A House at the End of the Track

by Michelle Lawson

  Back down on the path above the Garbet, the valley was beginning to darken but the early evening golden light held fast on the upper slopes. It was one of those times when an appreciation of the moment comes vividly into focus and holds fast within memory. My walking had become trance-like, an automation induced by eight hours of determined striding, and I was aware that this is a time when accidents can happen. One slip and I’d be rolling down towards the Garbet, and not even the narrow ledge of Piston’s path below would be enough to stop me. I sat down on a boulder that radiated the day’s warmth, draining the last of my now-cold coffee. The thud of footsteps alerted me to the couple making their way down behind me, and I pulled my legs to the side as they edged past. No words were needed and the smile we exchanged said everything – yes, the disappointment of turning back, but above all an acknowledgement of the moment: being there, in that place, at that time.

  Treading On My Toes

  ‘I think a lot of work goes on here on the black. I’m sure some of the French do it and that’s probably what some of the Brits do. They come out and they just get by and if that’s what you want, then it’s fine. But if you want a certain standard you’ve got to pay for it.’ Emma and Mitch had come out a few years ago with the promise of internet-based work for Emma, but this had recently fallen through and the couple were in the difficult situation of living in France without an income. Many of their belongings were up for sale as they prepared to return to England, although the prospect of actually selling the house wasn’t looking good. Mitch put it down to the financial crisis and that now people were “wanting more for their money”, which meant that houses in the middle bracket, like theirs, weren’t selling. ‘The house next door has been up for sale for five years. There’s one further down the road that’s been for sale ever since we moved here.’

  We were sitting around a table in what Mitch had pointed out was their “beautiful south-facing terraced garden”, although it was also surprisingly noisy. Facing south meant it sat above the main road and the noise from traffic was constant. There was also a rear garden, a large expanse of lawn that had to be mowed using a sit-down mower. The garden was clearly a jewel in their crown as well as something of an irritation, with Mitch using it to show off what they’d achieved: ‘It was very, very run down when we got it, the gardens and all the grounds. It‘s taken two years to get it to looking something like it is now. But that’s probably something you’d warn people about if they were thinking of coming over.’

  ‘Don’t buy anything with land,’ nodded Emma.

  ‘It sounds very romantic, having a place with 2 acres of grounds, but forget it,’ said Mitch. ‘You’re buying hard work.’

  Unlike some of the others who’d bought a house out here without having visited France, Emma and Mitch had been familiar with the Ariège, having visited English friends who’d already moved down here. They became tempted to follow as a way to escape from a hectic life in the UK, with Mitch ready to take early retirement. ‘We just really appreciated the quality of life that we thought we were going to get by moving away from the hustle and bustle of the UK,’ explained Emma. ‘We both had quite stressful jobs and we embraced the French attitude, where the family comes first.’

  I quickly picked up that Mitch and Emma were keen to distance themselves from the way that other Brits did things out here, going into detail about how they themselves had managed their move. ‘One thing we decided was we wanted to do it properly and we wanted to be above board,’ said Emma. But according to Mitch, doing everything right hadn’t quite worked in their favour.

  ‘I think with us, doing it absolutely the right way, being straight down the line and signed up for everything, we probably lost out,’ said Mitch. He sounded resentful of the Brits who stayed outside the French system, owning property in France without becoming full residents. He referred to them as people who come out and play it both ways. ‘I think most of the English people we know have still got bank accounts and all that stuff in England. They’re people who really want to pretend they’re still English and live in England, but they stop all the year out here in France.’ Unlike him and Emma, such people had it easier, not having to suffer the French bureaucracy. And why should the Brits benefit from the European health system when they weren’t working? ‘It’s a sort of problem. It’s the wrong way to do it – to me, you either live here or you don’t.’

  It was the same argument raised by John, and although I could see why they felt resentment at the easier life of the “part-timers”, I wondered if it was generated more by envy than by anything that was genuinely immoral. In Mitch’s case I guessed that some resentment was rooted in the fact that they could no longer afford to live “properly” in France. ‘If we’d have done it the other way, on the black, we’d have probably been a lot better off.’

  Working on the “black” was not confined to the Brits in France, as the odd French person was similarly to be found supplementing their benefits with a bit of building work here and there. I’d also overheard conversations about occasional odd-jobbing among the English-speaking community, although this was as much to steer clear of entanglement with the terrible French bureaucracy as to avoid paying taxes. The French journalist Fralon, however, claimed that Handyman for British renovation projects was one of the three main professions available to the Britons in France. According to him, in some popular regions there existed complete teams of British house renovators. These presented an entire package au noir, from the plumber to the stonemason and the roofer, with the advantage of being able to discuss it all in English. The other two professions he cited were as a chef for foreigners, and the ubiquitous English-speaking estate agent, both of whom I’d come across here in the Ariège, although I would also add gîte-owner to the list.

  The importance of coming across as the right kind of British incomer was a key theme that afternoon, just as it had been with Pat and John. The conversation shifted to how the Brits should embrace the rules and regulations when moving to a new country. Mitch was strong in his attitudes, referring to the migration situation back in England to make his point that migrants shouldn’t stick together. ‘In England we call them ghettoes, don’t we, when you get all the Caribbean people living here and all the Polish people living there, or whatever,’ he said, drawing his finger across the table. In his view it was all wrong. ‘That shouldn’t be. It shouldn’t be in England and it shouldn’t be out here.’ As always, people were referring to somewhere else in France, not here. Apparently all the Brits were living in the Tarn, according to Mitch, who referred to it as “Great Britarn”. And as Mike had insisted, it wasn’t only British incomers, was it? ‘You’ve got all the Dutch living in Carla Bayle and so on.’

  I’d already come across the Brits abroad using the word ghetto to discriminate against each other, but it seemed a vast overstatement here in the Ariège countryside. British clustering was a long way from the forced minority settlements of history, such as the Warsaw ghetto. I even cringed when people used it to refer to the large, purpose-built urbanizaciones that were popular with the Brits on the Spanish Costas. So why did it occur in over ten percent of the British press articles that I’d read concerning the Britons in France?

  Looking closely at its use, I guessed it was just another flippant comment that followed the stereotype without bothering to think too deeply about it. I’d read quotes in the media from incomers in France who “tried very hard not to fall into a British ghetto”23, and there were references to Brits living “in British ghettoes surrounded by British mates”24 or “stuck in a cosy ghetto, watching re-runs of Little Britain”. One confusing article claimed the Brits “form ghettoes and buy isolated properties”25. Heaven forbid that someone might want to catch up on news back in Britain, since being spotted purchasing a British newspaper “branded” the buyer as “belonging to the British ghetto”26.

  What to make of it all? I had a hunch that there was not much substance b
ehind any of this labelling. The “little England” town of Eymet in the Périgord, where supposedly more than half of the population are English, is perhaps the closest thing to a ghetto, supporting an English chip shop, optician and cricket club. But it was also driven by myth. Fralon claimed to have heard a Parisian state that Eymet is so English that they drive on the left, yet, after spending a few winter days there, he concluded that the English residents he came across were pretty discreet and unassuming. A few of them had even picked up the distinctive accent of the south-west of France.

  Just as the word invasion is frequently used in reports of the British influx, the word ghetto is another metaphor that over-exaggerates what it represents. The actual ghettoes were suitably vague, leaving the reader to build on their own assumptions about the way the English live in France. This was the root of the trouble; by presenting these English-speaking ghettoes in a de facto way, the reader isn’t invited to agree or disagree; they are expected to simply take it in. And on and on it goes. When people asked me what my research was about, they invariably nodded and used similar language: “Oh I know, they all live there in their ghettoes, and they don’t integrate” was a typical response. But no one ever named a person or place where they had experienced this kind of behaviour; it was just reeled off as common knowledge.

  Back in the beautiful south-facing garden I was starting to feel uncomfortably hot, and I fought an urge to make a banal comment about mad dogs and Englishmen. The bottle of red wine that I’d brought them as a thank you had been left on the table to boil and I took advantage of a lull in the conversation to quietly move it into the shade.

  Despite agreement that the Ariège was distant, both literally and metaphorically, from the sausage stalls and bowling greens of Dordogneshire, it was clear that even here the English incomers attached a symbolism to certain actions that showed they were doing things the right way. One of these was the transfer of the car to a French registration plate, which was a sign that you were here for good; not a tourist and not just playing at living in France. I’d already heard Pat and John quickly justify their lack of options in this respect, presumably in case I made an assumption about them not being committed, with John quick to draw a line between themselves and those others “who don’t really live here”. Mitch similarly drew on this symbol of commitment, showing particular irritation at seeing the British cars lined up at Carcassonne airport. ‘Jesus, I hate that. Obviously means they’ve still got a base in England.’ He was quick to set himself apart from these others. ‘One of the first things we did was put the car onto French plates.’

  ‘That’s a real sign, then, is it, that you’re living here?’ I asked.

  ‘Absolutely,’ he nodded. ‘Anyway, I hope we haven’t trodden on your toes with some of the comments about how the British are when they live out here.’ I looked at him enquiringly. ‘I hope we haven’t offended you,’ he explained, ‘by going on about the part-timers.’ I felt slightly taken aback. Perhaps I’d been naive to see myself as an Ariège-dwelling insider, admittedly part-time, anticipating that it would encourage people to open up. I’d been aware that I might be seen as the “other” because I was a researcher, but I wasn’t expecting to be positioned outside a different kind of boundary – that between the “proper” full-timer and the uncommitted part-timer. Our shared context had felt pretty solid, on the whole. More than one interview had ended with an invitation to return for an evening or a meal out. I shared a love of walking in the Pyrenees with many of the incomers, and our conversations often digressed into an exchange of ideas about different walks. Mitch and I had talked about the routes up close to Mont Valier, and I’d encouraged others to visit the summer pasture huts and orries up at Goutets. Many times I’d felt that I was meeting acquaintances rather than interviewing participants, so this metaphorical shove to the other side made me feel a bit dislocated.

  Being a proper full-timer also meant using the French rather than the English community. ‘We’ve never used an English tradesman while we’ve been here, have we?’ said Mitch. ‘Everything we’ve had has been through the French.’ But this wasn’t easy with limited competence in French. Emma talked about the language barrier holding them back socially, admitting ‘I haven’t got enough French to hold a conversation. If we could speak fluently and get by we’d have a whale of a time.’

  But Mitch disagreed that it was down to language. ‘We’re not stand-offish with the people, but even if the French was very good, we still wouldn’t be going visiting French people. In England we had a very good social life and we just accepted that we were coming and that was going to change, and we’re quite happy with that change,’ he asserted. ‘So it’s not through lack of choice that we don’t go and socialise more and don’t go out for meals with people.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Emma, who seemed keener to pin responsibility onto their lack of French. Admittedly it didn’t make sense to talk about having an enjoyable social life in England and to then refer to an almost deliberate avoidance of everyone.

  ‘We don’t mix with the English very much so we don’t mix with the French very much,’ said Mitch. ‘Just boring, aren’t we, really,’ he laughed.

  I guessed there was more to it than what he was prepared to admit. Aware of the negative stereotypes of the Brits in France, he would have been unwilling to come across as a monolingual Brit, unable to socialise with the French. It was easier to present it as a conscious decision, a choice, that they were coming to France and they were going to be boring and that was that. It was similar to Iris’ claim that they hadn’t made any effort with the local French.

  What gave it away was Emma’s admittance that the language was a barrier. To her, it was more acceptable to blame their lack of language skills, rather than be seen as the kind of incomers who deliberately isolate themselves. Whichever way they represented it to me, it was hard to deny that they were so wary of being part of an English-speaking network that they preferred to give up on having a social life. Better to become “boring” than rely on the other Brits around.

  A similar thing happened when they talked about the Ariège forum for English-speaking incomers, which they’d used extensively. Emma described it as “like a little comfort zone”, although the couple disagreed on their reasons for using it, with Mitch insisting that the internet had taken over and that it was just easier for everyone to buy, sell and find out things online. Whereas Emma acknowledged that they used the English forum because using the French version was beyond their ability. ‘You should still integrate,’ she said. ‘We’ll be honest, Mitch, we haven’t gone on the French forums to sell stuff because we can’t speak the language. So we use the local network purely for that reason.’ Again, the lack of language was presented as the factor that steered their actions, rather than a deliberate desire to rely on the English community.

  I was seeing a clear pattern among the attitudes shown towards the rest of the English community. Speak French, integrate socially, don’t depend on the other Brits. Today there was even a parallel with the situation back in the UK, with Mitch comparing the migrant “ghettoes” in England with the Brits in France.

  People had often asked me what the French themselves thought about the English “invasion”, and it was difficult to say beyond anecdotes; a couple of people had commented about post office staff being unfriendly towards them because they were English, but that was all. Yet there had been reports of French annoyance in areas such as Brittany; moreover, a French researcher had noted that incomers were being blamed for a kind of fragmentation of the village as a social space; people lived individually, buying houses as commodities rather than passing them down as family homes. But this was surely happening everywhere, not just in France. Moreover, things were very different in the Ariège, where decades of depopulation had left houses and entire hamlets to decay.

  Driving home along the snaking valley road, I tried to envisage a future where the English inco
mers of the Ariège Pyrenees morphed into a more individual oddity, rather like the isolated Welsh-speaking communities in Patagonia. People found these historical migrants interesting, and they aroused curiosity as something unexpected, whereas the Brits in France were something to grumble about. They were much more familiar to us; we watched them on TV, read their exploits in books and there was always that couple down the road who’d made the move. I drifted off into a fantasy whereby the British stopped coming to France for whatever reason, and those who had rooted here among the foothills of the Pyrenees became a rare anthropological curiosity.

  The Half-Baked Dream

  The idea of selling up and moving abroad for a better life was thrust into our minds by the weekend supplements, the endless re-runs of A Place in the Sun and the neighbours or friends who’d made the plunge to sell up and go. So many people saw it as their dream, their goal, yet it wasn’t really a surprise that many of the Britons who’d moved to France found the reality of the new life rather different from what they had imagined. This had been a familiar theme in many of the British press articles that I’d read, and although the word “dream” had often cropped up, it was often used to comment about the imaginings that led people to move to France without always knowing what (or even where!) they were coming to. Writers described it as a “distortion between dreams and reality”, and they emphasised that contrast using language such as harsh truths, wake-up call for Brits, the dream has been ruined, no one can live a dream for ever, a dream turning sour or into a nightmare, and even a half-baked dream.

  Admittedly some of this was blamed on the financial crisis of 2007 onwards, with the weakening of the pound making France rather pricey for those who’d arrived relying on pensions or income in sterling. But there was also a suggestion that the move took place without properly thinking things through. Back in 2010 I’d become curious overhearing the conversation of a family sitting across from us in a restaurant in Cahors, and had managed to strike up a conversation with them. It turned out that they’d read an article in a Sunday broadsheet about buying in France, and the very next week they’d flown out to purchase what turned out to be a serious renovation project. Although the house was close by, they were spending their last night in a hotel, as they’d had enough of holidaying in a wreck. Apparently the floor had given way that week. While the father was still smiling and insisting that they would “be living here” within a couple of years, the teenage daughter sat there shaking her head, muttering “never”, while the mother looked on wearily.