Our House is Not in Paris

by Susan Cutsforth

  We then had one of the most memorable evenings of our life, followed the next day by one of the best days of our life. The dinner was splendid and the company convivial and charming. We were served local duck — which Françoise had collected earlier that day straight from a local farm — and it was presented with blini and poached abricot. A fromage platter followed, and, as this was a special dinner, they were not everyday fromage but rather specially chosen ones for the occasion. Then we were served delicious individual chocolat tartes with orange cream and lemon sorbet. All the courses were, of course, accompanied by significant French wines from Jean-Claude’s considerable cellar. Our tastebuds sang.

  Angela and John had recently finished renovating the house next door and it was now on the market, so they had brought their keys to take us on a tour. The house was immaculately renovated, though the only vestige of the original house is an old oak armoire attached to the wall. Angela and John told us while we were on our tour that when the maison was sold, the owner’s children ruthlessly removed any remnant possible from their family home. We had read accounts that when new owners move into their maison, everything is removed, right down to light bulbs and la cuisine. We found this extraordinary.

  Just prior to moving in, Angela and John discovered the previous occupants unsuccessfully attempting to wrench the heavy floor-to-ceiling cupboard from the wall. Hanging from a nail on the side of a cupboard was an old chain with a Virgin Mary on it. Traditionally these were hung over the bed to protect those sleeping there. Now it remained as a lingering tribute to the previous owner, Madame Jouve, and whatever the truth of her life was. A story from the war that, like many others, would never see the light of day. A story from the war that will now rest in peace — or otherwise.

  I was utterly gripped when they told us the story of Madame Jouve. She was accused of being a collaborator in the war. Her head was shaved and she was paraded, along with others, in the nearby town of Brive. The rest of her life was spent barricaded in her home. There were heavy wooden shutters, bars on all the windows and doors with triple bolts. Jean-Claude told me that, according to village legend, they were the object of a raid by the Resistance to be executed but were absent at the time. He also informed me that Monsieur Jouve is still remembered as, ‘A damn nuisance since he was always nosing around ready to denounce suspects.’

  Nevertheless, I felt a huge sadness for Madame Jouve, for I thought we could not judge or condemn what others may be forced to choose. Indeed, she may not have even been a collaborator, for many were wrongly judged and accused. And then, indeed, there were those who chose to join the Resistance shortly before the end of the war.

  In our small village of mostly older people, a war memorial stands as does one in every village and town in France. Inside our church, too, is a list of names from both the great wars to commemorate the men of Cuzance.

  There is a long list of names for both the wars. Some I deduced were brothers or even father and son, judging by the names carved in stone: Auguste Barre and Albert Barre. And, they must also be related to Marinette, our village matriarch. What I did know was that, in a small village, all are connected and now united in remembrance. Many of the names are no longer used today, such as Theophile, Gustave, Prosper, Honore and Cyprien. I recited the names as if they were a soliloquy: Lucien Entraygues, Joachim Laverdet, Adolphe Queryrel, Germain Rey. I can never possibly find out anything about these men who gave their lives for France and yet, decades later, they have seeped into my consciousness.

  After we returned from the tour of Angela and John’s house and the chilling stories of the war, we all gathered in the sitting room for a final digestif. I then listened, utterly spellbound, as Angela chose to share with us her father’s story of his role in World War II. At the age of ninety-seven, her father came to stay with them in France for a holiday. One evening, as they were having an apéritif in the jardin, he announced to his daughter, ‘There’s something I have to tell you.’ And so Angela’s father shared with her, the first person he had ever told, the story of his involvement in ‘Gloria’. This was the codename for the branch of Special Operations Executive that he was in. One night, the phone rang and a message was sent to him for the next mission across the Channel. Angela’s mother, pregnant at the time, answered, to be told one word only: ‘Gloria’. Her father had been exempted from signing up for the war, as he ran a business that was regarded as critical for the war effort. His job involved a lot of travel throughout England and, as such, he often stayed in London and didn’t return to the family home for nights at a time, due to business commitments. On hearing the one word, ‘Gloria’, Angela’s mother assumed that her husband was having an affair. And so she died forty years later, never knowing that her husband had been a secret agent. His commitment to the Secrecy Act meant that he had never felt he could share his role in the war with his wife. So it was, instead, that Angela learnt that her father had to bear the taunts of being labelled a conscientious objector as he travelled up and down to London, dressed in his business suit. The reality was far, far from this. I could only begin to imagine how his heart must have cried out in protest at the sheer injustice of such a label.

  In truth, he was disguised as a Dutch fisherman and hidden under piles of kippers to make the terrifying trip backwards and forwards across the Channel to engage in espionage. Angela did not know how many times he made this trip. Yet he kept this secret deep inside and buried within until the very end of his life.

  After I heard these sombre stories on the night of the grand dinner, the next time we were on an evening walk through the village I consciously stopped and slowly read each name on the memorial. I thought of the boys and men from ‘my’ village with deep sadness and reverence.

  I thought, too, that there is a strong possibility that men and women from the Resistance hid in barns such as ours. Jean-Claude told me that Monsieur Dalle, who sits daily on the bench outside his house in the village and watches our small world go by, could tell me stories about the war and Cuzance. It was times like these when I was especially regretful that I lack the language skills to talk to him and find out more. It also made me look with new eyes at the elderly villagers I always exchanged polite and warm ‘Bonjour’s with, such as Marinette, who occasionally walks past our petite maison, leaning on her cane. Though in her eighties, she is always immaculate in her summer frocks, her ensemble complete with a straw hat. What stories does she have? Was she in the Resistance? My imagination burned with the desire to know more.

  One of Our Best Days

  The day after one of the most memorable, moving evenings of my life, we set off early to Villefranche-de-Rouergue to have lunch with Brigitte and Erick. It turned out to be one of the best days of our lives. A day out for lunch transformed into a twelve-hour day in all. Indeed, a very long and memorable lunch. The drive to get to their chambre d’hôte took us through the countryside — rolling green hills, stunning chateaux and quintessential villages full of charm. In the height of summer, it was Brigitte and Erick’s peak season for booking in guests, so it was especially an honour to be invited when they were so busy. When we arrived, the table was splendidly set for lunch in their jardin. Simply arriving brought a sense of pleasure — just like the first time we stumbled upon their delightful chambre d’hôte after a full day of driving from the Pyrenees and desperate for a room for the night. Their small hotel is on the banks of the Averyon and hidden behind a high stone wall. As you open the heavy wooden gate, a lovely garden unfolds before you that leads to the L-shaped building that was formerly a bathhouse for travellers. The fragrant roses were in full bloom and the table, set with the family silver, complete with a crest, beckoned us forward. As Brigitte was once a chef in her restaurant in the south of France, the meal — just like Françoise’s the night before — unfolded in a symphony of textures and tastes.

  Brigitte and Erick met many years ago when they both lived in the south of France, but it had taken them thirty years to finally marry. Their l
ove story spans Erick’s four other marriages and four children between them. Finally, they are together, and it is obvious when you are with them that it’s exactly how it should be.

  After a very prolonged lunch, Erick showed us a photo of the chateau in Paris that his family once lived in and the home of the silver many years ago. We then walked in the late afternoon heat to Erick’s son’s house, which he was currently renovating for Maxim. It turned out to be a very exciting adventure.

  The two-storey little house is also on the banks of the river and it has a very special ambience. Before we even went inside to explore, we first ventured into a small outbuilding in the garden that had remained untouched for over forty years. We all loved a treasure hunt and there were piles of possible treasure piled up everywhere. Stuart and Erick started rummaging through old fabric that fell away in their hands and the room was immediately full of choking dust. Brigitte and I joined in and were soon in fits of laughter. We clutched each other in our mirth as we were engulfed by clouds of dust and covered in cobwebs. Erick kept handing us assorted items and asking if we would like them. It was like going to our own private vide-grenier. The old garden tools with wooden handles were like valuable antiques to us and just what we needed. I was also given a large pewter jug, which, on our next market visit to Martel, I was able to buy sunflowers for. I placed the jug on our bellows coffee table and, with such touches, our petite maison became more and more like a home. When Gerard and Dominique next visited, we proudly showed them our tools. They didn’t seem as excited about them as we were; no doubt they found them more commonplace than we did.

  The outing ended with us walking through Villefranche, pausing to watch the old men in the shady square, intent on their beloved game of boules. We dropped in to a second-hand bookshop and I was delighted to find a copy of Alice in Wonderland, which I bought for one of my students, Kaitlyn Munro, who was studying French. Though only sixteen, she too adores old things and I knew that she would treasure it forever. We lingered over an icy beer in the town square, returned briefly for a café before, laden with all our gifts, setting off back to Cuzance after a day that was destined to be one of marvellous memories. As we drove back through the soft hues of a late summer evening, we marvelled that, when admiring the crested silver over lunch, Erick later went to a cupboard and presented us with two silver spoons. We felt honoured and very lucky to have made two such wonderful friends, all as a result of booking in to stay with them several years ago.

  The following day completed a perfect weekend as we set off on our ritual Sunday outing to a vide-grenier in Mont Valent, another gasp-aloud town perched high on a hill. When we returned, we finally had time to collect from the attic all our treasure that we bought last year, and spent the afternoon unpacking IKEA bags and boxes of vide-grenier finds that had been tucked away. It was like Christmas, as of course, in the intervening twelve months, we’d forgotten about most of the things we’d bought. They ranged from pretty IKEA floral quilt covers to collections of old glasses from markets. We seemed to have already accumulated enough glasses to have our own ‘clear out the attic’ vide-grenier stall. No more glasses, we declared.

  Away from the World

  I absolutely loved the sense of being away from the world. No internet, no newspapers, no phone — except occasionally on the portable, as the French call mobiles — essential for emergency calls to the plombier, who had still not come as promised three weeks ago. No sense of the outside world intruded at all, except for the French radio, both ours and the roofers’, which they constantly played as a background rhythm to accompany their rhythmic laying of overlapping slate tiles.

  My waking thoughts were always, ‘Another big day in France.’ For no matter what had been planned, something else was sure to happen as well. I loved the unpredictability of wondering who would drop in today, who would I chat to, what treat would I choose today in the patisserie? A day in France without a delectable, melt-in-the-mouth pastry was a sad day indeed.

  While thoughts of home and work and family and friends drifted in at times, I tried to consciously dispel them. It was all a part of pushing my everyday world away and completely immersing myself in the privilege of this, our other life. A life of hard, hard work for days on end, but also one of immense satisfaction.

  Our first friends were due to stay tonight, Sylvie and her son Axel. In France, despite the long hours and relentless renovating, strangely, we had a far busier social life than at home. We felt privileged to have such close friends who shared their experiences and insights of life in France. If we didn’t have them, we would have been mere tourists passing by. I knew that we would always be on the outside looking in. Their stories added layers and layers of riches to our own story that we were creating in Pied de la Croix in Cuzance.

  The Daily Life of Juggling

  While in the midst of renovating, life was a constant juggling act. One day, lunch was prepared on the pew next to the table, as it was too cluttered with the detritus of renovating for us to even attempt to use it, while the next meal was prepared on the sink. Items were constantly moved from place to place, and every day it was a constant matter of trying to remember where the plates were, where the breadboard was, and sometimes even where the box of food was. Oh yes, I had moved the teabags and other random items to the spare room while we perpetually moved the ladder and furniture back and forth, back and forth. Now, despite sanding and stripping our bedroom door, the undercoat of white to match the white of the sitting room still looked appalling — so it was off with the door. The door was taken out to the front porch to be stripped again. Undercoating it had made it look even more hideous than its original coat of ghastly green and brown. As was too often the way with renovating, what should have been a quick job turned into a laborious chore.

  On the positive front, the little house had been transformed into a home in just a mere six weeks. While I knew how incredibly hard we’d worked, it still seemed miraculous. It had become a home to the extent that there were roses on the table, a tablecloth and treasures decorating the armoire in our bedroom and the two mantelpieces in the kitchen and sitting room. I marvelled at how much we had achieved and how inviting and attractive the petite maison now was. Yes, there was still a sink and stove in the sitting room, but la cuisine was a picture in its elegant, white-walled simplicity. The IKEA galley kitchen worked perfectly as a counterpoint to the long, dark wood dining table next to it, with its pew on one side and eclectic array of vide-grenier wicker chairs gathered round it.

  One of my favourite things after each day was finally done was to lie on our bed with the shutters flung wide open, and, as the heat abated, gaze out at the soft blue evening sky. There is a huge spreading walnut tree opposite our window and, underneath it, Monsieur and Madame Chanteur frequently sit chatting softly away. It is their evening ritual and she is always wrapped up in her dressing-gown. One night, as I flung open the shutters, tightly shut in the day to keep the heat and flies out, I saw them wandering hand in hand across the freshly mown field next to their house. They rarely seemed to leave their home and I’d only glimpsed the occasional visitor, yet day after day they seldom leave each other’s side. It seemed to me — observing them from afar — to be an enduring, epic love.

  As our home grew around us each day, so too did all that having a proper home entails when it is no longer just a renovating site. Now that I had a washing machine in the cellar — a cause for great celebration — I could throw on another load in between trudging across to the far corner of our jardin with the laden wheelbarrow. As I worked in the ever-escalating heat, I mused yet again about how the term ‘garden’ did not exactly capture what it was like at all. Instead of gardening, I decided that it was more apt to describe it as ‘restoring the land’. Right now, it remained a sea of rubble, weeds and rocks and grass that was becoming browner by the day.

  The weather was hugely changeable and unpredictable. Some days I was virtually passing out from the heat while working on the lan
d. At times the heat was like a fierce wood stove. I felt encased by it, as though I were a loaf of pain, slowly baking. Some evenings stayed very hot until very late, oppressive and enveloping. Then, the next night, the sky would blacken ominously and thunder would crack the sky. Then the following day would be very cool with the heaviest rain we’d yet seen. When it eased, I would venture out to the garden yet again. It would be misty and cool, with a damp drizzle that steadily intensified. Before long, I would be completely soaked. Yet, just two days before, I was saturated with sweat and desperately needed a shower to revive. Now, I needed one to warm up.