French Fried: one man's move to France with too many animals and an identity thief

by Chris Dolley

  And we were wedged again. High banks of soil and stone all around us and no room to make a proper turn.

  I have travelled past that junction many times since and every time I pass by, I marvel at the fact that anyone could turn a lorry that size in such a tight space. But they did. One driver at the wheel and the other outside shouting instructions. The giant horsebox moving a few degrees at a time, as it rolled backwards and forwards into the main road.

  From there, we found the church and were back on my pre-planned route. A few minutes later we were pulling up outside our new home. It was nine o’clock, Friday evening. Sixty hours of hell were over.

  We stepped out of the lorry into a mild star-lit night. No wind, no rain, no hint of sound. We’d arrived.

  And the electric fence was up and working. The keys to the house were where they were supposed to be. It was as though a line had been written under the previous sixty hours – all torment wrapped up and safely buried in the past, a new life about to unfold.

  How wrong can a person be?

  The First Day, House Hunting and Toilets

  I stood at the bedroom window the next morning, and looked out on a view that almost made the last three days bearable. Almost but not quite.

  This was what we had come to France to see. A deep blue sky emerging from the twilight and there, framed between two hillocks, the Pyrenees. Mountains, sharp-edged against the early morning sky and looking magnificent. With the Pic du Midi in the centre, dark grey and flecked with white as the first rays of morning found the lying snow.

  Breathtaking.

  And in the foreground, bunches of mistletoe stood out like floating green islands against the bare trees – acacia and oak, maple and walnut. A striking blue cedar and a yellow-flowered forsythia added colour to the left, green fields and swathes of trees swept up to the skyline on the right. And over everything, hung the cold sharp breath of a winter morning.

  I could have stayed there all day. But I was hungry. And getting cold.

  oOo

  I dressed quickly and went in search of the kitchen, stepping through the obstacle course of packing cases and assorted boxes, with one thought in mind.

  Food.

  Where was it?

  We had intended to stop off at a supermarket on the way down and stock up with fresh food and essentials. That is before roofs started flying through the air and our leisurely journey through France became a mercy dash through Hell.

  I found the remains of a digestive biscuit, the last survivor of our rations from the trip. I had envisaged our first breakfast in our new home as being something to remember – full of hot croissants and steaming coffee, a chocolate brioche or two, maybe a wedge of Brie. Instead, I was staring into a bagful of leftovers.

  I tossed the bag aside. At least there was coffee.

  I rummaged amongst the assorted boxes, thankful that we had labelled every one with a brief description of its contents. And there it was – coffee, both instant and ground. Things were looking up.

  The percolator posed a more difficult problem. I knew I’d packed it at the bottom of one of the boxes marked, Kitchen Materials. But I couldn’t remember if it was with the electricals or pots and pans. Or assorted tea towels and cutlery for that matter. Our system of packing had evolved radically when it came to the kitchen. Our first thought had been to pack by cupboard so we’d know exactly what each box contained. But the crockery weighed too much and the pots and pans didn’t stack very well. So we started improvising and spreading the weight and filling gaps until we had an amalgam of kitchen goods.

  Several minutes of hard rummaging later I found the percolator, pulled it out, unwrapped it and...

  Plugs.

  That was the other item on our list of things to buy on the way down. A French round-pin plug to fit onto our extension lead. It had seemed a brilliant plan, buy the one plug on the way down, fit it to a multi-socket extension lead and then we could use all our English square-pin electrical equipment from Day One without changing plugs.

  But we didn’t have that one plug so ... I sat the percolator down. It would have to be instant.

  But not from a kettle – also electric.

  I was not easily defeated. I’d made coffee from water boiled in saucepans before. As I leant over the sink and turned on the tap, I prayed that something would come out. I could look philosophically upon the lack of electricity, but the thought of being water-less, was not one that a veteran of a three-day mercy dash through Hell’s maw should have to face.

  Water gushed from the tap. Yay! The patron saint of house-movers had awoken from her slumbers.

  Before promptly rolling over and closing her eyes again. We had no gas.

  As Shelagh stepped through the kitchen door, she found her husband slumped over the kitchen table with a pan of water clutched in one hand and a jar of instant coffee in the other.

  But we had the view. And the house.

  oOo

  And what a lot of house. An eight-bedroomed maison de maître set in seven acres of grounds, fields and woods. It even had a swimming pool ... of sorts. The sort without any water, and sides that cracked and bulged inwards at alarming angles. And there were two outbuildings, forming an L on the edge of the house. And an orchard with apples, pears, plum, cherries, figs and apricot. And it was all ours. For well under a third of the price of our three-bedroomed farm and forty acres of Devonshire mud.

  But it had eight bedrooms. And there were only two of us, six if we counted all the animals.

  “Eight bedrooms!” had been Shelagh’s first reaction when I phoned her with the news of my purchase.

  “It’s a bargain,” I replied. “Well within our budget.”

  “But eight bedrooms?”

  Seeing as the bargain ploy wasn’t going down too well, I tried a different tack.

  “They’ll come in handy.”

  “For what?”

  “Well, a spare room for a start. And a study for the Great Novel.” I could have added another room for the Great Novel’s rejection slips but thought better of it. “And four of the bedrooms are in the attic, so why not look at it as a four-bedroomed house with a carpeted loft?” A touch of genius.

  But house hunting is often like that. You start off with a tight list of what you want – the two-bedroom bungalow, the tiny stone cottage – refine it over a period of months, then let your husband loose in France while you look after the farm, and back he comes with the keys to an eight-bedroom mansion.

  oOo

  But it could have been worse. During my two-week house hunting expedition I discovered that the rural French builder had a flair for the unusual. And a hankering for an earlier time, when building was more art than science, before architects and building inspectors started framing laws to curb the creative householder. Like the man in Brittany who ran the mains water pipe through a working chimney.

  “I think you might have to move the water pipe,” the estate agent told me as we entered the lounge.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “It comes in through the chimney.”

  “Like Father Christmas?” I asked, wondering if perhaps it was there to provide water for the reindeer.

  Unfortunately that didn’t appear to be its purpose. The pipe entered the house through the back wall of the fireplace, hovered a few feet over the grate and then bent along the wall in search of a kitchen.

  ‘Why?’ is a question often asked in house hunting. Sometimes it actually precipitates an answer. This was not one of those times.

  But we did have theories. A rudimentary hot water system? A useful pipe for hanging a cooking pot from? Favourite was the ‘it was the closest point to the road – therefore less copper pipe to buy.’

  Then there was the toilet in the Dordogne.

  Now, I’ve seen toilets before – I’m a man of the world – and under the stairs has always been a popular space-saving location but ... at the foot of the stairs? With no privacy? Placed such that to climb the stairs
one had to squeeze past the bowl?

  I stood at the foot of the stairs, staring in amazement, and wondered – could the stairs have been a later addition? Maybe there was nowhere else to put the staircase when the upper floor was converted?

  No. I looked; the plumbing appeared more recent than the staircase.

  For days afterwards, I theorised and explored various possibilities for the unique placement of the toilet. It was like one of those mental agility tests starring dwarves in lifts. Could the owner have had one leg shorter than the other and needed the first step for balance?

  Or perhaps it was a conversation piece. It certainly worked.

  Then there was the log-burner in Gascony.

  There’s nothing intrinsically unsound about placing a fire in the centre of a room. It can look very stylish and certainly can be a good way to heat a large room. But ... something wasn’t quite right about this installation. It was the flue. Which was where the problem started. Not, however, where it finished.

  Most people installing a flue would take the pipe straight up from the fire and out through the roof. Very few would take the flue fifteen feet across the room at knee height until it reached a wall.

  Even fewer would then knock a hole in that wall, take the flue through into the next room, angle it behind the sofa and around two more walls before sinking it into the chimney breast on the opposite wall. As I tracked the eight-inch diameter flue’s progress through the house, I wondered if I was at the birth of an entirely new form of heating system – no radiators required, just one continuous flue.

  I walked back and forth between the two rooms. One looked like a giant hand had pulled the log burner into the middle of the room, extruding the flue. The other looked like a neighbour had tapped into the chimneybreast while the owner had been out shopping.

  Then came The House, an eight-bedroomed maison de maître with seven acres and views of the Pyrenees. Not that we wanted eight bedrooms, two was our target, but the asking price had been reduced so low that it was now one of the cheapest properties on my list, having come down to less than half of its original asking price.

  So what was the catch?

  I waited for the estate agent to mention the toilet at the bottom of the stairs and the missing roof but instead heard about banks and financial problems. The owner was desperate to sell to pay off his debts and had moved out of the house four years ago.

  Aha. It had been empty for four years. Everything began to slip into place. The price, the need to sell, the image of encroaching rain forest smashing its way through the windows.

  There was something about the speed in which the French countryside could reclaim properties, which bordered on the supernatural. From what I’d seen, I wouldn’t risk leaving a house empty for the weekend. After four years, the lounge was probably thick forest.

  When we arrived, I thought we’d come to the wrong house. It looked in too good a condition.

  Aha, I thought, Indian burial ground.

  It was the traditional maison de maître of the area with huge rooms, nine-foot high ceilings and stone walls of the thickness normally associated with small castles.

  The hallway alone was three yards wide and big enough to garage a couple of small tractors. Apparently it was the local custom to design farmhouses that way to accommodate the trestle tables for the harvest festivities. When all the families who’d helped bring in the harvest would be wined and dined and stuffed with roast pig. Which sounded fun for everyone, except the pig.

  As I walked around the first floor bedrooms I began to see a possible reason for the lack of sanitary facilities I’d encountered in earlier properties. They’d all been installed here. I had never seen so many toilets. And in so many unexpected places – like right next to the bed. In suite instead of en suite, I suppose.

  Truly, here was a man who loved porcelain. Every bedroom had some. All had a sink, some had bidets, some had toilets, some had all three. None had partitions. Bidets and toilets stood side by side with beds and wardrobes. A ‘proud to be porcelain’ smile beaming out from their glazed countenances. When I entered the bathroom, I half expected to see a bed. All in all, I counted five toilets and four bidets in the house. I gave up on the sinks after the second recount. There were a lot.

  When I rang Shelagh later that evening, I glossed over the excess of plumbing as best I could. The eight bedrooms hadn’t gone down too well, so I thought the five toilets and four bidets were probably best left to another time.

  But Shelagh wanted to know more.

  “Did it have a second bathroom?”

  “Er ... yes,” I replied hesitantly. After all, it was the truth. It did have a second bathroom, in between the first and third.

  “What about toilets. Did both bathrooms have one?”

  Yes, again. As did the cupboard under the stairs and some of the bedrooms. But so what. We could open a showroom.

  oOo

  That morning – our first morning in our new residence and a so far breakfastless one – we sat down and made a list.

  It was some list.

  It was headed by a car. We had to have one. As we had to have logs, gas bottles, food, a cooker, plugs, telephone, money, a cheque book, hay, straw, fence posts and undoubtedly a thousand and one other things that temporarily eluded us.

  But we lived in the middle of nowhere with not a shop in sight. Or a bus stop or a telephone kiosk or a man who knew semaphore. After all, this was what we had wanted – to be away from it all. What we hadn’t envisaged was the sheer desperation of our trip down. All thoughts of plugs, food and stopping to phone ahead had been pushed aside, locked away by the certain knowledge that any attempt to deviate from our course would have resulted in unimaginable disaster. Any supermarket we stopped at would undoubtedly have been struck by a meteorite within seconds of us pulling up outside.

  But today was another day. Paranoia was living somewhere in Northern France and we needed to find a phone.

  So we grabbed a map and took Gypsy for a walk.

  Which went down very well with Gypsy, who was enjoying her new life. After all, she’d had breakfast. Like the cats, she didn’t need her food heated and we had plenty of tins and no problem locating the tin opener. I think the cats had packed a spare one just in case.

  We left the cats unpacking – there’s something about large boxes full of screwed up paper that cats find irresistible. They’d be busy for hours.

  We thought we’d try Tuco first as it was the nearest village. Well, perhaps not quite a village. With three houses, a church and a road sign, it was large enough to rate a mention on our map but that was about it.

  Walking down the winding country lane it was difficult to believe that this was winter. The mid-Februarys that we remembered were the coldest part of the year – with howling gales and biting winds vying with snow and drizzle and thick grey blankets of cloud that could hang around for weeks.

  But here, the sky was clear, there wasn’t a breath of wind and the sun had real strength to it. Even this early in the morning you could feel its warmth on your skin. Which made the transition between light and shade the more noticeable. Step into the shadow of the trees and it felt cold – you could feel the frost beneath your feet, hear the crackle on the tarmac. Step into the sun and it felt like spring, the grass was green and the road was dry.

  We ambled along the curving lane as it wound down the little valley. A steep-sided wood rose up on our left, another almost as steep on our right. Ahead of us, we could make out the steeple of the tiny village church and beyond that another tree-lined hill marked the far side of the main valley. It was a beautiful spot. Rolling hills and valleys, tiny villages, forests and fields. Just what we wanted.

  A few minutes more and our little valley widened out into the larger valley in which Tuco stood. We could see for miles. Tiny white spots of habitation dotted the far hills. Patches of green marked out the growing crops against the predominant browns of wood, ploughed fields and scrub.

&nbs
p; It was idyllic.

  Until the advance guard of the Tuco dogs spotted Gypsy.

  We dragged her past the first barrage of woofs straight into the teeth of the main contingent. Four dogs of various size and pedigree held us at bay while a large black dog harried us from behind. Gypsy was not a happy dog. It was probably the first time she’d seen other dogs since leaving her mother. And these were growling at her in French.

  Then a farmhouse door opened, and out shot a small dark-haired woman alternating shouts and smiles as she tried to chastise her dogs and welcome us at the same time. The dogs ran back inside the yard and lay down, yawning and looking the other way as though whatever had just happened had had nothing to do with them.

  Gypsy took this as an opportunity to shout abuse at them from behind our legs – amazing how brave a puppy can be after the danger has passed.

  Another figure appeared from a barn, a curly-haired man in his late thirties, wiping his hands on his overalls as he walked up to meet us. There was the usual hand shaking and then...

  It was our first introduction to the local dialect. I had expected it to be a variation on the French we’d heard on the language tapes and schools’ programmes. But not this much of a variation. It was unintelligible.

  I’d been reasonably confident of my French up until that point. I’d coped with estate agents who couldn’t speak English, I’d survived restaurants and hotels. I could usually make myself understood – eventually. And I could normally pick up the gist of what was being said to me – if it was repeated slowly and often enough.

  But this was beyond me. It sounded more like Spanish. Perhaps we’d been learning the wrong language. And as my entire knowledge of Spanish was limited to beer, squid and airport, my conversation would be less than inspiring.

  The best way to describe the dialect is to imagine French being spoken at speed by a Spaniard who has taken out all the words and linked them together with that rolling Spanish ’r’ sound, to form one long unintelligible word. And as my normal method of translation depended on recognising one or two keywords in a sentence and then gradually working out the others from the context, I was stumped. There wasn’t room for even the smallest keyword to breathe – everything was so well wrapped up in ’r’s.