How Blue Is My Valley

by Jean Gill

  What I am still finding tricky is spelling a name which has two of the tricksiest letters for an English speaker – G and J, which are pronounced almost vice versa in French. Simple – all you do is remember that they are vice versa – but then you think, have I already switched them? Do I still need to switch them? What are they in English anyway? What is my name again?

  Then there are my alter egos. I’m quite flattered to have ‘le Jean’s café’ as my local bar but I’m less pleased by Jean Gilles being racing correspondent for the local paper – ‘Jean Gilles a choisi...’ announces this week’s tips. If I can manage to stutter out my own name successfully, especially on the telephone, I am doomed if I have to give John’s.

  There is something very funny to a French listener in Jean being married to John. Once past that hurdle there is the excitement of spelling John Harley Pilborough – enough to make you very glad that your own name is three four-letter words. Still, it provided the French notaire, who carried out our conveyancing, with a Humour Opportunity.

  We were all gathered in his office, the estate agent, the sellers, us and the notaire himself, to conduct the formalities of the final signing and handover of the keys. It was a bit like a wedding service with the notaire slowly reading key bits of the contract and us saying ‘Oui’ now and again, although I did ask a few more questions than when I got married. (Perhaps I should have asked a few more questions then too?)

  There was a theatrical pause before John’s name then the notaire read, ‘Zhon ‘Arley Davidson’. Luckily we all laughed – it could easily have been like so many times in my classroom where I Cracked A Joke. I remember once laughing so much at my own joke that my chair fell off the old-fashioned dais on which it was perched. Even then thirty pupils stared at me blankly. In case you wondered what struck me as incredibly funny, it was the way Sohrab and Rustum don’t recognise each other and ... No? Perhaps you have to be studying a nineteenth century ballad with a group of fifteen year olds to appreciate the joke.

  I think the notaire’s office was where our first welcome to Dieulefit took place. We were congratulated and did lots of handshaking, and we were told how wonderful Dieulefit was and how we would be happy here. We then headed off to our new home for the real handover from our Marseillaise sellers (please feel free to hum whenever I say that – John always does). They had a pastis and some bretzels waiting for us and we had the tour of the house that you always wish you had been given in Britain – the one where someone tells you that the key only works if you pull the door just a little to the left and turn the key at the same time; or the exact and individual time at which you should open or close each shutter in order to maximise air and minimise summer heat; or which hosepipe connects to which junction in order to trickle over which bit of garden.

  The water system was the real revelation; we had realised that we were using spring water but it had been news to us in the notaire’s office that we didn’t own the springs – they belonged to who else but Monsieur Dubois, the neighbour with the truffle oaks and right of access via our driveway. All these neighbourly agreements seemed to be working fine and as the relationship allowed us to walk through Monsieur Dubois’ orchards into the woods beyond, without any of the maintenance of all this land, there were more pluses than minuses. However, I was taken aback to find out, after the pastis, that the kitchen was plumbed into Monsieur Dubois’ spring water, giving us free water (great?) except when it was freezing underground and there was no water (not so great). As I investigated the house further, I found that the separate W.C. was also on spring water.

  This was apparent when all water in the kitchen or to the garden stopped if the toilet was being flushed – and stayed off if the flush stuck. If you’ve ever played the computer game ‘Riven’, opening and shutting valves in virtual adventures, you would find our plumbing system very similar.

  The handbasin in the WC was also on spring water which meant that the hot tap was connected underneath the sink, inside the little cupboard, to absolutely nothing. Other little quirks, of which every house has its share, included an open fire condemned as ‘too smoky – the chimney needs to be taller’.

  This I still do not understand. Now I know that the parents of Monsieur Dubois lived here into their eighties with no central heating, I cannot believe that the fire did not function perfectly. Apart from a few woodworm holes there were no other surprises – unless you count the ‘remise’, an outbuilding which we had missed completely in our viewing of the house.

  In the remise, the atelier (workshop) and cellars, Jean-Marie was leaving us all manner of useful things and we said how pleased we were as we inspected the plastic coat, various rusty tins containing even rustier nails, half-used cans of wood varnish, a slightly damaged cane chair and Jean-Marie’ fully stocked poison cupboard – allegedly for the garden. I am not sure what we are going to do with a ploughshare and an old scythe – not a sickle but a full, Death the Reaper scythe – nor oak barrels and a rabbit cage but there is a strong feeling that they all live here, did so before us and will do so after us. Some of the left-behinds are definite treasures; a stone garden table with two benches, dozens of terracotta pots – some decorated with a mosaic of varnished fragments – and a pair of fire dogs.

  These cast iron bars, for ‘guarding’ the fire, each have a bust, sphinx-like, at one end. One is a woman with hair coiled high and a regency neckline to her gown and the other, a man, has a double-breasted collar fastening high on his chest. Napoleon and Josephine were covered in rust, made worse by a sluice and scrub using washing-up liquid. My next idea was to use some car rust remover that I had bought to spruce up our set of boules.

  However, the instructions clearly stated that the rusty areas would turn blue – not exactly the effect I wanted and I didn’t want to paint something that was to live at the edge of an open fire. Then I considered what I would do if these were rusty, cast iron frying pans and I did it. I smothered them in sunflower oil and baked them for twenty minutes in a moderate oven. They came out gleaming black and a little oil seems to keep them that way. When you think about it, that’s more or less how the Royal navy maintains the machinery on their ships, isn’t it?

  As well as the oddities left here permanently, Monsieur and Madame Manega loaned us basic furniture to make our two weeks camping here in the summer, before the move proper, more comfortable. They not only sold us a house, they were our first welcome here and although they were returning to Marseilles, Madame Manega grew up in Dieulefit and roamed the hills as a girl, so her affection for the valley had drawn her back here.

  To keep a foot in both camps, they decided to keep a small ‘cabanon’ in the nearby village of Poët-Laval and weekend here from their new flat in Marseilles. We were given useful phone numbers of everyone from The Best Vet to The Man Who Vacuums Your Fosse Septique (please let the no maintenance group be right). I was given the full version of Where To Go on a hair-raising drive to France Telecom’s office in Montélimar.

  Madame Manega is a traditional French driver, the kind who has prompted the Government’s multi-million euro campaign to get the French to drive ‘comme des anglais’. The flow of instructions along the lines of ‘...go to the hairdresser’s along to the left at the min-roundabout and ask for Sophie...’ she took both hands off the wheel and checked out my hair ‘... but of course you don’t have your hair done but if you do... and there is a little market at the mini-roundabout, tres sympa... and don’t go to the vet in Astuce, mais non...’ all this was interrupted by the usual beeping and hand gestures (a new highway code which I understand but can’t bring myself to use.

  Once, on a narrow road in the Var, John was awarded a particularly eloquent gesture, along the lines of, ‘You stupid foreign person don’t you know that on a one-track mountain road I have priority and must drive very fast past you while you get off the road, preferably over that precipice’ and I was glad not to be the driver.

  Madame Manega and I had an interesting French moment as we n
eared the bottleneck of la Bégude, where a lorry and a caravan had played chicken, neatly fitting both vehicles into a space through which neither of them could now progress. Nor of course could they reverse, as there was a queue behind each of them. In true Asterix fashion, the two drivers were punching each other in the middle of the street while everyone waited for the gendarmerie.

  Madame Manega took evasive action, swerved up a side street and, showing off her local knowledge, took us on a detour which added three-quarters of an hour to a twenty minute journey – but we didn’t have to stop once. There was one new aspect to traditional French driving; every few minutes Madame Manega would stamp on the brakes with an accompanying ‘Merde’ and the suggestion that the gendarmerie ought to have better things to do than be out there with speed traps and the uncivilised intent to get at motorists.

  Despite – or perhaps because of - the friendly flashes of motorists, warning of gendarme presence, the campaign is definitely having an impact. We have seen the unthinkable – drivers stopping for pedestrians at zebra crossings and even, however rarely, the British driving gesture I love, ‘No, after you...’ No chance of that with Madame Manega but she did get me to France Telecom, where I delighted a queue of twelve French people by choosing a new telephone from a display of about thirty, while they all waited.

  With promises that they would return and take us mushrooming, the Manegas called round to say goodbye, bringing with them the soppiest German Shepherd in the world, who made it plain that he still lived here.

  After they had gone, I mused on my social etiquette. Never mind the fact that I had puzzled them deeply by reminding Jean-Marie to take his mistress with him, referring of course to the ‘maitresse’, the mattress on the spare bed. Well ‘mattress’ ought to be ‘maitresse’. Was it my imagination or did Jean-Marie look shifty for a minute?

  No, what was worrying me was more important. ‘John, ‘ I said, ‘I think I’ve kissed people when I shouldn’t have.’ He gave me one of those looks and replied without interest, ‘Recently?’

  As he had been doing serious backing off and shaking hands every time I had been throwing myself in to three-kiss my new acquaintance, he was going to be smug, wasn’t he. It seems that you should keep to shaking hands until you really get to know someone, unless he’s your cousin, nephew, bank manager... I need to study French kissing a bit more. Why do the English call it that anyway when what the French do all the time doesn’t even involve contact between mouth and cheek? (I get that wrong too)

  This then was the start of our life in Dieulefit. Since then I have been overwhelmed – with locals’ patience in listening and responding to my French, with bureaucrats helping me to sort out paperwork over importing car, pets and ourselves, and with the day-to-day smiles and ‘Bon journée’ in our local shops. In casual conversation, I explain that we have recently moved here and every time the response is the same; ‘Vous avez raison’, ‘You’ve done the right thing. You’ll love it here, it’s a wonderful place to live.’

  This wholehearted love of your own region is new to me. Yet I have taken visitors on tour in the Gwendraeth Valley and they loved its variety of landscapes; hobbit hills, lush pastures, lanes and hedgerows, and seascapes of all kinds – sand dunes, marshes and wild craggy cliffs. It is just not Welsh to glow with enthusiasm about the place where you live – perhaps it should be.

  Who were these welcoming people? Mostly people whose job it was to deal with us. I can hear you saying, so what’s so good about that? Think again. What response do you really think that someone whose English is poor is likely to get at the local Welsh – or English – Post Office, or Department of Health or a local solicitor?

  Our experience includes the clerk trying to fill in a car registration form with our inadequate help, who phoned the local Nissan garage to get the details we needed and didn’t know. Or the nice lady at the mairie, who was amazed that we needed permission from the French Ministry of Agriculture to import more than three pets, suitably concerned for us that we hadn’t received this permission, and who organised an ‘attestation’, a testimony signed by the mayor of Dieulefit to the effect that two dogs and two cats could accompany us to become good Dieulefitois.

  The nice lady asked me what sort of dogs we owned and relayed the answer to her workmate typing away in a back room – in very rough translation, our dogs were considered to be big cutie-pies. This ‘attestation’ was even sent on to our home in Wales because the Mayor had been too busy during the two summer weeks we were here completing the house purchase – you can imagine our surprise when the letter arrived, exactly as promised.

  The nice lady was also a big help when we discovered a massive nest of huge waspy thingies in the doorway of the little fuel shed. She told us to phone the fire brigade but we were a little worried at dialling the equivalent of 999, for fire, during the worst regional heatwave since records began, when every night’s news told us how overstretched the pompiers were.

  We could imagine how chuffed they would be when we phoned up and in stilted French, told them that no, we didn’t have a fire, or even know of one, but we had a nest of big wasp-like-thingies in our fuel shed and the nice-lady-at-the-mairie had said to phone.

  We delayed phoning and then John had a brainwave. His first reaction to the nest had of course been to rush out of the fuel shed – and into the house for his camera. He had gone back, facing certain death to get a photo of an amazing, intricate structure about eighteen inches deep, honeycombed in a substance that looked as strong as concrete. It had not been there when we first saw the house in April so the thingies had built all of this in three months. It was awesome but it had to go.

  We looked up the fire depot on our map of the village and took the laptop computer up there with us. I’m not sure it was what you would call reception but a pompier was hanging around outside, taking a drag, and he was perfectly willing to look at our photos on the computer. ‘Frelons’ he said. ‘Ah oui, frelons,’ I agreed and nodded.

  Once again we were told that we needed to phone the pompiers for an appointment and that they would sort our frelons out so we returned home to look up ‘frelons’ in the dictionary. As you’ve guessed, they were hornets. And big buggers, at that.

  It was surprisingly easy as it turned out. The phone number leads to a switch board with so many lines that you are transferred efficiently to one for odd-foreigners-with-strange-thingies-in-sheds and the pompiers call you back to arrange an evening visit (off-peak for fires apparently).

  I was understandably excited at the thought of the firemen’s visit, motivated further by the calendar left in the kitchen by the Manegas, and the inevitable letdown of the two ordinary men who turned up in an ordinary van was only mitigated by their total professionalism. I especially liked the bit where they came round to the front of the house, where I was keeping well out of their way, and asked me for a bin bag. Presumably they put the whole nest and its population into this bin bag. I wouldn’t have done it, not unless I’d been wearing the sort of suit and helmet which would protect me against radioactivity, and these two pompiers had only added gardening gloves to their basic uniform. My heroes.

  What’s more they were cheerful about their work and told me that they offered a public service, that we would be charged a standard fee for sorting out pests, and that it was ‘normal’ for them - more professionals who dealt with us in a friendly and helpful way.

  Perhaps it is just that being ‘English’ is acceptable in Dieulefit; some immigrants are more equal than others. When I prepared for our move by reading whole rainforests of English magazines about moving to France, there was very little awareness that ‘one’ would in fact be an immigrant.

  There is no connection made between the desperate faces behind bars in the huge refugee camps, at Senlis or Lyon, and the Brits who move here, sometimes not even bothering to apply for their residency permits – I mean, Brits can’t be considered illegal immigrants, can they?

  There has only been one occasi
on so far in France on which I was reminded of my status. We were signing on with CPAM, the French Health Service, and I asked the clerk whether she wanted my old address on the form or my new one. With a patient smile she replied, ‘Your own country, where you’re from.’ I was hurt. I am the sort of kitten who, if born in an oven, would try very hard to be a biscuit.

  6.

  Flying Pigs and Chimney Inspection

  Today we saw pigs fly. Or rather, we saw wild boar and they were running very fast. John was up a ladder at the time using a lopper, secateurs and a saw, to turn our mulberry trees into amputees like our neighbours’.

  We are at the stage of copying everything our neighbours are up to in their gardens, although we still haven’t worked out exactly what one vegetable is, a giant-leek-with-palm-tree-top type thingie, that has been carefully encased in cardboard tubes.

  Presumably it is part of the region’s overwintering behaviour, which gives the impression that we live in a polar region, particularly if you judge by the collection of cut-to-size plastic covers sold in the local garden centres – cut to the size of whole trees and picnic-tables-with-six-chairs, that is.

  On a golden November day, there is no sign of the arctic winter, which we are told arrives at the end of December. If we stand still in our walled garden, falling acacia leaves tangle in our hair. As we walk out through the old stone archway into the orchard we brush the seedpods, dangling like huge peapods from the nearly leafless wisteria and we scrunch through mulberry leaves piled high along the drive. Proper crunching walks through autumn leaves are new to me; they used to squelch in Wales.