My Good Life in France

by Janine Marsh

  ‘There’s a wedding on at the Mairie tonight,’ she said. ‘But I bet we keep going longer than they do.’ I could tell we were in for a long night.

  At the bar that had been set up in the garage, made from wooden pallets by our Belgian neighbours, there was a serious discussion going on about how to open the barrel of Belgian beer they had brought with them. It was one of those metal canisters that goes into a beer dispenser but unfortunately, the fittings for the French machine did not fit the Belgian cask. This was a serious issue. When one brings a gift for all to enjoy, it must be enjoyed by all – it’s an unspoken law.

  ‘We could maybe make an adaptor,’ suggested Petit-Frère hopefully. He is called that by everyone in the village and I suspect it’s not just me who doesn’t know his real name. He has nine older brothers and sisters (he is forty-nine) and so has always been called Petit-Frère (little brother).

  After a bit of fumbling with some tube, that idea was dismissed.

  Aha, said everyone, the day is saved, when a young man said that he had a fitting at home that would work. He dashed to his car and drove off at speed.

  ‘Where does he live?’ I asked.

  ‘About thirty minutes’ drive away,’ came the answer.

  While he was gone, everyone drank bottled and canned beer. It was a hot, humid night, and the beer was laced with Picon, which creates a sort of beer cocktail. I’m not a beer drinker but it was very fruity and refreshing on a hot night, and also very strong.

  Of course, we could not start the barbecue until the return of the man with the machine fitting, though by now it was 10 p.m. When he finally arrived, everyone breathed a sigh of relief while a couple of men fidgeted about with the part to see if they could mend the beer machine. The sausages were put on, and local spicy merguez and other types sizzled deliciously under a half moon with a sky that was brimming with stars. The table heaved with salads, breads, olives and other delicious food.

  Bernadette, ever the perfect hostess, encouraged us to eat our fill … the night was young yet!

  Music and dancing followed dinner. The garage door was closed, the tables cleared, the beer machine got a cheer when finally it was used. One man looked thoroughly miserable throughout, though. Paul is a university professor, has written several books and is a French academic of the old school. He loves to talk in long, flowing, flowery sentences, frankly boring everyone to bits. He is in his late fifties and looks rather worse for wear thanks to his fondness for home-made crème de menthe. Not something I recommend, by the way: drink a whole glass and you’re likely to wake up on the floor the next day with no memory after the first sip (but if you have a cold it will be cured).

  Last Christmas Paul stunned everyone by managing to persuade coquettish Sylvie from the next village to go out with him. Twenty years younger, incredibly pretty in a sultry French way, she can have her pick of beaux and has a reputation for being somewhat choosy.

  Quite what she saw in Paul with his scruffy, smelly suits, ancient falling-down house and his habit of talking for hours on end is beyond everyone.

  But love is strange.

  And in this case it is stranger than usual.

  Several weeks into their budding relationship, Paul found a baby chicken in his garden. For Paul it was a coup de foudre. During the week Sylvie works away from home as an advertising executive in Paris and Paul was alone as usual. He took the chicken in, bought it food and accoutrements and called it Cherie.

  When I say he took the chicken in, I mean in the house, to live with him.

  When Sylvie came back at the weekend, she went to visit Paul and was charmed by his attachment to the little bird. The pair of them spent the weekend cooing over it.

  Paul’s affection for Cherie grew. He took her everywhere with him. We all looked out for his car to pass so we could spot Cherie sitting on his shoulder like the ugliest parrot that ever lived. Cherie continued to live in the house, running around freely (and doing what chickens do) and sleeping in a box on top of Paul’s bed.

  Sylvie started to resent Cherie, and really, who can blame her? It all came to a head when Sylvie decided enough was enough when Paul suggested Cherie might like to sleep on the pillow instead of in a box.

  ‘It’s me or Cherie,’ Sylvie said to Paul.

  Soppy he may be, stupid he is not.

  Cherie was adopted by a local farmer after he promised to cherish her and Paul went home to Sylvie who wiped away his tears. Alas, by the time of Jean-Claude’s party, Sylvie had recently dumped Paul; it seems she had met a younger professor with a smart car and a clean suit who didn’t sulk about a lost chicken love.

  Mark and I staggered home from the party in the early hours of the morning.

  As we passed the town hall, the music was still playing loudly but when we looked through the windows to see what was going on, there were just four men playing cards round a small table and one man dancing on his own in the middle of the salle des fêtes, dressed as a cowboy with a long leather coat over the top, Matrix-style. In this heat! Typically French, neither party wanted to be the first to give in.

  We opened the door to our little house, fell up the stairs and into a deep sleep where I dreamed that I gave birth to a baby made of gingerbread and woke up vowing never to drink Picon beer again.

  The next day was my own birthday. Money was as usual quite tight and we were making sure we stretched our savings as much as possible, so we decided that for my birthday I would get a cup of tea in bed, which was fine with me since I am always the one who gets up to let the dogs and cats out and feed the birds. However, I got a present that day I had never expected.

  A pathetic little black kitten turned up at the back door. He was starving, bald in places and had an awful eye disease that was so bad his inner eyelids covered his eyes permanently – they were horribly red and swollen. He had fleas, cat flu and worms. He was feral and vicious: when I tried to pick him up to take him to the vets he bit me so hard his sharp little teeth went right through my fingernail, leaving me with an infection. It was my fault, as the poor thing was in pain and terrified and he could hardly see.

  Though I really did not want another animal, I couldn’t just let the poor creature die and I could tell he was suffering. For a week I put food out for him at the back door. He made himself a bed on top of a bale of hay in the garden and ate the food. It got so I could pick him up safely and pop him in a cat crate and I took him to my lovely vet.

  ‘How many cats is this now?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, if I keep this one it will be number six,’ I told him.

  ‘You have to stop this. I’ve seen it before with you expats. You have one cat, then two, then six and then twenty-six. You will be my best customer, but it isn’t good for you and not for your cats. Promise you will try to stop.’

  I said I would try. I don’t want this to keep happening, I travel a lot and Mark, my friends and family have to look after the zoo when I’m not there. But I couldn’t leave a sick, starving creature to just fade away like that.

  ‘It is nature,’ said my sensible vet, and of course I know he is right but …

  I named the kitten Hank Marvin on account of the fact that he was starvin’. I regret to tell you that everyone else calls him Skank Marvin on account of the fact that he is extremely skanky. His hair has never fully grown back, his eye infection has left him blind in one eye and he will never be a big cat, always a runt, but a happy runt.

  The same week Hank Marvin turned up, another one of my ducks had babies. That is, her eggs hatched. Unfortunately, this first-time mother duck had led her five ducklings into a pond and they couldn’t get out. I found one of them frantically paddling, the other four had drowned and the mum was nowhere to be seen. I brought the plucky little survivor into the house, rubbed it dry and put it under a red lamp to warm up. Lucky, as I called it, lived in a trolley (don’t ask) at the side of my desk for three weeks. I am not sure what my vet would have made of this story. With no competent mum to care for
this duckling, he would likely have just perished in the garden and he needed time to grow stronger before he joined the rest. For quite a while after he was rehabilitated into the duck pen he followed me around as if he was tied by string to my shoes.

  Despite my best intentions, I appear to have turned into an expat Crazy Cat Lady. An expat Crazy Dog Lady. An expat Crazy Chicken and Duck Lady.

  CHAPTER 22

  The land of milk and honey

  IT BECAME CLEAR that having a big garden in the middle of the countryside in France was not going to be a walk in the park.

  Before we lived permanently in the old farmhouse, every visit had been a battle to gain control of the house and the garden. An acre of land might not sound like much but when you’re used to a space that is just about big enough to walk round your parked car, it’s a daunting prospect.

  We couldn’t afford to pay someone to cut the grass and keep it neat, so we just had to roll up our sleeves and get on with it. In my naïvety I was sure that once we lived there full time, the garden would somehow become more manageable. I was wrong.

  We decided to indulge in a ride-on mower to help make cutting an acre of grass easier and more fun. Not just for us, as it turned out.

  One sunny summer afternoon Mark was riding leisurely round the garden when what we assumed was one of our neighbours suddenly appeared from nowhere on his own ride-on mower. We’d never seen him before and he didn’t introduce himself.

  He drove on to the grass and started racing my totally bemused husband. Up and down they went uttering not a word to each other. It was hardly Le Mans but they were both in it to win it.

  As they ‘raced’ down to the last lap of the lawn with all the speed of a pair of determined but geriatric snails, the neighbour pulled away, raised a hand and disappeared back out of the gate.

  As we heard him riding off into the distance, we stood for a moment in quiet contemplation.

  ‘Did that just happen?’ said Mark.

  ‘Yes. You just had possibly the slowest race in the world. I think I might phone the Guinness Book of World Records.’

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Look at the grass.’

  ‘Yes, it looks like dyslexic aliens have visited and made quite possibly the worst crop circles in history.’

  ‘At least it’s done.’

  ‘Let’s cut the hedge – he might come back.’

  Actually, we have never seen him again; perhaps he wasn’t a neighbour after all and the mower was his means of getting about. It is possible.

  I was once in the car park of the supermarket in Fruges when a tractor pulled up next to my car and a family of four disembarked from the cab and went in to do their shopping. Returning to their tractor, they put their goods in the bucket, hopped back into the cabin and drove off.

  We came to discover that neighbours simply walking or driving into our garden would be a common occurrence.

  Our land was actually two small fields separated by a ragged hawthorn hedge, with more fields at the bottom. To make grass cutting easier we decided to remove the hedge with or without the random stranger on his ride-on mower. It was not a task to be relished. We approached with caution, as the hedge was old and prickly and its roots were deep. Three hours later we had hardly made a dent in it. Jean-Claude came wandering in; he had most likely been watching the idiot English people from over the fence and, exasperated by our pitiful efforts, came to offer a hand.

  ‘My tractor will make short work of that. I will go and get it,’ he announced and walked back out. Life in the country is very much give and take. If Jean-Claude has a loose tile on the roof he will call on Mark whom he calls Le Singe (the monkey). Mark has no fear of heights or climbing to the top of a roof via a wobbly ladder.

  Jean-Claude returned shortly afterwards driving his ancient held-together-with-plasters Massey Ferguson. He instructed us to tie a rope around a bush and then to the back of the tractor. He drove forward and, ‘PLOP’, out came the bushes as one by one we made our way up the garden. The bushes weren’t the only thing that came out, though. The gaping holes revealed a wealth of rubbish, old roof tiles, plastic boxes and even a rusty old motorbike. Someone had been using the garden as a rubbish dump and had dug great holes either side of the bushes to bury unwanted items. Over the years nature had covered the scrap heap with grass so we’d never noticed that there was anything under there. It felt that everything we did to try to improve the house simply led to more work and more problems.

  Still, by the end of the afternoon the hedge was gone and we celebrated with a bottle of red wine.

  The three of us sat on the terrace (a square of concrete at the back of the kitchen) in friendly contemplation of the mess we’d made.

  Me: ‘Were you born here, Jean-Claude?’

  ‘Non. I am a stranger here.’

  ‘A stranger?’

  ‘Yes, I was born five kilometres away.’

  ‘That makes you a stranger?’

  ‘Yes, in this village you are a stranger unless you are born here. My wife was born here, so she is not a stranger.’

  It was pretty obvious we would have our work cut out to become part of this community.

  ‘How many people are there in the village?’ I asked.

  ‘One hundred and forty-two humans and a thousand cows,’ laughed Jean-Claude. ‘Do you know the story of Monsieur Martin and his cows? Non? Well, he keeps his cows in that field at the top of the hill – you must have seen them come charging down when he calls them for dinner? It’s so steep, once they get going they cannot stop until they reach the level at the bottom. Well, anyway, one day he went to call the cows and some of them were gone. They had got out into the road and wandered off.’

  He stopped to take a big slurp of his wine.

  ‘He went to look for them and found some of them staggering around at the bottom of the village. He said they looked drunk and very unwell. He was very worried and went to get his friends to help him find the other cows.’

  More wine; thirsty work this storytelling.

  ‘They called and looked and eventually found the rest of the cows in the garden of an empty house and they were all acting very strangely. They were falling over and just lying there looking happily into space. Monsieur Martin got his cows back to the field where they just lay down. He thought they might have been poisoned so he called the gendarmes. They went to the empty house to look around and discovered the entire garden was covered in marijuana plants. Someone had been growing them there and the cows had eaten some. They were sky high.’

  He chortled away to himself, finished his wine and ambled off with a wink.

  It took us several weeks to clear the garden of the rubbish, which enabled us to discover the pleasure of visiting a déchetterie – a municipal rubbish dump.

  We were dreading a trip to dispose of the rubbish we’d dug up, which by now also included a large fridge. In London we’d had to provide evidence of where we lived, pay to dispose of certain pieces, fill in forms and all sorts of administration. With its reputation for bureaucracy we figured the French requirements were going to be really dreadful. We loaded the rubbish on to the trailer and headed to Beaurainville and our nearest rubbish tip.

  We drove in, were waved to pull over and one of the workmen came over. We were ready: we had utility bills, passports and all sorts. He looked in the trailer and started to throw the rubbish into a skip. We leaped to help him. And that was that. The most friendly, helpful people work at that rubbish dump and over the years we’ve come to know them well – we once estimated we may have cleared more than 20 tonnes of rubbish from the house and garden.

  You might think I am exaggerating but I assure you I am not. Originally a barn, the house had dirt floors in several rooms. Even though it had passed through the hands of several families since cows were the main proprietors, the work was what you might call ongoing when we bought the house. In fact, it still is and probably always will be. That
is the nature of homes in the country.

  We had been able to find out some of the history of the house from Jean-Claude. It was once the village telephone exchange and there is still an ancient ‘téléphone’ sign in one of the rooms. In the 1950s and 1960s people from the village would come here to use the phone. They could also get a cup of coffee, a beer or a glass of wine while they waited for their connection. To be perfectly honest, there are times when I could happily pour myself a glass of wine while I’m working because the internet speed is so slow; there are days when I could get a message to my friend in the next village more quickly if I just drove there.

  There used to be hundreds of houses in this area that acted as telephone exchanges; some had a TV where villagers could congregate to watch, some were small shops and bars. To this day there are still homes where you can go to buy a drink and many of the bars are also shops where you can buy all manner of items you’d never expect, such as children’s sweets in the shape of toilets. I’m not kidding, I’ve actually bought them. (How can you resist a miniature toilet with a lolly that you dip in the bowl, which is filled with sherbert?)

  In the little village of Hesmond is a ‘pub’ that is the home of a local woman called Adeline. She is quite elderly and has run a bar for decades. You simply go up to her front door. If it’s warm you can enjoy your beer or coffee in the garden outside, and if it’s cold you can sit at the table in her front room. It’s very popular with the local farmers who stop in on their way to and from work.

  One day Jean-Claude came to our door, huffing and puffing as usual.

  ‘Can I borrow Mark, just for a couple of minutes?’

  This is how it always starts. Sometimes it is a couple of minutes, sometimes it is for considerably longer. It is the way of the countryside here. Neighbours help each other out and Jean-Claude repays us in many ways for utilizing Mark’s relative youth and strength. A trailer load of dried wood, a tray of plums, or even a goose or two. Yes, once I made the mistake of telling Jean-Claude that I thought a goose would be fun to have in the garden. Later that day Mark and I were invited down to his house and into the back garden where he keeps his pigeons, rabbits, chickens, ducks and geese. Jean-Claude produced a basket and then, with Mark’s aid, attempted to catch a male and a female goose. After much cursing and falling over I was presented with a basket containing two very angry hissing geese.