighbours, drinking beer and watching as François made his way round our garden, being nosy and checking the apple trees. From time to time he would pull one of the not-yet-ready fruits off a branch and take a bite.

  ‘Miam, delicious fruit,’ he said. ‘You can grow anything in this garden, you know. The old lady up the top of the hill only got a flushing toilet about two years ago; before that she used to go in the cow shed. I reckon, being down the hill, you’ve got the best soil in town.’

  Later Jean-Claude told me that that was when the villagers nicknamed me ‘Madame Merde’.

  CHAPTER 10

  The art of small steps

  OUR HOUSE IS a long, low building. Once an animal barn, it was extended over a lengthy period. A single room built from chunky lumps of flint stone and oak beams had been the original structure perhaps four hundred years ago, although only one wall remains. Subsequent owners added rooms made from concrete blocks, slabs of chalk, sheets of corrugated metal, wood and even a bit of old plastic fencing. It was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a feast for the eyes.

  Some rooms had impressively solid ceiling beams of ancient oak; some rooms were painted lurid yellow or were lined with pine boards, turned orange by time. Some floors were concrete; others were plain earth left that way for decades, perhaps centuries. You might think that sounds quite romantic. I assure you it is not, especially when you have to dig out some of that old dirt to lay foundations for a proper floor.

  A previous owner with no sense of style had created the upper floor, reached by the spiral hobbit staircase. Somebody had apparently been sleeping up there. We know this because the previous occupant left a rusty old bed, and a piece of cotton material that formed a minuscule curtain pegged on to a line of string across the only, tiny, window. It was dark upstairs; it was a place of spiders’ webs and strange smells, muffled scratching, squeaks and draughts. When it rained, water came in liberally, and there were patches of mould on the boarded floor, which bounced horribly when walked upon.

  It’s odd how you don’t notice quite how bad things are when you don’t have them under your nose all the time. We had already decided to do all of the work ourselves, mainly because we couldn’t afford to pay anyone else but also because we wanted to create something that truly represented us. If you ask me now would we do it again, I’m not sure I would say yes.

  Our first job was to find storage for the boxes containing all our belongings. Putting them upstairs seemed the obvious choice and that’s when we discovered yet another problem. A mezzanine floor had been created in the high roof space, just plain boards set on top of a scaffold of wooden planks, like an enormous shelf. We hadn’t really taken much notice of it before; we just assumed it was a storage area and because it was so dark we had ignored it. We knew it had to come down, as it was neither safe nor useful stuck 2 metres up in the air. We climbed a ladder to see what was up there only to discover that it had been covered with about 30 centimetres of pinky-brown clay-like material with bits of straw in it. It was also slathered over much of the walls upstairs.

  ‘Ah yes,’ said Jean-Claude when we asked him about it – he had become our go-to Frenchman – ‘some country folk used to apply a layer of straw and mud to fill in gaps in the walls and floors. It keeps the wind and cold out and adds a layer of insulation. Smells disgusting.’

  What it also adds is a whole lot of work you didn’t know you had to do before you could even store boxes.

  It took days to pull the floor down and shovel all that dried mud out of the window. We wore masks and at the end of each day, when we took them off, we could easily have auditioned for the part of Baloo the bear in The Jungle Book. When it was finally done and we had cleared out all of the rubbish, we found we had one very long room upstairs that could be made into three bedrooms and two bathrooms, but at that stage we were a considerable way from actually creating any living space. We stored the boxes that contained the remnants of our London life up there. One day, when Mark fell up those narrow, dangerous spiral stairs and cut his head open, causing him to look like a human money box, he ripped them out in a temper and access was by ladder only, and that’s how it stayed for two years.

  It started to dawn on us just how much work there was to do. There were thirty-seven windows and thirteen doors that needed replacing and, though we didn’t know it then, more than 100 tonnes of concrete would be mixed by the time we were finished. To all intents and purposes we aimed to build an entirely new house within the old one.

  The first month went by in a whirl of mud removal and cleaning. The weather was fine and the fact that I had no oven but had to cook on a barbecue in the garden was not a problem. We’d become accustomed to making do in France. We had no television, no phone and no internet
; our mobile phones could only be used if we left the bottom of the bowl that is the valley in which our village sits. A month can easily be used up – it’s little more than a lengthy holiday and we worked long days.

  In mid-October, it started to get colder. We thought about heating. But we didn’t get much further than that. There was one fire in the whole house, an ugly old wood stove in a corner of the front room with its very chilly tiled floor – but it was big. Surely, we reasoned, the people living here before us thought it was sufficient, so it must be fine. The cold Christmases we had spent here had become a distant memory and we convinced ourselves the problem was just because we weren’t there permanently and so the fire never had sufficient time to build up a good blaze for a long period.

  By then I was starting to really miss my friends and family. I wanted to get the internet and phone sorted out so that I could at least communicate. We discovered that this required us to go in person to an Orange Telecom shop (our nearest one is an hour’s drive) to complete the forms. When we got there they informed us we needed to come back with a utility bill and various other bits of paper. We returned a week later, signed up and were told we should have a phone line by Christmas. I protested that we wanted it sooner and was dismissed with a Gallic shrug. Sometimes the shrug means ‘I wish I could help’ or ‘that’s the way it is’, sometimes it means ‘whatever’ or ‘talk to the hand’.

  By mid-November it was bitterly cold. The condensation that ran down the inside of the windows in our bedroom turned to ice on its journey – at least it prevented the pool of dirty water that usually collected on the windowsill. A glass of water left at the side of the bed had a fine layer of ice crystals by the morning. The water in the pipes was glacial. My feelings for life in France followed suit.