French Leave

by Liz Ryan

  So the little green Renault zips around to and fro until – waahh! One day some man, who seems slightly detached from reality, drives into the back of it in the hypermarket car park. Big dent. He gazes at it.

  ‘What dent? I don’t see any dent. There is no dent.’

  And he gets back into his own car and drives off. I have his reg number, so I pursue him, but to no avail. He simply ignores all contact, and the police say ‘Ah, useless, forget it.’ Eventually, I have to get the damage repaired myself, thereby losing my no-claims bonus, which teaches me a valuable lesson: if, as a foreigner, you are involved in a fracas in France, expect little justice, if any.

  Scarcely is the dent repaired than – waahh! again – a speeding red sports car shoots through a crossroads, whirls my little green Renault away to the left, catapults me fifty metres down a road on which I had not planned to travel and slams to a standstill with a terrible thud. One of those resounding thuds that silences everyone in the recognition that we have missed death by a millimetre.

  The driver and his three passengers get out. All British soldiers, they are en route back from the races at Le Mans to the ferry at Dieppe. The front of their car is badly crumpled, and so they whip out tool kits and get stuck in, apparently quite confident of fixing it. I sit on a ditch at the side of the road, gazing at the little green Renault, which looks as if it has gone ten rounds with a sumo wrestler. Eventually, two cops arrive, tutting about the nuisance of having to come out to an accident in which nobody has been killed.

  The soldiers start chatting up the lady cop, who is young, blonde and good-looking. She smiles back. Soon they are all having a great old time. My services as interpreter are requested. Soon everyone is shouting in stereo. They are all extremely put out when, without warning or explanation, I burst into tears.

  ‘Don’t dramatise yourself,’ admonishes the lady cop. ‘Nobody died. It’s only a question of panel-beating.’

  I experience a very strong desire to panel-beat her.

  The other cop whips out a notebook. Ignoring the English lads, he turns to me. ‘You have committed an offence, madame. Here’s your ticket. You have three days to pay the fine.’

  Eh? I am being fined because a speeding car has crashed into mine?

  ‘Yes. Priority to the right, you see. That’s the rule in France.’

  But how could I give priority to a speeding car, especially one rendered invisible by a field of ten-foot-high barley? I was doing barely thirty kilometres an hour and it was doing at least three times that …

  ‘Save your breath, madame. Priority is always to the right.’

  Never forget this when driving in France. If you’re coming from the right, you’re in the right. You can do anything you like. You can shoot out into mainstream traffic, killing everyone in your path, and you’re still in the right. No matter how wrong you might be, you’re still right. Very handy, unless of course you’re on the receiving end of the rule, which I reckon was specifically invented for the frustration of foreigners.

  Next day, I was black and blue. The car was in intensive care. My bank balance was reeling from the impact of yet another claim, plus the news that the insurance excess would now be doubled for four years and the premiums would go stratospheric.

  So, I may well end up a bag lady yet. Soon, I might not be hitching over bridges but sleeping under them, with a red jerrycan for a pillow.

  6.

  Meet the Folks

  At twenty, you think you can save the world. At forty, somebody else will just have to save it while you save your own life. Sigh.

  Mornings are best. Those pearly June mornings when, getting up at a time of your own choosing, you reach the beach sometime around ten, park your stuff on the galets (pebbles) and pick your way in jelly shoes to the water’s edge. The colour of the water varies from milky turquoise through brilliant blue to steely grey, and its temperature rarely goes above twenty degrees, so that even on the hottest day you plunge in with a little gasp. But once you’re in, it’s very hard to get out. Uncrowded, unpolluted, the water becomes a cocoon, almost womb-like, and a lot of accumulated stress, mental and physical, was washed away as I swam and swam, serenely, my mind emptying of absolutely everything. If I wished, I could keep on swimming until sunset; there were absolutely no other demands on my time and I began to appreciate why France sets so much store on la liberté. To anyone debating leaping off a treadmill, I’d say yes, do it. Do it now. Run for your life! Leisure is one of life’s most underrated luxuries. After so many hectic years, you have to learn to savour it, to let go of the instinct to fuss, to dash on to the next thing – but you can learn. You can simply empty your mind of all the junk, and relax. You can learn to say ‘hey, no sweat’.

  But even a beach bum has to earn her lunch. If she doesn’t work it off, she might start having difficulty fitting into her little swimsuit. And so, in the afternoons, I got into the habit of walking for an hour, exactly as the health gurus say you should if only anyone ever had the time.

  Walking, in the milky valleys of coastal Normandy, can be as energetic as you like, with plenty of cliffs to climb for those who enjoy slogging up cliffs. However, having vertigo, and also now being officially a layabout, I struck out on the flat, leafy tracks through the fields and salt marshes, slowly strolling amidst the roly-poly cows and sheep, often following the meandering path of some little river in which, every now and then, fish jumped for joy. I often felt like jumping for joy myself: never had I felt so fit and healthy, in body and in mind. Later, I was astonished to be asked whether I didn’t feel vulnerable on these solitary walks. Au contraire, the concept of danger never entered my head. Was this incredibly stupid of me? All I can say is that I felt safe, sensed no danger whatsoever. Invariably, the few other ramblers I met would nod and say bonjour and, out in the bright sunshine, it all felt absurdly innocent. Frequently I got lost, and worried not a jot: sooner or later there would be a ramshackle old farmhouse, with somebody out in the garden shelling peas or spraying roses, who would indicate the way back to the beach with a friendly smile.

  Phew. Even if they weren’t very fast walks, they were long ones, and by the time I reached the sea again it might be three or four o’clock, time to get back in the water. Glinting water, now, with the sun beating down, the children’s sailing school in full flow as the dinghies ventured out like ducklings, roped together, their doll-size sails a joyous blur of pink and blue and green, the kiddies’ whoops whirling away on the wind. (Mind you, the monitors are strict, shouting instructions through a megaphone, and woe betide the child that can’t tell its sheets from its cleats.)

  All this air and exercise was working wonders, and so was the battery-charging solitude. Sometimes it was even difficult to articulate properly when friends rang to talk about what was happening in Dublin, London or New York: they seemed to be speaking about some other planet, one I definitely knew I’d visited but only distantly remembered. My tongue seemed somehow stapled to my tonsils, and conversations filled up with puzzling voids.

  But of course it couldn’t go on. Sooner or later, one must start meeting people and making friends. Not as easy in France as in some countries but, eventually, essential. So, how do you go about it, where do you start?

  First and foremost, you seek out a fête champetre, the communal outdoor meal hosted by most villages, on a weekend rota basis, in summer. Any fool can find one, and when you do you simply plough your way through the dust to the smouldering barbecue, buy your frites, and sit down on a battered old bench at a long wooden table. Amongst the forty or fifty people sitting around this table, there will almost certainly be somebody who speaks English. Somebody who, in fact, may well seize you by the lapels, burst into tears and start sobbing with gratitude: at last, a voice from home!

  Not that you want to live in an English-speaking ghetto (because then you’d have stayed at home, n’est-ce pas?), but at least now you’ve got somebody to bitch to about the French, until you’re sufficiently fluent to bit
ch to them face-to-face. Surprisingly, they won’t take offence when you do, because there’s nothingmost French people enjoy more than running themselves into the ground. One week, the front cover of L’Express magazine posed the question: ‘Should we be ashamed to be French?’ Sad – tragic, actually – but despite their beautiful country, the French are congenitally convinced that every other country in Europe is passing them out like Ferraris at Le Mans. (If this is the case, long may it last.)

  Another sure-fire social contact is the brocante, or flea market, also held on a weekend rota basis. Mooching amidst the stalls, dusting off old dolls and sepia photographs of papa militaire, you hear not just English but Dutch, Danish, German … take your pick, there’s always someone dying to chat. Through the brocante I began to meet lots of people, hear gossip, develop contacts and gradually blend into a little cluster of people who liked to gather in various gardens for apéritifs on rose-tinted evenings.

  And then, one day as summer was yielding to autumn, I saw an ad in the local newspaper. ‘Come join our cookery class’, it chirped. So I did. The group consisted of about a dozen women, mostly overweight – unusual in France – and strangely silent, plus one man with a cap and a cigarette permanently dangling from his lip. The dishes all seemed to be made with the cheapest of generic ingredients, and something about the atmosphere was oddly lugubrious. It took a couple of ponderous sessions before I realised I’d unwittingly strayed into a ‘social rehabilitation’ group for people with long-term problems, in obligatory pursuit of a new skill to qualify for their grants. The day the instructor asked what I did for a living, and I replied ‘write’, I saw horror etch itself all over her face, and knew without another word being exchanged that my relationship with this group was doomed. Still, at least I learned new ways with walnuts, blackberries and mushrooms, apples and pumpkins, all the hedgerow bounty we were encouraged to gather ‘for free’. Unlike the Irish with their ‘it-can’t-cost-enough’ attitude, the French love anything free and anything that grows wild: one Sunday, I was invited to lunch by French-Irish friends and the entrée was a huge aromatic dish of mushrooms, simmered in butter and garlic, richly redolent of the forest. They tasted as good as they smelled, and everyone purred in appreciation.

  ‘I’m glad you like them,’ said our host, beaming. ‘I gathered them in the woods just this morning.’

  Oh, really? There was a thoughtful pause, forks aloft as we, his guests, digested this, peering at the mushrooms to ascertain what kind they were. Are trompettes de la mort (trumpets of death) black, or yellow? We couldn’t quite remember. Hmm … had he got the pharmacist to pick them over (the normal safeguard), in case any might be poisonous?

  No, he hadn’t. And it was too late to start fussing, since we’d all swallowed some by then. Happily, we lived to tell the tale. (Just don’t try this at home.)

  And then, one October evening when the sheep stood statue-still, shawled in mist, a leaflet arrived. The village festival committee was looking for new members. Normally I loathe committees, but I decided to join this one, if only for a short time, to find out more about the local community.

  Next thing, at the end of the very first meeting in the village hall – a converted stable block – I found myself voted in charge of organising the caterer for a Spanish night. Like most French villages, ours has a salle des fêtes fully equipped for throwing parties, and the caterer was to do paella for a hundred people. ‘There’s a great caterer near Dieppe,’ someone airily said, and this was how I discovered that French phone books are listed in a kind of geographic code: unless you know precisely which town or village someone lives in, you will find it almost impossible to find their number. Finding that caterer’s number was like trying to find Osama bin Laden’s.

  But finally we ended up with delicious, albeit expensive, paella. My proposal of sangria to go with it was shot down: ‘We will have kir,’ the committee declared, and that was that. When it comes to food and drink, a foreigner is never going to win in France. Giving in gracefully – well, gritting my teeth but saying nothing – I got to know the other people in charge of music and assorted logistics over the several weeks it took to prepare the event. As always, there were some natural organisers, some of those people who love committees for the petty power, some old diehards as well as several blowins like myself, who simply wanted to get acquainted. For a tiny village, it was turning out to be surprisingly cosmopolitan: there was a shy couple from Madagascar, a laid-back Dutchman and his half-Finnish wife, a friendly Polish couple, a Parisien couple new to the area, a young goat farmer and a fervent National Front supporter. Between us, we spoke four languages, but worked together in French.

  This wasn’t school French or even college French. It was zippy, slangy, everyday French and I came home from those meetings exhausted, not by the agenda but by the sheer concentration required. Sometimes I misunderstood, failed to get a joke or had to have things repeated and – while everyone was cordial, especially over drinks at the end of each session – nobody was particularly patient. But why should they be? If every meeting was to be held up while each new word was painstakingly explained to me, we’d be there all night. It would be neither fair nor reasonable to expect the French to converse at my rusty pace, any more than an Irish committee would slow down for a French blow-in. So I battled on, catapulted from summer’s silence to autumn’s brisk agenda, and as paella night drew nigh, acquaintances slowly began to form.

  Marian, the Polish woodworker, was especially likeable. Discovering a common interest in table tennis, we began to play regularly on the table that is part of the communal furniture in virtually every village. Natalie, the Parisienne, invited me to join an aqua-gym class on Saturday mornings at the local pool, where I met Gabrielle the sculptor … and so, slowly but surely, a small circle began to blossom. Naturally, not everybody would turn out to be a bosom buddy, but the seeds of a social life were undoubtedly being sown.

  Even if your French is fluent, making friends in France is not easy. My pal Sheila, long married to her Frenchman, confided that it took her several years to start making ‘real, proper friends’. After a lot of effort, out-reaching and intensive work on her level of linguistic fluency, she finally cracked it the day her child was old enough to enrol in the local school. But even if you’re lucky enough to have ice-breaking children, you still have to be prepared to take the initiative, to wade in no matter how horrible a hash you might make of things and to be less choosy about whom you befriend than you might be ‘at home’.

  ‘But,’ Natalie unexpectedly said one day, ‘you Irish have an advantage. You’re extroverts. You’ll talk to anyone about anything. The British are more reserved, and so they have a harder time. Some of them seem to be almost prisoners in their homes. They never mix with us.’

  Later, as I began to meet the unsuspected hordes of Britons who quietly lurked in the area, I realised the truth of this. One Englishman could barely say ‘Hello, my name is Joe’ after a full decade in France. Another chap bellowed at all the local shopkeepers in English, terrifying them with his ferocity while his incredibly shy wife refused to join any of the local language classes, insisting that she’d never be any good. (Anyone who says this never will be.) Rather than socialise with the French, they mostly socialised with each other, unable to go to the cinema or theatre, to parties or barbecues or even to church, unable to read the newspapers or local advertisements or participate in community activities, missing out on the very fabric of French life. Some did try to learn French, and a few chirpy stalwarts managed to join in activities without it, but others spent much of their time watching the BBC, clinging to The Antiques Roadshow for dear life. One day, I was having a cup of tea with one of them when the phone rang and she gazed at it, visibly terrified. ‘I can’t answer! Can’t talk to these people in French! They speak way too fast!’

  Not true. The French don’t talk faster than anyone else. They have not hatched a plot to defeat the anglophones. They simply have normal conversations
at normal speed and, if you don’t learn to keep up, you will find life in France quite maddening. Many of those who give up and sell up, returning ‘home’ with tales of how they hate France, hate it chiefly because they can’t communicate.

  Meanwhile, paella night was fast approaching. Tickets were selling well, musicians were engaged, and, the day before, a dozen of us set up the trestle tables, decorated the salle des fêtes and had a fun time dissing the local mayor, whom I was discovering to be unpopular. His plan to build social housing on the village’s only green space, which was currently used by the children for football, would harden over the years into an out-and-out feud. In turn, nobody was discovering much about me, because the French are sanguine about the foreigners who fetch up on their doorstep, and not remotely interested in why you’d choose to live in their midst. Personally, I found this refreshing – constant explanation of your motives must get as tedious as does constantly having to spell your name – but if you’re the kind of person who loves attention, be warned. In France, you will not be the star of the show.

  And so paella night arrived, and was fun, and very hard work. No matter how local the event, no matter how cheap the tickets, the French expect value for money, high culinary standards and better service than is often the case in restaurants. We were run off our feet. Some of those who attended were gracious and pleasant, others were demanding to the point of rude, and I learned a lot from it. Once regularly waited upon in Irish restaurants, now it was my turn to do the waiting, and I felt like a CEO demoted to tea lady. But what mattered was the teamwork, the chance to take part in local life at last, to burrow another centimetre under France’s skin. At the end of the night, when the dancing had finally died down at around two in the morning, somebody produced a bottle of calvados and we toasted our communal success.