by Janine Marsh
Since we had no oven in the house when we first came here – at least not one we ever learned how to use as it ran on coal and only ever filled the house with smoke – we cooked on a barbecue, had chips from Francky’s or enjoyed baguettes with an accompaniment. There isn’t much that will beat a freshly baked baguette from the boulangerie, a hunk of cheese from the fromagerie, some fresh tomatoes from the marché and a cake from the pâtisserie.
‘Food of the Gods,’ my dad used to say.
Whether it was raining and cold, or sunny and warm, we have never got fed up with this simple fare and have learned to truly appreciate seasonal, local, fresh produce.
The French are a nation of hunter-gatherers. When you drive around the countryside you’ll see them at the side of the roads, picking berries, apples, wild garlic or mushrooms. Once I was driving home and passed a deer that had been hit by a car; the poor thing was quite dead. As I pulled into the village I mentioned it to Jean-Claude who was outside his garage nattering to a man in a tractor. I’ve never seen Jean-Claude move so fast – he was off like lightning, cutting short what had seemed to be an engrossing conversation and leaping into his little white van to retrieve the complimentary ‘meal’.
Picking mushrooms is so popular that many chemists in France offer a free mushroom checking service. Not everyone cares to take precautions, though, and every year there are several deaths from eating poisonous ones. Nowadays there are fewer pharmacies offering the service than there used to be, perhaps because of the prevailing mood of health and safety and fear of prosecution. Although France is not anywhere near the sue-for-a-peanut-league of America or the UK, this mindset is starting to creep in.
In the next village along, one of my British friends asked if I’d like to join her and her French neighbour Stefan in the woods for a few hours of mushroom picking. Of course, I said, it sounded like fun. Off we headed to the forest near Hesdin, which is an unusual little town with a fascinating history. The famous musketeer D’Artagnan learned to read and write here. Charles V’s vast territory in the north ended at Hesdin and he built a palace there for his sister, Marie of Hungary; the Imperial Eagle of the Habsburgs is sculpted over the porch. Later the building became Hesdin’s town hall when Philip II of Spain became ruler of the local areas of Flanders and Artois and the royal arms of Spain are sculpted over the balcony.
In the forest where kings and noblemen once hunted we spent several hours mooching around mushroom mounds. Stefan, a real fun guy (oh, I can hear you groan at that!), had instructed us to bring a wicker basket so that the spores of the mushrooms we picked could fall through the holes – it helps propagation apparently. With his help, we managed to gather a sizeable collection of various colours. He invited us back to his house to check in his book of mushrooms to make sure that they were all safe.
Stefan lives in a small lane that is really just a dirt track on which ducks and chickens promenade, and his house looks neglected and derelict. The step that leads from the front door to the hall is covered in moss. Inside it was cold and damp and very dingy since the shutters were closed and the single light bulb would have been hard pushed to attract the smallest moth that ever lived. He seemed to inhabit one room that served all his needs except as a bathroom, which I didn’t ask about after he boasted that his mattress was over a hundred years old.
The book in which Stefan checked our mushrooms was dated 1896 and was full of very poor drawings that could have been anything vaguely mushroomy. He held our bounty up, stared at them and then at the book intently, leafing pages, frowning and fondling the fungi. Clearing his throat he announced, ‘They’re all good. No problem with these. They will be delicious, gently sautéed in butter for your supper.’
My friend and I left and decided that just to be sure we’d pop to the pharmacy. Luckily, Monsieur the chemist was delighted to help and proclaimed himself a mushroom expert. Putting on his glasses he examined the little pile in our baskets, picking them up, mumbling and popping some to one side, others back in the basket. Each time we started to talk he glared at us; clearly this was a serious business, so we kept quiet. By the end of his investigation, he’d put all the mushrooms back in the basket except for one, a huge monster with a pointy hat that we thought was quite a prize.
‘Are you married, Mesdames?’ he asked. We both nodded.
‘Are you both happily married?’ he said, looking from one to the other.
‘Yes,’ we said.
‘Why do you ask?’ enquired my friend.
‘Well, if you love your husbands, you should not feed them this one.’ He pointed to our prize giant.
‘Would it kill my husband if I gave him that one?’ asked my friend, going white at the thought.
‘No,’ said the pharmacist chortling, ‘but he would shit for a week!’
Hunting is popular in my part of rural France, though often it’s less about catching something to eat and more about an excuse to drink beer and socialize. In my village of just 142 people there are no fewer than seven hunting clubs as people keep falling out with each other, so they leave one club and start another. The most popular meeting space is an old Second World War German bunker in the forest close to our house where there was once a V1 launch site. The runway still remains, and there are plenty of traces left from the time when there was a huge camp there. The bunker is half buried in the moist forested ground and these days it’s a popular place for local hunters to play cards when they’re taking a break from hunter-gathering. Jean-Claude once asked Mark if he wanted to go along but hunting holds no appeal for either of us, though I did ask if I could go in the interests of research. Jean-Claude was completely horrified: a woman, going hunting? He was flabbergasted.
‘Non’ was the answer, although he did offer me the chance to go and help cook lunch with his wife and her friends, while the men were running about in the woods with guns attempting to despatch small animals and wild pigs.
Sometimes the hunting is not quite what you’d expect.
On a cool spring morning, Jean-Claude came to the house and said he needed to ‘borrow’ Mark for ‘cinque minutes’ and he mentioned something about a barrel, which neither of us understood. So Mark departed on the back of Jean-Claude’s tractor, none the wiser about what was required, which is fairly normal.
An hour later he returned – he was ashen-faced and looked quite queasy.
He said he’d gone to Jean-Claude’s barn where he keeps his ugly horse and stores food for his numerous rabbits, chickens, geese, pigeons and ducks. In all I think he has around 250 animals of one sort or another, but it may be much more as they’re kept in different places around the village – his garden, his mother-in-law’s garden and various fields – so it’s hard to tell, and he has no idea himself.
As Mark doesn’t speak much French and Jean-Claude speaks no English they resorted to charades and hand gestures. Jean-Claude asked Mark to fill a big barrel in the centre of the barn with water via a hosepipe lying next to it.
Mark looked inside the barrel to see half a dozen rats scurrying around in the bottom. Jean-Claude explained that he had a serious rat problem in the barn, which had to be controlled as it could be dangerous for him and his animals. They attack baby chickens, carry diseases and bite humans if scared. Not wanting to harm his animals by putting rat poison down, he’d run a wooden ramp up to the barrel, filled it with rat-tempting goodies, and of course once in they couldn’t climb out. Jean-Claude said he hated rats so much he couldn’t go near the barrel. Mark thought the idea of drowning a load of trapped rats was horrendous, unsporting and he didn’t want to do it either. There was some discussion accompanied by much shuddering, many gestures and more face pulling. In the end they shared the job.
It was around this time that we realized that we would never be anything but fake country folk; the townie in us was just too strong.
CHAPTER 20
More cats than you can shake a tail at
SOMETHING SEEMS TO happen to people when they become
expats in France. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. It has to do with becoming crazy animal lovers.
I was introduced to a lovely couple called Gary and Annette from England. When French people find out that you’re British, they want to tell you about every British person that they know in the area – they think they’re helping but sometimes it isn’t always so. Just because you’re foreigners in France doesn’t mean you’ll get on with everyone else who’s in the same boat.
Gary and Annette, though, are exceptional. They are funny, kind-natured and ever so slightly bonkers.
Annette keeps chickens, and not just a few. She tells me she started with five chicks from the local supermarket and got hooked rapidly, buying a couple more each time she went shopping. At certain times of the year in rural northern France, garden centres and even some supermarkets stock chicks, ducklings and goslings the same way that supermarkets in the UK stock seasonal plants. Fortunately, she has a large enough garden to accommodate them all comfortably.
Annette’s chickens live side by side with ducks, geese, guinea fowl, quail, a large turkey, four cats, two dogs and two goats. Heidi and Gerty the goats are what you might kindly call entertaining. When Annette and Gary go away for a night I pop in to make sure the menagerie is okay and to feed them all, and every time it’s always the goats that cause a problem. They are greedy, mean and, quite frankly, scary. They love to escape and cause mayhem.
Annette is very hands-on with her animals. One time, arriving at her house, I waded through the birds that live in the courtyard and knocked at the front door. Waiting an age, I was about to leave thinking she must be out when the door opened very slowly and Annette beckoned me in. She walked along her passageway with careful, deliberate steps and into the kitchen. All of her movements were hugely exaggerated and slow, as if she was in a bubble filled with treacle that at the slightest rash movement might burst. She sat down gingerly.
‘Have you hurt yourself?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she laughed. ‘I’ve got an egg in my bra.’
It’s hard to know what to say to that. It turns out that Annette, on her morning egg-gathering and chicken-checking rounds the day before, had discovered that one of the chickens that had been sitting on some duck eggs had given up. Annette checked the nest; all of the eggs were cold except one. When she picked it up and held it close to her ear, she could hear a ‘cheep cheep’ from inside. In a quandary, she says her first thoughts were, ‘It needs somewhere warm. I know, I’ll pop it in my bra.’
‘I’m not sure that’s what I would have thought of,’ I told her as I made the tea in her unusual kitchen. Annette and Gary are hoarders of cups and saucers, bowls and pots, cookery books and kitchen paraphernalia. They love nothing more than to browse and bargain at flea markets and most weekends go home laden with things to re-love. As a result, their kitchen is filled to the rafters with this and that. You have to move something from a chair to sit, something from the oven to cook, and something from the table to make space to put down a cup of tea.
‘Well,’ went on Annette, justifying her actions, ‘I remember as a kid we had chickens and if one of them abandoned an almost ready egg, my grandmother would pop the egg in a glove and put it on top of something warm like the oven. I was worried about roasting it, though.’
She told me that, the night before, she and Gary had gone to dinner at a friend’s house. The egg went too. All through the meal Gary and Annette, who had not mentioned the additional dinner guest to their hosts, were trying to stifle their giggles as they could hear cheeping noises coming from her chest and their host kept removing his hearing aid and tapping it trying to locate the source of the noise.
The day after my visit, Annette phoned me to let me know the egg had hatched early that morning. She was sitting at the kitchen table with a mug of tea, when she felt a crack in her bra. The egg started to move about so she whipped it out and popped it on to the table. My friend watched, mesmerized, as a beak emerged through the shell, quickly followed by a fluffy yellow duckling.
Annette is now the proud mother of Titania, named after the Queen of the Fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, of course.
Another couple I know, Leanne and Mike, moved to the Dordogne area from the UK for health reasons. They like dogs – in fact, they had two that went with them. When one of their beloved pets died, they went to the SPA, the local animal refuge, to find the remaining dog a companion. They particularly wanted an older animal as their dog was getting on a bit. They were horrified to discover that old dogs were euthanized as it was so hard to re-home them. They ended up going home with seven dogs that day. Now they have up to thirty-five at any one time in their home. Many of the dogs are sick, almost all are very old and often don’t live for a long time, requiring a lot of care. This couple somehow cope with the stress and sadness of constantly losing animals that they truly care for, many of them having been abused and neglected. Leanne and Mike call themselves The Twilight Retirement Home for Dogs and over the years they’ve gathered a group of like-minded friends who help them raise money to look after all the animals. They are not rich, just an ordinary retired couple surviving on a pension in France and living a quite extraordinary life with their much-loved pets.
I’ve met many people here in France who take in animals. They’re not all retirees with time on their hands. I think that, like me, many of them feel that with a big garden and a bit more free time than they’re used to, there’s room for an animal or several in your life.
This is, of course, leading up to me telling you that we somehow ended up with fifteen ducks, two geese, four more chickens and another three cats about a year after ’Enry Cooper arrived.
Loulou came from a flea market. Some kids had her in a box and they were begging someone to take her as their mum wouldn’t let them keep her. They spotted us suckers a mile off. I went home from that flea market with a bucket, a butter pat and a mewing tortoiseshell kitten.
Shadow was a jet black kitten who adopted Mark when we went to dinner with friends in another village. She kept sitting on his lap and wouldn’t leave his side; our friends pleaded with us to take her as they had so many. When we went home, the kitten came with us.
Ginger Roger is a totally deaf ginger tom. He was starving and terrified of everything when I found him in the garden. However, he took an immediate shine to me and though he wouldn’t come in the house, I made him a little hut outside and fed him every day. I did take him to the vet for a check-up and was told never to bring him back when he attacked the vet’s assistant. It’s not that he is a bad cat, but because he can’t hear, he’s terrified. ‘I don’t care,’ said my vet. ‘He’s not a house cat, he’s a wild cat and we can’t help with this one.’
One morning I went down to the pens where the chickens and ducks happily cohabitate. As usual the seven ducklings, Sneezy, Wheezy, Grumpy, Nosey, Chewy, Sleepy and Beaky, had escaped and were following me about. At ten weeks old they had little of their yellow fluff left and were voraciously curious and hungry, and this lot were particularly tame. The parent ducks had been a gift from a neighbour. We knew nothing about keeping them but found out shortly after that they love nothing better than to eat, splash in a pond and hatch their eggs.
That morning, on my way out of the pen after feeding the noisy birds, I almost trod on a tiny duckling. It was lying on its side, its head floppy, not moving. I picked it up; its feet and beak were freezing cold and it was bleeding – it had clearly been pecked by some of the other birds. It is one of the horrible discoveries about keeping fowl. They are really not very nice at times. Sure, some of them have great personalities, they can be very cute and fun too, but they can also be aggressive and mean. They don’t call it henpecked for nothing. I picked up the newly hatched duckling and cupped it in my hands to warm it. There was no sign of a mother to care for it and I was sure it would die in my hands. I could see the life ebbing away.
Mark had gone to the shops and I waited anxiously for him to return. He came back
to find me in floods of tears in the kitchen with duckling poo on my hands and shirt. Calmly, he found a box, set up the heat lamp and put a jam jar lid of water in it. I popped the duckling in and it cheeped very feebly just once. I hugged Mark. It’s one of the things I have discovered about him that I never knew before we came to France: he is just as soft as me when it comes to animals.
Then we walked round the pens and checked the hedges to see if there were any more ducklings. We found a hatched eggshell in the chicken coop and the mother duck still sitting on the other eggs. She’d been there the entire summer and nothing had happened. I’d thought about pushing her off but ended up just cleaning around her as she got so distressed. Clearly, this egg was ready ahead of time and she had decided to just stay in situ for the others, which meant checking the coop regularly from now on to see if we could catch any more. I had to set the alarm for sunrise, which is when most of the eggs tend to hatch.
Jean-Claude thinks that I am completely and utterly crazy. Why try to save a duckling? You can buy them in the shops or at farms for a euro, and if you ask your neighbour nicely, you can get them for free.
Mark says to me, ‘You can’t save them all,’ but I try and so far I’ve been very lucky, rarely losing any, except for one time when I took a few ducklings from a neighbour who didn’t want them. Unfortunately, they brought a virus with them that wiped them all out and some of mine too.
Amazingly, by the afternoon the duckling was running about and cheeping away. I called him Rocky after the Sylvester Stallone film because this little one was obviously a survivor. He thought I was his mum and would go crazy every time he heard or saw me and I picked him up quite a bit so he wouldn’t feel so alone. He grew to love sitting in a little box on my lap at night watching TV or dozing while I read a book. When he was three weeks old, a neighbour came to the rescue with another duckling so he would have company and learn how to interact with his peers. Within a few weeks the pair of them were integrated into the pen with the rest of the ducks. Rocky rushes to the gate when I go to feed them each day and loves to eat from my hands.