How Blue Is My Valley

by Jean Gill

  My most extravagant impulse buy since we moved has consisted of a mountain cheese that took my fancy (and cost so much that we expected to own a square of the mountain itself, to add a piece of Alps to the piece of Snowdon I seem to remember that we acquired as National Trust subscribers) Previous peccadilloes were mostly connected with an underwear website – there is something very dangerous about being able to shop while sitting comfortably with a glass or two of wine.

  In the village I check the local events board and am intrigued by a talk at the local library with the title ‘Je suis aussi un mouton’. Apparently it is to be given by a local historian. Somehow I can’t imagine the title translating well in Wales, although I save the idea of ‘I am a sheep too’ for my future valleys-drugs-sex-unemployment novel, which will have a young male anti-hero and will undoubtedly be a best-seller. It has of course been written but then, what’s new?

  I call at the newsagent and browse the magazine rack. Although we’ve met French people who were keen on all things English, especially the language, the Francophilia of Brits is not reciprocal. You won’t find magazines in Dieulefit called ‘Living in England’, and a ‘Teach Yourself English’ book, if there is one, will have a discreet place on a shelf rather than compete with ever multier-media glossy products which promise to teach you French while you brush your teeth.

  There are however just as many magazines on the shelves of the local ‘presse’ as in any British newsagent’s. Like the produce in the markets and supermarkets, the titles vary seasonally, with October a frenzy of ‘Make the most of your mushroom-picking’, edging ‘the Firemen’s Monthly’ into a less prominent position.

  Can you imagine the impact of ‘the Firemen’s Monthly’ in Smiths? Or which shelf it would be on? Make no mistake, firefighters have a sexy image in France too, with more volunteers than there are permanent pompiers, but the stories and photos play up the heroism more than the sex appeal.

  In our region, as everywhere in the south, fires are neither rare nor someone else’s problem. Keeping our grounds clear of undergrowth is not just common sense, it is a legal responsibility, and when you see how quickly a few brambles can light up, you understand why. ‘The Firemen’s Monthly’ offers a mixture of fire know-how-not, daring rescues and of course, photographs of the daring rescuers. I hover, hoping to glimpse the (other) customers who like pompiers but only tally two local newspapers being bought before I get bored.

  As I buy my copy of ‘100 kitchens’, I prepare a sad face for the newsagent himself, who seems to have been bereaved, to judge by the black-edged notice below his counter announcing that he is ‘en deuil’, ‘in mourning’. I read on while he collects my change and remember that I am in a foreign country, where an increase in tobacco taxes can arouse personal fury and the solidarity of a day’s strike; this is what the newsagent is ‘en deuil’ for.

  Apparently cigarettes are so expensive in France now that people are even buying them in Germany. Imagine - Germany! I ignore the petition which has already been signed by a dozen good Dieulefitois, protesting the government’s interference – as if the Minister’s expressed concerns about health had anything to do with it! So the French head all kinds of European leagues for smoking-related diseases? Personal choice!

  It is easy to see the contradictions in another culture and I am still amazed at the acceptability of cigarettes – and pets – in French cafes and even restaurants when the World Health Organisation has pronounced the French Health system ‘the best in the world’ (according to my French information, I admit) and when no-one challenges the reputation of French cuisine.

  Although there are increasingly areas which are designated no-smoking, I think it will be a long time before we see workers standing outside their office-blocks, sneaking a drag, in the way that is now commonplace in Wales.

  As for the pets, the attractions of spending a night in a hotel room with two Pyreneans and two cats, or eating out with all of my extended furry family, have passed me by so far.

  I back out of the newsagent’s with apologetic foreign smiles and trace the old road out of town. The lizards want the last trace of summer sun but don’t trust its October warmth enough to do more than poke a head out of a hole. As I walk past a wall, my shadow creates a reflex flicker from nearly every drainage hole, as lizard-heads disappear.

  When I was eleven and pestering my parents for pets of every kind from snakes to puppies, my father said I could have a lizard (my latest idea) if I made a grass noose, held it in front of a hole in a wall and lassoed one. He thought this extremely funny and I was old enough to know at least that it was meant to be.

  I wish that I could call him up and say I’ve found a wall where it would work – can I have one if I catch it? – but it is another one of those conversations that cannot happen. Each time you understand a moment of the past in the light of your new, older present – as a parent, even a grandparent – you realise what you have lost when you lost your parents, and why your children cannot share it all with you – yet.

  Such reflections suit the cemetery en route, typically walled with family plots for the old names of the village. You sense the familial politics behind Marie being buried here when, according to the plaque, her husband Jacques was buried with his parents, in a different village graveyard. Who do you belong to when you die?

  What always surprises me is the old age so many lived to, 18th and 19th century octogenarians. Perhaps there are more of these matriarchs and patriarchs buried in style in their local cemeteries than there are loose-living, die-young migrants? Of course there are the tragic deaths, like the twenty-six year old who was married for 1 year and 7 months, and was buried with the baby she could not give live birth to; the war deaths and the touching tributes from old comrades at arms.

  If you want to visit a graveyard to make your spirits soar - and break your heart - go to what must be the most beautiful cemetery in the world, at Saint Christophe aux Oisans.

  If you are not driving, you might enjoy the view sheer down mountains as the road twists through the Alps up to a tiny village legendary for its great mountain guides, who led the rich nineteenth century adventurers, particularly from Britain and Switzerland, enabled them to conquer a peak and, more importantly, to return safely – usually. Giant among these characters is Père Gaspard, who was almost as fascinated by the 11,000ft heights of la Meije as were the foreigners who paid him, and who claimed first conquest of its peak.

  The Gaspard family plot is large and there are clearly six or seven other dynasties which flourished in a village so high that supplies often had to reach it by cables in weather too severe for the donkeys. It seems that all the villagers were mountaineers by necessity – not the place to suffer from vertigo, this eyrie, level with the permanent snows of the peaks’ dark faces.

  The headstones tell of men, including old Father Gaspard himself, wise enough in snow and ice to survive into their eighties, and then be buried with their ice-picks crossed above the lilies at the grave head, silhouetted against the mountains. Other graves tell sadder stories of the young foreigners who earned the right to be buried in St Christophe, the twenty-year olds who didn’t make it back down, their ice picks still glinting in the Alpine sun.

  2

  Connecting to Mains Alcohol

  I’m so scarred I could work undercover in a high security prison and when I look in the mirror I realise it could be a men’s high security prison, no problem. When was the last time I dressed like a girl?

  It must have been Our Night Out when a daughter treated us to our first restaurant meal in Dieulefit, where the menu du terroir, using local produce, sparked the goat cheese project, and where John was so exhausted that it was all he could do to smile and nod.

  I suspect the restaurateur and any customers who looked our way thought how kind we women were to take the village idiot on an outing. As I inspect the scars on my arms and the blood on my trousers, I wish I’d left it to the village idiot to weed the rose bed.

/>   This is not as unloving as it sounds. When John can be talked out of the teenager’s excuse to avoid weeding (‘I wouldn’t know which were the weeds’) by an unequivocal bed of roses (plants) and grass (weeds), he will finish the job in ten minutes, having removed all trace of weed greenery. However, the concept of removing roots is not one he’s willing to accept so I have the choice of quick and easy now and pay later, or do it myself the hard way. Life’s like that; you have to choose between underwear which looks good and underwear which feels good – you can’t have both.

  He has been constructing fences. One of the great attractions of our walled garden was that John would not have to fence it. Having dog-proofed two and a half acres in Wales, with a daughter’s help, he was happy to rest on his fencing laurels, until we looked out on our newly planted herb garden to see two Pyreneans playing ‘I’m the king of the parsley’. Within a day, the plants were fenced in. Bear in mind that these are dogs capable of turning a heather bed into a war zone, with craters the size of meteor landing-sites – and all in ten minutes. As a puppy, Freyja dug up a six foot high wisteria and dragged it round the house to present it to me, on Mother’s Day. She wagged her tail as I shrieked with delight. These are not dogs you mess with

  Train them, you say contemptuously? We did the classes and the dog went with us. For abject humiliation you can’t beat standing to one side of a large village hall while your dog doesn’t come from the other, amidst a dozen smug Belgian shepherds and their owners. It did result in some interesting theories on dominance (our lack of) but we blame hundreds of years’ breeding for the independence which is fine in ‘Belle and Sebastien’ but less attractive when you’re on a beach and your dog is high-tailing it off over the horizon.

  We take a break and sit on the terrace, drinking too much coffee, and I am amazed to see steam rising from John’s head. I have never seen a human compost heap before but he does not seem totally thrilled to be told this.

  As if the urgent fencing needed to create a plant zoo were not enough, we felt the sudden urge to try out the caged, three compartments system for composting. Like sister Anne, we have tried the heap, the tumble-turn barrel, the wooden-sided container ... unlike Anne we did not have the benefit of Hertfordshire’s free plastic composting tepee, which she swore worked so well that she was going to take it to the Pyrenees with her.

  Having listened to her advice – perhaps ‘listened’ is an exaggeration – on the pointlessness of me taking forty boxes of books, and furniture which wasn’t worth the removal costs, I was interested in her choices. It’s a bit like one of those interview questions; ‘If there was a fire, what would you save and why?’ It seems that a Hertfordshire County Council composting tepee comes high up the list.

  I have total respect for Anne’s gardening knowledge, as I do for sister Ruth’s cooking and carpentry and for brother Ian’s parachuting, physical courage and adventurous spirit; if only each of us kept to our specialism. And who is the worst? Me of course, Jack of all trades.

  The advantage of my interest in everything is clear when I meet the various workmen who keep us up-to-date with the days of the week (If it’s Monday, it must be the plumber ...) In our first six weeks living in France we have met nine workmen with different ‘métiers’ and have arranged to meet a tenth, the chimney sweep.

  You don’t believe me? Let me see ... there was the plumber, the man who delivered the oil, the boiler serviceman, the fridge (and TV) delivery men, the electrician, the builder – who returned with ‘le menuisier’ or as I called him ‘the staircase-maker’ (or according to the dictionary, the ‘joiner’ – would I have found a ‘joiner’ in Wales I wonder?), the satellite engineer and the kitchen designer (and cabinet-maker).

  It’s just as well we bought a house which has been ‘fully modernised’ (see estate agent’s brochure). That’s not actually what the electrician said when he looked at the job but as John had already reached the same conclusion and I had blown up the Dyson, I was resigned to a quote which was not poetic at all.

  The first plumbing job, however, was unexpected. The bath, which had performed perfectly throughout the two weeks we lived here in the summer, developed a leak and I made my first, painful phone call to ask for a workman to visit.

  I was very disappointed in John, who had been working on his French and had been studying the English subtitles to Francis Cabrel’s lyrics on DVD. He could quote whole chunks and I thought this would have been the ideal opportunity for ‘Il y a plusieurs mètres d’eau dans les rues de ma peine’ (literally, ‘There are several metres of water in the streets of my pain’ – trust me, it sounds better in French) But no, he was happy to leave me with a more prosaic dialogue, or rather monologue, on an answerphone, which would have been more effective if I’d managed to leave my own phone number correctly (as I found out when I phoned again the next day and the plumber was upset at not having been able to get back to me).

  I’ll repeat that because I sure as hell didn’t believe it; the plumber was upset at not having been able to get back to me. I am only willing to write the next sentences because I no longer live in Britain and will not need the services of a British plumber or electrician again (I hope).

  I have lost track of how many plumbers and electricians I phoned in Wales who never even bothered to return the call. I was incensed by a Report from The Basic Skills Agency which said that 9 out of 10 adults could not find a plumber in Yellow Pages; I couldn’t find a sodding plumber and it was nothing to do with my literacy skills.

  Even when I thought I’d found a plumber, he just didn’t turn up. Small jobs were worst; if you mentioned a bigger job coming, you were in with a shout of seeing someone. Perhaps this is the true indicator that Dieulefit is not really in Provence, or perhaps Provence has been misrepresented, but I am going to testify, bravely, that every single one of the ten different workmen returned my call promptly, arranged a meeting, made it clear that they were busy but gave rough dates as to when they would give estimates and when they could actually start jobs. Every single workman has kept to those arrangements.

  Don’t get me wrong – I am immensely grateful for the work on my various houses done by people I respect for their skills. Welsh workmen have been a lesson and an entertainment for me. I will never forget Franz Becker, a German immigrant to the small Welsh village of Pontyberem, who lightened my life by wearing some version of lederhosen as he shifted breeze blocks and swore in German because he’d got carried away and bricked in the space where a window was supposed to go.

  It was the usual case of three-jobs-on-the-go and do-the-most-on-time-for-whoever’s-nastiest (the same thing happens with schoolkids doing their homework), and our replacement of windows seemed to be last on his list... nothing out of the ordinary except that I was nine months pregnant and he had promised me that it would be done before the baby came.

  He had taken out the old windows when my waters broke; I spent a total of 24 hours in hospital and those windows were all in place when I arrived home with my son. My mother was waiting in York, not even knowing I’d gone into labour and I phoned her half an hour after giving birth to give her the good news. ‘The windows are in,’ I told her.

  ‘That’s great news,’ she said.

  ‘And I’ve had a baby boy.’ I think she just shrieked; she had already packed her suitcase and my parents were there within a day to admire the new windows.

  By the end of Summer 1984, I knew Franz Becker’s shorts better than I knew my own wardrobe, as he and his men were re-plastering the living room walls while I was desperately seeking somewhere private in my own house to breast-feed my baby. Don’t talk to me about the need for young mothers to relax in order to breast-feed – a bit of stress never did anyone any harm.

  Other key figures in my life for weeks on end were Wayne and the boys. This time I was at home for long periods because I was now working freelance, giving me more time to make the required cups of tea (my mother’s genes) and to supervise the work on hand (my
father’s).

  There was the moment when one of ‘the Boys’ had left his toolbox in the middle of the drive and I neatly scrunched over it as I drove out into town, waving to them as I went. I’m sure I heard one of them muttering, ‘Women drivers...’

  It was my pond that brought out their best qualities. They had organised a digger to excavate some ground in front of the stables, where they were laying concrete. The digger was brand new, beautiful machinery with a turning circle on the scoop that could have served ice cream.

  The four of us, Wayne, his boys and I, stood admiring their mate’s new toy and I couldn’t help saying, ‘I’d love a go in that.’ Without a flicker of humour, one of the Boys said, ‘You’re one of them ambitious women, aren’t you,’ and I was put in my place.

  I asked Wayne if he would scrape our drained bog, while the digger was there anyway, so that we could restore the pond by putting in a plastic liner and a lot of work. Within minutes of me asking, the four of us stood and watched the digger scooping out the pond. I’m good at joining in the bits where we all stand and watch.

  One of the Boys, the sixty-five year old, said, ‘Your husband could go in there if you do it now.’

  We all considered this.

  The Boy added, ‘Do it for you.’

  We considered it some more.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, ‘but I’ll keep him.’

  We thought on.

  The other Boy asked, ‘Have you got newts?’

  As it happened, I did have newts and had even found one swimming in the dogs’ outside water bowl (dropped by a heron? pissed as a?) so explained all this enthusiastically.

  I was missing the point. ‘You can get a grant,’ he told me, ‘from the council.’

  ‘How do they know you do have newts?’