by Janine Marsh
It wasn’t good news. Doctors checking the X-rays had noticed a shadow in his chest.
‘Give it to me straight, Doc,’ said my dad as my sister and I held hands tightly under the desk, hoping and hoping that they wouldn’t say the worst. It was déjà vu: the memories of discovering Mum was ill were still horribly raw.
‘It’s lung cancer. You have two years, maybe, if you respond to treatment. It is inoperable,’ said the doctor gently, placing a hand on Dad’s shoulder. It’s a rotten job sometimes.
My dad was a fighter all his life. Both he and my mum had awful childhoods in inner London. Poor, often hungry, not well cared for and rather broken young people, they had found each other in their teens and been together from the day they met at my mum’s engagement party to her then boyfriend. Dad was a rascal and was at the party with a friend of a friend. He’d never met my mum before but he swept her off her feet when he wrote her name in ink on his dazzling white shirt sleeve and begged her to meet him and go to the cinema. My mum broke off her engagement and within months they married, and most of the time adored each other.
My dad had counted every single day since she died and every time I spoke to him he would tell me the exact number: ‘Your mother died two years, three months and twelve days ago today …Your mother died four years, eight months and eight days ago today … Your mother died six years, nine months and seventeen days ago today.’ Every night, he kissed a photo of her before going to bed.
When we left the hospital, my dad told us to pull ourselves together after we broke down.
‘Your mother died seven years, eight months and nineteen days ago today,’ he said, his voice cracking, and it was hard not to sob out loud on the train going back to his house. He hated a fuss.
‘I feel fine and I want to carry on living a normal life but I might need some help,’ he said.
It was almost as if being told that he had cancer induced the physical symptoms, which we hadn’t yet seen any signs of. My sister, who lived close by, took on the majority of the daily tasks like shopping and cooking. I travelled back and forth between France and England and went with him to his appointments and to his chemotherapy sessions. I’d stay for a few days to cook and be there when he needed company, someone to talk to and to make him feel cared for. When he was feeling better he came out to France and we enjoyed going to restaurants, bars, supermarkets, markets – everywhere he went he would charm and flirt outrageously with the ladies. Even though he had never quite forgiven me for giving up the chance to be a director in a bank, he came to love my village and this part of France. I like to think that he knew that I would be happy here.
Dad remained fiercely independent, although it was mostly us who drove him to and from France, as he was an awful driver at the best of times. Once, he decided to come out on the ferry alone. Often I travel as a foot passenger on P&O Ferries – it’s so easy. For most people, at least. It is a ninety-minute journey across the Channel and takes no more than twenty minutes or so to disembark and get through customs. We were to meet him at 3 p.m. He was still very spritely at that stage, despite his illness, and he couldn’t abide people mentioning it; he wanted to act normal, as he put it, for as long as possible.
His ferry arrived in the port. The foot passengers came through customs where we were waiting but there was no sign of Dad. He didn’t answer his mobile phone. I went to the information desk and asked if it was possible to see if they had my dad’s name on the passenger list, as he hadn’t disembarked with the other passengers. Perhaps he had missed the boat. They checked. His name was there. By now I was getting really stressed, convinced something awful had happened, that he’d collapsed on the ferry, perhaps, and was lying under a table unseen. The woman at the information desk called the purser on board to ask for information. We were asked to sit in a waiting area while they searched for the missing passenger. All sorts of horrible scenarios ran through my head.
Fifteen minutes later I heard my dad’s voice: ‘There she is. There’s my daughter.’ He was laughing loudly as he came through the passenger control area, flanked on either side by two men in uniform.
‘Is this yours?’ asked one of them, and I think I saw an element of sympathy in his face, but it might just have been extreme irritation.
‘Erm, yes, that’s my dad.’
‘We found him in the bar,’ said the security man. ‘He hadn’t heard the announcement that we had landed and he should disembark … on account of the fact that he has had several glasses of whisky, it seems.’
‘I had one glass,’ hiccupped Dad.
‘He’s all yours,’ said the man. That was the last time we let Dad come out on the ferry on his own.
Work slowed on the house while I spent half my time in France and half in the UK, living with Dad, sleeping on a blow-up bed in the spare room. Some days were good, some were bad, and some were very bad.
I adored Dad and grew closer than ever to him. I was grateful to have the chance to make sure he knew how important he was to me before it was too late. He was quite a gruff character, hated sentimentality and found it hard to open up to anyone. I only ever saw him cry twice: when my mum died and when we visited the American Cemetery in Normandy.
We worked our way through some of the things he had on his bucket list, which mostly revolved around food and cars. We went motor racing at Brands Hatch, enjoyed afternoon tea at Harrods and dinner at Simpson’s in the Strand. We sat at a table at the back of the room surveying its legendary grandeur and drank champagne while Dad told me how, as a little boy, he lived not far away and would sit outside, cold and hungry, ‘watching all the posh people, all these nobs in their finery’ going into this historic restaurant. He had always wanted to eat there and when he did it was a bittersweet moment as we realized that many of the other things on his bucket list would never be fulfilled.
When brain cancer was diagnosed, Dad was told he couldn’t drive any more. His beloved Jaguar had to be sold and he made friends with all the local taxi drivers, who would ferry him around, taking him to the shops, bridge club (he was by then a grand master), the doctors, the dog racing track, the betting shop. Gambling was always one of his great loves: even on my wedding day he was in the betting shop and almost missed the ceremony, making my mum as angry as hell. All the wedding photos show her with a pinched face and Dad with an ‘oops, I’ve done it again’ smile.
His friends and family rallied round and it was a mixed time of joy and pure misery. When he came out to France he would get his ‘fix’ by driving the ride-on lawn mower, frequently crashing it into fences. Once he drove into a stone birdbath that my mum had given me. He broke it in half and almost upended himself and we had to ban him from driving the lawn mower as well, in case he got hurt.
I spent many days just sitting quietly in a chair in my dad’s house, not making a sound as he slept fitfully on the sofa. He refused to go to bed during the daytime even though he was exhausted, reeling from the results of chemo and the pills he was taking on a trial programme. The doctors had explained the trial wouldn’t help him, it might even have some nasty side effects, but what they would learn from his experience would benefit cancer patients in the future. He signed up immediately.
I passed the time at Dad’s house by writing about my life in France, the things I saw and the places I went.
When Dad woke up he’d ask me what I’d been doing and I’d read him my scribblings.
‘You should write something,’ he said one day. ‘Your mother was a great writer but she never had the confidence to see it through and write a whole book.’
The inevitable, unwanted time came when my dad had to go into the same hospice that my mum had been in. When the administrative staff told me the room number Dad was to have, I was shocked: it was the same room Mum had died in. I wanted them to try to change it but he said he was happy to be in that room where his beloved had been nine years, nine months and twelve days before. Where he had sat and held her hand tenderly and told her gently t
hat it was okay to go, that it was time to sleep, to rest. I had sat beside him, weeping quietly, hardly daring to breathe as I witnessed true love, and watched him let her go.
Two days after going into the hospice, Dad passed away. It was a little over two years since he was diagnosed, almost exactly as the doctor had predicted.
He was a reprobate, difficult, generous, intelligent, brave and sometimes badly behaved, and he taught me that life is something that must be treasured and that every minute counts. I went back to France determined to make a success of my new life.
CHAPTER 14
I say potatoes, you say pommes de terre
I AM BRITISH – we queue. In fact, we are a nation that is, on the whole, extremely good at standing in a line in front of an entrance, cash desk or anywhere else, waiting for our turn. We may even take a sandwich and a flask of tea with us if we think it might be a prolonged affair. If anyone should presume to sneak in front of us, we will cast a sly look around to see if someone else has noticed and roll our eyes at each other. We will heave a deeply disappointed and disapproving sigh. Someone will say, ‘Excuse me, there’s a queue here,’ and everyone will stare at the lawbreaker. Usually, the queue jumper/criminal will shuffle off pretending he or she hadn’t noticed the long line of patient lemmings.
What happens in France goes against all my British instincts. French people push in.
In a shop, at a bus stop, in the bank, at the cinema, in a café, ticket office or anywhere else you have to queue.
They use bags and umbrellas, elbows and knees. They use their bodies as battering rams. Elderly French people who look so frail you might think they could hardly lift a feather seem to find renewed energy when faced with a queue. Their skin brightens, they limber up on the edge of the line, they straighten their backs and smooth their wispy hair and, va va voom, they dash to the front, knocking out the opposition with walking sticks and Zimmer frames, or with trolleys if you’re in a supermarket, one of the favourite hunting grounds for queue jumpers in France.
One summer at a village event in which two hundred of us attended a lunch in a tent, the spit-roasted pig cooking in the canvas kitchen caught fire in rather spectacular fashion. We were not evacuated from the tent while the pompiers (firefighters) rushed to the rescue and doused the flaming cochon. Oh no, none of that health and safety nonsense. Instead the kitchen staff made rum punch and handed it out liberally to keep us quiet and in our seats (they didn’t want to do refunds) until they could return to continue the cooking.
A lethal mix of dark and white rum and a piddling amount of orange juice, combined with the heat of the summer sun and a blazing kitchen – there was only ever going to be one outcome.
When it was announced with great fanfare that lunch was at last being served and we should form an orderly queue, it was like a stampede at the Pamplona bull run. Grown men and women fought with each other to get to the front. My neighbour Jean-Claude and his wife were on our table. He jumped to his feet and dragged Mark with him, dead-legging anyone who got in the way, pushing Mark in front of him to use as a human shield.
The servers plopped charred meat and hunks of bread unceremoniously on plates as fast as they could to move the arguing, swearing, fighting queue on, and eventually order was restored and everyone acted as if nothing had happened.
This attitude towards waiting in line spills on to the roads of France. A line of traffic will cause an immediate angry reaction from a French driver.
Driving in my part of France is generally a pleasure after London; you usually only witness gridlock when cows are crossing the road. But as soon as a French person spots a car going more slowly than he thinks it should, he seems to consider it his absolute duty to overtake, no matter the circumstances. The change from normal, happily driving French person to road-raging fiend, be it a ninety-year-old man who can hardly see or a usually calm and sweet-natured woman, happens in an instant – they all seem to turn into maniacs behind the wheel.
Although I drive at the regulatory speed, I’ve been overtaken on hairpin bends, with a heavy goods vehicle convoy in front of me, on blind corners, on roads with signs saying no overtaking and in the dark in thick snow. The hand gestures used in the UK when communicating in such circumstances appear to be just as well understood in France.
I don’t know if it’s because they are genuinely all in a rush or if they just don’t like being behind a foreign car, but I have a feeling that any sign of authority turns some French people from really nice, friendly, cultured people into wannabe anarchists.
In the rural town of Desvres not far from where we live, there’s an old church in the town centre with a big sign saying ‘Defense d’uriner’. Now you, like me, might think that it was unnecessary to put up a sign forbidding people to urinate on the wall of a church. What that sign appears to have achieved is actually to encourage it. Twice I’ve witnessed a man relieving himself directly under the notice.
French people also take umbrage when the road rules are updated. Take priorité à droite, for instance – a strange and frankly dangerous rule that gives drivers priority to enter a road from the right without stopping, including on main roads. This isn’t on all routes – only where the priorité à droite sign is displayed, which actually makes it even more treacherous, because it’s completely random. It appears to be a case of national pride and a test of will where any French driver may utilize this crazy law without stopping or looking. It is the cause of many accidents and the government has been attempting to phase it out. You wouldn’t know that where I live: there are still dozens of roads allowing this practice. Even when the road sign is amended to a ‘give way’ sign and lines are painted on the road to indicate to the driver entering from a right-hand road that priority is no longer theirs, locals invariably ignore it because they don’t think the rule should be changed.
In the Café du Centre in Fruges, which looks as if it hasn’t altered in sixty years, Mark and I sat sipping coffee that could wake a hibernating polar bear in the middle of winter, discussing with Madame the proprietor whether the French have anarchistic tendencies.
‘Not at all,’ she said, turning to greet a customer who had just parked his VSP outside the café.
What, you may ask, is a VSP? It stands for voiture sans permis – a car you can drive without a licence. Incredibly to anyone not born in France, it is permitted to drive a particular type of car without taking or passing a driving test. From the age of fourteen, youths may drive these cars after spending seven hours in one with someone who is qualified to drive. This means that if someone loses their licence for drink-related offences or dangerous driving, they may still drive, albeit in a car that doesn’t go very fast, as the speed is limited to 45 km/h, although manufacturers are working on models that may go faster.
‘Aurellian,’ said Madame to the VSP driver, ‘do you think we French are anarchistic in nature?’
‘Yes, of course,’ he said. ‘But we are also not anarchistic. Take me. I cannot, as we all know, drive my van because I just happened to have a little sip too much one time and I got caught. So they take away my licence. I comply with the rules, as I am not an anarchist. But I drive my little clown car out there which I am allowed to do and I wave to that gendarme who stopped me and made me lose my licence and I thumb my nose at him, and that, I think, is anarchistic.’
Aurellian sipped his red wine, looking quietly pleased with himself and then disappointed with us for not carrying on the conversation. We know better. French people absolutely love to debate. If there is a way to say something using a hundred words instead of ten, you can be absolutely sure they will go for it. Every single event I have ever been to in France has started late because, given an opportunity to make a speech, a French person simply cannot pass up the chance. A French audience accepts this as normal; foreigners are completely bemused by it. Whether it is the opening of a road, a restaurant or a concert, everything that can possibly be started with a long drawn-out dialogue is considered an op
portunity to use the skills of language, a highly prized talent – there is no such thing as someone who talks too much in France. Sometimes debates sound like arguments – full-on, abusive, yelling-at-each-other rows. Monsieur and Madame Jupe, who live across the road, often scream at each other, trading insults and accusations that anyone who walks by, or lives opposite them like me, can hear. Jean-Claude tells me that this is seen as a sign of a healthy relationship: your partnership is close enough that you can talk to each other this way and still be friends, lovers, or married even, after it’s over. He has a point, perhaps.
While Mark and I contemplated the complete weirdness of being able to drive a car when one is banned from driving a car, we could hear strange noises, like someone strangling a cat. Four skinny men dressed in tight leather trousers and jackets, and sporting bandanas and sunglasses, appeared through the back door of the café, tuning up their instruments – two trumpets, a drum and a harmonica. They gave a quick rendition of ‘Desmond has a barrow in the market place – Ob-la-di ob-la-dah’ in strong French accents and then wandered out. It’s that sort of town: friendly and ever so slightly odd.
Fruges is not a showy place, but there are some interesting buildings and a public water tap where the locals help themselves to free mineral water, and the people there are welcoming. So, when I saw that Mathilde Paris, an architect in the town and also the proprietor of the Bulot Gourmand restaurant, was organizing a party to celebrate the restaurant’s first very successful year, my friend Kat and I jumped at the opportunity to have a girls’ night out. Kat is an Australian from the outback, a textile designer who came to France to house-sit in our village. Seduced by the gorgeous countryside of the Seven Valleys and the affordable house prices, she and her Greek husband couldn’t bear to leave when their house-sit was up, and so they bought a house the other side of the valley where they grow wonderful vegetables in their hilltop garden. Kat uses the vegetables as inspiration for the beautiful linen she makes at her quirky farmhouse. The party was held at the Domaine de la Traxène, the local ‘castle farm’, which I’d passed umpteen times and had been itching to get inside and have a look at, having watched it progress from a total wreck to a restored beauty.