by Janine Marsh
Even in the fifteen years that I’ve been here things have changed. In our first year, Thierry the farmer used to walk his cows past our front door. Not for fun, of course, but to get to their field about 300 yards away. I was both charmed and appalled in equal measure (mostly on account of the dollops they would leave behind). As a townie, seeing cows passing my bedroom window was not unlike going on safari and coming face to face with an elephant. A few years ago, a change in regulations meant that farmers are no longer allowed to walk cows on the road but have to drive them to their field. In our village, the tractors dragging the trailers full of cows damaged the road surface so a new road had to be laid that could cope with the heavy traffic. For the first few weeks after the brand-new road was laid, it made the village look relatively clean and modern, but it didn’t last. Mud from the tractor tyres soon made it look its normal grubby self.
All is not lost, however, from the charm of the old days. Just around the corner, another farmer has only to walk his cows across the new road to reach his field, so he is allowed to carry on, meaning at least a hint of the past remains. The only time you will ever see gridlock in these parts is when he and his ancient wife come out with their long sticks to keep the cows on track to cross the road. Cars stop on either side of the line of slow-moving, mooing cows. Mr and Mrs Vache, as we call them, keep the huge animals on track from one field to another, though the cows are curious creatures and would lick the cars and stick their heads into open windows to have a good look at the creatures inside if they were allowed. The traffic jams only occur when the weather is good. In the winter, the cows stay in their barns, snug and warm with hay bales to munch on to keep them going through to spring.
The bitterly cold February weather meant that extra vigilance was needed in the garden when it came to my pet chickens, ducks and geese. They’re always excited to see me but on very chilly days they are really quite joyful when I open the door of the kitchen at the back of the house and they see I’m about to take care of them. A cacophony of clucks, quacks and honks fills the garden, prompting the wild birds to stop pecking at the fat balls and seeds I put out for them and look around to see what all the fuss is about. I do all the usual things, such as making sure there’s plenty of dry straw in the coops and ferrying buckets of water from the house when their troughs and ponds freeze. Some days, when I feel really sorry for them, I’ll make them some rice or porridge and serve it slightly warm.
A man in Arnaud’s bar once told me that it was important to make sure each bird is mobile, as when temperatures are so cold it’s not unusual for a bird to find its feet completely frozen to the ground. Of course, I knew this couldn’t possibly be true, but I asked Madame Bernadette, who’s an experienced poultry keeper, just to be sure.
‘Absolutely true. I’ve had to chisel a duck out of the icy mud many a time,’ she assured me with a serious face.
‘Surely not,’ I said. ‘That must be a joke?’
‘Non,’ she said firmly. ‘It happens. You must check that none of your birds get stuck in the ice. It can cause serious injury and even death.’
I told Mark what Madame Bernadette had said. ‘Surely not,’ he also said. ‘That must be a joke.’
As neither of us were completely certain, we took some old wooden pallets down to the pens to give the birds somewhere to keep off the frozen ground. Every day I checked but never saw any signs of this apocalyptic prediction coming true. The birds loved jumping on and off the pallets, though, and playing chick-king of the castle!
Chickenitis, as my friends call it, has crept up slowly on me since the move to France. In their opinion, I have become addicted to keeping chickens as pets. But there’s something very soothing about spending time with these feathered creatures – despite living in this wonderfully tranquil countryside, my life is quite frenetic at times. You might think that, if anything, a flock of fifty birds, a mix of chickens, ducks and geese, would simply add more stress. But I assure you it has the opposite effect.
When I’m frazzled, taking five minutes out to sit in the pen and watch my birds live their lives is very calming. They boss each other about, inspect everything that moves and chase the wild birds off their food. There are wrens, chaffinches, tits, pigeons, woodpeckers, robins, jays, magpies and even pheasants – but it’s the doves that really get everyone going.
The ducks are very offended at the dove intruders and race around flapping their wings. The geese waddle furiously, honking loudly. The chickens seem to take a deep breath, hitch up their skirts, figuratively speaking, and dash over to have a look. There is always one chicken, usually Joan Crawford, the bossiest and meanest of them, that puts on a spurt and sprints across the pen. Of course, the doves always escape. Dozens of them roost in the trees that surround the pens, waiting stealthily until the chicken ninjas’ backs are turned, then they drop down to the food trays to start again.
I’m always amazed at the difference in chicken personalities. In one pen, the girls are very house-proud, their coop always quite clean. The pen next door, on the other hand, is completely different. They trash it and sit back to wait for the maid to clear up after them. The good girls wander around while I clean, inspecting the newspapers I use to line their trays and the straw that goes in the nest boxes. The bad girls, led by Joan Crawford, want to get involved. The little gang of black and white birds, some fluffy-footed, others bouffant-haired, are poultry hooligans who jump up into the coop while I’m cleaning, rooting around and clucking loudly with a protesting tone. They climb into the bucket where I put their waste to go to the compost heap. They shred the newspapers that line the coop, pull the straw out, and the minute I’m done there’s a race up the ladder to be the first in and leave their mark. At least that’s how it seems.
Meanwhile, having completed the tiling of the kitchen floor and the finishing touches in January, the last room in the house to be renovated was finally ready to use. We’d started with a long narrow room with walls, painted a very lurid yellow (apparently inspired by Monet’s kitchen at Giverny in Normandy), that frequently ran with condensation, the water pooling in a dip in the floor. In one corner there had been a very old loo (yes, in the kitchen), though it was roughly boxed off with thin plywood. There was also a chipped china sink in another corner, opposite a coal-fired oven of indeterminate age that started billowing smoke when we tried to light it. There were a few rotting old cupboards with plenty of rat and mouse droppings in them, and a few mismatched worksurfaces. For years we cooked on a barbecue in the garden.
Over time we added a small extension to create space for a table and chairs overlooking our acre of garden. We fitted wide lantern lights, bought cheap on eBay – horribly heavy and hard to fit – to the roof of the extension to let in more light. We bought cheap cupboard carcasses from a DIY store and then made our own doors and worktops. We installed a new sink and a range oven that works on bottled gas as we have no gas mains. We covered up the well hole in the middle of the room (no one wants to fall down that in the middle of dinner) and built a walk-in pantry with cupboards made of the wood from our old staircase. I would like to tell you it was enjoyable doing up the kitchen but there were times when I could have easily just given up. Twice the pipes burst when the temperature dropped well below freezing, despite copious amounts of protective insulation. The kitchen and extension were flooded both times. The kitchen was the room in the house that took the longest to do, with lots of electrical wiring, plug sockets and lights, the removal of the disgusting loo and new plumbing to fit. As we have a septic tank rather than mains drains, doing that wasn’t half as much fun as you might think.
We studied YouTube tutorials on fitting kitchens, scoured design magazines and the internet for ideas, and took our time to get it right. When we finished it was with great relief and enormous joy that we popped open a bottle of champagne and celebrated having a real kitchen, more than ten years after we’d bought the house. It might seem like a long time but in the village of Embry nearby, we knew a
couple who had had no clean running water for the best part of twenty years. They didn’t live in the house full time but took all their holidays there and would bring out copious amounts of cutlery, glasses and dishes, and wrap them all up in paper to take home to wash.
Now that it was completed, I decided that it was time to try out the kitchen. Thanks to Constance’s cooking lessons and encouragement, I’ve improved considerably as a cook, but lack discipline. Mark, though not exactly chef of the year, is more focused than me and he doesn’t have a social media account, which is my downfall. I love chatting on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. I read every comment someone puts on a photo or post that I share, and reply to as many as I can, and sometimes there are hundreds of comments. And I answer every question someone posts, and there are sometimes a great deal of them. I start out with good intentions when cooking, but often simply get caught up chatting. Frequently I’m alerted by the smoke alarm going off, which Mark now calls the timer.
So, though Mark normally cooks, I thought I would surprise him by making some cupcakes. When I presented them to him, they looked a bit brown (sort of mahogany coloured). ‘I’m sorry,’ I confessed, ‘but someone asked me on Facebook about where the best place for hot chocolate was in Paris, and by the time I finished telling them I was a little late getting them out of the oven.’ Mark managed to ignore the charred tops and bit into one. They were apparently very good – for building walls. Generally the animals love what I cook. They don’t seem to mind my slightly blackened and wizened offerings.
That month we lost Hank Marvin He’s Always Starvin’, the cat who liked my cooking the most. His flu got worse over the winter and, despite injections from the vet, one night he just went to sleep and didn’t wake up. I was utterly heartbroken to lose this poor little cat. I’d only had him for eighteen months, since the day he’d turned up at the back door on my birthday, his eyes horribly red with a raging infection. He was so skinny it made me cry to see his bones stick out. It took me weeks to get him to trust me, leaving food for him in the garden every day. But one day, after he had bitten me so hard that his needle-sharp teeth pierced my fingernail and I still persisted, he decided I was going to be his mum. I rushed him to the patient vet in the town of Hucqueliers, who managed to save one of Hank’s eyes, and I managed to get the cat to eat. Hank, or Skank as everyone else called him, put on weight and followed me everywhere. He loved cuddles, so to hold him I would put on a long-sleeved housecoat to cope with his constant sneezing, which would be interspersed with very loud purring. But he was never a well cat. We buried him near the chicken coop where he loved to sit and watch the birds play, never chasing them.
It wasn’t long before another cat turned up. I think there is a sort of feline grapevine in our village and the word went around that there was a vacancy at the house of the animal-mad British woman. In addition to my own cats, I feed a number of waifs and strays. The people across the road moved out just after Christmas and left their two cats behind, so I put food out for them too and left the door of the woodshed open so they would have shelter.
The new cat, however, was clearly not like the others: she was hugely padded and not at all feral. She had a pretty but grumpy face and meowed frequently. We called her Fat Cat. We were sure she had been well looked after but no one in the village knew of her. We took her to the vets to see if she was chipped. ‘She’s not a biter like those other strays you bring in, is she?’ said the vet, eyeing Fat Cat suspiciously. I assured him she was tame and sweet-natured. Apparently she had a cold and the vet gave her some medicine – also informing us that she was in fact a he!
‘Ow many cats is zis? FIVE? You Brits,’ he said, ‘you are all ze same. Cats, dogs, ’orses and goats … first one, then another until you are almost a zoo.’ Ah well, I always tell him, there are worse things, eh?
And so the hole in our hearts left by Hank Marvin was filled with an enormous, fluffy cat who doesn’t like to move and has a gargantuan appetite. The name Fat Cat stuck. Luckily the other cats took to him and let him eat what he likes. He occasionally makes a feeble effort to join us for morning walks with the dogs, but has never made it further than the end of our fence.
Those morning walks take us through the village, past a little chapel big enough for half a dozen people, built by a local man in honour of his late wife. From there we head up into the hills and fields of the Seven Valleys. Every day I see the same people: Jean-Claude in his van, driving to the home of Claudette to check she’s well; Bernadette on her way to her office job in town, leaving her husband free to find ways to spend the day avoiding things to do; Madame Bernadette cleaning the doorstep, dusting the walls or walking with her little shih-tzu that yaps incessantly and squares up to our dogs. Twice a week, I see the mayor’s assistant, industriously typing away in the town hall. Then there’s Jean-François, who cuts the village’s hedges and grass, and keeps it looking spick and span; and the Young Man, who moved to the village in his early twenties.
At the top of the rue du Chapelle, there is a field with two very large pure white horses in it. They are Boulonnais horses, an ancient breed in the region going back to the first century when the Romans brought a similar breed of horse with them, and are owned by an old farmer who lives in the village. Every night we see him come by on his antiquated tractor with a small box with feed or hay on the back. In warm months he stops where the grass is long under the hedgerows and pulls out a rusty scythe. Despite his great age (well into his seventies) he swings at the grass, piling up the cuttings in the box. Traditional ways are held in high esteem around here.
As he approaches the field, the largest white horse hears the gentle putt-putt of the old tractor and races to the gate like a youngster, though she too is very old. She is a big, muscular horse and comes from a line of horses that were used to pull heavy carts, but she is very tender as she nuzzles the old farmer, snuffling softly and shaking her head. They clearly adore each other. The other white horse, her daughter, is more reticent and ambles over slowly, almost nonchalantly. Kids …
Sometimes there is a giant stork – pure white, too – in the field with the horses. It is almost magical when you see them all together. There are times when I pinch myself at how beautiful this place is and how very lucky I am to have had the chance to appreciate its gentle, authentic and seasonal beauty.
Everyone addresses the ancient farmer as ‘monsieur’. Each night when I see him chatting away to his horses I call out ‘Bonjour, Monsieur.’ Usually he waves and calls ‘Bonjour’ before turning back to the horses and hay, to cleaning out their stable or filling their water butt, and off we both go about our business.
One day he introduced a young horse to the field, another pure white Boulonnais, a male this time. When we passed by, it galloped towards us to stick its big head over the hedge and neighed excitedly. We said hello and gave it some grass from the verge. When we left, it raced along the fence with my dogs and was generally very playful. One night, after I called out my customary bonjour, Monsieur called out to me as I walked on, ‘What do you think of my new horse?’ Surprised, I stopped and turned. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I think he’s gorgeous. He’s given a new lease of life to the older ones, hasn’t he?’ As I said this, the young one ran over and started chewing the old man’s sleeve. The other two horses, including the one that is usually a bit standoffish, also galloped over and were jealously vying for the old man’s attention. ‘Perhaps it’s time for me to introduce someone younger into my life,’ the old man said, laughing. He’s been on his own, according to Jean-Claude, for more than thirty years. Then he winked at me. Since then, we’ve returned to our usual bonjour greetings, but every now and again he does stop and chat about the weather, his horses or the Parisians who have moved to our village.
At the end of last year, our Belgian neighbours moved about 2 kilometres down the road to an even smaller hamlet to live in a bigger house. They sold their old house to Parisians. This was big news in our village. Claudette, who at nearly ni
nety is not the oldest person in the village, has a very good memory and told us, ‘The last time we had Parisians here was nearly fifty years ago. I remember it well. They wore high-heeled shoes and fur coats to walk their whiny little poodle around the village – the ladies that is, not the men.’ She can still crack a joke despite her great age.
The last Parisians apparently lived in our house. During its four hundred or so years, the house has been an animal barn, a peasant dwelling, a café, the village telephone exchange and then, in 1971, the poodle-owning Parisians bought it. They left the enormous telephone exchange sign up in one of the rooms but built around it – it’s still there and we too have built around it. One of these days, when we finally finish renovating, I’ll get this old sign’s light working.
The Parisians lined the walls with newspapers dating from May to October 1971. They are still there, hidden behind the new internal walls that we put up. I like to think that hundreds of years from now (when this old house will surely still be standing as Mark builds as if preparing for the apocalypse, with reinforced walls and floors) someone will find the newspapers on the wall and be amazed by them. The Parisians also put hideous pinewood panels everywhere, lining room after room with vile orange planks, sucking all the light and life out of the place. The panels are long gone now but the memory haunts me still. When we took them down, we discovered why they had done it. Previous, much earlier, owners, maybe as long as a hundred years ago or more, had smeared a mix of mud, dung and straw up to twelve inches thick across the walls and ceilings to act as insulation. I can’t tell you how much fun it wasn’t to dig it all out and get rid of several tons of decades-old animal poo.
No one has seen our new neighbours, so we don’t know if they are wearing high-heeled shoes on our muddy, cowtrodden rues. Or if they have a poodle – as it is believed all Parisians do. But their car has been spotted and apparently it is clean, which has amused everyone as no car stays clean around here. Someone has allegedly confirmed that lights are on in the house on some weekends (I am not quite sure how they know this as the Parisians have erected a tall wooden fence all the way round). Monsieur Partout, as he is known (it means Mr Everywhere and is the name given to a villager who likes to knows what’s going on; there’s one in every village), has on a daily basis been wandering down the little alleyway to the Parisians’ house. As there is nothing else down there except an old footpath that leads to another tiny village a couple of miles away, he has only one reason to be there – spying and reporting back to the village grapevine.
