The couple also admitted to a degree of reliance on the other Brits, with Jim describing the British network as “a sort of sounding board”. Yet like everyone I spoke to, he showed awareness of the stereotype. ‘We didn’t want to go to somewhere that was going to be a British enclave. We did want to be somewhere that was going to be French.’ It was the familiar story; wanting to avoid the Brits and live with the French, without having much idea at all about life in France.
Iris nodded in agreement. ‘We wanted to avoid a British enclave,’ she added before admitting, ‘but we’ve ended up doing that, haven’t we?’
Jim was swift to extricate them. ‘Well, not really, no, not really, we’re not involved with them every day. It’s not like it’s a continual sort of involvement with the Brits. As Iris said, for about six years we were totally, absolutely on our own.’
It was becoming clear that they’d reacted differently to their new home. Iris described herself as feeling extremely comfortable here in the Ariège, although the fact that Jim hadn’t felt the same way had made it more difficult for her. ‘It’s tarnished my enjoyment for many years, because he hasn’t felt the same. But in a nutshell I’d describe the Ariège as charming.’ What was charming in her eyes came across as annoyingly old-fashioned in Jim’s. He conveyed a sense of irritation, from the substandard cheeses to the frustration of getting things done in a place that he saw as 60 years behind the times.
‘I still can’t get used to the shops closing from 12 till 2,’ he said, echoing Steve. He put it down to 25 years of working in a large multinational company that had instilled “a sort of discipline” that he couldn’t let go in retirement. Conscious that he was coming across as dissatisfied, he checked himself and admitted that he often reminded himself not to take it for granted. ‘The whole sort of lifestyle that we have now, the way that we enjoy where we are, the house, the privacy we have, the space and that sort of thing, you could never have back in the UK.’ The couple didn’t go back to England very often but when they did it brought things more clearly into relief. ‘You get off the plane at Stansted, and you go and park on the M11, and you think, Oh, this is why we left. It brings it back to you. You do realise then and you appreciate the benefits.’
I couldn’t get over the fact that they hadn’t even visited France, let alone the Ariège département, before moving here. This sparked off some disagreement on why they’d ended up in this particular spot. Iris was keen to frame it as a more aesthetic search based on wanting to be near mountains, with a vague initial plan of letting out gîtes. ‘It was just chance. We stuck a compass pin in a map and drew 40km radius circles around Toulouse and Carcassonne for the airports. I saw this house on the internet and loved it and that’s how we ended up in the Ariège.’
Jim disagreed. ‘There were some more practical reasons as well.’
‘Not particularly for the Ariège, there weren’t. It was by chance.’
‘But it was also financial,’ insisted Jim. ‘We did some brief investigations here, and at that time it was really good value for money. So financially it was a good deal. We really wanted to make more of whatever investments we’d got. Our property in the UK bought us a lot more here, not just our house. We decided that letting gîtes was too much like hard work, and over the years we bought apartments that we run as long-term rentals but for the French people. So it was really trying to maximise whatever investment we’d got.’
Iris seemed unwilling to let them come across as hard-headed, commercially minded folk in search of the best deal. ‘I think the Ariège in particular wasn’t about investment. It was by chance, just where the house was.’
‘Well, it was and it wasn’t,’ replied Jim, perhaps keen to avoid being seen as romantic and impractical. He tried bringing in other practical reasons. ‘The mountains are one thing, but we still have the plan to do some more travelling. One of the reasons for looking here was that it was nice and central for getting around Europe.’
‘Am I gonna get interviewed as well?’ Len, a friend of the couple, interrupted the flow as he leaned over the table and proceeded to fill us in on the details of his recent cruise holiday to Greece. I heard all about where his money had gone; seven euros for a gin and tonic, fifty for a short excursion and eight euros per day compulsory tipping. He’d been especially put off by the communal eating arrangements on the cruise, aghast that people were queuing up to put spaghetti Bolognese and chicken wings onto their plates. ‘When I saw the people eating I couldn’t face it.’ I sat there smiling politely, not wanting to appear rude but wondering if all of this detail could wait. Eventually he moved on. ‘Gimme a shout,’ he cried as he walked away.
Trying to paper over the disruption, I asked about the language. Iris had moved out with the O level French that she’d learned forty years ago, and had set about building on that. The couple had attempted to join the infamous French classes in Saint-Girons, where they admitted they “didn’t learn a lot”, but more importantly it had helped to broaden their circle of English-speaking friends. They’d spent most of their time in the classroom comparing notes with the other English incomers on various French processes.
Being the main French speaker meant that Iris was responsible for all the paperwork for their lettings business. Jim, however, drew on that vague notion of getting by; a phrase that the Brits used to refer to a wide spectrum of ability. ‘I can get by, I can go and do most things now,’ he said. ‘But what I can’t do is have a French conversation. Where I run into problems is where I go to speak to somebody and use a few words of French and of course it comes back like a machine gun.’
Their estate agent had told them an anecdote about a couple who’d come over without knowing any French at all. ‘They were full of it, you know, they were full of it, and she was a very gregarious person but she couldn’t speak French. Within less than a year she was in hospital, her nerves were shot. She developed mental problems because she couldn’t socialise.’
‘We don’t socialise a massive amount,’ said Jim. Nevertheless they spoke of the British circle with warmth and relief at having discovered a valuable support network. In contrast there was little reference to mixing with the French, and Jim admitted that they weren’t really immersed in the French way of life. He saw this as due to a number of practical factors, such as not working or having children, which made it easy to avoid everyday mingling in the community. I asked whether they felt they shared anything culturally with the French, thinking back to the jolly get-togethers that Pat had said were essential for the Brits to avoid being seen as isolationist. Iris shook her head. ‘We don’t share in the French-type cultural things, do we? We’ve been very bad, we’ve not really done much.’ Some of the responsibility was laid at the door of the locals, whose “closed” nature was explained as a legacy of wartime events. ‘This area was a centre of resistance. One year 13 people were shot by the Germans and a nearby village was practically razed to the ground by the Germans because of the resistance activities.’
Once again Jim waded in with another practical factor that drew attention away from Iris’ claim that they had not made any effort. He drew outlines with his finger on the table. ‘No, I don’t think that’s the only reason. You’ve got the village here, and we’re up over there, so we’re not actually in the village.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Iris, ‘but if we’d gone to the fête and that sort of thing we would have got to know people. We’ve not made that effort.’ Like everyone else they’d repeated the formulaic factor of wanting to avoid British enclaves and to move to “somewhere French”, but they seemed happy to observe it all from a distance. As long as they could buy the space, privacy and mountain view they wanted, and make some investment for a retirement income, the choice of France itself was of less significance. At least they were honest and didn’t pretend that they’d slotted into the French community, happily citing their own lack of effort, as well as the froideur of the local French.
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I finished my coffee and took out the photograph of the Mirepoix café menu, wondering what kind of reaction I’d get from people who regularly shopped for British-branded goods. Iris frowned. ‘No, there’s too much written in English. It would put me off.’
‘It’s in Mirepoix,’ I said.
Iris nodded, recognising it now. ‘We tried to go there. I’d heard it was nice to go to and we went one day, but it was closed, wasn’t it?’ She turned to Jim. It was a familiar reaction; people turning their noses up at the menu and claiming that they would boycott it. But everyone seemed to have gone out of their way to visit it.
‘Let us know when you’re this way again and we’ll go for a pizza,’ said Iris as we parted. ‘We’ll show you a really good pizzeria in town.’
A Lifestyle Change That You Know Nothing About
On the drive back I pondered what seemed, to me, to be a bizarre decision to choose an unfamiliar country for a new life. Once again I was put in mind of the power of the media – especially television programmes such as A Place in the Sun – in propelling people towards a new life in France. Why shouldn’t we do that? Let’s be adventurous! There’s more to life than… But the TV shows almost invariably ignore the practicalities of real life, being focused on showing properties that “tick all the boxes” in places where “your money goes further”. I couldn’t remember ever seeing any sign of neighbours or people in the background. Presumably the setting is cleansed of locals for the filming, giving the impression of a nice empty environment for the English to slot into. The issue of it being a country where another language is spoken is almost always skirted over. Prospective buyers always stated that they wanted to integrate with the locals and learn the language, but it wasn’t that simple.
I managed to track down the instalment of A Place in the Sun that Lynn had mentioned, the one featuring Massat that had been filmed in 2008 and was titled Ceredigion versus Couserans. The couple were Steve and Lisa, who were planning “an absolutely huge lifestyle change”, with plans to live off the land and become self-sufficient. The programme was focusing on whether this huge change would take place in Wales or Ariège. Steve had some familiarity with the Couserans region, but, true to the genre, there was absolutely no mention of the French language, or of any practical aspects of the area beyond the views from the property windows. If anything, the practicalities focused on Wales, which seemed illogical when self-sufficiency would surely have been a much more challenging project for a British couple landing in the depopulated, French-speaking Couserans. For all I know Steve and Lisa could have been French speakers with a good idea of what kind of life they’d be living as subsistence farmers in the Massat valley. Yet the presenter gave it away when she referred to buyers like them “taking on a lifestyle change that you know nothing about”. The couple admitted that they were looking forward to “a big adventure, with lots of mistakes along the way”.
I have to remind myself that these programmes are made for entertainment rather than any kind of advice, but nevertheless they are taken seriously by viewers who just see a property search in a stunningly beautiful area and a bit of negotiation to knock a few thousand off the vending price. The superficiality was intensified when the “beautiful mountain village of Massat” was accompanied by images of a completely different place: the stations of the cross stretching up the hillside from the church of Notre Dame de Raynaude, some 33km distant.
Resistance
Mulling over my conversation with Iris and Jim, I’d wondered about the supposed link between the wartime resistance activities in the area and the “closed” nature of the locals, wondering if it was an easy excuse for their lack of socialisation. However, it turned out that they were not the only people to believe this. Another English incomer, living in the same area, independently commented to me about the continuing suspicion and even animosity between former collaborator and resistance families in the same area, and has also written about it.16
In fact, the episode that Iris referred to has become one of the more notoriously cruel events that took place as the war drew to a close, one that left the village of Rimont with horrific memories and the designation of village martyr. That part of the Ariège had an active résistance maquis based around the Col de la Crouzette, who were regularly in conflict with local supporters of the occupation, particularly the Milice – a small but ruthless French militia drawn from supporters of the far right. Edward Stourton has described in detail how the event demonstrates a kind of blindness, or unwillingness to face up to the inevitable, among the collaborators. The event appears to have been sparked off by the assassination of a prominent local resident, Paul Laffont, by fascists on the 13th July 1944. The following retaliation on a list of collaborators drawn up by the maquis included acting on false information that had been given maliciously, as well as the simple mistake of shooting the wrong person at the wrong address. Such “errors” have no doubt sustained a foundation of resentment between some of the families.
Yet worse was to follow for the village of Rimont. As the Allied landings set the liberation of France in motion, German troops began to evacuate the Ariège mid-August. Some towns were liberated following their departure, whilst others suffered from those who continued to fight. Saint-Girons, for example, had its liberation complicated by the arrival of around two thousand reinforcements that included Soviet prisoners from the Legion of Turkestan. They moved on to Rimont on the 21st August, augmented by sympathisers and collaborators, where they forced their passage by shooting villagers, raping women and systematically setting fire to all buildings in the village and surrounding areas.17 The Germans surrendered the following day, but it was too late for Rimont – eleven civilians and four maquisards had been killed, while some 236 buildings had been destroyed.
There was the usual rounding up of collaborators after the liberation of the Ariège towns, with suspected denouncers shot in towns like Saint-Girons. In the frenzy of l’épuration – the purge – the divisions and the tragic mistakes fuelled local resentment that would have taken a long time to fade away. So perhaps the events of so long ago really were continuing to affect the way in which the community interacted in and around the village martyr – with suspicion being the normal way of life, and quite possibly affecting how newcomers were accepted.
However, I’d also been reminded that the continuing influence of the past in how newcomers were accepted was not confined to wartime events. There could also be a lack of shared understanding between what the long-standing villagers saw as the normal, indeed the only, way to live, and the trend to live a more mobile lifestyle, uprooting to a country one had no connection with. The same incomer who’d confirmed the continuing divisions in Rimont described this dislocation as a significant factor that could affect relations between the locals and the incomers. If the concept of upping and moving country, or even region, was an alien concept to the villagers, then it could understandably form a barrier between incomers and those whose families have lived in the same locality for generations.
And yet… Ariège has seen more emigration than most départements in France, so the concept of moving away to live would surely not be totally unfamiliar to the Ariégeois. What might be unfamiliar would be the reasons behind the move. In broader terms, people moved both in and out of the Ariège for “a better life”, with locals fleeing the poverty and lack of employment. Yet for incomers like Iris and Jim, with money to invest, the Ariège was seen as offering a particularly good business opportunity for buying up cheap property to rent out.
In The Steps Of Piston And His “Trout”
While looking into the events described by Iris, I’d had little inkling that my own village had a wartime history linked to a well-known member of the resistance, and, moreover, that I had unknowingly been walking a route he’d used to smuggle escapees over the Pyrenees to Spain. The Ariège Pyrenees had a number of routes that had been operational for wartime escapees to Spain as
well as earlier evaders fleeing Spain in the 1930s. The most well-known of these routes had opened as an official hiking trail in 1994. Le chemin de la liberté had an annual four-day commemorative hike, that until recently had been organised by the late Scott Goodall, a British man who’d settled in the area.18 The Freedom Route had been featured on a BBC radio programme and described in Edward Stourton’s painstakingly researched book on the wartime activities in the Ariège. More recently, the route had been featured within Channel 4’s series WWII’s Great Escapes: The Freedom Trails.
There was even a dedicated museum to the route, which I visited at the former site of the railway station in Saint-Girons. With just a receptionist watching television, I had the place to myself and wandered around the boards, discovering that some 33,000 French and 6,000 Allied service personnel had escaped over the Pyrenees, with 782 of the former said to have used Ariège routes. From 1943 anyone attempting to flee to Spain would have had to pass under cover of night through a Reservation Zone created by the Germans. This zone, some 20km deep, ran parallel with the frontier just north of the Pyrenean chain, strung out along the German posts within the settlements of Sentein, Seix, Oust, Aulus les Bains, Auzat, Tarascon and Vicdessos. Freedom of movement was limited to those granted a circulation permit. Many of the isolated barns that were still dotted around had sheltered would-be escapees, sometimes for weeks or months on end.
A House at the End of the Track Page 11
