by Janine Marsh
One postman was apparently a potential serial killer because his ‘eyes are too close together’. When the Fish Man went on holiday, his rounds were taken on by his brother, who came from Le Havre in Normandy to help out. ‘You could tell he can’t be trusted because he’s got big earlobes,’ Bénédicte commented.
‘Is that your doggy?’ asked the chatty new Bread Man one Tuesday, after he tooted the horn so much outside the house that I gave up trying to work and went out there. ‘Yes, he is very friendly,’ I said, looking down at Churchill, who had been in the pigsty with me while Ella and Bruno, who are totally in love at the moment, were in the back garden together. They have been leaving Churchill out a fair bit lately and he stands at the gate looking forlorn and pitiful. He loves to meet people and took an instant shine to the new Bread Man, chasing his own tail, running around and around in circles like a complete maniac.
He’s learning English apparently (the Bread Man, not Churchill). He told me that his daughter was having English lessons at school and he was helping with her homework. He was hoping to practise on me, the only Brit, apart from Mark, in the village. And I think he might have swotted up for the Thursday delivery.
‘The rain is very falling,’ he said carefully. ‘It like a river.’ He tapped the side of his nose as if he had made this personal discovery while driving around in his little white van full of delicious-smelling bread. He wasn’t wrong: a river of rainwater was cascading down the hill. I think it might have even been possible to surf it, though I wasn’t tempted to try.
The next baguette delivery led to another English language lesson in the rain with the Bread Man:
‘Where is your doggy? The rain has carried him?’ He laughed at his own wit and his moustache wriggled as it if was trying to escape.
‘The dog refuses to leave the pigsty,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t like the rain.’
The Bread Man looked lost. ‘What is pigsty?’ I had no idea what the word is in French.
‘The house where the pigs live,’ I said.
‘You have pigs living in your house?’ He was incredulous.
‘No. We have a small building in the garden where the pigs used to live. Now it is where I write.’
‘You write with the pigs?’
In the end he drove off because Madame Bernadette, his next customer, was waving from the bottom of the hill for her bread. He was obviously running late.
I am pretty sure he will spread the word that the crazy Brit in the village has pigs in her house and they help with her writing. I’m not sure if that’s worse than being known as Madame Merde.
Returning to the topic of the weather, Claudette assured me that locally we were in for good weather for the next few days – no raincoat needed the next morning at least.
Whenever I take a trip out of the region, I always go by train. In my little rural corner of France there’s no public transport for miles so I have to drive to the town of Étaples-Le Touquet to take the train to Paris, from where you can travel all over France and beyond. It’s not a speedy service to Paris, which is about the same distance away as London (approximately 150 miles). In fact, it’s quicker to go to London, which takes less than 2.5 hours from my door to King’s Cross St Pancras if I hop on the Eurostar at Calais, and that includes an hour driving to the station and going through customs.
I love the French rail network despite some strange rules linked to using the trains. For instance, it’s illegal to carry a live snail on a French highspeed train – unless you have bought it a ticket. Any domesticated animal under 5 kg must be paid for, so when a traveller carrying a box of snails was stopped by a ticket inspector, a fine was applied (although the authorities did subsequently relent and reimburse the traveller). It’s also illegal to kiss on the platform if the train has arrived – apparently this is to make sure that the passionate French don’t cause delays. On the whole, after the UK, I find French trains refreshingly clean and comfortable; the people who work on them take real pride in their jobs; and the trains are almost always on time. Except when there are strikes.
France has a passion for striking. It’s a serious subject and has its roots in the French Revolution of 1789 when people took to the streets, stormed buildings and overthrew the ruling royal family, proving to themselves that if they worked together they could change their world. Many countries simply don’t have a strike culture and don’t understand the importance that French people attach to their right to protest. Here, it is a way of life, just as much as eating cheese and drinking wine, and even those inconvenienced by strike action often accept it with little grumbling. There’s even a website dedicated to who’s striking and where, which is helpful if you’re a travel writer who needs to travel round France by train.
Luckily there were no train strikes the next morning despite SNCF (Société nationale des chemins de fer français, the national state-owned railway company) being one of the most strike-hit services I have ever experienced. They have had a strike every year since 1947. Having left behind Pas-de-Calais, which was sunny just as Claudette had predicted, I arrived in Carcassonne where it was warm but overcast. I checked into my B&B at the base of the stunning citadel, with its turreted ramparts enclosing the city perched on a hill, and phoned Mark to let him know I’d arrived safely. ‘How are things at home?’ I asked. ‘Dogs all right? Cats okay? You all right?’
‘We’re all okay, but there are more of us now than when you left,’ said Mark. ‘Another thirteen ducklings hatched this morning …’
JUNE
The first rule of Wood Club is you don’t talk about Wood Club
THE START OF June brought the sun and I saw my neighbours dragging dusty barbecues out of barns and sheds, ready for a weekend of outdoor feasting. Winston was in his usual spot under a lilac tree. He prefers to be alone but, inevitably, Shadow and Loulou will join him. Fat Cat isn’t tolerated because he always ends up squashing everyone. ’Enry Cooper likes to sit on the wall in the front garden so he can watch the tractors go by. He loves it when the post van stops for parcel deliveries and the postie has to get out instead of leaning out the window to push papers through the post box. This is the cue for ’Enry Cooper to jump down and make friends. He adores people and will follow someone he likes for a long time before giving up and coming back home to be fed.
It was perfect weather for the annual Route des Vacances festival. The event harks back to the post-war days of summer when pasty-faced miners would bundle their families into vehicles of all sorts to make their way from the mining basin of Lens in Nord, leaving the now UNESCO-listed slag heaps behind to breathe in the fresh air at the seaside town of Berck-sur-Mer in Pas-de-Calais. Here, the owners of the coalmines also owned a large hotel where the miners could stay. Although it wasn’t much more than 100 km away, the cars were slower than they are now and the journey was part of the holiday, spread out over a number of hours with stop-offs en route at towns such as Hesdin and Montreuil-sur-Mer. In memory of those days, and with the locals’ everlasting love of tradition and heritage, a procession of vintage cars has followed in the tracks of the old miners’ holiday route and has taken place annually for several years.
People come from miles around to admire the vintage vehicles parked on the main square in Hesdin, in front of the imposing sixteenth-century town hall. You don’t have to be a petrolhead to appreciate the sight of row upon row of ancient cars, including the much-loved 2CVs, Renault Estafette vans and antiquated buses that look like they drove straight off a St Trinian’s film set. Around 350 cars and a thousand people make the journey, many dressed appropriately for the occasion. Thousands of people turn up to look at the cars, remember the good old days and enjoy a knees-up in the town. If you ever need convincing that authentic France still exists, you’ll find the evidence on the day the convoy comes to town.
‘Built to carry a basket of eggs across ploughed fields and not make an omelette,’ an old man was explaining to a little boy who was staring at a dusky blue 2CV, affectionat
ely known as ‘deux chevaux’ or ‘la deudeuche’. Despite the fact that these legendary lollopy cars haven’t been made since 1990, there are still plenty of them about. Perhaps they were so popular as they really were a ‘car of the people’, and everyone in France knows someone who had one. They were cheap, simple and they just kept going. Not only was the suspension good enough that eggs on the back seat didn’t break, but they were also able to accommodate a passenger wearing a hat – important for those Sunday church outings, and the seats were detachable for picnics!
The cafés in the town were doing a roaring trade despite it being a Sunday, when normally everything is closed. In the Café Le Commerce, which looks like it might have been delivered direct from the 1970s to its corner spot, tables and chairs spilled out onto the pavement, and we sat there taking in the spectacle of people enjoying a sunny day looking at cars.
After lunch the drivers returned to the square, ready to join a convoy to the seaside. The 2CV we had been admiring was fired up, its flat twin-cylinder engine sounding like no other car in the world. With a dashboard-mounted pull in, out and turn gearstick, it’s an unusual drive to say the least. The procession departed in a slow and steady manner to continue its travels on largely empty roads all the way to the sea. Other car drivers beeped their hooters in appreciation as they passed, and all along the route people came out of their houses to wave and take photos.
The good weather felt like it was here to stay, so when Annette offered to look after the animals so we could have a day off to enjoy the sunshine, we jumped at the chance and decided to drive to Normandy for the day. Autoroutes stretch across the country, making it easy to get around once you reach them. Although it feels as if our little village is in the middle of nowhere, the A16 motorway can be reached in just twenty-five minutes and from there, Rouen, the historic capital of Normandy, is just an hour and a half away.
We hadn’t been back to Normandy since taking my dad in June 2009 when we were still living in London. He had desperately wanted to be there for the sixty-fifth anniversary of D-Day. Aged sixty-eight at the time, he decided there were a few things he really wanted to do before he got too old, and being in Normandy for the D-Day remembrance ceremonies was one of them. On such a big occasion, and with dad only deciding at the last moment that he absolutely wanted to go more than anything else in the world (he wasn’t a planner and sprung this bucket-list item on me at the last minute), it wasn’t easy to get accommodation, so we ended up being an hour’s drive from the main sites. For several days we drove back and forth to ceremonies and events. We watched a fly-past, chatted to veterans, went to some of the iconic sites such as Sainte-Mère-Église and Pegasus Bridge, and to cafés where veterans congregated and held listeners enthralled with their tales. We also visited the American cemetery, and it was only the second time in my whole life that I saw my dad cry (the other time was when my mum died). He was completely overwhelmed by the sight of the pristine grave markers, row upon row upon row. It didn’t stop him moaning about the drive though, and when I suggested we add on a trip to Mont-Saint-Michel he was adamant another hour’s drive in the car was just too much. We took him anyway.
Mont Saint-Michel is majestic. It’s one of those places where the magic shines through despite its wiggly cobbled streets being covered by tourists (around 2.5 million a year). It’s a tiny town on a granite island cradled between the coasts of Brittany and Normandy. Lopsided half-timbered houses wind their way round what looks like an upside-down ice-cream cone, topped by a gravity-defying golden statue of Saint Michael. Victor Hugo, the great French writer, called it ‘the pyramid of the seas’ and you can really see what he meant. It’s one of the wonders of the world and has attracted hordes of tourists since the Middle Ages.
I remember that when we wandered with Dad through the stone arch that forms the entry to the town, he stood there open-mouthed. Afterwards, we made our way up a cobbled hill and past chapels, souvenir shops and cafés in medieval buildings. We peered into the restaurant Mère Poulard, famous for its fluffy omelettes made to the same secret recipe since 1888, and cooked on an open fire in front of customers who have included Ernest Hemingway and Marilyn Monroe. We wandered down tiny alleyways and lost ourselves in the wonder of the ancient architecture. ‘This,’ said Dad, ‘is one of those places that everyone ought to see before they die.’
The three of us stopped in a restaurant to have lunch. From the outside, it didn’t look special, but it had a terrace overlooking the bay and we could see for miles. Far below us there were people armed with buckets, undertaking the great French tradition of pêche à pied, fishing by foot. ‘It’s not real fishing, is it?’ Dad said. He prided himself on being a bit of an angler. His friends tell me he once went fishing at a lake in Kent and stopped to buy some bait on the way. Not liking what was on offer, he bought what was said to be a dead piranha, a small one, around a pound in weight, from a pet shop instead. He chucked it into the lake on the end of his rod where it promptly fell off and floated on the surface out of reach, causing much laughter among the anglers that day. A little while later a newspaper story appeared with a wild headline that a man had caught a piranha in the lake. It had, according to the report, dragged his line about 500 yards and took fifteen minutes to reel in, all 1 lb of it.
Normandy has its own feel and its own food. And if you go to Normandy, you had better like butter. And cheese. And garlic … Let’s just say, don’t go there if you’re on a diet. Steaming bowls of mussels, fresh as can be, were put on the table before us with a basket filled with chunks of baguette for mopping up the creamy, garlicky sauce. Crispy fries and a green salad accompanied the fishy feast. Afterwards a selection of cheeses was brought to the table. I explained to Dad that it was polite to ask for up to three of the cheeses on show and the server would then cut a sliver of each for you. Of course, that didn’t happen. Confronted with the sight of several cheeses, a ripe Brie and smelly Camembert, Livarot and pungent Pont l’Evêque, heart-shaped Neufchâtel and Pavé d’Auge, Dad had no idea which to choose.
‘This one,’ said the waiter, ‘comes from a dairy farm in a sleepy village among the rolling hills. And this is one of the most creamy and delectable cheeses in the world … flavoured with a little Calvados, this one tastes of heaven, it’s funky and delicious …’ He rolled his tongue around the words, filtering them through his droopy moustache, proudly paying tribute to the local cheeses much like a sommelier does when describing wine.
‘I’ll have a bit of everything,’ said Dad firmly. The waiter sliced expertly and popped the portions on a plate. Dad spread them over chunks of baguette and sighed happily as he took his first bite. He didn’t share and he didn’t stop until he had finished. ‘I have eaten myself into a sitting position,’ he announced, so we left him to enjoy the views and entertain some American tourists on the table next to ours. Dad was a great raconteur and loved to tell tall tales. I still don’t know if the piranha story is true.
We went off to climb to the top of the Mont to visit the abbey at the summit of a steep stone staircase. It was far less crowded than the streets, which is not a surprise since there’s no lift to the top so you really don’t have a choice but to tackle a whopping 350 steps. There were a couple of paramedics sitting on a bench halfway up and we joked to each other that they must be there to help those who have eaten too much cheese to make it to the top without collapsing. Getting to the peak was worth every challenging moment of the climb. The thick stone walls of the abbey are punctuated with arched windows, which allow panoramic views over one of the most beautiful bays in the world. Inside the Gothic abbey there is a feeling of spirituality and of peacefulness, and you stop in wonder at cloisters that seem to be suspended halfway to heaven. The history of this place goes back millennia but it was in AD 708 that Aubert, the bishop of Avranches, dreamed he had an encounter with the archangel Michael, who instructed him to build a church on the island. Three times the archangel instructed the bishop, until finally, according to legend,
he burnt a hole in the bishop’s skull to drive home the message. Aubert built his chapel and the current abbey has stood on the same site since the eleventh century. As Mark said to me afterwards, it was one of those places you will always remember visiting for the first time.
Driving round the bay later, we stopped to watch the pêcheurs à pied, just like those foot fishermen we had seen from the ramparts of Mont Saint-Michel. We took off our shoes, rolled up our trousers and wandered onto the sandy beach. There were several groups of people bent over, scanning the ground, some gently scratching at the sand with rakes.
‘Ask them what they’re looking for,’ urged Dad at the top of his voice in English. He couldn’t speak French, but believed that saying things really loudly would help French people to understand him. An elderly woman who had been bent over, scanning the sand, looked up at us quizzically. She had a wrinkled face and a big smile underneath her wide-brimmed straw hat. She explained that she was seventy-five years old and was there with her family hunting for clams, winkles, cockles and whelks.
‘You have to be careful not to catch too much,’ she said. ‘It would be bad for the fish to take too many and, besides, the gendarmes might check.’ She explained that the amount you can take is strictly regulated and fines are steep if you overfish. ‘We depended on fish to live when I was young,’ she told us. ‘Of course, life’s not so hard now, but it’s good to catch what you can for free, non?’ She covered her bucket with seaweed. ‘You must be cunning like a rat and have plenty of patience, but the prize is the freshest fish you’ve ever tasted.’ She stooped to pluck a shell from the sand and dropped it into her bucket. ‘Mangez bien, riez souvent, aimez beaucoup.’ She winked and wandered off to find more fish. I explained to Dad that she had said, ‘Eat well, laugh often, love abundantly.’ A perfect philosophy for life.
