A House at the End of the Track

by Michelle Lawson

  I often wondered what became of them. They seemed to me to personify the half-baked dream of buying on a whim. Much of what Tina said had echoed this, especially when she talked about being inspired by the writing of Peter Mayle. Even Gerald talked about “taking the plunge” and buying in an area he didn’t know. As a French observer of the English incomers in and around the Périgord, Fralon concluded that what was driving many incomers was a nostalgic affection for the less-populated England of the past, an England that they saw mirrored in the rural France of today. Ariège certainly seems to fit these pull factors: plenty of authentic countryside that’s not dominated by everyone else fleeing the towns and cities, and a house that’s not overlooked but close enough to a village. If these are people’s priorities then it would certainly account for the baffling decision to move to a country that one isn’t very familiar with.

  What also made sense was Fralon’s distinction between the way the English see the British countryside – something precious and rare and therefore costly – with how the French themselves largely view the vast spaces of the hexagone as a place for the less successful, the marginals and the excluded – the complete opposite of the British middle-class aspiration. It might come as a bit of a shock to some of the Britons to find that they were sharing one of the most socially deprived départements with some of the country’s poorest inhabitants.

  This was raised by Mitch in his next point. ‘Something we have noticed since we’ve been here is the decline in social habits, such as the amount of graffiti that you find,’ said Mitch. ‘And there are more reported house and car break-ins. One young American girl was attacked by the bridge in town, and we’ve noticed the amount of rubbish that just gets thrown at the side of the river bank.’ So they were starting to be aware of the less idyllic aspects, although he presented it as a very recent phenomenon that was “creeping down” from the big northern cities. ‘It wasn’t happening when we first came out,’ he claimed, ‘so we’ve seen a decline in the habits of people in the few years we’ve been here.’

  Emma nodded, keen to show that it wasn’t just an English trait to moan about deteriorating habits. ‘Even the French people have said they’ve noticed a difference in town over the last 3 or 4 years. It used to have its streets cleaned regularly and that’s all gone, but now the dog mess is terrible. There are certain streets where you’re walking like this, hopping on one foot. And the flowers on the roundabouts have gone. I know it sounds silly, but the French go on about it.’

  Mitch and Emma had at least been familiar with the Ariège, but it was their keenness to do everything the right way which had partly been their undoing. Privately I wondered whether they would have been better off if they’d stayed as UK residents, at least initially to try things out, rather than registering Emma as self-employed and paying the crippling taxes that France bestows on micro-enterprises. But they also exemplified how easy it was to be influenced by getting value for money and ending up with a house and grounds that were impractical for their needs. Despite the couple having viewed a number of properties, when they actually came to purchasing this house, it was done in an instant – and by just one of them. Emma explained. ‘Sometimes your heart rules your head. Mitch bought this house without me even seeing it.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, he flew out on the Monday and it was a done deal and he flew back on the Tuesday and that was it. He said I like it and I’ve put an offer in and it’s been accepted. I didn’t see it until I signed the final papers. I couldn’t say no.’

  Mitch was quick to remind me that they’d ended up with “a lovely house”, but the undercurrent of their impending departure and the reason why – basically that they could no longer afford it – had cast a shadow over our pleasant chat on the south-facing terrace. He repeated that he would warn others not to run away with the idea of buying more than they needed. ‘Prospective buyers should think about how they’re going to get older, not younger.’

  ‘I think with hindsight we could have bought something smaller, more contained. We might not have found ourselves in the position we’re in now,’ said Emma. I winced as they said the amount of money they were likely to lose on the house, even if it sold. But things could be worse, they assured me; they had the safety net of a house in the UK that was being rented out, compared with some friends nearby who really were in dire straits. This was a couple who’d bought two properties to renovate and sell on, in what they’d imagined would be a cycle of profitable retirement activity. But now they were stuck with two houses that they couldn’t sell and with all their money used up on expensive renovations. ‘They haven’t got any prospect of going back to England but they can’t afford to stay. They’re frightened because they haven’t got any money to see them through retirement.’

  Emma’s theory was that France was too difficult for what she called “the middle people”, and it mirrored Tina’s frustration at being one of those who needed to work, compared with incomers in comfortable retirement or those prepared to live in a shack. But it was as if there should be something in place to prop them up. ‘There doesn’t seem to be any compensation for people that are prepared to work,’ complained Emma. The word “compensation” made it sound as if one was entitled to a reward for taking the plunge: we’ve come here, we want to work but our French isn’t good enough, so we need something to compensate. I tried to imagine one of Mitch’s Polish migrants saying something similar out loud in an English pub, and the kind of reaction they’d get.

  4

  The Quality Street Gang

  Worzel Gummidge In A Jaeger Suit

  My eyes followed the white-heeled sandals as they flipped up and down between the coffee table and the kitchen, bringing in tea, milk and fresh cookies still warm from the oven. When a second cup was called for, Elaine called to her partner Colin to make it and bring it to us. It was unusual to be sitting inside, as up until now the default setting had been around a table in a garden or courtyard. Today, however, a light drizzle obscured the view out through the French windows. I leaned back on the patterned sofa and admired the cookies, feeling as if I’d been transported into an English seaside town.

  ‘We haven’t got a French house,’ said Elaine as she set down an Earl Grey teabag for me. ‘That sort doesn’t appeal to us, a dark old French house. And I’ve transferred a lot of my furniture here because we couldn’t afford to buy new, so nothing in the house is French.’

  Once again, it was finding the right house that had governed a move to the Ariège. The couple had crisscrossed France over twenty-odd years, looking for where they might want to live eventually. Elaine admitted that they hadn’t known anything about the Ariège beforehand. ‘I saw this house on the internet but Colin said I’m not going there, it’s near mountains, it’ll be too cold. So we looked near Mirepoix and we just couldn’t get what we wanted for the money that we had. And then we saw this house again, in the estate agent’s window in Mirepoix. I said It’s there, look, that’s the house and it’s a lot cheaper than it was. I told the estate agent when we were having coffee, I said That’s the one I really want, and I kept going on about it until he took us so I could get it out of my system. And we walked in the gate there and just fell in love with it.’

  Just like Iris and Jim, the choice boiled down to where the house was. There was no mention of checking that they liked the village itself, and that it had everything they’d need in their retirement; it was the image of the house exterior that had drawn Elaine. Nothing too exotic, not dark and French, but something that felt familiar. If Kate Fox had tilted her anthropologist’s ear over our conversation, she would have nodded and smiled at this evidence that to the English, their home was more than their castle; it was their identity, their status and their prime obsession. It also supported her claim of an all-important English desire for privacy, whereby people like Elaine, and Iris and Jim, base their search on the house itself, trying to find something that isn�
��t overlooked. The town or village, the region and even the country might be almost irrelevant. ‘This house is half the size of our house in England, but the gardens are 4–5 times bigger. Now we’ve got gardens all the way round,’ she said. Elaine admitted that they wouldn’t have been able to afford that kind of thing in the UK.

  With Colin out of the way in the kitchen, Elaine began to open up about how they didn’t share the same vision. ‘It’s my fault, in a way, that we’re in France because I gave him the tape of A Year in Provence to listen to on the way to work, and he fell in love with the idea. He wanted to be that man with the millstone table.’ She’d clearly reflected on how to cope with it all. ‘Right from the start, this is Colin’s dream, to live here. It’s not my dream, it’s my adventure.’ In other words, she was facing up to it as a practical challenge, something to get through. And as the afternoon went on, it became clear that she wasn’t the kind of person to drift through retirement.

  Elaine’s tendency to organise everyone and everything permeated the conversation. I heard how she’d organised impromptu sightseeing when on holiday in Russia and Morocco, taking groups of women around the resort with her. She’d been mentioned by almost all of the other Brits I spoke to, as someone who organised various gatherings, who did charity work and would be “really good to speak to”. People told me that they met so and so “through Elaine”. I’d suggested to one woman that Elaine sounded like a kind of hub for the British community, and she agreed, adding, ‘Oh yes, and we’re all satellites going around her.’ Elaine shook her head at this and laughed in denial, although she went on to describe herself in a similar way.

  ‘Yes, I’m quite organised and I am the organiser here at home, everything revolves around me. And I like networking. That hasn’t changed as I still network with an English women’s group.’ A few years later, back in Devon, I’d been chatting over the wall to my neighbour’s visitors, a couple who’d previously lived in the Aude, and I was astounded to hear that even they remembered Elaine from a brief encounter in Toulouse.

  One of the main challenges that appeared to bug Elaine was the financial constraint of living in France on retirement pensions, but as with everything she’d organised a plan. ‘Before we came we weren’t used to economising, but we did practise living on the limited income that we were going to have on our early retirement pensions. We did that for about 18 months before we came, and found it worked ok.’ But they’d still had to change how they lived, and she complained about the novelty of having to save up if they wanted to eat out. ‘Money’s tight. Every week you cross something off the list. I don’t want that this week.’

  The contrast between Elaine’s former life and living here in the Pyrenean foothills was considerable but I was impressed by how hard she was working to adapt, finding numerous ways to use her skills in the new environment. Everything was thought through. ‘I still need something to motivate me, I still need targets. I’m a list-maker. I need to achieve every day and at the moment I’m interested in getting to know Toulouse really well. I go to Toulouse at least once a month with an English-speaking guide.’ She admitted that not knowing French had put a big barrier in the way of everything. ‘I like to build relationships. I like people to know me, the person, but when you can’t speak the language there’s a barrier there. But I’ve used different tools to make sure they know that I’m not just that silly English woman who’s an immigrant and can’t even speak the language.’ Elaine and Colin had been to the same French classes that others had described and had similarly given up; not only because they didn’t learn anything, but as a former professional, she’d felt highly frustrated by the poorly organised classes.

  Elaine described the Ariège people as “lovely” and the culture as “nice”, with the lack of commercialism being part of the area’s allure. ‘They don’t know how to market things or present things. Last weekend it was the village fête and everywhere was busy, but the bar was closed, so we went to the créperie and it was closed. Closed on a Saturday!’

  I asked if there was a specific time that she’d felt particularly foreign. ‘There was, actually, when we went to vote in the regional elections,’ Elaine said thoughtfully. Unlike Pat and John, who’d told me about getting a “round of applause for voting” as if they had celebrity status, Elaine’s experience showed how unfamiliarity with the system could be unnerving. ‘It was most peculiar, we sort of stood there for a while as we didn’t really know how their system worked. We didn’t know how many people to vote for, whether it was 2, 3, 4. I still can’t remember what we did,’ she mused. ‘They tried to explain to us what to do but they couldn’t come near us at first. It’s all secret, you see. I said I need aider. Help me, I need some help.

  Despite not really speaking French, Elaine felt that she was “slowly getting there”, and much of what she talked about showed that she was active with both the French and English communities. She mentioned a local elderly woman who’d knocked on their door when they first arrived and taken them to all the village dances and festivals. ‘She’s a very good friend now and I’ve volunteered to go and help with her garden.’ I asked her if she agreed with the sentiment I’d heard among some of the incomers, that actually being competent in French was less important than making the effort. She nodded. ‘I don’t think it’s important and I think it puts a lot of people off from coming. But I still hanker after speaking English.’

  Like Iris, Elaine was one of the few who admitted to enjoying the company of the other English speakers, clearly feeling much more at home with them compared with Tina, who had positioned herself as not quite fitting in. I delved deeper into what she felt she shared with them, guessing that she would be honest about it. She listed books and cooking and a shared interest in what was happening in the UK, but unlike Tina, who stratified the Brits into different categories, Elaine drew attention to what she saw as a more level playing field here in France. ‘Here we’re all in the same boat. We’re all expats, we’ve all got the same problems and difficulties and I don’t find that it’s competitive here.’

  It was interesting how Elaine used different terms to refer to herself. Here, when talking about the shared context of the Brits and their solidarity, they were all expats. Yet earlier, when voicing the French who might see her as “that silly English woman who can’t even speak the language”, she used the word immigrant. It was down to what linguists call semantics, where words become “flavoured” by their associations. Academics refer to it as a double standard, whereby it is fine to be an expat, that relatively wealthy kind of incomer who could be left to sort things out among their compatriots and not be a burden. But if you were the more troublesome kind of incomer, then you were a migrant or immigrant. I’d already noted that the British press often used the word migrant to distinguish the recent British incomers – who were also a swelling army, a deluge, a wave – from the more established and permanent-sounding residents.

  The double standard of expat versus migrant has been discussed by migration researchers who claim that it all comes down to privilege. The white Western expat generally enjoys more freedom to settle abroad without any expectation to assimilate, and they are grudgingly tolerated because they have some perceived right to be there, compared with the darker skinned or eastern European-accented migrants. It’s true that the latter are never referred to as expats. Yet even academics can fall into the stereotyping trap; one migration professor claimed that Europeans living abroad “love to call themselves expats”, describing them as “haughty” migrants who are exempt from demands to learn the language and do not bother to integrate.27 It was the kind of lazy comment that strangers said to me when they heard what I was researching, repeating the same old cliché when it happened to fit their own views.

  Because it was becoming clear to me that, in reality, away from the broad brush of generalisation, things were different. While the term expat was certainly used, it was ridiculous to say that it was the preferr
ed term among incomers. If anything, people were aware that it carried a negative association, especially in the British press, where I’d seen writers try to distance themselves from the other “expat types”. Gerald too had used the term when distancing himself from the other Brits, referring to what he saw as a more superficial migration of those who depend for a social life on fellow expats here in France, as well as in Spain where they form communities of expats where they speak exclusively English. Again, the word reflected a sense of entitlement and privilege, a leftover from colonial times that was to be avoided. Another incomer had insisted to me that she was, and always would be, an immigrant, and she’d made a point of using the term on the forum when she asked what other immigrants get up to here. So at least here in Ariège there were incomers who did not love to call themselves expats.

  Expats, migrants or immigrants, Elaine then went on to present the English in a very uniform way. ‘All the English are good cooks. And all the English people tend to dress very well.’ I raised my eyebrows doubtfully at both suggestions of collective distinctiveness, since I was an example of neither. Perhaps Elaine saw my disbelief as a reflection on her own image, since she went on to add, ‘I don’t dress quite like I used to. I dress down here because I’m always up on a ladder, I’m like Worzel Gummidge. But I’ve still got my Jaeger suits that I will not give up for anything. I’ve just had them all cleaned. Any opportunity to wear them, I’m thrilled to put them on.’