A House at the End of the Track

by Michelle Lawson

  Another time I walked from the Col de Pause up to the summit of Pic de Fonta, a ridge that towers over the Col and yields a panorama of the endless folds and ridges of the Pyrenean chain, as well as the plains running north to Toulouse. On the way back down I was surprised to meet three hikers coming the other way, as it seemed late in the day to be going up. It turned out that they were heading for the GR10 hostel at Rouze, on the opposite side of the valley, having missed the signs for the path at the Col. There was no sign of a map and I had some difficulty persuading them that they were going in the wrong direction, but eventually they believed me. Two of the three decided to cut down the steep slope to the road, visible through the woods far below, while the third hiker, filled with nervous energy, opted to follow me along the path back to the Col, excitedly shouting “GR dix? GR dix?” every couple of minutes. Eventually he left me, running to catch up with the others who’d emerged from the woods. They were already pushing it to get to their destination before dark as they had a steep descent to Couflens followed by an equally steep ascent. But at least they were on the right path now. I don’t know where they’d have ended up if I hadn’t turned them around.

  As I’d sat alone on the upper slopes of the Pic de Fonta, I‘d been startled by a rush of air as a pair of wings swooped close by, and looking up, I saw forty or so of them, circling around on the midday thermals. They were griffon vultures, the vautor fauve distinguished by their white collar ruff and drooping round head that contrasts with the pale brown of the body and the short dark tail with its fanned-out flight feathers. They continued to circle for the next hour or so, taking advantage of the rising updrafts and thermals to soar around looking for carrion. These carnivorous scavengers had multiplied quite rapidly in France since being endangered in the 1960s, although their numbers were minor compared to the thousands over in Spain.

  Here in France there were growing concerns about the increasingly aggressive nature of the vultures. Reports had been coming in that they were turning from scavenger to predator and targeting live animals, not just carrion. Just as with the bears, the conservationists were at odds with the farmers, and here there was an added undercurrent of a potential serious risk to humans. In April 2013 the body of a woman hiker had been found an hour or so after she had fallen whilst walking in the mountains near Larrau. The problem was, the “body” had, in that hour, been stripped of flesh. Only her bones, clothes and shoes lay there; the rest had gone with the vultures.

  Some were blaming this increasingly predatory nature on the recent regulations laid down by the EU, who’d ruled that any dead livestock had to be immediately removed, to help control the spread of BSE. Obviously this had had consequences for the growing vulture population, who were now facing stiff competition for food sources. The French Vulture group of the Ligue pour la Protection des Oiseaux saw fit to publish, in English, a clarification report against what they termed a distortion of facts by “some media with unscrupulous sensationalism”, singling out “the British tabloid press” for its opportunistic blaming of the EU. It was no surprise to find that it was the Daily Mail that had featured a noticeable anti-EU stance when reporting the story.

  One of the more ghastly aspects was the possibility that the vultures had begun to gorge before the poor woman had actually died. The ecologists and others dismissed this and insisted that it was simply not possible – vultures don’t scavenge on live prey. Nevertheless, there had been some claims by farmers of weakened lambs being taken, so if that was really the case, then why would a vulnerable human be treated differently? The French Vulture group attempted to remind us that what had happened was, however shocking, a natural example of nature’s efficiency, which is true. And yet… the fact that farmers were being warned to keep carcasses away from vulnerable live animals and livestock buildings acknowledged that the unspeakable remained a possibility.

  5

  Like A Soap Opera

  They Don’t Know Where Else To Turn

  ‘The Brits coming over now, they’re not expecting the same thing as we were when we came. It’s a shame in a way, and I’m adding to it by selling this stuff,’ laughed Felicity as she looked around the shelves stacked with British brands. ‘But I do have this side of me that thinks: you’re coming to live in another country, you shouldn’t expect it to be like it was in England. Surely that’s the idea of moving somewhere?’

  We were sitting in what was, at that time, another British shop in the Ariège. Felicity was a relative old-timer, having moved to France some twenty years ago with her children, who were now bilingual. Like some of the other incomers, she’d intended on buying in the neighbouring Aude, nearer to Carcassonne, but had “drifted” into Ariège. The area had been familiar to her as she’d spent childhood holidays there.

  I’d been particularly keen to speak with Felicity as I was aware that her shop was seen as a central point for the Brits in the area. Iris had commented how much better she felt after meeting Felicity and “the network that she represented”, meaning the way that Felicity acted as a knowledge base for the Brits and any problems they experienced. Felicity described herself in similar terms. ‘I’m a bit like a drop-in service I suppose,’ she admitted, going on to list all the things that she’d been asked to do over the years. ‘People come with all sorts of paperwork, what’s this? and what does this mean? and can you just phone and make me an appointment? and I’ve got this thing… You wouldn’t believe the things I’ve done for people; reading blood test results, making appointments with specialists, going to hospitals in Toulouse with them for the appointments, you name it. I’ve translated people’s wills and tax returns. It’s extraordinary,’ she said, nodding at my raised eyebrows, ‘but they don’t know where else to turn.’

  I agreed that it sounded a surprising level of responsibility, but Felicity exuded no sense of resentment. ‘This is how it works,’ she stated. ‘I’m a friendly face and I’m a point of contact and if I can’t help then I know somebody who can. And that’s why I’m here,’ she smiled. ‘I’m never going to make myself a fortune by having a place like this. I’m doing it because I absolutely love it.’

  What interested me was that although Felicity claimed to love helping the incomers, it was viewed as a vocation rather than a social activity that fulfilled a need to be with other Brits. In fact she was adamant that she didn’t actually socialise with the other Brits, feeling that she didn’t have much in common with them. ‘It’s difficult, because I do favours for them, they kind of feel they need to pay me back somehow, so they invite me for meals. I find it hard to continually say no,’ she laughed, ‘so I do socialise in that sense. But having said that, I don’t invite them to my house, ever.’

  So it was her calling, an accepted responsibility to help out the other Brits because there was no one else, it’s what I’m here for. At the same time, she acknowledged that it wasn’t exactly ideal for people to come over and “muddle through” with their limited French until something happens, when they become “just totally and utterly lost”.

  Felicity confirmed my belief that people were moving to this corner of France with no French at all. ‘Oh definitely,’ she nodded. ‘They’ve found an English-speaking lawyer and an English speaker at the bank and an English-speaking estate agent and they think it’s going to be as easy as that,’ she smiled. She admitted that she’d discouraged some of the dreamers who were under the impression that they could get work anywhere. ‘So France, that’s already got its own unemployment problem, is going to take your husband, who can’t communicate with anybody, over a French man… No, it doesn’t work that way.’

  I was enjoying how Felicity animatedly voiced the dreamers, raising her eyebrows in mock glee as she mimicked them. ‘Ooh, we’ll go over and have a gîte, and then they find that you spend all this money and you get your gîte together and then actually nobody comes and stays in it.’ And it was all evidence to support that theme I’d seen in so many articles abo
ut the gap between the dream and reality.

  Felicity knew of others who’d come to the Ariège with a dream of making a living as a builder, then found that there weren’t enough Brits around to keep them in business, since the French largely preferred to use their own established French-speaking compatriots. And then there was that peculiar British phenomenon, the cowboy builder. She told an anecdote about a British builder who’d been sued by some British incomers for a large amount of money. ‘He didn’t help himself. He went to court for the first proceedings and basically stood up there and said Je ne pas parle français and prepared a statement in English, and you think, why on Earth would you do that? You must have some friend or somebody that would go with you.’ She shook her head. ‘Unfortunately there’s a lot of cowboys. I get the stories, don’t go to him, don’t let him do your kitchen/bathroom/extension.’

  This wasn’t a problem confined to France, as I knew from my own experience in England, but the English cowboy builder did seem particularly notorious over here. I guessed that the root problem was the same in France as in my home county of Devon: people move to areas with little work, they think about what they can do, and if they have some previous DIY experience then they decide that’s enough to become a builder. With so many of the British incomers unable to speak a reasonable level of French, they would have a captive market. On the other hand, unless they’d been there for years, it was unlikely that they would have had a French builder’s knowledge of local building techniques and materials, as well as a local builder’s links with all of the other craft- and tradespeople in the area. Mitch had been keen to point out that they’d only ever used French tradespeople. But I knew from Mike’s regular building work with English incomers, and the frenzy of excitement when a plasterer announced his arrival on the forum, that many of the others were excited at the thought of a tradesperson who could speak their language.

  A French customer came in to buy teabags and spent a few minutes chatting with Felicity about the teachers’ demonstration taking place in the main square. I took the opportunity to cast my eyes around the shelves stacked with British staples such as tinned soup, sliced bread, teabags and baked beans. One corner was given over to a range of teapots, and an entire shelf was stacked with infant formula. Were the purchasers buying things for a nostalgic indulgence, or did they genuinely feel that British brands were must-haves? Felicity admitted that both kinds of customer came into the shop, although she found it weird to see people get excited about things that they had so far been able to live without. ‘They come in, then they see it and they go ooh, you’ve got that and it’s all must have some of that. But I bet your life they haven’t thought about it for months or years.’

  Even more bizarre were those for whom the shop was their main source of groceries. ‘I’ve got customers who actually want me to get English-brand tinned peas and carrots. They come in here and treat it as a weekly shop, going can’t you get this? and can’t you get that?’

  Here, at last, was confirmation of the unadventurous British stereotype living in the Ariège. Nevertheless, it was difficult to ignore the high prices of the goods on the shelves. Felicity read my thoughts. ‘Obviously stuff that I’m selling is going to be an awful lot more expensive. Why would you pay twice the price for jam that’s come over from England, when it’s better in France?’ It was a good question, and I had no idea why, when perfectly good French jars could be bought more cheaply.

  Felicity’s close contact with so many new arrivals, as well as holidaymakers who dreamed of making a move, provided valuable insights into why incomers were choosing the Ariège for a new life in France. She summed it up as there being enough of an English-speaking back-up in a place that still felt like France. Then she shrugged. ‘It’s one of the last undiscovered places, isn’t it, so I think it’s probably down to price on the whole.’

  Although Felicity’s role in helping the Brits was both informal and unpaid, it was clearly defined and I expect that grateful incomers used the shop where possible. There were other areas of France where this had actually developed into a paid job – aideur d’Anglais – according to the journalist Fralon. In Limousin and in Dordogne, for example, there were Britons holding down jobs as facilitators of communications between the incomers and the French administrative system.

  I’d been struck by Felicity’s reluctance to mix socially outside of this role, and I wondered aloud whether she felt different from the rest of them. She frowned, thinking about it. ‘Do you mean like the old school and the new arrivals?’ she asked, and then nodded. ‘I think possibly, yes. Some of the Brits who’ve come in more recent years do have this expectation that it won’t be as foreign, but when we came, you faced the fact that there wasn’t going to be anything British.’ She pointed to the shelf full of British milk formula that was waiting for a customer. ‘There you go, silly things like baby milk, can you get me in some follow-on baby milk? I can’t find the right baby milk.’ She loosened up, voicing comments from customers that she must have heard over the years. ‘This is what we know, this is what we like, this is what we need. It’s things like that. It’s yes, we’re moving to France, but we want all our things from home around us, we don’t want to be that foreign.’

  Felicity then made a point of emphasising that none of this actually bothered her. I understood that she was perhaps mindful that she might come across as being critical of her customers, the people whom she unfailingly helped out. ‘I haven’t consciously thought of it before, but once you asked the question, then yes, we were the pioneers I guess.’

  Of all the people I sat chatting with, Felicity had the most reason to moan about the dependencies and unpreparedness of some of the new arrivals. Yet compared with almost everyone else I’d spoken with, she was careful to avoid drawing boundaries between herself and the other incomers. Even when she admitted to the possibility of feeling different, it was presented as something that emerged only after I’d got her thinking about it. She gave no hint of showing scorn or derision, only of concern for the dreamers.

  Even when we moved on to talking about the online forum, her tone was solicitous rather than scornful. I asked her if she found it interesting to read the posts on the forum, wondering whether she’d been intrigued, as I had, by the kinds of questions people had asked. She nodded, saying predictably that she enjoyed helping people and sharing what she knew about life in France. But then her face dropped. ‘I do despair though that some of the stuff is so basic, really. You haven’t got a clue, have you? sort of thing. And that does worry me a lot.’

  Felicity was the real thing in terms of support, exuding concern rather than judgement. There was no sense of the other incomers being perceived as sad and wrong, or a “sore point”. Even when mimicking their demands, there was no invitation to sneer; that was just how it was.

  If I had to give one enduring point from my observation of the English incomers in Ariège, it was how people’s attitudes towards behaviour – their own and others’ – was overshadowed by a pervasive duty to do things properly, to fall into the category of the “right” kind of English person in France. Almost everyone I spoke to or observed was at pains to demonstrate it. The fact that it raised its head in almost every conversation, on the forum and in so many of the British press articles, showed the extent of the social pressure to be seen to conform.

  The online forum was where it was at its most raw, due to the disinhibiting effect of being able to write what you want behind the screen. Recent years have seen a huge rise in trolling on platforms such as Twitter, so much that it’s sadly become a feature of everyday life. Yet back in 2007, when the forum infighting was at its peak, it was less common, which made the spate of insults on a supposedly supportive forum even more unexpected. One particular newcomer had been singled out for asking too many simplistic questions. He comes to France but can’t be bothered to get off his backside and explore a bit. Cotton wool has nothing on him. The insults grew,
labelling the new member as someone who wants help with everything because his mindset tells him he can’t… who I think of as a joke, someone who obviously needs a bum wiper to survive. Other members, affronted, waded in to point out that the whole purpose of the forum was to support each other. They questioned why he felt it acceptable to act like this online when surely, if the conversation had taken place in a bar, the person posting the insults would have acted in a normal, human way. The moderator took the step of banning the troublemakers but the damage was done. For a new member to be labelled a joke really did call into question that person’s social value as part of the English-speaking community. In spite of the support rallied from other members, that particular incomer didn’t make an appearance on the forum for over a year after this incident, citing the “problems” he’d had before.

  The consequence of all of this was that people sometimes had to carry out quite elaborate reasoning to explain their behaviour if it didn’t fit that of the ideal British incomer. I’d heard people claiming they had a duty to show the French what the English eat, while others, who were unable to mix with the French and unwilling to network with the British, stated that they were “just boring” people who’d decided not to socialise in France. I didn’t find it particularly surprising that people made such effort to avoid coming across as that negative stereotype.

  It would be easy to sneer at the incomers as privileged people with the means to leave Britain and buy into a dream life in France, but like any dream, it was vulnerable: to the economy, to exchange rates, to illness and to the uncertainty of political developments such as Brexit. Moreover, life in France could not be divided, in binary terms, into doing things the right or the wrong way: you either live here or you don’t. In spite of almost everyone denying the existence of a tangible British community in the Ariège, each and every one of those I spoke with belonged to a definable group of British incomers. Drawing on the stereotypes was an attempt to marginalise people, and it was felt acceptable to do so because the criticisms were aimed at a faceless mass, those other embarrassing Brits elsewhere. It was cliqueyness, but it was something else too; it was attempting to evaluate each other according to a hierarchy of social worth.