by Janine Marsh
‘They rampage through the streets,’ said Jean-Claude when he told me that the secret to a great Christmas dinner was to make sure that you went to the right places to get supplies, Licques being one of them.
Actually, what happens is the birds are let out, they amble leisurely up the street at their own pace, gently herded by a gaggle of children dressed in medieval costume. As thanks for their service, these turkeys escape being offered up as Christmas dinner.
Afterwards everyone goes to enjoy a lunch in a huge tent that seats a thousand people, with the central space cleared for dancing. Afterwards, it’s time for shopping in a massive marquee. Foie gras, champagne, escargots, charpons (castrated cockerels), cheeses, baby Jesus sweets, St Nicolas biscuits, regional wines and a whole lot more – this gourmet market is where many of the locals go to taste and to buy specialities from all across France.
Bars and restaurants may sell more champagne in the run-up to Christmas, they may even put on a different menu, but on the whole here in the sticks, it’s not a big commercial affair and life carries on pretty much as normal.
CHAPTER 16
Animal magic
AFTER DAD DIED, we worked long hours renovating the house and growing vegetables. He wasn’t rich by any stretch of the imagination but he left me enough money to pay off the mortgage on the French house. We built my dream kitchen from scratch. I went through old Homes & Antiques magazines showing Mark what I liked, including an article that featured Sir Terence Conran’s kitchen in his south of France home. Mark drew pictures of cupboards and shelves and sketched what he thought I wanted. We built everything ourselves, including a lovely pantry cupboard made from the staircase we’d ripped out. Nothing was wasted if we could help it and we recycled where possible. A builder friend had been restoring a site belonging to the Ministry of Defence in London – where Winston Churchill had once had offices in the 1940s – and he told us a load of wood had been removed and was to go to the rubbish dump. We asked if we could have it; sure, they said, and we brought it out to France and stored it until we were ready to use it years later. When we eventually sanded the filthy, thick wooden planks we found they were beautiful old oak floorboards. We made them into a staircase and I often think how I might be walking in the footsteps of the great man.
More boxes were unpacked as more rooms were finished, and in one of the boxes I came across the envelope with a chicken picture that my colleagues had given me when I left my job. It had been packed away for over two years, and when I opened it I found that my lovely friends had put money in it with a note saying it was to buy chickens with. We decided the time had come to honour their gift. We built a chicken coop and shelter at the bottom of the garden, ready for birds.
From spring through to autumn you can buy chickens of all sorts at street markets, of which there are many in this part of France. We headed to the Thursday morning market at Hesdin, which is a lively one that spreads from the main square in front of the town hall, down ancient cobblestone side roads, alongside the little canal that winds through the town and past the church.
A long line of cages filled with birds offered a confusion of choice, although for me it was more a question of did I like the look of them than what breed they were.
‘Do you want to eat them?’ asked Madame, who was selling them.
‘God, no. We just want them for eggs,’ I said, much to her amusement. City slickers playing at being country folk, I am sure she must have thought. But she took pity on us and picked out two brown, two white, two black and threw in a scrawny grey one for free.
The skinny grey bird grew rapidly, so much so that I began to think I had a special way with chickens. I called her Eaglet, as she resembled a baby eagle, all legs and sparse feathers. As the smallest in the group she got picked on so I gave her more attention than the rest. Eventually, she towered over the other girls and they all overcame their differences and got on well together. Every day Eaglet climbed into the nest box to lay an egg, as did all the birds. The strange thing was, even though I had seven chickens, there were only ever six eggs. Eaglet was an affectionate bird, eating out of my hands and cooing when I came to the pen. As she followed me everywhere and returned to the pen when I told her to, I carried on giving her special treatment and the run of the garden when I was out there.
One day I was hanging out the washing when I heard a very loud cock-a-doodle-doo close by. I turned to see where the noise had come from. Eaglet turned too, looking behind her. There was nothing there, so I assumed it was one of my neighbour Claudette’s birds. When I heard it again, the sound came from right by my feet. It was clear that the culprit was Eaglet. When I asked Jean-Claude if it was possible for chickens to sound like roosters and told him about Eaglet, he laughed so hard he almost choked.
She was, in fact, a he. I was not a champion chicken grower after all. Despite this, Eaglet continued to climb into the nest box every day like the girls and emerge a short while later making triumphant clucks
One day Eaglet broke his leg. I had grown very fond of him and didn’t want him to suffer. I thought about taking him to the vet, but Jean-Claude assured me that it wasn’t kind to prolong the agony and that it was time to learn how to deal with a sick bird and put it out of its misery. I couldn’t do it; the duty fell to Mark, who hated every moment but accepted that it was something that had to be done.
‘You really should eat him,’ said Jean-Claude sensibly, and there was a part of me that agreed that we ought at least to try to live up to our self-sufficiency ambitions. So Mark despatched and plucked poor Eaglet and I cooked a coq au vin.
It smelled delicious in the slow cooker. It looked tempting on the plate. Mark tasted it gingerly and declared it disgusting. It was the excuse we needed; neither of our hearts were in it.
Later Jean-Claude popped by to see how it had gone and told us off for not trying harder. ‘It’s all in your head,’ he remonstrated. ‘That’s why I told you not to give your birds a name.’ It didn’t matter, we knew we were pathetic but we also knew we would never eat one of our birds again – we were still townies at heart.
One Sunday morning we went to a flea market at Montcavrel, a hamlet close to Montreuil-sur-Mer. It was once an important place owned by grand lords of Picardy. Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia, stayed in a castle there in 1717, but sadly there are just two towers remaining of the once grand château. There is a smaller château whose claim to fame is that French King Louis Philippe spent a night there while on the run after abdicating.
Today it is a sleepy place with pretty front gardens and empty little roads, though on this Sunday the roads were thronging with stalls and people had come from far and wide to peruse the second-hand goods on sale.
There was a stall with a sign that read: ‘Cockerel Nagasaki 5 euros’.
Mark and I looked at each other.
‘No,’ I said. ‘We can’t … we’ve got more than enough animals and we don’t do well with cockerels.’ I still missed Eaglet.
‘Nagasaki, though,’ said Mark, who is into martial arts and all things Japanese, and then, ‘Five euros.’ He does love a bargain.
So I spoke to the lady selling him, but she knew nothing about birds. She texted her husband who was in their house, behind the stall, and he duly arrived with their four children and a couple of friends.
I told him that we were thinking of getting a cockerel for our younger chickens, nine white birds we had recently added to our flock, which were very docile and sweet natured. They lived in a new pen and had never been near a cockerel.
By now everyone else in the road who was near enough to hear us talk, those who were selling or browsing, had stopped to watch.
‘No problem,’ said Monsieur the cockerel seller. ‘Keep him in a separate bit of the pen where they can get to know each other but only through the fence. After a week let them be together and they’ll sort it out.’ He hesitated and then added, ‘He is a lovely bird, but a little nervous.’
A crowd had ga
thered round by now.
After a bit more chat and advice we agreed to take the Nagasaki cockerel home and the wife of the seller procured a cardboard box.
Everyone seemed to take a step back.
The man bent down to get the cockerel out of the cage and I heard him say to the wife, ‘Be careful, this bird is a right bastard.’
I looked at Mark – he hadn’t heard … perhaps I was mistaken?
The cockerel was furious at being disturbed and put in a box: he squawked, screamed, pecked, flapped his wings, headbutted the sides and was generally quite mad – they had to use so much sticky tape to keep the lid down you could hardly see the cardboard. Luckily, we only live fifteen minutes away so we knew the bird would be all right with the few holes that we’d poked through, but it was clear we wouldn’t be if he got out in the car on the way home.
I handed over 5 euros and we walked down the road with our box. Everyone was looking, which was hardly surprising after the commotion that the bird had made.
‘Do you get the feeling that everyone is watching the crazy English pair who’ve just bought the most vicious, mentally disturbed, troublesome cockerel that ever lived?’ I asked Mark.
I actually felt like people were waiting to applaud us.
On the way home I could feel the cockerel pecking the side of the box – I’ve never known a bird quite so determined to get out. They’re normally really quiet in the dark and I talk to them to keep them calm. Not this one. Talking to him seemed to drive him wild.
We got him home and put him in a small pen on his own with some food and water.
Within two minutes he managed to wriggle through the fence into the older chickens’ pen, the first set of birds we’d bought, which by now were quite grown up and had become very confident.
It seems he was a lot smaller than we’d realized.
The bullies were on him straight away – indignant and disgusted to have a man in their midst. Mark ran into the pen to catch him, but they cornered the cockerel and started to torment him. He then escaped into the field at the bottom of the garden.
Mark leaped over the fence and into the field on the other side. Usually there are cows grazing there, but not today – they had left plenty of reminders of their presence, however, which Mark trod in as he ran around in pursuit, risking a broken ankle thanks to the presence of many deep mole holes.
Watching Mark clutching a butterfly net, with which he hoped to catch the very sprightly young cockerel, and cursing when he had breath was the best entertainment I’d had in a while. Luckily for him, this being a Sunday afternoon, all the neighbours were enjoying a long leisurely lunch or I’m sure they’d have come out to watch.
Eventually, the cockerel ran into the little chemin at the side of the field, which leads to the road to the village one way and into hundreds of acres of fields the other way. Mark yelled at me to run round to the front of the alley so we could corner him.
I went as fast as I could, down the garden, through the house, down the road, into the chemin – there was no sign of Mark or the bird. As I stood there trying to get my breath back, I was pretty sure we would never see the cockerel again, when Mark appeared – a small dot in the distance – way across the fields. He was holding something …
We took the bird back to the garden and this time put him in a cage with smaller mesh next to the young chickens, and there he stayed for a few weeks, growing and crowing for all he was worth until he was too big to get through the fence in the big pen. We called him Kendo after Kendo Nagasaki, the British champion wrestler who was very famous in the 1970s. He is a beautiful bird with golden feathers and comes and goes at will, as he can climb fences with ease.
The birds had a surprising friend. ’Enry Cooper (named after the British heavyweight boxer) was a grey and white kitten with eye markings that made him look like a cute racoon. A malnourished stray, he simply walked through our open back door one day and decided we would be his family. He loved it in the chicken pen where the girls would fuss over him, inspecting him and giving him little affectionate pecks. In return he offered to chase them about a bit but not be mean to them.
Often I couldn’t find him anywhere and he’d ignore my calls. One day I was late collecting the day’s eggs. Opening the door to the nest box I discovered ’Enry Cooper sleeping in the warm straw. He stretched lazily and narrowed his eyes while I felt furtively underneath him for eggs. Amazingly, they were all safe. When I shut the door, the cat went back to sleep. We call him the chicken enforcer.
CHAPTER 17
The Forrest Gump of blogging
THE ENVELOPE CONTAINING the money and the picture of a chicken also bore a message from my friends: ‘For chickens, because we think you’re like The Good Life’.
I laughed when I read it. The Good Life was a 1970s British sitcom about a couple from Surbiton in southwest London who hankered after a rural life. A mid-life crisis saw them attempt to escape their city lifestyle, shun commercial values and become totally self-sufficient, growing vegetables and breeding chickens in their suburban garden. The series was incredibly popular in Britain and aired in the US as Good Neighbors.
The Good Life indeed, I thought to myself as, not wanting to make direct contact, I picked up a mouse nest on the end of a stick while we worked on renovating the utility room.
Later that night, when the third friend in a day phoned to get an update on how the work was going on the house, to find out if my tomato seeds had grown, if we’d frozen to death yet and how had my French onion soup turned out, the phrase on the message came to mind.
‘We’re The Good Life in France apparently,’ I said to Mark, who was still trying to fit a window in the hall even though it was pitch black outside and pouring with rain. It was late but it couldn’t be left or we’d be open to the elements all night.
‘Living the dream,’ he said as he hit his thumb with a hammer. ‘Pass me that squirty foam, we’re nearly there, just got to fill the gaps,’ he called, just as the phone rang again. ‘You should just send out a mail shot so they stop bloody ringing every night,’ he said in annoyance. ‘It’s crazy – you’re telling people the same stuff over and over again.’
How they laughed when I told them I’d somehow broken my finger carrying heavy bricks. The fact that I broke my toe dropping a gas bottle on my foot filled them with mirth. But they also wanted to know if my hours of planting vegetable seeds was worth it and whether Jean-Claude, my lovely French neighbour who had become my mentor, had been proved right when he advised me to plant according to the moon’s waxing and waning … and how was the laying of floors coming along, and had I learned to cook yet?
‘Perhaps I should start a “The Good Life France” page on Facebook,’ I ventured, ‘or maybe a blog?’
‘Blog? You do know that means you’d need a website,’ sniggered Mark. ‘You’re the least techy person I’ve ever met in my life. How would you create a website and put stuff on it?’
He was right: I was and still am a technophobe. But the seed of an idea had been planted in my head, and my dad’s words, ‘you should write’, returned to me over and over.
When the phone continued to ring regularly I brought the subject up again with Mark.
‘I really like the idea of The Good Life France blog,’ I said. ‘It means I could keep in touch with my friends and family every day and gives me a chance to start writing again.’ Years before I’d worked as a writer on a glossy magazine in London and loved it but gave it up because the hours weren’t great for a single mum.
Although I was a disaster when it came to anything technical, Mark wasn’t and had been studying how to build websites. We had anticipated that Mark would carry on working as a financial advisor after we moved to France, but we hadn’t realized just how long the recession would last and how much the finance industry would change. Work was hard to come by.
Mark had been training for a new career. A great salesman already, he had learned how to write computer languages, how to
design and build websites and was planning to start a business making websites. I could be his first client, I told him.
I drew a picture of what I thought a homepage should look like. Mark set up a website reflecting what he thought I should have. We wrestled over the look, the feel. ‘I don’t want to be corporate,’ I told him. ‘It’s not me any more. I want it to be friendly and fun and fabulous. Where I can share what I learn: real life in France.’
By this time, I had started to be the go-to expat for other expats in the area. People would ring or turn up at our house to ask for help with their paperwork, to find out how to locate a tax office, where the rubbish dump was, who to sell their house with, what was a good language course for expats with not much time and a hundred other questions. It was a great way of meeting other expats in the area and I learned a lot about the sort of problems people encountered when buying in or moving to France.
I decided to include practical advice pieces on my website. From there it was an easy decision to write about everything anyone would ever want to know about France.
Even though I didn’t really have much of a clue what blogging or a blog was, I was excited about having one. At the very end of 2011, I wrote my first post. I typed it and emailed it to Mark because I had no idea how to put it on the website he’d designed. I sent him a photo separately to go with it. He uploaded it to www.thegoodlifefrance.com – my new website. I wrote a few more posts and sent them to Mark to upload.
A friend set up a Twitter page for me as I had never even looked at Twitter. Mark set up a Facebook page for The Good Life France as I was so clueless.
Twenty-five of my friends liked my Facebook page and followed my Twitter account and I shared my posts with them.
It was fun.
After a month I checked the stats – 480 people had looked at my website.