My Good Life in France

by Janine Marsh

  Our fire was useless and ate through our wood stock at an alarming rate. By now all the bigger stores that sold wood had run out in the cold spell and we had no idea where to get more from.

  We bought a couple of oil heaters and at night would sit, each with a heater at our side, facing the beautifully bright but horribly hopeless wood fire, wearing coats, hats, gloves and scarves, watching a DVD or trying to read a book, which wasn’t easy as you had to keep removing gloves to turn the pages.

  During the day we were still managing to work on the house, which kept my mind occupied; at night I would start to daydream about going back to London. When it reached a highly unusual –20 degrees Celsius I was ready to give up. I sat in the kitchen, shivering and wondering what on earth had made me think I was cut out for country life – I was a city girl, and I wanted to be back in a city, in a warm office in the day, and a warm house at night. I wanted to have a good old moan with one of my friends; I was desperately missing them. It was cold and damp; we woke up every morning coughing and feeling unwell.

  It was about then that we both realized that we didn’t know each other as well as we thought. We had been together for several years, but not twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, as we were now. It was tough. Our flaws and foibles were revealed. I had had no idea that Mark was so bossy. He had had no idea I was so bossy. There was a power struggle; it was at times subconscious and at others as clear as day. We were freezing. We argued. We disagreed.

  I like order when it comes to planning, and graphs and maps of what needs to be done. Mark likes to rush in and just do.

  I knew Mark had a quick temper, but the frustrations of learning a new language, the huge project and the cold weather fuelled his bad moods more than I’d ever seen before. The day all the pipes in the house froze so that we had no water at all, it was like opening a gate of fury. We had an almighty row, both admitting that we were not happy. We were pulling apart. We’d been in France nine weeks and I felt as though I had made an enormous mistake. I wanted to go home. Back to the UK.

  I retreated to the greenhouse where, feeling sorry for myself, I sat shivering (it still wasn’t warm despite the winter sun) and crying. I wasn’t comfortable driving on the wrong side of the road or I would have taken the car and driven back to the UK there and then. I had made some friends in France but none I felt relaxed enough to talk to about how I felt. I could walk up the hill to call a friend in the UK on my mobile phone, but they were all at work. Dad would tell me I was whining. I cried some more.

  Then I wrote out a list of what I would need to do if I was to give up and go home:

  1. Go back to the bank or get a new job.

  2. Find somewhere to live, maybe stay with Dad.

  3. Get a car.

  4. Get a divorce. Probably.

  Why had I done this? Over and over again I wondered how I would tell everyone that I’d given up after such little effort. I sat in the greenhouse for two hours, my fingers frozen, my nose running and my eyes red with crying. I wanted Mark to come and find me, say sorry and tell me it would all be fine. He didn’t. In the end, when it started to get dark and I could hardly feel my toes because they were so cold, I went back to the house.

  ‘I want to go home,’ I told Mark. ‘I hate it here. It’s cold and dirty. I have no friends. I hate it.’

  ‘Okay,’ he replied and went to bed, where at least it was warm under the duvet. I slept on the sofa, covered in coats and blankets, feeling like a failure and wondering if ‘okay’ meant go back on your own or let’s go back together.

  Once again Jean-Claude came to the rescue. He regularly stops by for a chat and a beer, though no matter what time of the day it is he won’t drink our coffee, and, as for tea, you might think he had been offered a pint of Paraquat the way he reacted when once I offered it to him.

  He came by on the morning after the row to find us bundled up in blankets but still breathing frost patterns in the kitchen and barely on speaking terms, considering giving it all up and returning to the UK. He is generous in nature and very practical and suggested his friend Patrice could help with the wood.

  ‘What we really need is a new fire,’ we said.

  ‘No problem.’ (This is Jean-Claude’s answer to everything.) ‘My friend fits fires and I’ll ask him to sort you out as a priority.’

  At that stage we were somewhat naïve about the ways of French workmen and artisans.

  Mark and I kissed and made up. I said sorry, he said sorry. We assured each other we would make it work. Filled with hope, I tore up my list, pulled my woollen scarf tighter and believed that all would be well. Soon. After all, the word priority had been used.

  The wood came the next week. Without alerting us to his arrival, Patrice drove his huge tractor into the garden and dumped 10 tonnes of logs on the grass. It took us two days to stack them but we didn’t care: we were ecstatic. So much wood – we thought it would last us a good long while with our new fire when it arrived. And that is a lesson for all expats in France – relish the moment. The wood wasn’t even enough to see us through one winter: we had to get another load in by March, when it was still cold, and we were still using our futile fire.

  We didn’t know then that some things take longer than you might expect. Much longer. In fact, they may never happen at all. We opened a bottle of wine and we opened up to each other. Mark needed to express himself; I needed to not take things personally. We both needed to accept each other’s idiosyncrasies. I created a project plan that showed the priority jobs and dependencies and Mark agreed that clarifying the jobs we needed to do was helpful. When he needed to vent his frustrations, I tried to let him be until he worked it out.

  As for the new fire, every month for a very long time, Jean-Claude told us his friend would come to fit it. We bought the fire, we bought the bits. We waited. The fantasy fire fitter never arrived. We learned to fit it ourselves before the end of the next year rather than face another frozen winter in the house.

  That first Christmas of our new lives was celebrated with an ice cold glass of champagne that hadn’t needed to be chilled in the fridge – we just left the bottle on the kitchen table and enjoyed it with barbecued turkey legs and microwaved potatoes.

  Shortly after Christmas we were joined by a cat. I had never had a pet as a child, never wanted one as an adult and hadn’t ever considered getting one in France. But that all changed when we went to shop in the hypermarket in the ancient port town of Boulogne-sur-Mer, and ended up going home with more than we bargained for.

  We were sitting with Mark’s stepfather Dave and mum Sylvia in a restaurant in the commercial shopping area, a place where lots of stray cats congregate around the car parks and scavenge for food. Sylvia was grimacing at the Frenchman on the table next to us who was relishing every mouthful of his steak tartare. ‘It’s raw mincemeat,’ she whispered dramatically, in a tone of utter horror. Suddenly, she gasped out loud. Bloody hell, I thought, they must have brought the snails out. But no, she said she could see a tiny kitten being attacked by a bigger cat in the car park of the restaurant – we all looked, nothing there. Mark replenished her wine glass and we carried on, thinking no more of it.

  When we got to our car on leaving the restaurant, Mark leaned down and from behind one of the wheels pulled out a kitten. The animal was covered in blood, its nose was all but hanging off and it didn’t move; it just lay there pathetically. We couldn’t leave it and although we knew nothing about cats we decided to take it home and at least let the poor creature have a last night in safety.

  On the way home we stopped at the vets to buy kitten food, milk and a pipette, which we used to squirt milk straight into the little thing’s mouth. We put the kitten in a cardboard box with a blanket, a bowl of water and some newspaper and left it in the hall when we went to bed. We really didn’t think it would pull through, as it was in such a bad way.

  I got up early in the morning and was shocked to find the kitten gone. But not far: it had escaped from
the box and was now cavorting happily round the kitchen, diving under cupboards and mewing and playing. It was a boy and we named him Winston after Winston Churchill. A white kitten with black markings on his head and in the shape of wings on his back, he was adorable. He had bright blue eyes and the vet we took him to said he was probably only four weeks old. Over time his injuries healed, he ate more and more and is now the biggest cat in the village.

  Winston is not a friendly cat; he is obsessive and highly strung, he doesn’t like people, is scared of loud noises and won’t come in if he hears music being played or there is anyone other than us in the house. He is very affectionate with me, though, and is very talkative with a large repertoire of mews and chirrups. He also likes nothing more than to dig up whatever I have just planted in the vegetable patch.

  Winston’s arrival was the start of a slippery animal slide. We shopped each week in Boulogne and bought his kitten food in a pet shop there. Almost three months after we had found Winston, Mark remarked that there was a dog in one of the glass cages in the pet shop that he was sure had been there for at least eight weeks. It was a sorry-looking tiny russet-coloured creature. The label on the cage said Pinscher and the price had been slashed. Mark asked a member of staff if he could get the dog out of its cage to have a look. I had always been afraid of dogs but this one’s big, sad brown eyes melted my objections and the wag of his feeble tail broke my heart. Mark told me that he thought the dog would likely be put down if it weren’t sold soon.

  ‘I’ve always wanted a Doberman Pinscher,’ he said looking into my eyes. What could I say, the last time I’d done it to him I bought a house. We left carrying a dog we called Churchill, who turned out not to be a Doberman at all but a German Pinscher.

  Churchill does not think he is a dog. We should have called him Pinocchio, since he feels he is a real boy and wishes to get involved with whatever we are doing. He also does not like to be alone. This was fine when he was with us during the day, but at night in his own bed in another room, he howled endlessly.

  A month later he was joined by the dog that had been in the glass cage with him. She was labelled a spaniel and her price had also been slashed. Like Churchill it seemed she did not appeal to any of the customers. The day we got her, Churchill stopped crying at night and the pair have been inseparable ever since. The pet shop closed shortly after, which was a huge relief or we may have ended up with a dozen sorrowful-looking dogs.

  We called the new dog Ella Fitzgerald after one of our favourite singers. A few months after we took her home it became obvious that she wasn’t a spaniel at all, despite what it said on her registration forms. The sweet puppy we brought home was already way too big for a spaniel. She has shaggy dark golden hair, white paws like little boots, a white patch on her chest and huge brown eyes that she blinks at you to communicate. She is in fact a large mutt that is mostly German Shepherd and she is neurotic to the point of lunacy at times. I have a few phobias – spiders, heights, flying, dentists – but Ella has way more. She doesn’t like remote controls: we have to hide them or she will eat them. She doesn’t like fence posts and will happily chew them until it looks as if giant chipmunks have been busy in the garden. She hates noisy children, strangers, strange noises, other dogs, cats that aren’t ours and chickens. In fact, her dislikes are far too long to list. She will merrily pull nails out of the wall and chew doors; once she ate a leather sofa. Churchill, her partner in crime, dances around adoringly while she misbehaves and then alerts us to her misdeeds by barking insistently – afterwards, of course. She is the most affectionate dog and when she turns her big brown eyes on me I find it hard to tell her off.

  Work carried on with the house and the cat and the two dogs lived with us among bags of cement powder, tubs of paint, sheets of plasterboard and a thousand tools.

  CHAPTER 11

  The best-laid plans of mice and men

  WE GOT THROUGH that first winter by keeping the fire going and wearing two sets of clothing until spring finally came. Plants pushed through the frozen soil and burst into flower, we woke to the sound of birdsong, and it was warm enough to carry on working without stuffing our cold fingers into gloves that slowed us down.

  We’d read enough books about living in France to know that we needed to make sure we didn’t fall foul of administrative requirements when it came to renovating. It feels like every article I’ve ever read about expat life includes a reference to a benevolent mayor who goes out of his or her way to help the newcomers settle in to their new life.

  This is not one of those stories.

  The mayor is an important figure in France as the position wields quite a lot of power. There are around 36,700 mayors, almost enough to fill the O2 Arena twice over. Mayors are like little kings of the communes they represent, despite the fact that some 80 per cent of the mayoral municipalities have fewer than a thousand residents. My own village, for example, has a mayor. There are 142 inhabitants in the village, including second home owners. The next village along also has a mayor – for 180 people – and so on. When you’re a mayor, size is important, but not essential. Our mayor recently commissioned a new road through the village after the old one started to disintegrate from the combination of the many tractors that use it and a couple of harsh winters. Some in the village say that the real reason the road was commissioned was that the old road was too narrow for the mayor’s new tractor. My little bit of road, which is in a U-shape annex off the main road, was left untouched. Everyone else got new drives, fences, kerbs and a spruce up. The cost of this smart new thoroughfare, around a mile long, was about half a million euros. We were astonished. And worried that the bill would be shared among the 142 people in the village (though this does include children who would presumably have to be subsidized). We haven’t heard anything yet, but this being France, we still occasionally wake up in the middle of the night after dreams of a road bill that will ruin us.

  When it comes to bureaucracy, it often feels like the more complicated it is, the better the French like it. Indeed, France could win an Olympic gold medal for creating complicated, long drawn-out administrative processes.

  We decided that we wanted to extend the kitchen. It’s a long, narrow room with three doors and featured a big window that took up most of the wall overlooking the garden, which made me fall in love with the house in the first place. With that many openings there wasn’t much wall left for cupboards. We asked our French neighbours if they would be happy for us to add a small room of about 15 square metres on to the back of the house to make the kitchen bigger. Not that they could see anything in our garden as it is encircled by tall hedges, but it seemed the right thing to do. No problem, they said. We also want to put roof windows in the front of the house, we told them. We can’t see out of them but we need more light, we explained. Again, no problem.

  I’d done my homework: I knew from my books that we simply needed to inform the mayor what we wanted to do, get permission and submit drawings and details and fill in a form or two. It seemed so easy! Well, it is if you believed the books and didn’t take into account the constant tweaking of rules by various administrative departments, which seem to operate to different procedures in different areas.

  Mark measured up, drew pictures, took photographs and created diagrams to scale. We filled in forms and took everything to the town hall to show to the mayor.

  He got another form out, confirmed he had seen our drawings and the request to amend our house. With a flurry he twirled his moustache and gave the request the stamp of approval.

  We were stunned. Everyone always complained about how hard it was to get planning permission in France. It was easy. We smiled and thanked the mayor and shook his hand vigorously and enthusiastically.

  We collected our paperwork. We made for the door.

  ‘Ahem.’ We stopped in our tracks as the mayor’s secretary shook her pen in our direction. Yes, he does have a secretary, even though the town hall is only open for four hours a week in the winter and six
hours a week in the summer.

  I knew it. I knew it had gone too well. I waited for the words that would burst my planning ecstasy bubble.

  ‘I need to take copies,’ said the secretary.

  We trundled over, all smiles. Ah, that’s not so bad. The photocopies were made, slowly. We didn’t care; we had permission.

  The secretary came over and gave us the paperwork and the form back. The form that gave us permission.

  ‘You need to take this to the Deh Deh Err,’ she said.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘The Deh Deh Err in Montreuil.’

  She wrote it down: DDE.

  We had no idea what she was talking about but we smiled sweetly, thanked her for her help and left.

  It turned out that it wasn’t as simple as just getting the mayor to sign off on your plans. We were required to get further permission from the official planning department in the nearest main town.

  We went to the DDE (Directions Départmentales de l’Equipment), the equivalent of a town planning department, and discussed the paperwork with an administrator, who nodded and smiled at us. We took this to be a good sign. We left a box load of notes, photos, forms and drawings as required and prepared to receive the go-ahead.

  We went back to the DDE office several times over the course of the following months to ask if permission would be forthcoming. We submitted more paperwork on a number of occasions as they asked for an additional photo or an extra measurement, this, that and the other. There seemed to be no end to the number of requests, and in despair I went to the mayor to ask for help.

  ‘It’s just a question of waiting,’ he said philosophically, with a typically Gallic shrug.