by Janine Marsh
We waved them au revoir as the Porsche roared down our little hill, setting off all the neighbourhood dogs. The sun came out the next day and the rest of the month was glorious.
Like the Parisians, the whole of France seems to go on holiday in August, though generally, unlike Hubert and Vava, the French too head south. Many shops close, and restaurateurs too take weeks off at a time during the busiest season of the year. Half of me rather likes that family and ‘me’ time means more to them than making money. The other half of me thinks they must be totally bonkers.
The farmers, of course, never get a holiday in August. They work flat out looking after animals and crops, assessing the perfect time for harvesting and sometimes working all through the night if wet weather looms and threatens to ruin a field full of ripe hay. Some tractors are big and modern like Thierry’s – he sinks all of his money into modern equipment because he and Mathilde do most of the work between them and have a lot of land to cover. Some families often use the same old tractors they’ve had for decades.
Those that stay put in these parts spend sunny days on the beautiful sandy beaches of the Opal Coast, and it sometimes feels as if the roads are full of ancient drivers, pottering to the coast, with no interest in using signals of any sort, as if to say ‘Whose business it is of anyone else’s where I’m going?’ We, too, would normally make the most of the stunning seaside towns on our doorstep in the summer months. But we had a roof to repair.
I try to avoid going into the woodshed because it’s dark and spiders weave jumbo-sized webs across the walls and ceiling, but we needed to make the most of the good weather and get on with replacing the tiles. Mark climbed up onto the roof and threw the broken ones onto a pile, ready to reuse to make garden paths. He passed any whole tiles to me and I stacked them in a corner to reuse for the roof or to share with neighbours who might need them. The activity provoked spiders to run up the walls and across the floor and parachute down from the rickety old rafters. If you happened to have been passing by a French farmhouse in a tiny hamlet in the middle of nowhere in rural northern France one August day and heard shrieking from a shed, followed by the sight of a small woman hurtling up the garden flapping her arms – it might have been me.
We soon discovered that fixing the roof would involve more than just tiling. The ancient roof batons were rotten and the joists were just about clinging onto the rafters, which were also in state of decrepitude. We realized we would have to reinforce the whole lot before we laid the new tiles.
It took us the rest of the month to finish and Mark later informed me that he had gained the sympathy of every man in the village that summer. They had seen him render the walls of the house and the garden, paint the house, and afterwards put up trellises for the roses to grow up. He had hung the shutters, built steps to the front gate and the door, spread 5 tons of gravel on the 100-foot-long front path and erected a vertical herb garden in the courtyard.
When Mark went to walk the dogs, he bumped into Jean-Claude, who shook his hand saying, ‘Le chef [boss], she has you working today, mon ami?’ and nodded to his own house where Bernadette can often be heard shrieking for her husband so she can tell him what needs to be done that day. ‘The young man who built his own house’ also came out to commiserate. He’s known by that name to everyone in the village as we all watched in awe three years ago as he set about turning a simple wooden barn into a manoir for the love of his life. He worked day and night and, thankfully, his true love married him at the end of the build. Monsieur with the white horses and petite frère all nod, apparently with sympathy, at Mark’s plight. Clearly I am now viewed as a house-proud, bossy madame in the village. Never mind that I get up at six in the morning to paint shutters, or that I put down my writing pen to help out with the rest of the jobs that need doing, from mixing concrete to plastering walls.
We finished the roof and, as a reward, treated ourselves to a meal at Friterie Francky, a café in the front garden of a house in the neighbouring tiny village of Manninghemau-Mont. It’s the equivalent of Cheers – the bar in the TV series where everyone knows your name. You can tell if it’s open as orange lights flash on the gateposts.
As you go through the gate there’s a terrace with tables and chairs, colourful umbrellas, lights in the trees and flowers everywhere. Eighties disco music fills the air. Everyone in the terrace area says bonjour, shakes hands with you or kisses you on the cheek, so sometimes it can take a while before you can place your order. When we do make it into the café, Francky stops cooking and hops round from the kitchen to plant kisses on our cheeks (two in this area). His partner Arnaud comes around from the counter, more kisses, then we shake hands or exchange kisses with everyone inside. There are two dining areas inside and when you get to them, there are more bonjours, kisses and handshakes. Then the ‘bon apps’ start (shortened from bon appetit). When it’s time to leave we start again with the au revoirs, kisses and handshakes.
At the end of the month, our friend Paul popped by to make sure we were definitely going to be there in October for his wedding to Delphine. I was feeling particularly generous that morning, and Paul took full advantage of my good mood, spending an hour telling us where he met Delphine, which we already knew, and how much he loves her, which everyone knows as he makes no secret of it, kissing her often in public with real passion. If talking was an Olympic sport, Paul would be a gold medallist. He can speak for hours and hours on end. And does – if you don’t know better and allow him to get going, it’s very difficult to get him to stop, though Delphine often just tells him to be quiet. But he is also witty, generous-natured and kind, so, although he can go on a bit, we all forgive him for it.
In fact, being able to talk for hours on end is considered a very good thing in France. At school French kids learn to debate as a matter of course. A wildly popular French TV documentary in 2016 called À voix haute (Speak Up) pulled in the viewers with its marketing, which read: ‘Speaking well is the key to social advancement and what is better than a beautiful and long speech? Nothing. Is not a beautiful and long speech to be heard, understood and acclaimed? It is an ancient art that has a name: eloquence …’ The programme followed teenagers who took part in verbal contests to prove their oral worth by ‘arguing, whispering, arguing more, laughing, haranguing and arguing again’. They even have a TV show in France called Le Grand Oral, which definitely isn’t as exciting as it might sound to some. Twelve amateur speakers compete against each other to give the best speech before a jury – not the sort of talent show to which most of us are used. It’s very earnest and there’s not a lot of laughing. French audiences lap it up – the more passionate, dramatic and eloquent the speaker, the more the French seem utterly mesmerized. One of the speeches gained more than 10 million views on social media networks.
The adage that ‘sometimes not speaking says more than all the words in the world’ doesn’t apply in France. I wondered what Paul’s wedding speech would be like …
SEPTEMBER
Fifty-two ducks and one Ducasse
HARVEST TIME IS also party time in the Seven Valleys and the mayor had organized a Ducasse at the town hall. It has absolutely nothing to do with the great French chef Alain Ducasse, but is an old Flemish word meaning festival.
When a Ducasse is held, the entire village is invited to join in. There’s always dinner – nothing formal or stuffy, usually mussels or fried chicken and always frites and copious amounts of beer, wine or cider. It’s followed by dancing and often goes on until the early hours of the morning. Although there are only 142 people in this village, socialites from miles around reserve tickets for what is claimed to be one of the biggest nights of the year in these parts.
Forty-eight hours before the big day, a marquee was put up in the car park of the town hall (formerly the village school). The DJ came the afternoon before the party to test the sound quality, and we could hear Gloria Gaynor assuring us she would survive and Kool and the Gang urging us to get down on it reverberating around the
valleys, making the cows moo and the dogs howl.
Always held on a Saturday, the party kicked off at 7.30. A steady stream of people began to fill the tent and take their seats at long tables laid out in neat rows on either side, with an aisle down the middle. By using very thin benches, not unlike the church’s pews, they managed to squeeze in a staggering 420 people. Not everyone sits – a few craggy-faced farmers always stand at the makeshift bar at the front, holding their Picon beers or a glass of robust ruby-red wine, surveying the room like ageing Mafia dons at a country wedding. Kids run around, getting under everyone’s feet, pretending to be riding horses and sliding on their knees on the wooden floor. The old folk always sit on the front tables so they can leave before the dancing starts without climbing over other guests.
There was a lot of toing and froing as trays filled with glasses and bottles from the bar were precariously carried back to tables. Even Thierry the farmer and his wife Mathilde were there, enjoying a rare night off. It had been a difficult year for them with storm-damaged crops, so they really did deserve to let their hair down.
‘Did you see Mathilde?’ said my friend Annette. ‘She’s not wearing her green boiler suit!’ This was big news – she hadn’t been seen outside her green boiler suit in years. ‘I missed her,’ I said to Annette. ‘What was she wearing?’ I was hoping for something glitzy: sequins, high-heeled shoes, dangly earrings …
‘Green top and green trousers,’ grinned Annette.
The new mayor made a speech, of course. He talked about how we would all pull together to get the village back on track, and that work would be starting in earnest soon to cover roofs before winter. He welcomed friends from ‘near and far’ (though hardly anyone is from further than 10 km away), as well as the Parisians and the Anglais.
In order to avoid the usual pandemonium when it came to queueing up to get entrées from the buffet table at the back of the tent, this year, he informed us, we would all be called by table number. ‘Table 1, come and get your entrée,’ led to an eruption of wild cheers and clapping. The oldies lined up to go to the buffet, making their way down the centre aisle to claps and whistles. If they had been supermodels twirling about in the latest Louis Vuitton outfits, they wouldn’t have got a better reception. As they returned with plates heaving with vegetable salad, diced beetroot, grated carrot, pâté and bread, more applause erupted.
‘Table 2 come up and get your entrée,’ was even more enthusiastically received. We clearly had a new contest between the tables, fuelled by copious amounts of alcohol, to see who could be the noisiest. Twenty tables, each seating twenty people – it took hours to get the entrées over with as people couldn’t make up their minds whether to have the salad, the beetroot or the carrots, or both, and with or without pâté – bread, of course, was a given. Earlier on, the Bread Man had dropped off hundreds of baguettes – a special vanload just for this night.
Finally, by ten o’clock, the smell of the main meal wafted in through the tent door: heaps of French fries (which are actually Belgian) cooked in boiling vats in a mobile chip wagon in the car park, and chicken cooked over a massive oil-drum barbecue manned by Tomas. His face was red and sweaty as he toiled in the roasting heat, the flames of the barbecue whipped up by the wind whooshing through the valley, heralding the arrival of autumn and making the sides of the marquee quiver. This time, volunteers carried the main-course dishes to the tables, speeding things up a little. Swiftly clearing away, they followed with slivers of cheese and cornichons, those piquant pickles you only ever seen in France, and finally a selection of petit four cakes, éclairs and madeleines, tiny lemon meringue tarts and crunchy merveilles, a meringue balloon filled with cream.
By midnight, everyone had finally finished. Tomas and the frites-van staff came in for a well-deserved drink and a round of applause. The oldies made their escape, not keen on the loud music. The disco lights were switched on, and the new mayor pushed a button on the turntable to release the sounds of Right Said Fred’s ‘I’m Too Sexy’. The marquee was bathed in rainbow colours as the DJ burst through the entrance, resplendent in a pair of tight black plastic trousers and a white vest stretched tight across his ample body, sporting the words ‘Superstar of the music machine’ and cut low, revealing an impressive mass of chest hair. He made his way to the back of the tent accompanied by whoops and cheers, turned on the microphone and shouted ‘Allez, allez, allez.’ He put on the slower number ‘Joue Pas de Rock ’n’ Roll pour Moi’ by Johnny Hallyday, which felt a bit anticlimactic, but electrified the partygoers nonetheless. There was a stampede to the dancefloor and hours of line dancing and every other kind of dancing ensued.
Jean-François, almost unrecognizable out of his blue overalls, was wearing a smart shirt and jogging pants. He made us all jump when he stamped the wooden floor with lusty abandon in a Flamenco-style display – which he then repeated for every single tune. Seventy-year-old Marie-Thérèse, who uses a walking stick, swayed along to the Eurythmics. People jived and jumped, twisted and dipped, spun and shook their tail feathers with gusto and total joie de vivre until the sun peeped up over the hills. The next week, many of the partygoers would do it all again at another harvest party in another village.
It was also the time for la rentrée, a term used to describe the particularly French phenomenon that signals that summer is over. It is the cue for everyone to return to work, school and normality after the long summer holidays. Despite this, there’s really nothing sad about this season – quite the opposite. There’s a feeling of enthusiasm and joy in the air. And best of all, the restaurants throw open their shutters to welcome back customers and the shops are all open, too.
Over the next few weeks, keen gardeners would be harvesting as much as they could, and keen cooks would be making jam, chutneys and sauces, and freezing summer fruits and vegetables. Potatoes would be dug up and hoarded in cellars, carrots stored in boxes of sand. Soon pumpkins would be ready for harvesting and there is always a contest to see who has grown the biggest in the village. One year, a green-fingered monsieur managed to grow one so large no one could lift it and it had to be rolled into a tractor bucket to be taken out of the garden. If four wheels had been put on it, I think I could have driven it into town.
Gardeners and cooks are not the only ones preparing for winter. Wild pigs, deer and birds of all kinds start some serious foraging, and my adopted hedgehogs (by now there were at least eight of them regularly feeding at the back door) started to eat more, preparing for hibernation. The ducks, geese and chickens enjoy autumn perhaps more than any other season as they are the beneficiaries of the glut of apples we have every year. The dogs love to run in the cooler weather, and when the farmers cut the fields of sweetcorn (maize) they race down the neat lines, searching for grouse and pheasant, which they never catch.
La rentrée also brought a call from the roofing company, who were due to repair our house in November. A slot had come up unexpectedly and they would start the next week. We were delighted. Although we had become accustomed to the sight of the roof covered in tarpaulins, flapping about in the wind, we were thrilled that we would be watertight before the weather changed.
I was up way before the sun rose on the day the roofers were due. I couldn’t sleep for excitement and headed to the pigsty with a cup of tea to write in peace and quiet. At five o’clock in the morning, the quarter moon didn’t give much light but the stars twinkled like diamonds in a black velvet bag. An owl hooted in Claudette’s barn, irritated that I’d put a light on to find my way across the courtyard. Another owl replied, no doubt agreeing that I was inconsiderate. Pheasants made weird croaking noises in the hedges and flapped their wings nervously. Moths flew in and out of the beams of light.
Brad Pitt and George Clooney became very excited when they saw me. Any form of light means sunup for them, even if it’s just a torch. Their hollering set off Kendo Nagasaki and Gregory Peck, the older cockerels. Then the geese started running around squealing like they had seen a ghost. Two cat
s stuck their heads out of the woodshed door to see what the fuss was all about. I almost trod on a hedgehog that had fallen asleep in one of the cat-food bowls and let out a screech, though by this time you could hardly say it shattered the tranquillity of the countryside. The only thing missing by now was a marching mariachi band.
Four burly builders turned up promptly at eight o’clock with a lorryload of scaffolding. Not stopping for coffee, they immediately began unloading and completed the job by the end of the day. The next day, five builders arrived together with a lorryload of tiles, which were craned into the front garden, and an enormous skip for the broken tiles. They scampered about on the roof of the main house all day long, forming a human chain to remove all the tiles, salvaging any that weren’t broken and neatly stacking them for us to reuse. The broken windows were removed before they laid a roofing membrane to make sure the house was protected against rain.
On day three, two tilers turned up – wiry men who looked like brothers, with their dark hair, dark eyes and deep tans. This was our first experience of working with French artisans as we had handled the entire renovation by ourselves until now. They were incredibly polite and hard-working and, contrary to the popular stereotype, they turned up on time every day. They took plenty of breaks, sipping thick, sugary, milk-less coffee from tiny cups, and every day asked to plug a lead into our electricity so that they could use their microwave oven in the back of their van. We could see them through our side door, sitting at a table they had brought with them, enjoying a three-course lunch and glass of red wine. The aroma of stews and strong cheese wafted around our garden, attracting the attention of passers-by, as well as the local dogs and cats.
The weather stayed mostly dry and they made good progress roaming around on the roof. Music from their portable radio blasted out over the sound of tiles being hammered into place. Surprisingly, they were very partial to an English singalong. I wasn’t sure if it was for our benefit but as I sat working in the pigsty I could hear them warbling an out-of-tune version of ‘You Are the Sunshine of My Life’, whistling when they didn’t know the words, and a spirited rendition of ‘Rrrrra-rrrrra Rrrrrasputeen, lover of the Rrrrrussian Queen’.
