A House at the End of the Track

by Michelle Lawson

  A rather different example of forum humour was a spoof post that turned up, written by a supposed “new” member in the guise of a French person:

  My friend jimmy say look at thes site for funny laugh, see what england send to France. I am French, ow did england win 2 wars of world and beeted Napolian when i reeded of people who in Ariege can not the find wood for burning in fire, can not the fire shop to buy the fire discover, can not going to big shop when open buted closed and find the faults with the worker for stopping to eat, know noted how to get electricity, a lady who thinks the anglais will change the ecomomie francais. The man Nick he is funny i lik the person smizz he is crazy idiot. Tell if me why you live en France if so difficulty or you lik to speak of chains for pnues for long time?

  appy christmas et new year

  nichole

  It was an attempt at satire by one of the members, and a pretty crude one at that. Whoever wrote it was attempting to come across as a French person who had little control of the English language; someone who didn’t understand the irregular past forms of the verbs beat and read, and couldn’t spell them either. Yet their control of written French was similarly poor, misspelling the word for tyres – pneus – as pnues, as well as making a basic blunder with the spelling Napolian. It was a classroom attempt at mockery, with giveaway errors.

  I reckoned a more Standard English version would go something like this:

  My friend Jimmy told me to look at this site for a laugh, to see what England sends to France. I am French, but how did England win two world wars and beat Napoleon, when I read of people in Ariège who can’t find firewood, can’t find a shop selling wood burners, who go to superstores when they’re closed rather than when they’re open and then blame the workers for having a lunch break; people who don’t know how to get electricity, and a lady who thinks the English will change the French economy. But Nick is funny and I like Smith, the crazy idiot. Tell me, why do you all live in France if it’s all so difficult, and why do you go on and on about snow chains?

  Happy Christmas and New Year,

  Nicole

  The writer was what’s now referred to as a “sock puppet”, someone who creates a fictional online identity in order to dominate an online discussion, skew the balance of debate and spread fake news, although the intention has also been to promote or criticise a product by writing phony reviews. Researchers are developing ways to detect these kinds of multiple accounts, using analysis of writing style, for example. Back in 2007, it was a startling example to post onto a support forum, but it seems unlikely that the writer was trying to be taken seriously. The errors were more confusing than clever, perhaps as a result of someone having written it in a hurry, without much thought. Yet someone took the trouble to write it, satirising the forum members using insider jokes that only a forum user would understand. For instance, I remembered the online discussions about firewood and buying wood burners, as well as the thread on setting up a micro enterprise in order to obtain health insurance that developed into a critique of the French economy, as well as the rant about the retail park shops shutting at lunchtime. There had also been a very long thread about the necessity to carry snow chains and whether one could buy a set that would fit any hire car.

  As a humorous attempt at satire it failed to garner many reactions, and I suspect this was partly due to the effort required to decipher it. Perhaps some members felt it wasn’t even worthy of comment. One member made a serious observation that there was no way it was written by a genuine French person with those kinds of deliberate errors. He went on to say that he’d heard similar, if more authentic, comments expressed, so there might be something in them. The “funny” member Nick (a pseudonym here) replied to say who cares, at least it is better reading than chains, fish and chips and the rest of the tat and it happens to be pretty accurate. Researchers note that one of the giveaways of sock puppetry is the writer’s relationship with other users, and this unsubtle example points to the writer’s link with the two named members; in fact, he was quite possibly one of them.

  Pervasive the humour certainly was, but not all of it was deemed acceptable by the other members. The attack on the newcomer who was likened to cotton wool, who needed a bum wiper, had been justified by the writer as banter that brightens up the otherwise dull and boring website. I like to be sarcastic. Unfortunately most of the Brits leave their sense of humour in Dover. As other members waded in to protest at this idea of “humour”, the forum moderator also reinforced the purpose of the forum as a means of support. It is not an amusement arcade. The day will not come where I provide cheap entertainment for vulgar individuals. But even the moderator drew on humour to reinforce his point: If you want an adventure why not head off to Africa or some snake-infested South American jungle. Maybe then we will be impressed by your survival skills.

  It all demonstrated that what Kate Fox called “the most effective built-in antidote to our [English] social dis-ease” – the sheer pervasiveness of humour in English everyday life – didn’t get left behind when people moved across the Channel. Humour came as naturally to the Brits online as did the preference to ask each other for advice rather than the local French. Yet it also served to remind them of their shared context, alongside a darker purpose to reinforce that boundary against the more embarrassing newcomers.

  They All Go Quoi? And Do That Frown

  ‘Suddenly I’m in this place where they’re not speaking the French I’ve learned at all and I found it quite depressing to begin with.’ Susan and I were sitting around the same café table that I’d sat at with Iris and Jim. I had to work hard at keeping on top of the conversation, as Susan’s voice was often drowned out by the lively French customers. Visiting her at her house hadn’t been an option; Susan and her partner had bought an isolated barn five years ago, and the focus of the renovation had initially been on creating a garden. Even now they managed without mains water and relied on a generator for electricity.

  Susan had studied Open University courses in French before the move, but she’d found her inability to keep up in local conversation a disappointment. The regional accent had been a shock. ‘At times I wondered what have I done this for?, because learning to speak the language and working towards being fluent was a really important part of coming out here.’ Like Rosie, she laid some of the blame at her own shyness, particularly her nervousness when talking to strangers. ‘I try and talk to people and I talk quietly because I’m nervous and they all go quoi? and do that frown they do, because they’re not sure what you want from them.’ Once again we were coming back to the anxiety factor, and I couldn’t help but notice that of everyone I spoke to, it was the women, such as Gail, Elaine, Rosie and Susan, who talked of their concern about coming across as a silly foreigner, making them inhibited when talking to the French. Not one of these women lacked motivation to learn and speak French, but that motivation was affected by anxiety chipping away at their confidence.

  Susan compared her own arrival in the Ariège with that of another woman who’d now gone back to the UK after setting up a chambre d’hote that didn’t work out, and then found it impossible to find any kind of paying work. ‘She came out with no French at all as far as I can gather; she’d got this absolutely terrible French, no grammar to speak of at all but she did it with panache. Everybody seemed to know what she was talking about,’ she laughed. ‘Whereas there’s me with my diploma.’ She laughed again. ‘I don’t want to make it sound as though the woman didn’t care, she was trying to improve, but she’d just got this confident manner and got on better than I did at the start because of that.’ I nodded. I knew what she meant. Stig and I were at a similar level with our French, able to hold a conversation, but our walk up to Goutets had highlighted my own shyness compared with Stig’s buoyancy. I’d noticed how he spoke to every local that we passed, about the weather, the route and even admiring an elderly lady’s new roof, while I held back, afraid of getting into something t
hat I couldn’t fully understand.

  Susan’s motivation went well beyond just learning French to get by. Here was someone for whom conquering the language had been a fundamental part of the move, not a by-product of it. Some studies of second language learning claim that in fact it was never just about getting by, but about becoming the person you wanted to be – the ideal self. For someone like John, who aimed to get by on a “need-to-know basis”, that basic level of achievement was sufficient. To him it was pointless to aim for “that mountain you’re never going to climb”. Susan, on the other hand, had envisaged an ideal self that was fluent and had become disappointed, as had Gerald. Not surprisingly, those who kept their expectations low had less chance of being disappointed. For the Brits in France, I expect it was also about not being seen as that clichéd Do you speak English? incomer.

  I tried to get to the bottom of how it affected Susan’s sense of identity. ‘Do you feel different from any other British people here?’ I asked.

  ‘A bit,’ she admitted. ‘Perhaps it’s the language thing. I feel different to the bulk of them, I think. I get the feeling that I might speak French just for the sake of speaking another language, whereas for most people it’s a means to an end.’ She confirmed my thoughts about the gap between anticipation and reality. ‘I think maybe I had some unrealistic expectations after doing all that hard work in England, and that in a couple of years I would be totally fluent, it would just flow out of me. But five years on it’s just not flowing out. It’s not bad, and on a good day it’s quite good, but it’s not always good.’

  It was good enough to help out some of the others. Susan was the “tremendous friend” who was helping Elaine at that time. Chatting with a friend was one thing, but, like Felicity, Susan had been asked to accompany people to doctors and hospital appointments. ‘I’ve done that with two different people and I didn’t even feel that confident about what the doctors were saying to me. I had to take it on board and say it in English to the other person.’

  I winced. ‘That’s quite a responsibility.’

  ‘It’s horrible actually. I hope nobody ever asks me again.’

  Susan and her partner were in early retirement and like Iris and Jim they’d left England for a new challenge in life. ‘We felt that life is too easy, we knew how to do things. I mean, we’re talking five and a half decades of it. Things looked predictable and we were up for something a bit different.’

  ‘So why did you end up in the Ariège?’

  ‘We spent three months travelling around France in a motorhome and got very familiar with the place,’ she replied. ‘It always felt very comfortable here in France, it felt like the sort of place you could live.’ But they never got as far as exploring the Ariège itself. ‘We went to a show about France in Earls Court and we got talking to an estate agent in Saint-Girons and she said well, you couldn’t do better than Ariège, it’s beautiful. And it sort of sold us, so we came back out and had a look and we thought this is lovely.’

  Susan admitted that she did little socialising and that most of it was with other English people. ‘We never set out to do it, it just kind of happened. It’s so much easier to chat to somebody in your own language, isn’t it? And none of the neighbours have really shown any desire to be best friends. They’re perfectly polite, perfectly nice and friendly but it just hasn’t happened.’ As with some of the others, she claimed that socialising with the community wasn’t something she’d anticipated. ‘I have to say I’m not a very sociable person. If people aren’t around I don’t go out and find them.’ Yet she relied to some extent on being part of an online community, particularly that facilitated by Twitter. ‘There’s always someone there to respond to me, however banal the tweet,’ she said. ‘Without it I’d have gone mad.’

  A few people had mentioned Susan and it always revolved around her garden. The other incomers found it intriguing that the garden took precedence over making the barn more habitable. But it was the move itself that triggered the obsession with gardening, as if moving to the Ariège had presented an opportunity to reinvent oneself. I brought in Gerald’s concept of narrenfreiheit, the foreigner’s freedom to be a bit different. Susan nodded enthusiastically, adding that being here was like having a clean page. In the UK everyone knew what to expect of her, but here she could start afresh. ‘I’ve never been the sort of keen gardener I am now,’ she admitted. ‘I’ve had little tiny gardens that mostly I didn’t do a great deal with, so that side of life is very different now. It’s like new work. It’s not just a hobby, it’s more than that. It’s what I do.’ They’d taken care to choose an area where a typically English garden wouldn’t stand out, avoiding the open area around Cominac, for example. ‘The kind of compartmentalised English garden that we planned to make would have been very visible and out-of-place up there.’

  As we got up to go, Susan said something that surprised me. ‘Actually, I don’t feel completely settled here. I lack the feeling of having roots like in the UK.’ We agreed to keep in touch and a year later we met again, sitting outside a café in a village close to her home. She was full of enthusiasm about the ecological swimming pool they were building, one that filled naturally with rain and was kept clear by carefully chosen plants. As before they were keen to avoid something that didn’t sit well within the environment. ‘A normal pool would look too out-of-place,’ she said. But then the conversation turned back to what she’d expressed in that departing comment last time – a feeling of frustration. ‘Sometimes it feels like I’m not living in France, just spending time here.’ As before, the disappointment was related to language, and a feeling that she’d reached a plateau with learning French. ‘I go to the hairdresser and I reckon I understand, properly, only around five per cent of what she says.’ Despite all this there was no suggestion of returning to the UK. ‘We’ll probably stay here in the Ariège,’ she said. ‘I still feel lucky that we chose to come here.’

  Interlude

  Lucky To Be Here

  A couple of years later I was driving back to the Ariège after a winter in England, playing a mental game of Who will I see first? Some of the locals were like landmarks to me, and I was like a child, ticking them off as I spotted them after being away. These weren’t acquaintances, but people that I always saw around and about, familiar figures in the landscape. There was Black-dog Man, who stood outside his bric-a-brac shop, surveying passers-by and booting his dog when it tried to nibble donkey manure. Waving Catwoman was an elderly lady who stood in the road or crouched at its edge, gesturing at the cars as they drove past. If she wasn’t there then the cat would take on the role of reminding drivers of the speed limit, by sitting in the road. I held the most affection for High-vis-vest Man, whom I often saw walking down the middle of the road on his twice-daily walk from the retirement home. His wooden walking stick was so worn that the bottom fanned outwards like a circular broom. In time the stick became replaced by a zimmer frame, but I still had to swerve the bike to avoid colliding with him.

  I passed the brown and white sign of a skier that indicated one was leaving Aude for the mountainous Ariège. Winter was lingering in the crisp air, and as I rounded the crest of the hill to drop down into the Ariège, I saw that first glimpse of the jagged chain of the Pyrenees, the pyramids looming white against the sky and broken up by patches of grey haze that denoted the valleys. I always felt a thrill at that point. It wasn’t just the frisson from spotting the familiar silhouette of the summits; there was also an emotion sparked by the indistinctness of the haze, knowing that somewhere within that nebulous grey was my Pyrenean home.

  My mind wandered to what I knew about my new neighbours. The house next door, with its concrete stairs and leaking roof, had recently sold to a young couple. Vincent had told me a few snippets about them. Olivier was a local man who’d harboured a dream to live in the hamlet ever since he’d walked through it daily on the way to school. He was moving in with Marianne, and together they were
hoping to convert the land into something that would sustain them. I felt slightly nervous when Vincent described Olivier as a hunter. Was that his job? I asked, envisioning a string of slaughtered animals pegged up outside my windows. Vincent snorted, reminding me that hunting wasn’t an actual career in France.

  I need not have worried. Staggering up the path with a week’s worth of supplies, it was instantly clear that the place had been transformed with a more lived-in look, one that was undeniably untidy but nevertheless seemed to suit the ageing hamlet. My house at the end of the track now had the beginnings of a smallholding rising up around it, with rabbits to one side and poussins out the front that were plagued by a frolicking ginger kitten. The slope behind the house was dotted with the brown and white of sheep and their tottering lambs, with chickens fenced off to the side; whichever happened to be closest to the house could be heard loud and clear down the chimney, which was at the same height as the slope. A sheepdog puppy eyed me suspiciously as he wandered among the items lying in front of the houses: portable vegetable beds, a sheet of drying onions, old pots and pans, a lemon tree and even a cement mixer.

  Marianne came out to apologise for the mess, acknowledging that it was comme un bazar but that they were still getting themselves straight. I honestly didn’t mind. I could see that they had a mammoth job to get the house properly habitable, and at the same time they were trying to clear the slopes around to extend the grazing area. It was certainly cluttered and yes, it looked like an open-air junk store, yet somehow it all felt right, as if the land was being restored to its original purpose. The surrounding forest had been shaved, but with glints of sunlight now visible among the carpet of dried leaves, it all seemed less forbidding. Even the edges of the old terraces had been brought more clearly into relief as they were now bordered by piles of sliced logs interspersed with neatly stacked discarded branches.