A House at the End of the Track

by Michelle Lawson

  We gradually got to know each other, petit à petit as they say. Trying out John’s theory that incomers have a duty to show the French our food customs, I cautiously offered them the odd English treat, such as a couple of bottles of Devon craft beer that exploded in yeasty froth when they were opened. I handed Olivier a packet of Cornish clotted cream cookies that he ripped open and munched before I could explain the meaning of the words Rugged Cornwall on the packet. Marianne would painstakingly explain the different vegetables that she grew, introducing me to a creamy vegetable dish that I’d never heard of – potiron marron – and I tried unsuccessfully to copy. I bought vegetables from her and received the odd gift of presumably unsellable carrots that had great chunks nibbled away by some unidentified pest. They agreed to check an academic abstract that I’d written in French, poring over it together, eager to improve my clumsy attempt. I handed them a long-term loan of the key to my old garage that sat at the side of the track, knowing that it was more valuable to them with all of their stuff. In return Olivier cut down an overhanging tree that had threatened to flatten the flimsy structure, filling a corner of the garage with neat 50cm lengths to fit my fireplace.

  Every now and then they’d make an effort to involve me in something that they thought I’d be interested in. Once I met them on the lane when they were moving the sheep and they handed me a silver-handled crook so I could keep up the rear. Another evening the dusky silence was punctuated by a strange bark, followed by a hammering on the door. I opened it to see Olivier standing in the dark with a deer suspended upside down from his left hand. ‘Is it dead?’ I asked. It was the deer who answered with the same bark I’d heard moments before, raising its head to gaze at me from the humiliation of being dangled with its feet tied together. They explained that they’d found it, sick, in the forest and had carried it back so that a vet could investigate. A discussion ensued as to exactly what kind of deer it was, with concern that they got the English name right. It turned out to be a roe deer. I left them to it and gently closed the door on the spectacle of Olivier stepping onto a set of weighing scales as Marianne passed him the strung-up deer.

  Another evening they banged on the door, shouting, and I opened it, expecting to find some catastrophe, but instead I was pulled out to come and look at an unusually spectacular sunset. A deep red haze was suspended over the Massat valley, part of the mer de nuages that I’d seen drifting that way whilst out walking earlier. We wandered along the hillside to gain a better view of the phenomenon, watching the shape turn from red to gold along its edges. ‘We’re lucky – lucky? – to be here,’ murmured Marianne, testing her English. I nodded. It wasn’t an easy life, what with tending the sheep and the chickens, flitting between the different allotments to plant, tend and harvest everything, getting up early to do the markets and trying to renovate the big old house with its leaking roof. But it was a life they had chosen, just as the English incomers had chosen theirs, although the smallholding was a long way from Elaine’s manicured lawn with chickens alongside.

  Being local, Olivier had instilled the project with a sense of continuity in terms of place, and together they were slowly picking up the pieces of how people had lived here in an earlier age. Unexpectedly, their arrival also helped to deepen my own sense of familiarity and connection with the landscape. The previous owners had rarely ventured from the house during their short visits; Claude had spent his time on the renovations while Sandrine sat reading in the shade. I often told them where I’d been out walking, which was met with a polite interest, but the names of places and summits didn’t appear to mean a great deal to them.

  This profoundly changed with the arrival of Olivier and Marianne. Olivier in particular had an exceptionally detailed knowledge of the area, having spent years in these mountains. The first time he came inside, he walked around scrutinising the photographs I’d put on the walls, pretty much naming the exact spot where I’d stood to take each photo. He began suggesting various peaks, passes and routes for me, some of which turned out to be spectacular and to which I returned over and over. If he saw me exhaustedly walking up the path at the end of the day, he would want to know where I’d been, always nodding and explaining the route to Marianne, and usually dropping in the fact that he’d once run it in one hour and twenty minutes, compared to my five or six hours of plodding. Nevertheless, I learned to take care with understanding his instructions. When Terry and I walked into Spain, we followed a route that I thought he’d described as “flat”, but he could only have been referring to the initial approach along the valley floor, as over the course of the day we climbed a height gain of 1,456m.

  Of the hunting there was little evidence, apart from a jar of wild boar pâté that they brought round one evening. I even made friends with the scruffy sheepdog, which was a first for me, being a cat person. I got used to the dog following me around and coming to lie with his head on my feet when I sat outside. I didn’t care about the dirt he transferred from his paws as he jumped up, although Marianne would always tell him to stop, crying Michelle est propre! – Michelle is clean! I grew used to hearing the late afternoon “clock” of the chainsaw starting up when Olivier came home from work, glancing out to see him balanced on the hillside, one hand on his hip, single-handedly shearing the forest. I learned to wait patiently on the track with my bike while chains from a tractor pulled yet another felled ash tree out of the way. I got used to falling asleep to the chime of bells when the sheep were pastured in my “back garden”, and I even learned to blank out the Sunday 6am hammering as the couple panicked to patch up the DIY disaster they’d inherited. Juliette had been absolutely right when she’d said that whoever bought that house would need to begin all over again.

  Epilogue

  The End Of The Track?

  Before this journey, I’d been curious about the English incomers living in this corner of France; what brought them here? How did they feel about being English among that stereotype of cliquey British expats with their half-baked dreams? Did they feel social pressure to be the right kind of incomer, and not like the dreaded “others”?

  I’d learned that it was too easy to be critical of the other English, and if people’s behaviour flew a bit close to the stereotype – and it often did – then they just manipulated their way around any sense of hypocrisy. We have a duty to show the French what we eat; it’s the fault of the French for not understanding our pronunciation; it’s easier to use the internet than ask the locals; we aren’t the kind of people to socialise, and so forth. It would have been easy to ridicule it all, just like the trolls on the forum; instead, I began to see it as understandable. If the way the incomers behaved was often contradictory to the attitudes and the values that they espoused, it was their way of maintaining a sense of self in a world full of irony.

  That Mirepoix menu, which I’d shown people as an afterthought, turned out to reflect the contradictions perfectly. Almost everyone decried the café – it’s not what I’m here for – but almost universally they went on to talk about when they’d visited it. Faced with an interviewer, it was tempting to show disdain and question why anyone would want to eat bread pudding in France. Yet should a move to another country mean a total refusal to indulge in something you’d previously enjoyed?

  Some of the incomers worried about being seen to inflict their English culture, as if they were colonials imposing their way of life on the locals. Perhaps this wasn’t really surprising when journalists talked about a British invasion; admittedly it was tongue-in-cheek, and from what I’d seen, the British incomers who’d made their way to Ariège were a sparse and unthreatening lot. But there was a clear reluctance to be seen as not imposing an English culture, or being insensitive to local customs. In Pat’s words, ‘I bought a box of crackers for them ’cause they’ve never seen them before and I said it’s a tradition anglais and they just loved that I’d thought about it. That isn’t imposing on them, but just showing them a little different quirk that w
e have.’

  During the course of my research, I‘d often been asked how the French perceived the English incomers. It was impossible to generalise from anecdotal evidence; looking back over my notes, I’d noticed that three individuals had mentioned that they had sensed a chilly response at the post office, although that could have been down to one cashier. On the whole, people talked as if they felt they’d been accepted; not exactly with wild French enthusiasm for their English neighbours, but acceptance and tolerance. Pat and John’s perception of being treated like royalty was the exception, although Lynn talked about having to hide from the garrulous locals who wanted to talk to her and who had been nothing but kind. It perhaps helped that she lived in one of the valleys that had been at the heart of bear training, where almost every family had either a member living in the United States or one who had returned. Certainly Juliette had looked bemused when I raised the question of possible French resentment against English incomers. ‘Everyone is welcome here,’ she said, shaking her head.

  Something else that surprised me was the dissatisfaction that almost everyone claimed to feel at their level of French, especially those who’d spent years learning and came to feel that being “good” was never going to be enough. This was down to how people saw themselves in relation to what they’d imagined before the move – the ideal self. Academics call this kind of need or motivation integrative, as it relates to an emotional and social need to fit in. Susan and Gerald seemed to be motivated primarily by this need to be socially competent and to lessen the cultural gap.

  Those who needed to work also had an instrumental motivation; a more practical necessity to learn a language. You could argue that this was a basic aspect of living in France for everyone; nevertheless, some people tried to manage without it, although it was difficult for those who needed to work. For Lynn, Tina and Emma, their ability was reasonable but not quite enough to be comfortable in the kind of employment they’d been used to. While they also talked about emotional needs, where “it’s just not the same” to socialise with French people, the instrumental factors, the practical issues, might also lead people to pack up and return to the UK.

  For Pat and John, learning on a need-to-know basis was good enough. They’d made an effort; they appeared to manage on the whole and had probably reached their expected level. Whenever I set foot in a French DIY store I’d hear, in my head, John’s Midland vowels slowly repeating the mantra: That’s what they call a saw, that’s what they call a lawnmower. For them, being invited and welcomed to social gatherings was more important than being fluent, even if their pronunciation of pain au raisins was incomprehensible to others. Thrilled with their reception by the French, they took delight in being treated as something different, the English.

  In contrast, the conversation with Emma and Mitch oozed tensions between the ideal integrated French-speaking incomer, and what turned out to be their reality. But such tensions were smoothed out by an insistence that they hadn’t imagined anything different, and what’s more, in every other way they did things right – not like the part-timers. To sum it up, it was all presented in black and white terms, a kind of binary system where you were either the right or the wrong kind of British incomer.

  A Place Of Transience

  As time went on it became clear that the Ariège was a transient place for many. It wasn’t just the young Ariégeois who left; fast-forward a few years and not many of the incomers I’d met were still living there.

  On that late summer morning in Gerald’s courtyard, I’d detected an air that something was missing. Along with his acknowledgement that Sandra would really rather be closer to family, it all foreshadowed a likely future back in England. In the event it took three years. There was no doubt that they were happy with how their six years of small town Ariège life had turned out, but they were needed elsewhere.

  The brilliant family, aware that they had passed that crucial third Ariège winter, had nevertheless already sold up and moved out by the following summer. Valley Cottage, so painstakingly built and movingly named by Lynn and Steve, was on the market before it was even finished, its walls enveloping a sense of relief that they would one day return to family and the English culture they professed to miss.

  I’d often cycled past Elaine’s “English” house and noted that the shutters were closed; according to Susan, the pair were often back in England, visiting family. Trying to track down Tina, I discovered that the shop she’d worked in had shut down a few years after our chat and that she’d moved away. Even Felicity, the most settled old-timer, had decided to retire early, and rather than remain in Ariège as planned, they’d uprooted out of the département to somewhere further east. Less surprising was the speed at which Dylan had abandoned the collapsed yurt, leaving the barn to continue its passage into decay, no doubt to the glee of the resident loirs.

  So there were many practical reasons why people left, mostly connected with the need to work and stay close to family back in England. Yet there was something else that nagged at me. The whole idea of “moving to France for a better life” was a generic phenomenon that sometimes blurred the distinctiveness of place. To some incomers, Ariège could have been anywhere in France, as long as it had the right house. The country itself was sometimes an amorphous backdrop, affordable “France”, a commodity that people didn’t always examine beyond its ability to offer the right house at the right price. It seemed too easy to come to the Ariège inhabiting an idea rather than a place, and when the idea became the place, it was not always what people had imagined or intended.

  It therefore wasn’t surprising that some people became disenchanted and moved on, especially if they’d drifted into the Ariège because they couldn’t afford where they really wanted to be. They’d come to France for a better life, and if something wasn’t right, then it might finally dawn on them that it was the wrong village, region or even country for what they’d been looking for. I’d read a few posts on the forum from members saying their goodbyes as they prepared to move elsewhere in France or over the border to Spain. They talked about going in search of more settled weather and less rain, more opportunities to indulge in social and cultural events and more tourists to occupy their gîtes.

  A more reliable presence was that of the Mirepoix café. One rainy and deserted Sunday I had time to kill in Mirepoix and walked past it, noting that it had changed owners yet again and the chalkboard menu was now all in French – gateau de carotte replacing the carotte cake. The door opened into a steamy atmosphere and the sounds of Midlands accents. Just one other table was occupied and I sat beneath a string of stuffed fabric hearts hanging above my head, embroidered with fluffy slogans such as There’s no place like home. The walls were dotted with various English menus advertising cream teas, toasted teacakes and the like. I could see a few dozen English paperback titles stacked up on a tall bookshelf, with a notice advertising English book exchanges, here and at Léran, to support a cancer charity. The male owner shouted my order in English to the young French chef.

  The couple sitting there were happy to strike up a conversation, describing their holiday home nearby that they’d found on the internet. Like so many of the others they’d originally wanted something further east. They made their house sound rather grand, describing how it had previously been renovated and extended by an English banker and his team of British builders. They asked me where I was from. ‘How do you manage with the cold up in the mountains?’ asked Dave. I shrugged my shoulders. ‘I just dress in layers, and saw some wood when I really need to warm up.’

  ‘We’ve brought a log burner over with us, in the car, but it’s just sitting there. We can’t seem to find out how to get it installed,’ he said.

  Mary nodded. ‘Can’t find anyone to do it.’ The language barrier had possibly been a factor there, although they glossed over it.

  ‘We manage to get by,’ smiled Dave.

  ‘And everyone’s really helpful,’ chippe
d in Mary. They had been deep in conversation with the owner when I arrived, enjoying a bit of familiar English comfort on the Sunday when winter had finally arrived.

  A few months later, on yet another dismal Sunday at the end of a winter that had lingered for far too long, I opened the door of the café to find it was devoid of customers. Ordering from the cake display, I tried not to eavesdrop on the conversation between the French chef and the owner who spoke slowly back at him in English. The conversation ended when a young man came in and sat down to play chess with the chef. The owner drew up his chair to talk to me. I was curious about how viable it was to stay open on Sundays throughout the winter, and he assured me that it was – there were sufficient visits from the English incomers, as well as the French, to make it worthwhile. The phone rang and he disappeared. I pulled a book from the bookcase, left a few euros as donation in the charity box, and left the warmth of the café to pick my way over the icy cobbles back to the car.

  Finally, what about my own journey as I’d travelled around the Ariège talking to the English – had I deepened an understanding of my own place here? People had enjoyed talking about their experiences but occasionally I’d caught a glimpse of myself through their eyes. For some I was a fellow Brit in France with whom they would happily meet again over dinner; others had slotted me into the category of the irritating “part-timers”. For Dylan and his entourage I was the owner of a “proper house”, someone who automatically binned food that dropped onto the floor, and who used the normal supermarket entrance rather than dipping into the skips around the back.