by Liz Ryan
Yes, of course I still cared. Stories about child abuse, animal cruelty, miscarriages of justice and wanton evil were as appalling as ever. It was just that, for the first time in my life, I felt unable to do, or even say, anything about them. It was like trying to swim across a vast swamp, one that was too wide, too deep, too suck-in squishy. The real world seemed to be rapidly receding, and when friends in Dublin told me that they’d just installed their seventh television, I thought they were gluttons for punishment. Unless the programmes on the seventh set were somehow more appealing than those on the first? Increasingly, my little house was filling with the sound of music instead.
Serge Reggiani! Jean Ferrat! Isabelle Boulay! Sometimes their world vision seemed to make more sense than any number of news bulletins. One night I listened to Serge’s song about his humble, hopeless love for a woman too beautiful to notice an ‘ugly’ man like him, and all but wept. And music had another advantage: I was so keen to understand the lovely French lyrics that I listened to them over and over, hitting the pause button to break each song into little soundbites, until finally I understood every syllable and – eureka! – could even sing along.
Which meant I was now ready for radio. Of all the media, radio is the most difficult for a foreigner. Unlike television, it offers no visual clues and, unlike a newspaper, it can’t be perused at leisure. There’s no time to consult a dictionary, reread anything, hit the pause or replay button. Miss it and, like a plane, it’s gone forever. One day, I thought they said the Queen was dead; in fact it was her hundred-and-one-year-old mother. Words swooped by like paper darts: ‘Japan has exploded!’ turned out to be news of an explosion in Japan. For a while I was as lethal as a cruise missile, grasping garbled versions of important events, as likely as not to extrapolate the same nonsense as when, as a child having just learned to read, I spotted the headline on my grandfather’s newspaper: ‘A spoonful of poison for each little child.’ It was a story about some father who’d poisoned his family, but at five I was hysterical, convinced it meant that all of us children were to be poisoned.
Eventually, I found my level on local radio France Bleu, which is similar in scale to 98FM. Gerard Farcy explaining how to keep your roses bug-free (though not mole-free), some man from the chamber of commerce announcing a film festival, a chef from Dieppe giving a yummy recipe for rabbit casserole with honey and mustard … at last, I didn’t need pictures, no longer yearned to yell ‘Stop, wait, you’re going too fast!’ Of course, everyone was shocked by this choice of station, because true French intellos listen to France Inter, not France Bleu. But hey, it worked. Drunk on success, I started aiming for ever-greater heights, to the point where I might even some day participate in a phone-in to give my views on … well, no, perhaps not foreign policy. On the moles, maybe, or that divine recipe for carrot soup.
And then, after a year or more in Normandy, I discovered that RTÉ television could now be had. For many migrants to France, it is the answer to a prayer, ever-advancing technology bringing not only RTÉ but four BBC channels, plus ITN, CNN, and dedicated wine, travel, arts, fashion, cartoon and shopping channels, as well as hundreds of radio channels. In English! Hurray! EastEnders, Coronation Street, Ryan Tubridy … at last, we’re saved!
‘Ah,’ said Irish friends who’d given up on France and sold their houses, ‘if only we’d known about this, how different it might all have been.’
No, it wouldn’t have been. Digiboxes, Canal+ and the like are a luxury, nothing more. They do not change any aspect of real life in France. But, in context, they’re great, and at first it was nice – occasionally – to see Gráinne Seoige reading the news on Sky Ireland and to follow the continuing adventures of her hairstyle. Gráinne has since departed to pastures greener, but I still get a kick out of listening to Pat Kenny and posting comments on Facebook within seconds of hearing what he has to say. I even enjoy hearing the angelus ring simultaneously in Dublin and in my little Norman village. But the drawback to digiboxes is that people tend to become dependent on them. Extremely dependent, in some cases, watching Masterchef, Flog It, The X Factor and Strictly Come Dancing all day every day.
France isn’t about Strictly Come Dancing, or Ros na Rún or any other fix from ‘home’. It is – supposedly – about France. Unless you watch at least as many French programmes as English or Irish ones, you might as well stay in Kerry or Kent or wherever you were in the first place. Until you can understand France Bleu telling you about this Saturday’s tea dance in Douai or Dijon, you will remain a prisoner of virtual events in cyberspace. Housebound, completely out of touch with local life.
Besides, Louis Laforge is waaay prettier than Bruce Forsyth.
As time went by, other cultural keys to France gradually began to fit into previously locked doors. The Frustré cartoons of Claire Bretecher, with their hilariously cynical mothers, exasperated fathers and scheming children. The satirical newspapers Charlie Hebdo and Le Canard Enchaîné (similar to Phoenix magazine), essential for lightening up life on days when the world just seems a hopeless mess. And the supermarket bulletin board, arguably more important than any TV news bulletin – this is where you’ll find someone to fix your lawnmower. Little local magazines announcing houses, cars and canaries for sale, man-with-van, gardener €20 an hour … simple as they seem, these little contacts take you deeper into the heart of France (or anywhere), easing the way, opening up new vistas, until one fine morning you wake up not feeling like a foreigner any more.
One fine morning, you’re walking down the village street and a voice suddenly shrieks over the tannoy: ‘Allez allez allez! Tirage au sort! Clio à gagner! Tickets trois euro chacun ou dix euros le lot de cinq! Venez vite et nombreux à la mairie!’
Yes, it’s urgent news, but no, France hasn’t been invaded. The medium is the public-address system, and the message is a raffle. Quick, you could win a Clio!
Or did they say ‘Quick, the nuclear station has exploded, gas masks available at the mairie’?
There has been a terrible tragedy. An eighty-year-old woman, Léonie Cravel, has been brought to trial for the murder of her forty-two-year-old daughter, who was paraplegic, epileptic and ‘100 percent’ handicapped. One night, after four decades of utterly devoted care, Léonie could bear her daughter’s mute suffering no more. So she ‘released’ her, by strangulation with a length of string. When arrested, she freely admitted what she had done, but could express no remorse for her ‘crime of compassion’.
Now, after vigorous debate on its ethical implications, the case has come to court and France is on the edge of its sofa, a nation divided, watching the evening news on tenterhooks. As a rule, the French don’t have a sensationalist streak, events of an O. J. Simpson nature are viewed as decidedly downmarket and interest only the most sanguinary amongst them. But Léonie is exceptional. Will her plea for clemency be accepted, as most people volubly wish, or will she be imprisoned for the rest of her tragic life? So frail that her lawyer, Maître Jean-François Titus, has to all but carry her up the steps of the courthouse (on which she totters and nearly falls), Madame Cravel cuts a most pathetic figure as she arrives to explain her desperate action. A weary, feeble figure that would melt the heart of a stone.
‘Nonetheless, she did do it,’ argues state counsel. ‘She did kill her defenceless daughter.’
Yes, she did, she admits it. This has already provoked heated debate about euthanasia in all the media, but it is on television that the judge’s cards are unexpectedly marked for him as he retires to consider his verdict.
‘In such circumstances,’ says newsreader David Pujadas, ‘suspended sentences are the norm.’
Across France, there is an almost audible gasp. Almost everybody wants a suspended sentence, but is this going too far? Are news bulletins supposed to … well … sort of … nudge the course of justice like this? Might the remark drive the judge in the other direction, might he feel coerced? Of course, nobody knows whether the judge has even seen the news, or what his views might be
, but in any event state counsel has demanded a minimum five-year prison sentence for Madame Cravel because, no matter what the reason, people can’t be allowed to kill their daughters or anyone else. Justice must be seen to be done.
And, mercifully, it is done. Next morning, Madame Cravel receives a two-year suspended sentence. She is free to go home, if she can ever face the scene of her ‘crime’ again. Out on the steps of the courthouse, wearing a woolly hat and clutching Maître Titus by the hand, she croaks her thanks into a battery of microphones, bursts into tears and sobs all over her lawyer’s burly, kindly shoulder. Watching this, I am tearful myself and can almost feel la toute France quivering with emotion. With relief, too: this has been an important moment in the course of social justice.
But we will never know whether that televised remark about legal precedent swayed the decision, or had any effect at all – or indeed if it was intended to. All that’s clear is that yes, France does have a heart, and that Madame Cravel is perhaps lucky she doesn’t live in a country where she might have risked a death sentence.
‘Not,’ she murmurs, ‘that it would have mattered.’ Her life is ruined anyway. The only good thing about this trial-by-television is its demonstration of France as a humane, compassionate nation.
Mind you, if she’d forgotten to pay her taxe foncière, she’d probably have been guillotined.
8.
The Edge
Punctually on 1 April, the neighbours, who have apparently been hibernating all winter, appear. No, not to say hello, or how are you, or to introduce me to the divine Frenchman who would be the icing on the gâteau. Not to issue invitations for the first barbecue, or to say anything cheerful at all. Their mission is to air their grievance. The hedge between our houses has begun to sprout, and a faint greenish fuzz, like a teenager’s first beard, is beginning to spread across its surface.
‘You own it – so, when will you be getting it trimmed?’ they anxiously enquire.
Why, I reply, I will be getting it trimmed at just about the same time you will be getting your trees trimmed – yes, those forty-foot silver birches whose leaves clog my drains in winter and whose branches block all the summer sunlight from my patio. Sunlit patios are, after all, one of the chief reasons for living in France.
There is a long, thoughtful silence. ‘Well,’ they say at length, ‘that would be very expensive.’ Oh, hardly much more than trimming my hedge? After all, the hedge is causing no grief, it is blocking no light, it is minding its own business. Their trees are actually a far bigger problem.
‘Hmph. We’ll have to discuss it.’
No more is heard about either hedge or trees until, one sunny day a few weeks later, I am out mowing the lawn when monsieur le maire appears. Every village in France, no matter how tiny, has its own mayor, and ours has held office for longer than anyone can remember. Looking agitated, chain-smoking, he marches purposefully up the drive.
‘Bonjour, madame.’
‘Bonjour, monsieur. To what do I owe this pleasure?’
‘Ah. Well. You see. It is about your ’edge.’
My hedge? Why? What has it done? Been naughty, has it, out carousing with the lads? Accosting old ladies, tripping up small children?
M. le maire is not renowned for his sense of humour. Unsmiling, he stalks over to the hedge, kneels under it and starts plucking at small, shiny new leaves.
‘Look.’ Triumphantly, he holds a leaf aloft. ‘You see. Untidy. New growth all over it.’
Indeed. Somehow, he makes the new growth sound like a crime, one of which he strongly disapproves, as if hedges have no business growing. But spring growth is not in fact illegal. Indeed, it is in the nature of hedges to grow – and in the nature of my neighbours to whine, evidently. To go snivelling to him and send him in to fight their battle for them. I have to smile. Badly briefed, he is kneeling under the wrong hedge, the one that belongs to my other, much nicer, neighbours.
‘I see. Well, what a pity. There’s nothing I can do about the bits growing out of it, I’m afraid.’
‘What? But why not? Surely …?’ He looks aghast, as if he has never before encountered such insubordination. Of course, this is what comes of letting foreigners move in.
‘Because it’s not my hedge, don’tcha see. Belongs to Benoit and Blandine next door. They usually trim it every summer. Until they do, it’s not bothering me. Or anyone else.’
Belatedly, his mistake dawns on him. He looks ridiculous, and would only compound his idiocy by making a second fuss about the other hedge, the one he’s been sent in about. The one that does not conform to France’s first rule of gardening: everything must be geometric. Symmetrical. Precise to the millimetre. All anarchy nipped in the bud.
‘Well, madame, I am glad to see you are at least mowing your lawn. That is a start. Good day to you.’
Off he marches, leaving me fizzing with rage. So, the neighbours are hauling in the heavy guns, are they? Won’t cut their trees, but conniving with the mayor to make me cut my hedge? Sending round Mr Medallions to do their dirty work for them?
Right, so. If they are really fretting over this hedge, let’s grant their wish. Let’s get it cut. Stamping indoors, I seize the Yellow Pages and find a hedge-trimming outfit. Yes, they can come next week. Yes, a thousand euro should cover the scope and nature of the job.
A week later, the team arrives at 8 AM. By sundown, they have reduced the two-metre hedge to one metre. It is now so low that I can peer over it and wave to the neighbours as they cook their barbecues, entertain their guests, sun themselves … hey, we’ll be seeing lots of each other this summer! The hedge is also sufficiently low that it no longer offers any noise protection from the road behind: they will be able to hear every passing car, every thundering lorry, every school bus picking up les enfants at dawn. The thousand-euro investment has cost me a proposed trip to Greece, and greatly upset the friend who was going to come with me, but at least it has paid other dividends.
Curiously, the neighbours do not pop in to thank me for complying with their wishes, for spending so much money on such comprehensive cutting. Nor do they acknowledge their half of the bargain, i.e. the felling of those giant birches. They do not respond when I wave gaily to them over the hedge, over which I now have an unimpaired view of their kitchen and can even see what they’re cooking for dinner.
They seem to be both skulking and sulking. Until one day, weeks later, they emerge like moles in their garden. There are voices, the clink of glasses, barbecue smoke, frolicking children in their new pool, every indication that they are entertaining guests. It is that most sacrosanct of French moments, Sunday lunchtime. Their charcoal-grilled lamb brochettes smell herby, and garlicky, and divine.
I am alone. I have no guests. I have no brochettes. I have no friendly wave from them, no invitation to come join them, not even for a glass of wine. All I have is a radio, on which RTÉ is playing. In English, bien entendu. I look over the expensively trimmed hedge into their sunny garden, I look at my own garden shaded by their birches, and I see red.
I take the radio outside. I turn up the volume. To max. Bryan Dobson bawls the news at deafening decibels, as if relaying it to Australia. Startled, the neighbours gape over the hedge. I wave cheerily back to them. Isn’t it great, now we can see and hear each other? Yes, hear! Their raucously frolicking children will learn lots of English from Bryan, from this impending entire afternoon of RTÉ. The first of many over the coming summer, now that there’s no longer a hedge to muffle the noise.
I think the April Fool’s Day tradition of enquiring about hedge-trimming might be suspended next year.
Meanwhile, the silver birches, now in full leaf, continue to block my sunlight. But there is some small compensation: last night, the neighbours’ cat escaped over the hedge, which used to be too tall and thick for it to climb. It ran out onto the road, and was, alas, flattened by a lorry. Les enfants are distraught. I am about to write a little condolence card and pop it in their letterbox.
Bac
k at the mairie, monsieur le maire has run up against a small difficulty. His lovely new ride-on lawnmower has, apparently, attracted some attention. Rumour has it that it may have been a little incentive from an optimistic entrepreneur, to whom the awarding of a contract is within his gift. Pure speculation, of course, no proof at all; only what the French call the ‘Arab pipes’.
Eh bien. He hasn’t been round lately, seems to have forgotten all about my ’edge. I must invite him to come see it, and discuss those silver birches. After all, pruning them would constitute a nice little contract.
Towards the end of the summer, when the hedgerows are heavy with blackberries and the hydrangeas are ready for hanging, my friend Jim rings one evening. He lives in Derry and is, he announces, feeling depressed.
Well, Jim, you know, Derry …
‘No, no. It isn’t that. It’s … um … the therapy.’
What therapy? Reluctantly, he confesses all. His work, which he used to love, has taken a turn for the worse. The bank has been taken over by a new conglomerate and ‘practices’ have changed. He has been shunted into a vast, noisy, open-plan office where paperwork flies off his desk every time someone rushes by, his new boss is the anti-Christ, and he is spending all his time fobbing off angry customers shouting down the phone about their newly muddled accounts. The word ‘redundancies’ echoes everywhere, and formerly friendly colleagues are turning on each other in all manner of Machiavellian intrigue. In a moment of black despair, he confided to his ex-wife that it was all very depressing, and she sent him off to see a ‘therapist’.
What? A shrink? But Jim, this situation is depressing! For everyone! It’s not of your making. You’re not imagining it. Anyone would be depressed. In fact, everyone probably is. You didn’t cause it, you don’t need therapy …
‘So the shrink,’ he continues, ‘recommended scream therapy.’
Eh? What’s that?
‘He regresses you back to your infancy and gets you to lie on the floor and scream. Let out all your anger. You know, against your parents and everything.’