by Janine Marsh
We were driving home that afternoon in our van from the seaside town of Berck-sur-Mer on the Opal Coast, where we had been shopping. It had been a very sunny day, and the whole of the first week of July had been wonderfully hot. We’d spent the afternoon in Berck, an unpretentious, friendly and authentic seaside town. It was once a fishing village but thanks to its iodized climate, it gained a reputation as a place for recuperation for the sick and infirm to the point where, in 1869, a hospital was inaugurated there by Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III. The town still retains an air of faded grandeur, though the hospital is being converted to apartments and a hotel. The sandy beach is perfect for picnics and kite flying, and a world-famous annual kite championship is held there. There’s also an irresistible sweetshop where they make boiled sweets in front of you and, once tasted, you’ll never forget them. The Pas-de-Calais department isn’t usually on the bucket list for those who seek grand chateaux and sumptuous tourist sites – it’s something of a hidden gem and requires a bit of time to explore.
The main entry point to France, Calais processes more than 10 million passengers a year from the UK. Arriving in their droves, the vast majority follow the autres directions sign straight out of town and onto the autoroute to somewhere else. They look neither right nor left, oblivious to the rich heritage to be found in ancient towns and villages, and utterly unaware of the marvellous bistros, cafés, traditional estaminets (Flemish inns) and some of the finest gastronomic restaurants in France.
As we approached our turn-off, the sky started to turn an ominous dark grey. When we left the main road to go down the hill that leads to our village, small balls of ice began to fall, hitting the van with a loud ping. Within seconds, a sea of white hailstones covered the road. The intensity of the storm increased incredibly quickly, and Mark pulled the van over to the side of the road as it became difficult to see where we were going.
It was an amazing sight and, fascinated, I started to film it on my mobile phone. The hailstones seemed to get bigger and bigger. They were the size of tennis balls by now, and the noise became deafening. Thwack, thwack, thwack as they smashed onto the van. My fascination began to be replaced by fear – I’d never seen anything like it, and we suddenly felt quite vulnerable in our little van.
‘Cover your eyes,’ shouted Mark as the front window started to crack. Suddenly it caved in, spewing tiny shards of glass into the van. Even though I was terrified, I carried on filming. I’m not sure why, perhaps because it was so staggeringly awful and I wasn’t able to turn away. A car sped past us, as if trying to rush through the storm. One of its wing mirrors was hanging down, bouncing against the passenger door. We watched the car in horror as it slid about over the huge ice balls.
The deluge went on for just under six minutes according to the video on my phone. Then, just as suddenly as it had started, it stopped. We got out of the van and brushed the glass from our clothes, looking around us in disbelief. The van was covered in massive dents as if someone had been throwing bricks at it. The wing mirrors were hanging off, the windscreen was in bits.
We hadn’t really been able to talk to each other while the storm was going on as the crashing and banging of the huge nuggets of solid ice pounding the metal had been so immense. Now it began to rain, and the downpour was torrential. We got back in the van and Mark turned the key in the ignition. Thankfully the van started. We drove slowly down the hill, peering through the caved-in windscreen and bumping over a river of hailstones, which were now being carried by the rainwater. Our home was just two minutes away and as I began to recover from the shock of what had just happened, a gnawing pain in my stomach started as I wondered what awaited us. The journey felt a lot longer than two minutes.
As we drove past the first house on the outskirts of the village, the old mayor’s house, we slowed down to take a good look. We were relieved to see that it seemed fine, apart from a garden full of white hailstones. It is a modern house with a shiny tiled roof and garage. It was almost as if nothing had happened.
But as we drove on, we realized that it was the only house that had survived the storm unscathed. We passed twenty more buildings before we got to our own and they had all shared a similar fate. The old tiled roofs were in a terrible state, as was the slate roof of the church along with some of its stained-glass windows. By the time we pulled into our garden, we were fearing the worst.
The six-minute tempest had destroyed our car sitting in the driveway. The roof of the house, with its lovely old handmade tiles, had clearly borne the brunt of the onslaught; it was peppered with holes. It looked as if every single tile had been damaged and many lay in pieces in the garden below. The new loft windows we had fitted were also smashed to pieces and the roofs of the pigsty and woodsheds had all but disintegrated.
We ran to the back of the house to check the animals. The dogs were thankfully under shelter in their little brick house with its new roof still intact. The cats were hiding unharmed under the terrace, and the triple-glazed plastic roof didn’t have a mark on it. Even the birds were okay, hiding in the coops or cowering under the terrace with the cats. My beautiful greenhouse was a pile of broken glass and the vegetable patch was destroyed. Great chunks of ice lay everywhere.
Opening the front door of the house, we were confronted by the sight of water pouring through the ceiling of the hall and the sitting room. The roof was ruined and, with nothing to stop the rain, every room upstairs had terrible water damage.
I burst into tears, overcome by the carnage in front of us. Mark was much more practical. He declared that there was no time for crying, and pointed out that we needed to try to make the house watertight straight away in case it rained all through the night. But first, we needed to check on our neighbours.
We walked down the hill and could see people emerging from their houses, taking stock of their damaged roofs and looking around in disbelief at the disaster zone. Bernadette passed us as she drove home from work, to be met with Jean-Claude standing in their front garden, shaking his head in disbelief. Everyone seemed to be walking around like us in a state of stunned silence, checking on neighbours and wondering where to start. The new mayor arrived within minutes and took over the task of checking the houses and making sure the electricity cables that supply the village weren’t damaged. Often when it’s very windy, a tree will come down onto the lines and we’ll all be plunged into darkness without phones until its fixed.
Despite the violence of the storm, the damage to life was less severe. We discovered that two cats had been killed, and one poor woman who was walking home from a neighbour’s house was hit on the head by a hailstone and had to have seventeen stitches. And the electricity still worked.
When we were sure no one needed anything other than something to try and cover the roofs as best they could to protect against the still falling rain, Mark searched in the sheds for tarpaulins. Meanwhile, I phoned Annette to make sure she was okay. Her village is just a couple of miles away and, though it too had been hit by hailstones, the situation was nowhere near as bad as ours. As only a few tiles had been lost on their roof, Gary and Annette drove to our house as quickly as they could with all the tarpaulins they could muster. Arriving in our village, they said other places they passed en route showed signs of damage, but nothing like on the scale our village had experienced.
Gary and Mark clambered up on the roof, trying not to slide off in the rain, and tied down the plastic sheets across as much of the missing tiling as they could.
The rain abruptly stopped soon after and the sun came out. The hailstones melted. The birds sang in the trees. I thought of the words of the American poet Robert Frost: ‘In three words I can sum up everything I have learned about life: it goes on.’
We slept fitfully that night and woke the next morning to the sound of major activity in the village. Several carpentry and roofing companies turned up with van loads of plastic sheeting to help cover roofs and to give repair estimates for people to send to their insurers so that the big
clean-up could begin. The mayor went from house to house, checking that everyone was okay and letting the villagers know that he would be contacting the regional government to get the storm declared a natural disaster for insurance purposes, which would speed up the process of reimbursement and repair. Cherry pickers were out in force, lifting teams up to reach roofs throughout the village. In stark contrast to the day before, the sun stayed out all day, and it would have felt as if nothing had ever happened, except for the sight of buildings wrapped in plastic and the sound of builders shouting instructions and banging hammers.
That day we met the Parisians. The mayor had phoned them to let them know what had happened. He has contact details for everyone who lives here and, if you go on holiday, you can let him know and he’ll make sure your house is regularly checked by Jean-François, the village handyman. We were standing on the corner of the little alleyway where the Parisians’ house is tucked away from the main road, chatting to one of the builders about coming to give an estimate, when a car turned in. The driver stopped to lean out of the window. ‘Merde,’ he said, ‘this is bad, eh?’
‘Awful,’ I agreed. ‘Are you the Parisians?’ Of course, no French person would ask this. Although they have a reputation for being aloof as a nation, being forthright isn’t considered particularly good manners. The author Peter Mayle once said that a neighbour had told him that it was unfortunate that he was English, but that most people outside of Paris preferred even the English to Parisians!
The woman who was sitting next to him got out of the car, came around to us and shook hands as she laughingly said, ‘Is that what you call us here? Yes, we are the Parisians!’ The man got out too and shook hands with Mark and me. ‘They call us the British Ch’tis,’ I said.
The Parisians certainly seemed friendly enough, though he with his Hermès scarf and she with her high-heeled ankle boots and elegant cropped trousers and jacket stood out like a sore thumb. They couldn’t stop for long, they said, because they needed to see what damage had been done and make arrangements for any repairs, though from where we all stood we could see that their new roof had stood up to the onslaught pretty well. They told us that they wouldn’t be back in July – he was a policeman and had to work weekends – but they would be spending August at their house and they invited us round for drinks.
Unlike the Parisians’, 90 per cent of the houses in the village needed new roofs. All of the old houses, with the traditional-style thick terracotta tiles so popular in this area, had severe damage. Claudette, owner of the poshest house in the village, had lost most of her black slate tiles, the sort you get on chateaux and manor houses. All of the new tiled roofs had minimal damage.
I contacted our insurers and explained what had happened. I could tell they didn’t believe me when I said our house, van and car had been destroyed by giant hailstones. Who could blame them? I sent them the video I’d taken. They called me back and said the assessor would visit us the following week. I never shared the video with anyone else because you can hear me rather dramatically saying ‘I don’t want to die’ above the pounding of the hailstones.
For the next few days, newspaper reporters and cameramen turned up to cover the story of the biblical weather that had hit our little village. A few people had saved some of the hailstones in their freezers and posed for pictures holding the balls of ice, unsmiling as instructed. For the next few weeks, we were big news locally and people came from miles around to see for themselves what had taken place. Nothing like it had happened since weather records began.
The next week, the insurance man turned up. He had driven from Paris where, even there, they had heard of the storm in the ‘North Pole’ of France. He walked around the house and garden making copious notes on his clipboard, his face impassive. He looked over the two estimates we had received, one for 40,000 euros and one for 26,000 euros, to repair the roof at the front of the house, which had taken the brunt of the damage, and to the outbuildings.
He signed off on the cheapest quote, or at least the part that covered the main roof. As with everyone else whose vehicles were exposed during the storm, our car and van were deemed wrecks, too expensive to repair, so they were written off and we received money towards new cars – though not anywhere near as much as we had paid for them. The vehicles still worked, though, and we needed them to get around until everything was sorted out, so we got the windows repaired, and Mark, who is a former car mechanic among other things, sorted out the broken wing mirrors. In the end, we bought the vehicles back from the insurers and kept them, as did many of our neighbours. If you ever drive through a small village in the middle of nowhere and spot dozens of cars that look like they’ve been attacked by a club-wielding giant, you’ll know where I live.
The roofs of the outbuildings were not covered by the insurance, nor was the greenhouse or anything in the garden. As the cost of a new roof was a third of what we had paid for the whole house, we were still very grateful.
The roofers said they couldn’t start work until November. But with summer coming up, we knew how lucky we were. It seems that the entire building trade down tools in July and August and nothing changes for a storm. We didn’t know it then, but some people would wait more than a year for the repair work to be done. We didn’t complain about November but hoped it wouldn’t be too wet a summer and it wouldn’t snow early. Again, we were lucky – that summer was one of the warmest and driest ever in our region. It felt like the north was the new south.
For a while, our enthusiasm for renovation was dampened but at the same time we knew we’d been very fortunate. None of our animals was harmed, we were safe and the house could be repaired. It could have been far worse. And life went on.
Arya, one of my chickens, with a needle-like beak, turned up at the door with ten chicks the next week. They were beautiful yellow and black fluffy creatures that squeaked at the top of their voices. Arya then flew over the fence into our next-door neighbour’s garden, leaving us to look after the kids. With several cats, both our own and strays living in local barns, we knew they needed protection and so we took them under our wing, popping them into a cage under a heat lamp in the house – much to the disgust of the cats, who took it in turns to stare at the interlopers.
Meanwhile, at three months old, Ken the abandoned cockerel had become decidedly odd. He took a bit of a dislike to any flowers that were blooming and pulled off their heads. Not only that, he had taken to terrorizing me – it was hard to feel at ease in the garden as he started to sit in the trees, lying in wait for me to pass by, when he would jump down and run around me, squawking aggressively. He had also started to throw himself at the windows when he saw me in the kitchen. I had never been stalked by a chicken before – it was unnerving.
And another duckling arrived. It had been abandoned and was prematurely born with hardly any feathers. It couldn’t walk as it had very weak legs. I sat and held it for hours, keeping it company as I was fairly sure it wasn’t going to survive. But when it made it through the first day, I popped it into the cage with the abandoned chicks. We gave it swimming lessons in the bathroom sink several times a day on the advice of a lady who saw a video I posted on Instagram and knew about keeping ducks. Over time, its legs strengthened. The chicks and the duckling played well together and eventually I moved them all into a nursery pen in the garden. To this day, they get along famously.
Quatorze Juillet is a national holiday. It’s Bastille Day to us – but the French never call it that and think it odd that non-French people do. Coming so soon after the storm this year, it was an unusually quiet day in the village. So, we decided to head to Montreuil-sur-Mer where every Bastille Day (I can’t help it, I’m British) sees the town stage a spectacular antiques market.
This little medieval town, with its upper part encircled by ancient ramparts, has seen its fair share of drama over the centuries. Once it lived up to its suffix ‘sur-Mer’: it was a thriving port town and the only royal harbour in the tenth century, but the water has
long since retreated. It has been laid siege to, and was fortified by Louis XIV’s military engineering genius Vauban, and it was Napoleon’s choice of campsite when planning to invade England. It even inspired Victor Hugo to write Les Misérables, and was the HQ for Field Marshal Douglas Haig during the First World War. Outside the town’s pretty theatre, you’ll spot a statue of him looking very stern astride a horse, cast by the sculptor Paul Landowski, who created Christ the Redeemer in Rio.
These days it’s rather quieter. But it still has ankle-busting, chest-thumping hills to climb if you’re on foot, and its cobbled streets are lined with grand houses and ancient cottages, with the privileged few living in the upper town, of course. Those in the lower town were, to Hugo, les misérables. They have a saying here in France, ‘Tenir le haut du pavé.’ It means to succeed in life, but its literal translation is to walk on the high side of the pavement, a term that dates back to the Middle Ages, when in towns such as Montreuil wastewater (and other things) were chucked onto the cobbled streets and ran down the hills. The streets were therefore built sloping into the middle so that the waste would run away from doors. If you were rich in those days, you could walk on the high side where it was cleaner. If you were poor, you had to walk in the middle. It’s why when protestors in the French Revolution tore up cobblestones to throw at the authorities, it was more than pure vandalism – it was symbolic.
Enchanting streets such as rue du Clape en Bas, with its artisan shops and bars, and rue du Petit Coquempot, where archers shot birds for practice in the Middle Ages, have a quaint charm that makes the town a magnet for savvy Brits looking for somewhere deliciously French, but close to home. Montreuil, though small, calls itself a ‘destination gastronomique’ and packs a big punch in terms of French cuisine. When it comes to wining and dining, the choice in the town is second to none.
