by Janine Marsh
With five cats, two dogs and numerous birds, almost all of them wanting some attention ranging from cuddles to a pat on the head, I really didn’t want any more pets.
Let me tell you, living the dream with a small homestead involves a certain amount of stuff that is not that much fun and more of a nightmare than a dream, namely poo. The cats are good on the whole and spend most of their time outdoors, but on cold nights the girls like to stay in and that means a litter tray to deal with in the morning.
The dogs have their own run in the garden and that has to be cleared up.
The chickens, ducks and geese have five houses between them, all of which have to be cleaned. I shall never want for manure in the garden.
One dark November night we were driving home from the shops. We pulled into our little road and, by the bright glare of our headlights, saw a big black dog at the side of our neighbour Madame Jupe’s house. It was bitterly cold, a harsh wind blew the trees wildly, the great balls of mistletoe that cling to the branches were swinging back and forth, icy sleet fell. It was a nasty night.
Even by our neighbours’ standards, leaving a dog out in this sort of weather was bad. Generally, people here are less, shall we say, sentimental towards their animals than we are. Many dogs are kept in cages day and night; they are working dogs, not pets. Madame Jupe has a dog she loves very much, and though it spends all day tied to her front door, she lets it sleep in the house at the foot of the stairs every night.
We hoped the Jupes would soon take in what we thought was their new dog.
An hour later Mark went to look.
The dog was still there.
He went and checked four times and then came home and told me he simply couldn’t stand the thought of the dog being out there in these conditions. He was going to knock on their door to see if they knew their poor animal was out there suffering; perhaps they had forgotten about it.
I went too as Monsieur Jupe never understands a word Mark says.
We knocked. Monsieur Jupe came to the door and opened it just a few inches and peered at us as if we were crazy people come to kidnap him and Madame.
‘Oui?’
‘Bonsoir, sorry to disturb you but we thought you ought to know your dog is outside.’
‘My dog? No, my dog is inside sitting on Madame Jupe’s lap in front of the fire!’
‘No, we’ve just seen him, your new dog, the big black one.’
‘Non, that’s not our dog.’ Monsieur Jupe opened the door a fraction more. ‘That dog has been there for two weeks. He’s got rabies. We are waiting for someone to take him away.’
With that he bid us a good night and closed the door against the howling wind.
‘I can’t leave that dog here all night,’ said Mark, and we walked round to the side of the house.
The dog was enormous, with wild, staring eyes. As we approached, he slunk down low and backed up against the wall, growling. Slime hung out of his mouth and he was breathing fast and shaking.
‘Don’t go near him. He’s got rabies,’ I cautioned.
‘That dog hasn’t got rabies,’ scoffed Mark. ‘He’s terrified and he’s freezing. Go and get some rope.’
I ran back to the house thinking that, by the time I got back, Mark could have rabies too. I grabbed my thick gardening gloves (I am not sure what good I thought that would do) and the rope and ran back.
Mark was talking to the dog who was cowering against the wall; he put the rope gently over its head and led it to our house. It was surprisingly willing.
At nine that night, in the wind and the sleet, we built a makeshift shelter in the front courtyard for the dog. It did occur to me that they say that mad dogs and English men go out in the midday sun – English men also go out in the snow and almost freeze to death to save a mad dog.
We fed the ravenous creature, gave it water, which it drank as though its life depended on it and which made me more comfortable that it didn’t have rabies. Then we led it to the shelter, where it lay down on the dog bed we’d put in there and went to sleep.
This was no rabid beast; this was a scared, tired and hungry animal.
It was also huge.
The next day when we went out to the front of the house, the big black dog came bounding up to the gate of the courtyard. In the light of day it was far less frightening – still a big dog and clearly a boy, and he was wagging his tail a lot. He looked at me with his limpid dark brown eyes and I was sure I could see a bit of madness in there but mostly a longing. This was a very unhappy dog.
We went to see Monsieur Jupe again for more information. It turned out that the dog had been in the village for two weeks. It had scared the wits out of Madame Bernice down the road because it kept scratching at her back door. It had been in several gardens, scavenged for food in many dustbins. It had received absolutely no sympathy and in some cases had been kicked and hit and had things thrown at it.
So, there we were stuck with a dog everyone hated.
We checked at the town hall to see if anyone had reported him missing and left a notice on the board. We called the local SPA and they checked their database for missing dogs; nothing. Next we took him to the vet to see if he was marked.
The vet’s eyes popped when we came in with the dog.
‘Really?’ was all he said, but in a tone that meant ‘you’ve got to be kidding. Are you completely mad?’
‘No, no, we haven’t got another dog, we found him.’
‘You find them all.’
‘Yes, but we’re not keeping him, we want to return him. We need to find his owners.’
A little while before, we’d found two spaniels lying together in the road outside Desvres on a quiet country lane. They were utterly exhausted, emaciated and pitiful creatures. We took them home, fed and watered them and took them to the vet who found their ID numbers tattooed in their ears so we were able to reunite them with their owner. The dogs, a mother and daughter, had been missing for five days and had travelled miles from home. The owner cried when he came to collect them because he was so happy. We assumed it would be the same with this dog.
The vet looked him over.
‘Hmm, there is no tattoo. No markings. Nothing to identify this dog.’
We had already discussed what we would do in this scenario. Mark wanted to keep the creature. I did not.
‘It is about six months old, mostly Labrador,’ said the vet.
‘I’ve always wanted a Labrador,’ said Mark.
I said nothing.
‘Most likely,’ the vet went on, ‘with this type of dog, he was being trained as a hunting dog. He probably ran away when he was let out of the cage, or he was not doing well in his training and was put in a car and thrown out somewhere.’
Hunting dogs often run away when they’re allowed out. Cooped up all day and night for five to six days a week, freed at the weekend, sometimes they just run and run until they are completely lost.
‘This dog,’ the vet declared, ‘is very wilful, I can see it in his eyes. If you keep him you will need to be strict with him, he needs a boss. By the way, I think your neighbours will start tying their old goats and cows to your front gate soon when they are too old to be of use,’ he laughed.
For a week we tried hard to find out where the dog came from while he stayed in the temporary shelter. Then we introduced him to Ella Fitzgerald and Churchill and he joined them on their daily walks. He came in at night to lie in front of the fire and won the affection of ’Enry Cooper the cat by grooming him with relish. Soon he had his own bed in the dogs’ room. We called him Frank Bruno, after our favourite boxer, Bruno for short, and of course he is now ours.
He is indeed very wilful, greedy and clumsy. He is also very loyal and loving, but there are certain villagers he does not like at all and growls menacingly when he sees them, perhaps remembering the hard time they gave him.
Every day starts with the same routine: feed the birds, let the cats out or in, walk the dogs.
Come rain or
shine, we trundle out the gate and down the hill, up the little rue de la Chapelle and along isolated country lanes. Rue de la Chapelle consists of a few houses, a field and a tiny chapel, built by a local man as a tribute to his dearly departed wife. Big enough for two people to enter and pray in, it has stained glass windows and sculptures and looks like a miniature church that escaped from the Vatican City.
Just a couple of miles away is another chapel that is also very small, but this one is quite famous locally, known as the second Lourdes. In 1872 a local woman took ill with, it is now believed, peritonitis. In those days there was no real medical treatment for such an illness and the woman slipped into a coma. Her family held a mirror to her mouth from time to time, then the tried and tested way to see if a person was still breathing, and waited for what seemed a certain unhappy ending, as she would leave four young children motherless as well as a grieving husband. The local priest visited; he was fresh back from visiting Lourdes and brought with him a small vial of water he had acquired at the newly renowned religious site. The woman’s husband, a deeply religious man, wondered if the water would bring comfort to his wife and declared that if it did he would build a chapel in honour of a benevolent and omnipotent God. The priest administered a few drops of the holy water to the woman and it is said she immediately awoke from her coma and opened her eyes. In the next few days she recovered completely and had many years of good health; she went on to have a further thirteen children with her loving husband.
As he had promised, the chapel was built. Apparently, it was only the second church ever to be dedicated to Notre Dame de Lourdes just ten years after the town had been recognized for the miraculous apparitions that were said to have appeared to local girl Bernadette Soubirous.
The little chapel, on a sharp bend on a steep hill in the middle of nowhere, remains a place of pilgrimage for locals and tourists, who are greeted with the words ‘I am the Immaculate Conception’ at the entrance of a white chapel with a strong Caribbean influence.
No day is ever the same on our walks, even though we often follow the same route. When there’s a storm and the clouds are deep black and so low they almost touch the top of the hills that make up the Seven Valleys, the dogs run through puddles and bark at the thunder and lightning. On a crisp winter morning, they squeeze through a gap in a hedge of sloe berries to chase grouse and pheasant. In the spring, wild roses start to bud and meadow flowers appear at the sides of the road, and in the summer the tall trees offer shade to weary walkers and hot dogs.
Occasionally, we will pass a human, rarely a car, sometimes a tractor whose driver will raise a hand in greeting and acknowledgement that there is life here after all. Sometimes we will meet Thierry walking his horses back from their field to their barn. They are greedy animals and I’ve learned to my cost never to let them know I have an apple about me, which I do sometimes for the donkeys that live at the top of the hill. Thierry’s horses will steal them from your pocket, taking half your trousers with them.
There are plenty of deer here; they stand silhouetted against the woods, motionless, watching, ready to bolt as soon as our noisy dogs get their scent. A couple of storks arrived the year before last and more have followed. Their huge nests can be seen in the trees in the distance, as big as the enormous mistletoe balls that are so much a part of the landscape here; the nests blend in seamlessly. Herons sit on fence posts, buzzards hover in the air looking for small prey, rabbits and hares run around the fields besides shrews and dormice. Bruno once disturbed a stoat, which scratched his face and scared him half to death.
If you had told me when I lived in London that I would find one of the greatest pleasures in life was to pull on my rubber boots and wade through mud and along deserted country lanes with three excited mutts, falling in love with nature, I’d have said you were mad.
CHAPTER 21
The birthday party
THE NIGHT ARRIVED for Jean-Claude’s sixtieth birthday party. An informal affair, he had told us. ‘It’s mon anniversaire and I’m having a party in my garage.’ They don’t go in for embossed invitations in this part of rural France. The day before, Bernadette had stopped by to make sure we were still coming and to ask if Mark could help Jean-Claude in the morning.
‘He needs to take a cupboard to the new home of my friend Madame Danton in Mark’s big van,’ she said, leaning in and lowering her voice as if someone close by might hear. Not really necessary since she and I were the only people in the house. ‘Madame has been abandoned. Monsieur left her for a younger woman. She came home early from work at the builders’ merchant and caught him having un petit cinq-à-sept.’ French for an afternoon tryst.
She coughed discreetly and went on: ‘Madame is devastated and very depressed. She has moved into a house in the next village and has no furniture so all her friends are contributing. We have an old cupboard but it is heavy and Jean-Claude, well, you know with his heart …’
Jean-Claude’s heart is the subject of much debate in the village. He had a heart attack several years ago and tells everyone he must not do anything strenuous. He keeps vigorously to this approach to daily life, which means that even when he visits his mother-in-law Claudette just up the road, as he does several times a day, he doesn’t walk; he drives the car 30 metres on the grounds that the effort would be dangerous.
Claudette and Jean-Claude garden together every day and produce vegetables for the whole family. She keeps sheep, chickens, rabbits, geese and ducks – they are not pets like my animals, they’re for the pot.
Her garden backs on to ours and in the first year after we bought our French house I was determined to make our garden pretty so I sprinkled flower seeds with abandon. Each time I came to visit I could see the plants growing, and I was prepared for a colourful display to rival the Chelsea Flower Show. After a long absence due to having to work weekends in London, I came out for a week in the summer to – nothing. The young shoots that had been so promising had all but gone. Something had eaten them.
That night, as the sun went down and I sipped a gin and tonic in the garden, breathing in the scent of the countryside, I heard a rustling at the bottom of the garden.
It was one of Claudette’s chickens. She had climbed a tree on Claudette’s side, hopped on to a branch of a tree on my side and dropped down Mission: Impossible-style. She ran over to what was left of my flowerbeds and started scrabbling around in the dirt.
We shooed her off and put her back over the fence. She did the same thing the next night. We tried cutting the branches but the hen simply found another way in; she was the Rambo of the chicken world.
‘Let’s take her back to Claudette,’ I said to Mark. ‘Perhaps she’ll know how to stop her, clip her wings or something like that.’
Mark caught the bird and we wandered into Claudette’s courtyard. The door is only closed when she goes to bed.
I explained that the chicken kept coming into the garden and eating my flowers and asked if it was possible to do something to keep her out.
‘Sure,’ said Claudette and rung the bird’s neck on the doorstep.
‘It’s a bit earlier than I planned but she will do for Sunday,’ she said smiling sweetly. Whenever any of her animals come into our garden now, we keep quiet.
Claudette wasn’t going to Jean-Claude’s party that night; she goes to bed at precisely 7 p.m. and has done for many years. She rises at 5.30, as she has every morning since she married in 1950 and would make her husband’s breakfast before he went off to work as a farmer.
We had been told the party would start at 7.30 p.m. We took no notice of this, though, having been caught out before. When French people say a time you should visit, they don’t mean it – I don’t understand why they don’t just say the time they really want you there in the first place. Once we were invited for dinner at a French neighbours’ house.
‘Come at 7 p.m.,’ they said. So we did. We were new to it then and didn’t know any better.
We arrived precisely on time. Our h
ostess opened the door with a quizzical look. A look that said, ‘Who could this possibly be? I am not expecting anyone at 7 p.m.’ When she saw us standing there she was most taken aback.
‘Bonsoir,’ I said, trying to cover the awkward moment that could not be avoided since I heard her husband call, ‘Who is it, cherie?’
‘Have we got the wrong night?’
It turns out you must always be at least ten to fifteen minutes later than asked. I once asked Jean-Claude and Bernadette to drinks with some other neighbours and they turned up two hours after the time I told them and thought that was fine!
For Jean-Claude’s birthday party we thought we had it nailed. We would go at 8 p.m.
We wandered down the hill with a bottle of whisky for the birthday boy and heard loud music coming from the town hall.
‘Are you sure it’s in the garage?’ I said to Mark as another couple of neighbours in front of us turned into the drive of the Mairie, the town hall, clutching gifts.
Jean-Claude lives close to the Mairie so, though we were tempted to go with the flow, we thought we’d better make sure. We used the pedestrian crossing that the mayor had commissioned – for a village of 142 people through which several cars a day pass – and immediately saw Jean-Claude’s garage swing door was up – a good sign. Unbelievably, almost all of the guests were there already. Sometimes I realize that it doesn’t matter how long I have been here, how much I think I have learned, I am never going to get it right.
Jean-Claude’s garage contains the central heating boiler system for his house and Bernadette’s car, but for festive occasions, of which there are several a year, the car is removed and tables and chairs are laid out. It is the perfect party parlour, albeit with a bit of a hiss from the boiler. As with all get-togethers in France, one must kiss before one does anything else. Two kisses, starting on the left in our village. It takes a while to kiss thirty people and Bernadette had a Kir pétillant waiting for me.