My Good Life in France

by Janine Marsh

  The party was due to start at 8 p.m. and we arrived on time. It was a Mexican-themed night and there was a band and dancers; the proprietor (dressed as a cactus) and her band of helpers were handing out big strong glasses of punch. The French tend to eat dinner much later than foreigners so we sat for the first course around 10 p.m. – by then we were pretty happy!

  French people really know how to let their hair down. I don’t know if it’s because on the whole very little happens in the countryside so when it does they make the most of it, or if they just really like to party. Put on a funky tune and it seems you can’t keep a French person down – there was Mexican dancing, line dancing, disco dancing, ballroom dancing and cha-chas.

  There was singing too, and I was utterly amazed that so many people knew the words to Irish folk songs, which it seems are very popular in this area.

  I have no idea what time the dancing stopped, as Kat and I, lightweights, left in the early hours of the morning while they were still going strong, boogying to ‘Mambo No. 5’. The air is pure here, and the sky was filled with stars looking bigger and brighter than I had ever seen before. A full moon lit the way home; there are no lamp posts on these quiet country lanes, which were deserted apart from a hare, an owl and a hawk, startled from their places by the car’s headlamps. What they made of the noise from the party that echoed round the valley we can only guess.

  I had another chance to test the theory that French people are party animals soon after this when friends invited Mark and me to a beer festival near Hesdin in the local salle des fêtes.

  Adverts for the Soirée Bavaroise were plastered on posts in towns for miles around: ‘Venez nombreux,’ they urged, come in numbers, the fun will start at 7 p.m. We’d arranged to meet a dozen friends there. The British contingent, of course, arrived on time, though I am not sure why, as we all know by now that nothing ever starts when it is supposed to. Our French friends sensibly arrived closer to 9 p.m., as did almost everyone else, with some people still arriving when we left after midnight.

  The menu was choucroute (sauerkraut) and sausages. Despite my apprehension that we’d have to queue for it, creating a French-style storming of the buffet table complete with punch-ups, in fact the food was served à table – the starters arrived at 9.45 p.m. by which time many of the British men had had several glasses of beer.

  Since the north of France is famous for beer, I expected there to be lots of choice, but no, there were just two beers to choose from and a much longer wine list that also included champagne – a very French German beer festival.

  The ‘Austrian oompah band’ was in fact French and played mostly French music including ‘Le Madison’ several times. In my part of France it’s a very popular tune, and has been since the 1960s. French people are loyal to the point of obsessiveness sometimes. A case in point is Johnny Hallyday, who is the French equivalent of Elvis. Johnny continues to fill huge stadiums for his concerts and you can’t go anywhere in France without seeing at least one person wearing a T-shirt with his image on.

  ‘Le Madison’ is obligatory at any and every sort of French celebration where I live. It’s a catchy song, sounding a bit like the old Batman TV series theme tune, and as soon as people hear the first few bars, they all rush to the dance floor, form up in lines and start their moves.

  It looked like a really easy dance, so I dragged one of my friends up to the dance floor to join in. As soon as my back was turned she sat down and left me there on my own, right at the front of the heaving rows of line dancers. To my surprise and dismay I discovered it’s not that easy at all. I missed all the little jumps, and was facing left when everyone else went right. But, at events such as this, making an idiot of yourself is obligatory so no one took any notice whatsoever of the left-footed English woman.

  Generally speaking, the place to socialize is the café-bar in Hucqueliers, a short drive away. It is a hotbed of gossip, rumours and intellectual debate. Discussions about the goings-on at the Elysée Palace are conducted as if we are all on first-name terms with the president and his nearest and dearest. If you didn’t know better, you’d think old Monsieur Dubarre – who we all know has never been further than Picardy – spent the week in Paris as an invisible spy ‘comme cul et chemise’ with government officials, says his daughter Annie behind his back. It translates literally as to get along likes one’s buttocks and shirt, and means ‘as thick as thieves’.

  The bar is open pretty much when the proprietor feels like opening it, which is some lunchtimes but not all and some evenings, and never on a Sunday or national holiday. It closes early because he likes to watch TV and, as he says, ‘there is more to life than all métro-boulot-dodo’, the French expression that implies that your day is all hard grind (literally metro-work-sleep).

  The escapades of those in power in France are the subject of much debate in the bar. Although generally the French are happy for certain things not to be reported in newspapers, claiming that even the president deserves privacy, they nevertheless seem to enjoy talking about it just as much as the rest of us.

  They have been scandalized in recent years by some of the behaviour of public figures, the mudslinging between a president’s exes, for instance, and a one-time potential candidate’s shenanigans with prostitutes in a hotel in Lille.

  ‘I can’t really understand what all the fuss is about – it’s hardly in Italian Prime Minister’s Berlusconi’s Bunga Bunga league after all,’ I said, but apparently the French washing of dirty linen in public is simply not acceptable. On the whole, to my amazement, my French friends prefer that the media keep the lid on things. There are times when they may be right. I do recall reading that Cheri Blair once said that Tony still excited her in all ways, which left me quite traumatized and wishing a lid had been firmly kept on that little nugget.

  The bar is also the place to go when you want to know what is going on in the village or anywhere in France, it seems. And if I want to visit somewhere I haven’t been before, this is where I can get the insider’s view.

  One evening I mentioned that I had visited the mill of Lugy not far from Fruges. The family who own it mill organic flour, make bread and teach bread making the old way with their massive old wood oven known as ‘la grandmère’. On the way, I had passed through the next village of Verchin, where I saw a magnificent church in the Gothic style, with ornate patterns on its façade and lovely tall arched stained glass windows. But it was the twisted spire that made this place really stick in my memory; in most countries it would be a landmark, a tourist site of great repute, but here it’s just another old church.

  ‘Did you notice the slits in the walls?’ asked one of the bar regulars. ‘That’s where the archers used to fire arrows on the English invaders.’ Everyone fell about laughing. They take great joy in reminding me that I am one of their ancient enemies. It’s no good me pointing out that my paternal heritage is in fact Italian. As far as they are concerned, I am a rosbif.

  ‘That spire, though,’ I went on, trying to get off the subject of our historic enmity (even if it was 600 years ago). ‘It’s incredible how warped it is.’

  Twisted spires are caused by the wood structure drying out, but Monsieur Dubarre was totally dismissive of such a dull reason.

  ‘Bah oui, but you know the young girls of the village in days gone by had poor manners and loose morals, and when a virgin arrived at the doors of the church for her wedding the church spire was so astonished that it leaned over to look and when it arose, it was twisted!’ He stopped and looked around to make sure we had appreciated the story.

  ‘The spire will only unwind if such a strange thing occurs a second time!’ he added, and then he winked and roared with laughter. His daughter says he has been telling this tale for decades and when he is gone she will tell the tale and teach her son to tell it too so that the legend is not lost.

  It doesn’t matter where I go, how far away it is or how obscure, someone in the bar will know of it, will have been there and will have a st
ory to tell.

  I visited Marseille: ‘Bah, they are all crooks.’ I visited Lyon: ‘Bah, they think they are all chefs.’ I visited Paris: ‘Bah, they are all rude.’

  If you live in a village in France and you want to know what the mayor is thinking of doing, although I’m not sure why you would, just go to the local bar. Someone will have the sort of knowledge that politicians would pay highly to keep quiet and newspaper editors would sell their grandmothers to get. Did I know that the mayor of such and such village has been siphoning off the common land secretly, putting a fence around it, hoping that the villagers will forget its existence? Had I heard that the English lady councillor in a village close by has been causing all manner of problems because she opposes everything the mayor says for the ‘fun of it’?

  What will the weather be like in a week’s time? Go to my local bar, the one in Hucqueliers, where Monsieur Legrand will reveal all. He studies ants, newts, moles and frogs and is, I have to admit, generally far more accurate than the weather report. And the customers are full of helpful advice, although I’m never quite sure how much of it is real or made up. One man told me that when it gets very cold, you have to be careful to check that the feet of your chickens or ducks have not got stuck in the frozen ground. I have never seen it for myself but he assured me that he has had to chisel several ducks out over the years.

  There is all manner of gossip to be found out in the bar, the source of much of it being the pharmacy, I am sure, where your most intimate conversations may be overheard. French people seem to be obsessed with ailments and medicine. There is typically a queue at the pharmacy and people leave weighed down with enormous bags full of pills and potions. There is always a chair in the shop for those who don’t have the stamina to stand in line for hours, as the pharmacy is the one place where people seem content to wait their turn, calmly chatting away about this and that. The chair is always occupied by a little old lady who looks as though butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. But, beware, she is listening to everything that is said and will certainly share the news with her cronies.

  CHAPTER 15

  Flop chef, not top chef

  WE HAD HEARD a lot about how good the French health service is, but had been lucky enough not to have had cause to try it. This all changed when Mark was struck with a mysterious illness that made him very sick. Like many men, he is averse to going to the doctors but, after a week of him eating dry toast and moaning, I’d had enough.

  Me: ‘Right, that’s it, I am going to make you an appointment with the English-speaking doctor in town.’

  Mark: ‘I’ll be better by the time we get an appointment.’

  We were both used to London waiting times where, as a general rule, you need to make an appointment days, if not weeks, in advance. I phoned anyway. It was 9 a.m.

  ‘Can you come in at 11.30 a.m.?’ asked the doctor, who answered his own phone.

  My jaw hit the floor in shock.

  The doctor’s office is a room in a converted old mansion house. It has seen better days, but who’s complaining when you only sit for five minutes in the waiting room and then go straight in?

  ‘I love English patients,’ said the doctor. ‘You don’t mind waiting a few hours for an appointment. My French patients start screaming if it’s longer than thirty minutes!’

  That day he organized for Mark to have blood and various other tests, the results of which came back two days later. We phoned the doctor for an update and, although the cause wasn’t clear, it was nothing serious. Later we discovered Mark had developed an allergy to certain thickening products in processed food, which he had been eating a lot of when I was in London with Dad.

  It was a wake-up call.

  It is a well-known fact among my friends that I am useless in the kitchen. I have no interest in cooking. When I worked in London I lived on takeaways of all sorts, not just because it was usually too late to make anything except for toast but because I didn’t want to cook. Mark says that the issue is not that I can’t cook but that I’d rather be doing something else. It’s true. I start cooking, go and look at my Facebook page, or read emails and that is far more interesting so I sit a little longer and forget completely what I am supposed to be doing in the kitchen. Most people use a timer to alert them to when their dishes are ready to serve; for me it’s often the smell of burning.

  Of course, we all know about French cooking and the national love of good food and wine that is not just a hobby, but practically mandatory. However, I was totally unprepared for the shock-horror reaction of my French friends when it came to the subject of gastronomy and me. In the same way that we Brits are obsessed with talking about the weather, the French are fanatical about food.

  In my village, everyone, and I mean everyone, grows vegetables and fruit in their gardens; many of them additionally rent or borrow a bit of field and some of them are farmers. Nearly everyone keeps chickens and often ducks, geese, quail and various other birds too. For a short while Jean-Claude had a peacock that he found in the road behind the local church.

  Jean-Claude’s peacock was the talk of the town until the owner, a South African expat from 5 kilometres away, got to hear about it through the grapevine and reclaimed it. Everyone in the village heaved a sigh of relief, as it was horribly noisy and screeched day and night.

  Food is a common denominator here so, when we first came to the region, whenever I met someone new in the village, they always wanted to share their tips with me – the best market for fish (Etaples), for vegetables (Saint-Omer), the best butcher, the best baker, cake maker, cheese shop, wine store, restaurant, bar, café, pork farm, beef farm, chicken farm … the list was endless. Of course, I thanked them and took notes. It only became a problem when they asked me things like, ‘Did you see the fabulous asparagus at the market at Montreuil-sur-Mer this morning – we’re making asparagus à la roi, what will you do with yours?’, or ‘Monsieur T has made some marvellous rillettes this week, I can tell you where he buys his ingredients,’ with a wink.

  In the end I had to confess: I can’t cook. When I first told my neighbour Claudette of my lack of culinary skills she was horrified and cast an eye of sympathy to Mark. He is hardly wasting away, so her concern is really not needed.

  ‘At your age? You can’t cook?’

  It was clear that my admission made me seem, as far as the French were concerned, a complete and utter failure. It was also taken as a challenge.

  Claudette was eighty-four years old at that time, fiercely independent and very determined. She cooks a three-course lunch every day, and though Bernadette, her only child, isn’t able to indulge as she works in an office and likes to go out with her friends, Jean-Claude, her son-in-law, drives past our house each day, regular as clockwork on the dot of noon, to join her for lunch. Soup, a hot meal and a dessert.

  Claudette prepares everything from scratch; she told me she has never been in a supermarket in her life and has no intention of doing so. She does, though, confess that Bernadette buys her shampoo sometimes – she no longer makes it herself as she used to.

  In the entrance to Claudette’s farmhouse is a cloth to wipe your feet before you take your place at a table in the kitchen; there’s no hallway, so you go straight into this main room. Almost all the old farmhouses in this village have a table in the first room you enter from the front door. This is where you’ll be invited to sit and chat, are offered a glass of something or a cup of coffee or hot chocolate. Claudette wears a house coat every day, a sort of sleeveless pinafore dress that does up with buttons at the front and keeps the clothes underneath clean. Everyone seems to have them here and I have instructed Mark to take me to a psychiatrist if I ever show any signs of wanting to wear one. Claudette is a wonderfully fit old lady whose energy seems to know no bounds and I had to know how she does it, so one day, when I found myself seated with a glass of red wine in her kitchen, I asked her what the secret is.

  ‘Here on this oven, every morning, I cook myself a slice of pork for break
fast,’ said Claudette.

  She told me she has used the same oven for more than sixty years. It was a wedding present and not a day has gone by when it has not been in use. It is a beauty, shaped like the front of a row boat, a bright blue beast, covered with enamelled flowers of all colours. It looks like it wouldn’t be out of place in an old-fashioned fairground. Fuelled by coal and wood, it is the bane of her family’s life, since they have to cut the wood into small pieces for it all year round. It is not just for cooking but heats the water, too, so it is permanently on whatever the weather.

  ‘Then I pour myself a glass of cider, home-made is best. That is what gives me my strength and keeps me going.’

  Home-made cider is very popular in these parts. Wild apple trees are everywhere, and in the autumn months a waft of warm, fermenting apple will often drift out from barns or garages in all the little villages in this valley.

  ‘Life doesn’t need to be too complicated and I keep mine simple, which also keeps me young,’ she added, and then told me that she had never been on an aeroplane. In fact, she has never been further than 30 kilometres from the village.

  ‘Don’t you wish you had seen more of the world?’ I asked. I love to travel, I told her, and I go all over France by train. ‘Don’t you regret that you have never been to Paris or Rome, to London or Venice? Don’t you want to go somewhere exotic or even urban? Don’t you wonder what it would be like to go on an aeroplane?’

  ‘No,’ she said with feeling. ‘Everyone I love, everything I need, it is here, in this village. My family, my friends, all that I hold dear.’

  Then she added, ‘Well, perhaps one thing I would have liked … to see the Queen.’ She adores the British Royal Family. When Prince William married Kate Middleton, Claudette was glued to her black and white TV set in her cosy kitchen. I say cosy – I mean hellishly hot.