by Janine Marsh
I was absolutely delighted and very surprised. My friends had shared my posts with their friends.
I wrote another post about my life in France and one about how to get electricity set up and a few other items I thought might be interesting. I wrote them and emailed them to Mark, who is not a patient man, so, by the end of five weeks I learned how to upload my own posts and photos. Mark calls me the Forrest Gump of blogging – once I started, I didn’t stop.
At the end of six months I checked the stats again: sixty thousand people had looked at my website.
I was ecstatic.
I was also completely and utterly hooked.
I’d hardly used Facebook before I went to France but now I loved sharing news and photos of life here, the places I visited and the things I saw, the food I ate. I gained new friends from around the world, Lori from Georgia, Julia from New Zealand, Fred from France and many others. This is interesting, I thought: I’m sitting here in my little French farmhouse in the middle of nowhere talking to people all around the world about my life!
A year in and I had five hundred friends on Facebook – I was amazed. It had a profound effect. There were certainly times when I felt quite lonely in my new life. Although there was always a lot to be done, it was usually just the two of us and I could go whole days without seeing someone other than Mark. When he was away working in London on his website development business, it was just me on my own a lot of the time, but with Facebook I could ‘talk’ to people pretty much any time of the day.
My new friends from around the world started to ask me questions about France. They wanted practical advice like what bank did I think was good for expats or how to get a phone installed in their new French home. Others wanted to know what restaurants I recommended locally and elsewhere in France, and those following the page would add their tips too; it began to feel like a community. One expat woman who spoke little French and had just opened a gîte wrote in a panic saying that her French guests had emailed to ask if it was okay if they brought their shepherd with them – he was from Germany. She only had one room free and couldn’t accommodate an extra person, but she wasn’t sure if she’d read their email right. I told her to send it to me and I’d see if I could help. I could – they wanted to bring their dog, a berger allemand, a German Shepherd!
I posted something on my Facebook page every day, photos of things I saw, like cakes in the local patisseries or the markets I visited, and by the end of the next year I had five thousand Facebook friends – I was completely astonished. It inspired me to share more photos and tips about travel and life in France generally; other people started to share their photos and recommendations on my Facebook page too, and my circle of amies and amis grew and grew, reaching more than a hundred thousand. I was truly humbled, and utterly thrilled.
I think of most of them as friends I haven’t met, and I know we share at least one common interest – France. I say most of them because I actually have met quite a few people I never would have without my Facebook page. One day I posted that I was trying to make curtains for the house and I was really struggling. I bought some material on eBay at a knockdown price and had to make twenty-five pairs of curtains. Although I had a sewing machine my mother-in-law had given me, I had no idea how it worked and I was doing all the sewing by hand. A woman commented on the post saying she thought she lived near me and she would help me to learn how to use my sewing machine. She turned out to be an expert quilt maker who lived about 8 kilometres away, and she spent several hours patiently taking me through the processes of sewing-machinery and we became friends. I’ve now met people from all around the world via Facebook, like Susan from Tennessee who was Dolly Parton’s glass maker (who has a glass maker?!). Sometimes I would post a photo of somewhere I was visiting and people would share their tips and photos. I was learning more about France from Facebook than I’d ever thought possible.
By now publishers were sending me books about France and asking me to review them for the website. When I finished a book I popped the review on Facebook and did a random draw for anyone who said they’d like the copy. An Australian woman called Carolyn won one of the books and told me she saw it as fate. For years she had longed to have a French adventure and winning the book prompted her to take action. She joined a tour to Paris and Provence and by good luck I was in Paris on one of the days she was there. We met at the gorgeous Treize bakery in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, run by expat American Laurel Sanderson. It is tucked away in a courtyard opposite the Hôtel da Vinci, so named after the Mona Lisa was hidden there on the top floor by a thief who stole it from the Louvre in 1911. Carolyn and I recognized each other immediately from our Facebook photos, and didn’t feel like strangers at all.
Fred from France has become a great friend over the years and often helps me with tricky French questions. Coincidentally, his grandfather was born in my little village; he knows the area intimately and really understands the sense of humour of its inhabitants. When I’m unsure if Jean-Claude is teasing me, I’ll ask Fred! Although we’ve only met in person once, we’ve become real friends.
I was starting to receive invitations to visit different regions so that I could write about my trip, and what had started as a hobby became an all-encompassing affair.
Ernest Hemingway once said, ‘Writing and travel broaden your arse if not your mind.’ He was right and that was okay by me; I had found my passion (though I have to diet a lot these days).
CHAPTER 18
Tour de France
IN A TOWN where not very much happens, to have the Tour de France come through is a bit of a coup.
So it was that, in the summer of 2014, one of the biggest sporting events on earth was welcomed to Hucqueliers, close to where I live. In the Middle Ages it was an important village where a grand château once stood opposite the fifteenth-century church, which still remains. It seems that the locals objected to one of Louis XIV’s taxes, imposed to pay for the guarding of the borders with Spanish territory a little to the north. The peasants of Hucqueliers and nearby Desvres and Marquise rebelled. The King’s Lieutenant in Picardy brought his cannons to Hucqueliers and took pot-shots at the château and destroyed both it and the rebellion. Ever since, Hucqueliers has been a tranquil farming community. It is now home to about five hundred inhabitants, a boulangerie, a couple of friendly bars – including my regular – a restaurant and a handful of shops. It’s a popular meeting place for hikers because of the glorious countryside that surrounds it.
On the day that the circus that is the Tour de France came to town, Hucqueliers was mobbed. Thousands arrived from all around and from further afield. Mad (but fit) Brits hopped on a ferry from Dover and cycled 96 kilometres to Hucqueliers to join in the celebration. Mayors from villages for miles around arrived wearing their best suits to take their place in history. Photographers from the local paper were there to capture the moment for posterity.
I arrived an hour before the race was due to pass through and positioned myself to take photos of the cyclists coming down one steep hill, past the ancient church and into the sharp corner that would carry them up another challenging hill and out of sight.
Opposite my post, an elderly man sat in a chair smiling and waving a small flag; young girls hung out of windows holding camera phones to take pictures to send to their friends. Amazingly, the sun shone – this being the north you can never guarantee such a thing even in summer. The atmosphere was electric, everyone was happy. Or so it seemed.
Ten minutes in and I could hear a tone of misery as a woman walked past muttering ‘merde’. It wasn’t an isolated incident; more people walked past moaning, looking unhappy. Had they heard something awful? Had the Tour been diverted? I wandered down the hill to where the mayors and councillors were, but they still looked pleased as punch. The only auberge in town was doing roaring business. Across the road, though, I heard a few moans and groans of ‘oh la la la la’ (there are more la la’s when something is particularly bad or particularly good) and �
��merde’. They were coming from outside the boulangerie. What on earth was going on?
I drifted across the road, narrowly missing two young men dressed from head to toe in red, white and blue silk, faces painted in the same colours, arms linked, singing the Marseillaise and lurching from side to side. The sole gendarme, there to control the huge crowds single-handedly, attempted to move them on, much to the amusement of the onlookers.
As soon as I got to the door of the bakery I could see what the problem was. It was shut. But it was meant to be open and that, it seems, was enough to ruin the day for some of the people there. You see, a Frenchman must have his bread. It is the law. No, I’m not kidding, it really is the law. Or at least it was until very recently.
In 1790, a law was passed that decreed that bakers must declare the date of their holidays to the mayor in order that he could approve or veto the dates and thereby ensure that not all bakers took their holidays at the same time because that might mean no bread for the people and, as you know, not having enough bread in those days was enough to cause a revolution. However, in an effort to eradicate red tape in the twenty-first century, apparently, bakers can now take their holiday when they want, and if that means that all the bakers go away at the same time – then so be it. Off to the supermarket to buy hideous, mass produced, half baked, disgusting little bread sticks to finish baking at home. In 1790, the person who made that decision might well have paid with his head. The presidential candidate who promises to overrule this so-called progression might well get into power on that alone – my French friends are aghast at such a stupid idea that impacts their ability to get bread whenever they want or need it. In reality, there is usually a boulangerie open when you need one – even on Christmas Day you can generally find one open so that you can get your fresh bread fix.
Back in Hucqueliers, the baker had been baking like mad all morning. He had baked as fast as he dared. He had been tireless in his efforts to bake enough bread for the hordes that were expected. He failed. By midday the bread had all gone, the cakes had gone – the shop was empty. The baker closed the door and stepped outside. He wanted to see the riders go past and refused to return to the kitchen until they had.
Of course, for the locals this was a catastrophe of the highest order, and I suspect that there are more than a few from that momentous day in Hucqueliers who remember it not for the razzmatazz or the giant papier mâché horse that a tractor towed into town (I’m not quite sure why). They won’t reminisce about the children who wore their special T-shirts and learned a song and dance routine to honour the riders who whizzed through so quickly the kids never even got to the end of the first chorus. They won’t recollect the thousands of people who were smiling and happy or the decorated trucks from which corporate gifts were chucked. They won’t recall the sight of the old man who was hit with a bottle of water thrown from one of the parade vehicles and ran into the road ranting and shaking his fists only to get hit on the head with a Madeleine cake.
They remember it as the historic day that Hucqueliers ran out of bread.
Desvres, one of the towns that rebelled against the Sun King’s hated taxes, is a short drive from Hucqueliers and is where the famous Desvres pottery has been made since the 1700s. It is a great place to visit on a Tuesday morning when the town square comes to life with a street market. Afterwards we always head to a little bar outside of which is a cardboard cut-out of a buxom barmaid that certainly caught my dad’s attention when we first went to the town. Inside it is like stepping over the threshold of time to discover you have arrived in the 1950s. There are almost always a couple of old men sitting at the bar nursing their glasses of pastis as though the miracle of youth is to be found in the bottom of the pale liquid. The wallpaper and furnishings are most definitely mid-twentieth-century vintage, dark brown and orange swirls – think LSD meets a kaleidoscope. A canary in a cage is in a different location each time you visit, sometimes on the pool table, sometimes on the bar, on the windowsill or the floor near the door if it’s a fine day. This place feels as though nothing has changed for decades. The elderly barmaid, who could not be more different from the enticing sign outside, serves coffee at the pace of a snail. Her yappy dog attempts to either nip or hump the legs of strangers. We have grown to love this place for what it is: quirky, weird and very French.
One day we went in and Madame the barmaid was chatting coquettishly with an old man at the bar.
‘I was the toast of the Folies Bergère in my day,’ she said in her hoarse, hundred-cigarettes-a-day voice. ‘When I did the splits, the crowd would gasp.’ She took a big wheezy breath and fixed her eyes on him. ‘My breasts were like cushions from heaven.’
The old man brushed a hand across his rheumy eyes as if he could almost see the pillowy mounds. He tapped his empty pastis glass on the counter for more. The barmaid never took her eyes off him, but reached an arm out to one side, grasped a bottle and filled his glass.
‘I could have had anyone I wanted. Maurice Chevalier wouldn’t leave me alone, you know. Every night my dressing table was full of flowers.’ She paused and sighed and looked around the bar, seeing me listening, all agog.
She leaned in confidentially towards the elderly customer. ‘You know, I can still do the splits, if you want to see?’ and she winked lasciviously, causing the man to snort and then down his pastis in one go.
They don’t do pubs in France. Of course, in London I was spoiled by a plethora of pubs. There’s something about the aroma of beer, the sticky carpets, wooden bars with their smelly towels to mop up the spilt alcohol, dim lights and the promise of a good night. A bar in France just isn’t the same.
For a start, in my area, they’re very friendly to strangers. The first time we walked into our local bar in Hucqueliers, the conversation stopped dead and everyone turned to look at us. I stood frozen to the spot at this unexpected reaction, and was amazed when, one by one, every person there nodded to us and said, ‘Monsieur, madame,’ to acknowledge our arrival then carried on where they’d left off.
We sat at a table and the man behind the bar came over to take our orders and shake our hands.
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘you’re the new English lot from down by Embry, aren’t you?’
It was our first full weekend in our new house. I’d heard the country grapevine was rife here but I was impressed by how fast news spread – it was certainly better than the BBC.
That night, when customers left they shook hands with everyone, including us. It was our first experience of the legendary friendliness of the people of the Seven Valleys.
It took an age for me to get used to the fact that some of my neighbours do not always find it necessary to knock at the front door. They are quite happy to wander round the back of the house and into the garden. Some are even happy to just walk in through the front door if it is open. Our water meter is in a well inside the house and one day the meter reader simply walked straight in while we were eating lunch, said ‘bonjour’, walked over to the well, lifted up the lid, read the meter and walked back out.
There have been times when I have spotted a farmer driving his tractor very slowly at the bottom of our garden peering over the fence to see what the mad English have been up to in the garden.
When we were replacing windows in the front of the house, our tiny little road that leads to nowhere became the most popular place for a promenade in the whole village. The local builder in our village drove past in his van on his way home each lunch time to see how far we’d got. Claudette sometimes went by shaking her head in astonishment, and Jean-Claude later told us that she berated him for his slowness since she had noted that we were able to fit three roof windows in a single day, therefore why had it taken him three weeks to do a single window?
It is not possible to keep secrets in a village like this – everyone knows your business. I can’t really complain, though, since my life and the people who feature in it are the subject of my writing.
CHAPTER 19
Fre
nch cuisine
THIS PART OF northern France is not known for its haute cuisine, and yet here is the vegetable garden of France: Boulogne-sur-Mer is the country’s biggest fresh fish processing centre, and the rich soil provides fine fodder for livestock. Local dishes tend to be rather hearty in winter months as you’d expect, and the ubiquitous moules et frites is as popular here as in almost every region of France.
Typical menu stalwarts are carbonnade flamande (a beef stew made with brown sugar and beer), flammekueche (a sort of thin pizza made with crème fraîche) and tarts made with local cheese. And this area has some particularly smelly cheeses. One, called Vieux-Boulogne, was tested by scientists at Oxford University and came top of the stinkiest cheese in the world list. Maroilles is another with a mighty powerful aroma, created by Benedictine monks in the tenth century in the eponymous town. It is soaked in locally produced beer and is a staple of dishes throughout the north of France. I once ordered a tart smothered in melted Maroilles in a restaurant in Lille and got a round of applause from the French customers – they are very proud of their cuisine here.
There is, though, one thing that really puzzled me when I first arrived – chips, fries, or frites as they call them in France. Frites vans and frites shops are everywhere in this part of the country, more so than in any other region I’ve been to. On a through road between Hucqueliers and Hennoville, a resident decided to set up a frites van in his front garden. Friterie Francky now attracts people from far and wide. When he is open for business he turns on orange flashing lights on his gate posts, and you can be sure that the road outside will be chock-a-block with cars arriving for their frites fix. He has even turned an outbuilding into a dining area, and plays great music in the courtyard, which is a meeting place over a plate of frites for expats and locals on Friday and Saturday nights. Regulars are greeted with a kiss on the cheek from Francky and Arnaud who works with him, and people don’t seem to mind going home with the wrong order, as happens from time to time. You can of course have all manner of side orders with your frites, from dressed crab to a glass of red wine. It might just be chips, but this is France after all!