It had probably been decades since anyone had used the loos so before installing the new urinal I thought it was worth a quick explore to see if there was any treasure in the bottom of the hole. It sort of sounds disgusting in hindsight, but it made sense at the time. Some welly boots and gloves, a spotlight, a bucket and a ladder, and I was off. I’d given myself twenty minutes so there was no messing around.
There was a fair amount of wood from where the box had disintegrated but that was soon out of the way and I started raking around in what felt like rubble. Some lovely bits of crockery appeared – the colours were vibrant despite so much time in the ooze. There were also a couple of small bottles and bits of glass. There was absolutely no treasure but I did discover a tunnel about one inch high that joined the pit to the moat. It was lined with very nice cut stone and looked impressive for a loo output. With my time up it was just a matter of attaching the bath so that no one could fall down into the pit.
In total, our make-do toilet facilities were the best part of €1,400 cheaper than hiring portable potties, and some of them even flushed.
As October drew to an end, our stress levels rose. There are several things in life that are known to be stressful and we appeared to be doing most of them at the same time. We were getting married in two weeks, all our family and friends were coming to see us in our new home and we were entertaining a couple of hundred people in a château that hadn’t had running water or electricity eight months earlier. We still knew we would do it; we just didn’t know if we would ever sleep again. We also had the niggling feeling that there was so much more we should be doing. It was ridiculous but we felt there were things we were missing. For example, quince cheese. A year earlier, when we had seen the château for the first time, we had taken quince back to Southend and made our own jars. We still had a few left but surely we couldn’t miss out on making more in our first year living in France?
QUINCE CHEESE
Ingredients
1.5kg quince
1 vanilla pod
Caster sugar
Method
Peel and core the quince, cut it into pieces then put it in a large pan. Cover with water and add the vanilla pod. Bring to the boil and simmer for about forty minutes.
Remove the soft quince from the pan with a slotted spoon and put in a bowl. Discard the liquor.
Weigh the quince, then put back in the pan with an equal weight of sugar.
Slowly stirring regularly, bring up the heat and continue heating and stirring until it transforms into a rich coral-pink paste.
Transfer into sterilised jars and seal.
October was a big month. First we got our étude, swiftly followed by our sewage system and then we were well and truly plumbed in. Decoration was in full swing and day by day the château was becoming more and more beautiful. The honeymoon suite was looking very special and our wedding was only days away.
* * *
* The French hunting horn.
* Survey.
* A small, unsinkable plastic boat.
* Septic tank.
* A French chain of stores that sell DIY products.
* ‘Of course.’
chapter eleven
NOVEMBER
(A MONTH OF TWO HALVES)
This was it. Our wedding was two weeks, thirteen days or 312 hours away. Although November is not renowned for good weather, there were blue skies every day in our first year. With an autumn bite in the air, it was the best. Autumn really takes hold in November and, as you look out of the windows of the château, you are greeted with bare branches. On our island we have two rows of lime trees that have been pollarded for over a century, but probably not for 15 years now, so their canopy of leaves was enormous and looked a little out of place on the majestic trunks. The leaves were beautiful and had turned yellow and rusty orange. It was a wonderful sight and we hoped they would hold on a couple more weeks until our big day. Then they could fall off and become part of the château’s grounds.
We both knew November was going to be a month of two halves. Up to and immediately after the wedding was going to be high-octane and we would be working on adrenaline. Then there would be the calmness and reflection as everyone thinned out afterwards; we would be by ourselves, without any pressing deadlines, for probably the first time since we arrived in France. We could not wait for either.
Normally in the middle of Autumn we love wrapping up and going for windy, wet walks. As the nights draw in during October, the evenings are a time for comforting, warm stews that cook throughout the day and make the house smell wonderful. We took to putting on the slow cooker and enjoying a warming meal in the evening. The smell of oxtail, onions, red wine, tomato, carrot and seasoning cooking all day is enough to send any hungry carnivore round the bend. To our surprise, Arthur became an oxtail-eating monster. A visit to the local supermarket butchery department in France is a lot less sterile than a supermarket back in the UK. The abats* section contains those parts of an animal no longer available anywhere other than traditional butchers in UK. Our British visitors stare in morbid fascination at the heads, brains, tongues, ears, tails, hearts, lungs and gizzards that are on sale. As well as eating oxtail, Arthur is a sucker for gizzards, and they are widely available in France, so we decided we would serve them at our wedding, comfited and tossed in a rose jelly we make with an apple or quince base.
We pride ourselves on trying new food at least once and we really wanted to share our passion with our wedding guests. That’s what weddings should be all about, in my opinion. Some of the textures can be a bit off-putting, I’ll give you that, but over the previous eleven months of experimenting we had tried many things that were definitely not frightfully British. Some were amazing explosions of tastes and others were utterly repulsive, but at least now we know. Dick always orders anything he has not tried before and sometimes when he is eating it I cannot concentrate on my own meal because of the morbid fascination. Andouille and chips sound innocuous enough, especially when it is described as a garlicky sausage. There is even an andouille stall in Borough Market, so it must be trendy. But I’d say be very wary of anyone offering you a chitterlings sausage. The smell makes me gag and the fact that the intestines that have been cut into rings and put into a sausage casing that appears to smell even more ‘intestiney’ means it’s just not for me. The village of Andouille is only a twenty-minute drive from us, so it’s a local delicacy, and Dick loves it. We even considered including it on our wedding breakfast menu but, alas, I wanted to enjoy our wedding – not have my head stuck down one of the fancy new toilets.
Tête de veau * is also a ‘thing’ in our area. Dick’s ordered it a number of times, but has confessed to never having had a good one. I think it’s the hairy, spiky bits that throw him. We once took my parents to a posh restaurant (with white table linen, that’s how I define posh!) and a bowl of slightly creamy stew turned up with very recognisable bits of a calf’s head in it. Dick got the giggles and my mum could not take her eyes off it. For the avoidance of doubt, when I say recognisable, I mean eyelids complete with eyelashes, ears and what could have been lips. I don’t know how you’d ever make that look appealing. The sauce was very subtle and the meat had been cooked long and slow, but it was definitely hardcore for a British palette, and again not one for the wedding breakfast menu. But I am still proud that I tried it, before saying no f***ing way.
With every day taking us closer to the big one, we were truly putting lots of jobs to bed. After making the very valid observation that what I considered done was a different done to him, Dick gave me the job of ticking off rooms. So I dug out a clipboard and got to work. It felt good to be able to officially close rooms off but with only just over a week to go I still had nearly ALL the exciting bits to finish – the nuances and little details that would showcase all the hard work gone into the fabric of the château, which Dick refers to as the ‘dog work’. With the ratio of our build being 90 per cent dog work to 10 per cent beauty. It’s embarrassing
but lovely that’s everyone oohs and ahhs at the final 10 per cent. But it’s teamwork and I will never take credit for what goes into the often unseen.
In the entrance hall, the faux-taxidermy unicorns were placed symmetrically on either side of the entrance. Their faux white fur and faux white manes sat perfectly on the light gris walls. As you walked through the double doors the pineapple light hung perfectly in the centre (I hoped that Dick would soon forget the pain of that one!). At the back of the entrance, the original woodwork sat perfectly alongside the red and green stained glass, which was in perfect condition. Above was all the original stonework with the Baglion crest proudly declaring in Latin: ‘Any land is home to the brave man.’ It was a great reminder of the history of our beautiful home.
Facing each other on either side of the walls were two sideboards I’d managed to find at Emmaus. Each was three metres long and gave us lots of practical surface and storage space. I’d taken apart a Victorian taxidermy case and inside we drew a map of the château, so guests would know where to have a pee-pee. And last but not least, my favourite part of the room; the floor. A wooden flower took centre stage. This was surrounded by hexagonal pieces of chestnut and oak, which gave a stunning two-tone effect. The Bagliones had clearly wanted to ensure impressions counted. It looked very stylish.
As you head into the back entrance, the architecture of the grand double staircase was enough to take your breath away. We had scrubbed the stairs but the original burgundy lino remained for the moment. It felt like it was protecting the stairs and, although faded, you could still see the original gold trim; its faded glory was beautiful and a reminder of those who had walked before us. The lion-head stair spindles were a detail that I fell in love with the very first time I laid eyes on them. Above were my 3D butterflies in rich, deep tones: purples, yellows, reds, blacks – every colour and combination you could think of, launching from the back grand staircase and fluttering forward over the high walls of the château. I was so pleased with how they enhanced the château’s original features and brought a sense of our personality.
As you looked back to the front door, off to the right, the walls of the salle-à-manger were painted a very light mint green. I had managed to save half of the room’s original wallpaper, which had a lovely embossed floral print on. We painted over the wallpaper where it couldn’t be saved and the new walls that had been plastered in the same green to bring it together. I loved the contrast between mint green on the walls and the dark wooden panelling that filled the entire bottom metre of the room. It had lost some of its colour and looked a little tired but a stain and varnish later it had bounced back and felt very ‘gentleman’s room’ like. I approved. This room had a large double entrance, a door that led to the turret and two other symmetrical doors, one of which led to a cupboard that housed the Bagliones’ original drinks bar. We didn’t know this yet but Jenny Strawbridge and Dick’s sisters had been busy collecting Irish Tyrone Crystal to fill this space. The faux-taxidermy giraffe and zebra took their residency in this room, as well as a piece of old mahogany which was once a coat rack in the back of the main hallway. In the salle-à-manger it had been given a new life as a shelf and was host to twenty-five of my favourite teapots that I had collected over the same number of years.
The paint was still drying in the salon and in the honeymoon suite but Denise had been flying through the rooms and Tina had taken control of all the woodwork and windows. I knew it was just a matter of time now until these rooms would come together as well. Everyone was going for it and we all spent a lot of time scrubbing floors as well. We giggled at the idea we were Cinderellas, all determined to go to the ball … If we survived, that is!
By this time we were sleeping less and less, sometimes just two or three hours a night. And then Dick’s mum called: the Strawbridges were coming to help, a week earlier than planned. I cried my eyes out … we would be able to get back on track.
Next on my list was the grand staircase. The paint I mixed for the walls was light grey and perfectly complemented the original Alpaca gris paint that was on the woodwork. It was bigger than my flat in London and a lot more difficult logistically, as you couldn’t reach anything. In the centre of the double staircase, was a large six-metre-high window. On either side of the window were two cupboards, each one and a half by two metres, and then there were more windows. We had decided that we would put the steam engine lights in the cupboards, shining onto the walls like a Hollywood film set. The space was huge and without any carpet the sound reverberated.
Over the years, I had collected many vintage Union Jack flags that had flown over official government buildings. They were truly massive. The one that I wanted to mount over the full width of grand staircase was my favourite and had cost me a month’s wage many years ago when I didn’t have any money to spare.
You can imagine my reaction when Angela had the idea of putting a six-metre-long flag up as a sort of a pelmet above the central window on the main stairs. It was ridiculously high and the only way to get up there was to build our scaffold tower on wheels to its maximum height and then put the platform on top without safety rails. The phrase ‘don’t try this at home’ springs to mind.
The tower was wobbly at the best of times and to get onto the top platform you have to climb through a trapdoor on the platform, as if you tried climbing up the outside it would tip over, so you have to keep you centre of gravity in the middle. I understood all this but it still wobbled enough to make my bum twitch. Somehow I managed to get brackets securely fixed on the left and right of the main window. I then lifted the six-metre length of four-by-two with a large flag artistically draped on it over my head. I had to turn round, place it into location and secure it. It was a very silly idea. To lift the plank with the flag on it I had to face down the stairs and, as I started to lift the bloody heavy flag above my head, everything started wobbling. It was as if I had disco knees, which any rock climber will tell you is pretty shit when you’re that high up. Ensuring I was in the middle so it didn’t drop to one side or the other was more good luck than good judgement and I was dripping with sweat before I finally got one side, then the other, onto the bracket.
If only we had known we wanted the flag up there when I still had my island in the air for plastering! I have decreed the flag stays there until it disintegrates, as I’m never going up there again. I’m just not built for it.
The Union Jack hung proudly like the château pelmet, drawing your eye to the window below that waited for something special to arrive. Dick knew me well enough to know that I was up to something, but he was in for a big surprise. Not long after this, Broken Hare, aka Katherine and Jon, turned up with a special delivery. I snuck my head in the back of their van and the box that held wolf literally occupied the whole space.
I had planned to give it to Dick the day before our wedding but, even with a very large château, I had nowhere safe to hide something this big – and no one really wanted to be carrying something like this all the way upstairs just to bring it down again. So that precise moment was perfect! Dick and I were both in work overalls but I pulled him off what he was doing for the special moment. He giggled like crazy when he worked out what it was. He had had exactly the same thought – and nearly got me a taxidermy version. I was so happy I had executed the idea first. And with that, the grand staircase was ticked off as well.
Weddings tend to be a wonderful mix of old and young, so there are lots of ways of calculating how much drink is required for a party. Rules like ‘half a bottle of wine per person’ allegedly take into account that some won’t drink and others will party, but Angela has a fear of running out of literally anything, so she made sure there was half a bottle of each wine per person in addition to the bar. That meant everyone was to get half a bottle of red, half a bottle of white, half a bottle of rosé, half a bottle of white sparkling (in the case of our wedding, this was half a magnum) and half a bottle of red sparkling. Her reasoning was simple: you just do not know what will be po
pular. Funnily enough, we have never run out of anything, at any function, ever.
By the first week in November, it all began to arrive. First was the magnums of sparkling white. They looked ridiculously stylish with their deep orange and gold labels. There is something so celebratory about a magnum – we had purchased a hundred. We also had an abundance of the red Chinon, the white Touraine and the rosé d’Anjou with the very pretty watercolour label. There were enough spirits to stock a nightclub. The best part was getting to fill our wine cellar for the first time. The cave was lined with the most robust and authentic racks. Back in Southend, we had owned a wine rack that we absolutely loved. It had been quite expensive and was actually similar to those we found in our cave, except it held about forty bottles of wine. The racking in our cellar had space for about ten thousand. It would take some filling. There were also hundreds of empty bottles in the cellar, which would have been disappointing but for the fact that they were each hand blown and no two bottles were the same. They were history and both looked and felt fragile. Each and every one is unique. We love owning them and, what’s more, we’ve got aspirations to fill them all one day.
A Year at the Chateau Page 24