by Janine Marsh
Monsieur Martinez, a former postman with a penchant for storytelling, picked up his Picon beer (a beer with a shot of orange liqueur) and settled back in his chair. ‘Many years ago,’ he began, ‘Arnaud was in love with a woman who made cheese in Azincourt. Besotted with her, he was. Wanted to marry her and spend the rest of his life with her.’ He stopped and took another sip of his beer. ‘But they had a big falling-out because of his penny-pinching. He’s always been that way, but his girlfriend couldn’t live with it. She wanted her hair done and he arranged for his friend to do her hair as a surprise. But it was a disaster. The hairdresser cut off her long hair and put pink streaks in. And then when Arnaud said he didn’t know what she was moaning about because it wasn’t expensive, she dumped him.’
Everyone in the bar was of the opinion that for Arnaud to have spent money on such eye-popping decorations for the bar, which had been through many Christmases over the years without any change in décor whatsoever, it must be love.
‘Who is the new girlfriend?’ I asked. ‘Is she local?’
‘No,’ said Monsieur Martinez. ‘She works at the boulangerie on the corner.’
‘I thought Berthe worked there,’ I said. ‘Has she left?’
‘No, it’s Berthe that he’s going out with.’
‘But surely she’s local. She told me she only cycles for about fifteen minutes to get here.’
Monsieur Martinez arched his eyebrows. ‘That’s not local,’ he said. ‘Local is if you’re born in the town.’ Suddenly I remembered my neighbour Jean-Claude telling me his nickname, after forty-five years of living in our village, is still ‘l’étranger’, even though he’s from just 5 kilometres away.
Meanwhile the conversation in the bar was quite literally sparkling as everyone was covered in glitter, which sprinkled and swirled about every time the door was opened and the wind from outside took a turn around the room. Instead of putting glasses on top of coasters, we used coasters to try to keep the glitter out of our drinks. It was in my hair, in Monsieur Martinez’s thick eyebrows and in Mark’s beard.
When Arnaud announced it was time to close, everyone wished Madame Armandine a happy birthday and kissed her on the cheek, and we left them to their birthday dinner. As we drove home through the wiggly country lanes of the Seven Valleys, it looked as if the whole area had been abandoned. Shutters were closed tight against the cold and the wind, and we drove for miles without seeing a single human being. But, if you’re ever in these parts on a winter’s day, simply look up and you’ll see wispy smoke cheerfully floating from chimneys. Inside the houses, life goes on, warm and cosy, centred on a wood fire or a coal oven – very useful in the countryside where stormy weather causes power cuts from time to time. When that happens, we rely on candlelight, read lots of books and try to stay calm, though it’s not always easy when your job relies on the internet.
Back home, as I opened the door of the house, with the wood fire still glowing, I thought I could smell smoke from my dad’s roll-up cigarettes in the air. There are times when his presence is so strong that I can almost believe he is still with us. It was several years after we bought the house as a holiday home, renovating at weekends and on holidays, that Mark persuaded me that it would be a good idea to give up our jobs in London and our comfy home in the suburbs to spend more time together and do up our French folly. It was going to be a temporary thing as we knew at least one of us would have to go back to London to earn money to live.
But it was just a few months into our new lives when my dad found out he had lung cancer and it was terminal. The doctors estimated he had two years left. I went back to London sooner than anticipated and spent the next two years shuttling between London and France, looking after dad and helping with the renovation back in France when I could.
Dad signed up for a programme to test a new treatment, even though he knew it wouldn’t help him and would make him even more tired than the disease itself and the conventional treatment. Ten years after we’d lost Mum to cancer, he was still counting the days since she’d gone and he felt that if his participation in the tests meant one person had a better time than her, then it would be worth it. Some days it exhausted him. He would sleep for hours and I’d sit quietly, waiting for him to wake, to make him a cup of tea or something to eat, and to just be there. When Dad awoke, he’d ask me to read my stories about life in France that I’d been scribbling down while he slept. Not prone to praise, one day he said, ‘You should write a book. You’re quite good.’
When he died almost exactly two years after he was diagnosed, I was heartbroken. First Mum and then Dad to the same terrible disease. My dad may have always said, ‘Life is for living. Don’t waste one single precious moment,’ but there are times after you lose someone that you really don’t feel like making the most of things. You want to sit and remember, and some days you howl at the loss. But my dad’s words stayed with me and I was determined to make him proud. I went back to France resolute that we would get the renovation finished one day. And I began to write in earnest.
My friends and family had been quite sure I’d never last in France. I’d worked in an office job since school, I am a Londoner born and bred, and I didn’t like the smell of cow poo. In my office, they said my set-up in France was like The Good Life (The Good Neighbours in the US), a sitcom about a middle-aged man who reaches a milestone in his life and decides to make a change, giving up his job and persuading his wife to join him in a quest to live a more self-sufficient lifestyle.
After Dad died, Mark built me a website and I started blogging. I called my site ‘The Good Life France’. I wrote about my daily life, the places I visited, the people I met – anything and everything to do with France. It started as a fun way to keep friends up to date with my new life and the enormous renovation job we’d taken on. When other people started to read it, I was thrilled. The blog grew and grew, and I just couldn’t stop writing! And my audience grew and grew, too.
I started a Facebook community page and made new friends with people from all around the world who have a common love of all things French. Every weekend we’d share photos – it’s become a tradition on my page now and thousands of people join in.
Within a couple of years, the blog was getting more than a million views a month. It led to companies wanting to advertise on the website. I was asked to write about France for newspapers, magazines and other websites. One day a publisher contacted me and asked if I’d be interested in writing a book about my journey from city slicker to out-and-out country bumpkin.
The blog has led to me travelling all over France and discovering more and more about my adopted country, it’s history, secrets, culture, gastronomy, people and monuments. Mark, meanwhile, studied to become an expert on building websites and how they work. It turned out he was incredibly good at it. To our surprise, in the end we didn’t have to go back to our jobs in London.
FEBRUARY
Nouveau city slickers
BY FEBRUARY THE freezing fog had cleared and snow had arrived. The soft flakes fell on our village, smothering everything and muffling the sound of the tractors ferrying food to animal barns around the valleys.
The dogs loved to play in the white powder that dusted the hills and paths. We had to keep a close eye on them on our walks as the rabbits, hares and pheasants that are so prolific in the countryside were much easier to see against a white background and Ella Fitzgerald loved to chase them.
Not everyone loves the snow here, though, especially the old folk. In winter more than ever they rely on mobile deliveries. Pas-de-Calais, with a population of 1.2 million, is one of the most densely populated, as well as largest, departments in France, even though it has no large cities. It contains 895 villages and hamlets scattered throughout the lush countryside and along the coast. Some communes, as they are called, have shops, bars and businesses, but many have nothing. There’s very little public transport in rural areas, and often none at all. But, long before reducing your carbon footprint became some
thing to aspire to, this little part of France decided that making many people drive to the shops is daft, so they bring the shops to each village. Goods cost a few centimes more than you would pay in the shops, but nobody minds that at all.
When it snows, everyone in the village rallies round to make sure neighbours, especially the elderly or vulnerable, are looked after. It’s not unique to my village: it’s a normal part of life throughout the Seven Valleys.
To walk the dogs each morning I don scarf, thick, padded man-sized gloves, army-style parka, thick socks, welly warmers, welly boots and sometimes, if it’s still dark, a beanie hat with a torchlight sewn into the rim. When I think that not that long ago I’d be trotting over London Bridge with all the other city slickers, on my way to the office wearing a smart coat, stiletto-heeled boots and carrying a briefcase, I doubt anyone would recognize the half-yeti who now makes her way up and down hills with three excitable dogs.
Jean-Claude doesn’t enjoy snow at all as it means he has to walk. One morning I could hear him huffing and puffing in the road outside my gate before I even opened it. Usually he drives his little white van the few hundred yards from his house at the bottom of our hill to his mother-in-law Claudette’s house at the top. He has a fondness for beer, wine, cheese, cakes, duck à l’orange, snails, frogs legs, mashed potato, chocolate pudding and much more. It shows. He’s not exactly keen on exercise of any sort. He does the very short trip several times a day, checking on Claudette first thing in the morning, stopping in for coffee and pain perdu (French toast) every couple of hours, joining her for lunch – despite being nearly ninety years old, she cooks him a three-course meal from fresh ingredients every day. In the evening, if his wife is still at work, he will pop in to see if anything is needed before Claudette goes to bed at precisely 7 p.m. Along with rising at 5 a.m. all year round, gardening and exercising daily – and drinking a glass of homemade cider for breakfast alongside a slice of pork belly – Claudette swears that ten hours sleep a night is the secret to living to a ripe old age.
‘Zut alors,’ I said to Jean-Claude as I opened the gate to say hello, ‘isn’t it cold?’ Jean-Claude frowned at me because no one really says ‘Zut alors’ in France.
‘Merde, isn’t it cold?’ he corrected me. ‘Look at that idiot Thierry up the top of the hill. He has decided today of all days is a good day to deliver wood to someone and now he has got his tractor stuck.’ He rolled his eyes to emphasize his frustration.
Earlier the sound of an engine being revved loudly and persistently had echoed around the village, bouncing off the hills and trickling along the tops of the trees. To tell the truth, I thought the racket was probably Jean-Claude as he refuses to buy a new battery to replace the worn out one in his old tractor and usually bump-starts it on the hill. But now I could see that it was Thierry who was causing the rumpus. He had indeed loaded several tons of wood onto a trailer on the back of his tractor, and having slithered out of the entrance to his farm he had lost control on the icy road. He had skidded and was now wedged sideways after narrowly avoiding crashing through the very prickly hawthorn hedge that lined the garden of the house opposite.
‘I suppose I shall have to go and sort it out,’ said Jean-Claude, who is the self-appointed officer-of-sorting-things-out in the village. He stomped up the road (not easy when it’s slippery), muttering curses under his breath. Reaching the hapless Thierry, he began shouting instructions: ‘Back, forward, back, forward, back, forward, turn, back, forward, back, forward …’ The tractor went hither and thither, and Thierry’s face turned puce. Eventually the tractor was free of the gate and facing the right way down the hill. Thierry went trundling past, refusing to look in my direction. Jean-Claude watched with narrowed eyes like Clint Eastwood seeing off his foe, gave a Gallic shrug and turned to walk through Claudette’s gate for his morning coffee, his day’s work done.
A little while later, he was back, saying he had a favour to ask for Claudette. Mark and I followed him up the hill to Claudette’s house, which, at around two hundred years old, is considered relatively modern in these parts, and into an outbuilding at the side that leads to a gloomy cellar.
The tiny, fit-for-a-hobbit door to the cellar was broken. Jean-Claude said it had been there since the house was built and ‘had seen better days’. Seen better days? He wasn’t kidding. It looked like it was made from wooden lace and held together with sticky tape. Barely hanging on to a rusty hinge, the handle was a piece of string, and the woodworm holes looked more like wood-snake holes (if there were such a thing).
‘Do you think you could fix it up?’ Jean-Claude asked Mark, who everyone knows is a whiz with woodwork. ‘I think maybe we’d better just make a new one,’ Mark replied.
‘On no, there’s no need for that,’ said Jean-Claude. ‘It just needs a little bit of patching up. Belle-maman is used to this door. She’s been using it for nearly ninety years.’
‘She likes to make sure she gets the most use out of things,’ Jean-Claude once told us. She has taught me to use the corks from bottles as kindling for the wood fire and to repurpose empty plastic bottles into mole deterrents. Plonked on the end of a stick, they tremble in a breeze and the vibration apparently scares the bejeezus out of a mole. Does it work? Well, my garden is still full of molehills, but Claudette assures me it would be even worse without the plastic-bottle deterrents.
Mark said he would give the door repair a go, but he didn’t look convinced. As a thank-you, Jean-Claude wanted to give us some carrots. That’s how it works round here between neighbours and friends – no hourly rate, but a swap instead.
Jean-Claude took us down the cellar stairs. Quite how a ninety-year-old woman goes up and down those steep steps in such gloomy light is beyond me. Fit for a goat is all I will say. In the earth-smelling underground cave, there was a mound of potatoes piled up against a wall and wooden barrels lined another wall. There was also a huge, old pram, which looked mouldy, and a long wooden crate filled with sand. Jean-Claude plunged his hands into it and came up with an enormous carrot. He brushed off the sand and bit into the end. The cellar echoed to the sound of his crunching.
‘Magnifique, very juicy – from the field next to the one where Thierry keeps his horses in the summer,’ he announced. He pulled out a couple of dozen carrots for us to take home. They might have been down there in that dark, cold cellar for a few months, but those carrots tasted as fresh as the day they came out of the ground. I love this way of helping each other out in the country – it really brings people together.
Once, a woman who lives around the corner knocked on the door and asked if we could give her husband a lift to pick up his car. It had slid off the road in the snow several miles away. He’d had it towed to a garage and managed to get them to drop him off home. (Taxis are just not an option where we are – we once enquired how much it would cost to take a taxi into the town and back, about a thirty-five-minute round journey: 120 euros came the answer. ‘For that,’ said Mark, ‘I’d expect a gold-plated limo.’) We’d never met the woman before but had seen her waiting with her son outside the town hall for the school bus. Despite the skating-rink condition of the road that day, Mark agreed to take the husband to his car. Arriving at the garage, the man’s car was not in a good state but he told Mark that the garage staff were robbers and wanted too much money to repair it. He tied the dangling bumper up with string and revved the engine before thanking Mark for his help and shooting out the garage door and down the road. Mark was convinced, as he set off slowly and carefully, that he would find the car in a ditch on the way home. Luckily, that wasn’t the case and the woman came round a couple of days later with several jars of jam and a large sponge cake.
Mark took Claudette’s old door into his workshop. It used to be a garage, but we converted it as it seemed more important that we had somewhere to keep tools and build things for the house when we can’t work outside due to the weather. He plonked the door down on his workstation and set about repairing it. Mark made a wooden fr
ame and inside it he fitted the remains of the rotten old door that apparently meant so much to Claudette. He made little wooden dowels to fill in the holes and patched the rest up with wood glue and shavings. Once he’d rubbed it down, I could hardly see where the cavities had been. Then he fitted a new handle to the wooden frame and varnished the whole thing.
‘Mon ami, you are a genius, the Leonardo da Vinci of the wood shop,’ announced Jean-Claude when Mark returned and fitted the old door. Claudette came to inspect the work. ‘Tres bien,’ she said beaming and, patting down her silver hair, beckoned us into her kitchen for a glass of wine and to tell us stories of the old days when the village was a thriving place with several cafés and twice as many inhabitants as there are today. Wearing a nylon housecoat over a dress to keep it clean – apparently she has never owned a pair of trousers in her life – she told us tales of the back-breaking work that the farm boys did, how no one really went further than a couple of miles by horse and cart, and how it wasn’t until 1940 that she saw a car for the first time.
‘So much has changed,’ she said wistfully, looking at us over the top of her little round glasses. She doesn’t have a computer or a mobile phone, and has never used the internet. She has never been on a train, let alone an aeroplane, and has never visited Paris. She doesn’t like it when I say, ‘Have you never been ... never done ... or never seen ...?’ She tells me I should focus on what has been done and seen. ‘Life isn’t always about what you have, what you can get, what you see and do. It’s about family, friends and home. Those are the really important things and they are here, all around me. I don’t have to go anywhere else to make me happy.’
Claudette spends most of her time in the kitchen where she has an old television that sits on top of her ancient fridge and shows images in black and white. Her enamel-embossed oven is more than sixty years old, a wedding present, though sadly her husband has long since passed. The oven still works so she sees no reason to get a new one, though I’m sure Jean-Claude would be pleased if she did since he has to cut wood into tiny pieces to fuel it.
