by Janine Marsh
Not everyone was pleased at the activity, especially Frank Bruno, our rescue dog. He likes things to be quiet and calm, and all that banging about on the roof made him very tetchy. Churchill, the friendly German pinscher, loves attention. He had grown up in a glass cage in a pet shop before we took him home (as no one else wanted him and he would have been put down), so he was used to lots of people being around. He will happily follow anyone and everyone, and just wants more and more friends. Ella Fitzgerald is the love of Frank Bruno’s life. She grew up in the cage with Churchill and he would howl all night long for her, only stopping when we went back to the shop to get her, too. She is scared of her own shadow, and watched the roofers toing and froing with doleful eyes from within her little house in the garden. The geese, too, were indignant, honking at the strangers from afar (seriously, nothing ever happens in this village), but the chickens and ducks wouldn’t give a stuff if Father Christmas was up on the roof as long as they were fed.
The roofing repairs went on for a fortnight, exactly as had been estimated. I have to say that I didn’t like the new roof. It looked way too spick and span compared to the worn tiles we had before, but Mark assured me that a few seasons and plenty of rain would see it looking less shiny, and it would soon be dotted with the moss with which we were familiar. The important thing was that we were ready for winter. And the roofers predicted the roof would long outlive me and would stand up to large hailstones in the unlikely event that it ever happened again. Their boss came around to sign off the forms and brought a bottle of champagne. He was a very happy man – he had enough work from the village to last him many months to come. The storm clouds had a silver lining for some.
The village was buzzing to the sound of hammers banging that autumn, with saws whizzing and the coming and going of delivery vans and lorries. Under blue skies and a warm autumnal sun, the tarpaulins were coming off, new tiles were going up, and our neighbours were taking this as an opportunity to tidy up gardens, repair fences and paint shutters. It wasn’t a speedy process, though. With a finite number of builders to go round, some people were still waiting for their repairs to start. And there was Jean-Claude, who only had a few broken tiles on his relatively new roof, but was holding out for a complete replacement, driving Bernadette mad with his stubbornness but eventually wearing the insurers down.
With one big job done, it was time to deal with our duck problem. Even though I had become vigilant about collecting eggs, the final toll of hatchlings was high and that year became known as the ‘summer of fifty-two ducklings’. Jean-Claude told us that if you have more than fifty birds you must register as a farm, and we were now over the limit despite having rehoused several over the summer.
In the meantime, the daily feeding routine had become nothing less than a ruckus. Ducks and chickens wandered about seemingly at will, flying over the fences of the pens where I wished they would stay, or finding holes to squeeze through, and any vegetables that hadn’t been destroyed by the storm were devoured. Every morning my first job was to feed and clean the birds. As I groggily pulled on rubber boots in the kitchen, the birds would spot me and a flock of them would come winging across the garden to the back door, quacking and clucking. They pecked my boots, hung off my sleeves, climbed into the food bins and clung to the buckets of food while I was on my way to the pens.
I set to finding new homes for as many ducks as possible, and by the end of the month we’d shunted them all over the locality to kind-hearted families who wanted pets (and assured me they wouldn’t eat them). We also gave some to Annette, who has a huge garden with a pond and adores ducks – she took half of them in one go. The result was that I was left with nine boys and two girls, including Belle and her daughter Bella, with whom I couldn’t bear to part. To be sure we didn’t repeat our rookie mistakes, the girls were put in a separate pen from the boys this time.
But the bird fun wasn’t over. We still had to deal with crazy Ken. I felt a bit like Inspector Clouseau in the garden, waiting for Cato to attack. He was starting to really worry me as he was even worse with strangers. Barbie, the other abandoned chicken, had grown into a beauty and had the sweetest nature, and was happy to be stroked. Ken, on the other hand, was not remotely grateful for the special treatment he had been given. He charged at anyone who came into the garden. He didn’t get on with the other birds either and had caused mayhem in the pens. He tried it on with all the girls, but they just brushed him off and fixed their beady eyes on him. Despite his aggressive behaviour with humans, he was more of a coward with Kendo Nagasaki and Roger Moore, the pen leaders, and would swiftly escape back into the garden whenever he encountered them.
When our British friend Guy popped in on his way home from a holiday in the south, we sat in the kitchen to have a natter and enjoy the view of the garden, which was lush and verdant in the warm sun of an Indian summer. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted Ken under the gazebo, with Barbie following him about as usual. ‘He seems pretty tame,’ said Guy. ‘I thought you called him Psycho Ken.’
‘He hasn’t seen you yet,’ I said. And, right on cue, Ken looked up. ‘Now he’s seen you.’
Ken pulled himself up as tall as he could, ruffled up his neck feathers and thrust his chest out, looking indignant that an intruder had come into his territory.
‘He’s going to run down the garden and throw himself at the door, stare at you and then sing a song,’ I warned Guy. He looked at me sceptically. But sure enough, Ken began to take off down the garden towards us at a ferocious pace, threw himself at the door, stared hard at Guy and burst into a very loud crow with a sigh at the end. I always thought he sounded a bit like Minnie Riperton singing ‘Lovin’ You’ during these episodes. Guy and I both laughed, which seemed to wind up Ken even more. He crowed, jumped up and down and flapped his wings, knocking things over on the terrace outside the back door.
Meanwhile Barbie ran around the terrace and the geese started honking wildly. George Clooney, the biggest cockerel in the garden, jumped up into a tree and was swinging wildly like a trapeze artist. Rambo the duck decided to climb the fence to sit and watch the fun, which made all the other ducks quack and it sounded just like they were laughing. I wondered if, as well as Miss Poule and Mr Coq beauty contests, there might also be scope for a Coq and Poule talent competition.
Ken didn’t like the Bread Man either. Whenever he heard the van arrive he would run to the gate and I would have to shoo him off so that we could talk in peace as I took possession of my baguettes and boulots three times a week.
In the last week of September, the Bread Man brought little tarte Tatins, made with the early apples of the season.
‘What is this in English?’ he asked, pointing to the box filled with the caramel-topped apple tarts.
‘I think most people would know it as tarte Tatin. It’s very famous,’ I said, which put a smile on his face. ‘Or maybe as an upside-down apple tart.’
‘Ow you say zis?’ he asked, holding up a croissant.
‘Croissant,’ I said.
‘Non,’ he said, looking at me suspiciously through narrowed eyes.
‘No,’ I said.
‘Eh?’ He looked very confused now.
‘It’s not non – it’s no. And we don’t say “ow”, we say “how”.’ I breathed heavily into the ‘h’.
‘Ow ... ow ... ow’
‘No. Ha – the sound like when you laugh: ha ha ha,’ I tried to explain.
‘Ar ar ar ar.’ Still holding my bread, he sounded like a sea lion. He was looking a little crestfallen at his inability to ‘ha’. The French certainly have the letter ‘h’ in their alphabet – herbe, homme and honneur are everyday words, but I couldn’t think of a single instance without a silent ‘h’. Later, I asked my French-teacher friend Delphine why this might be. French people make the ‘h’ sound when they laugh, so why not when they talk? Apparently it’s because Frenchies think that their language is the most beautiful in the world and flows perfectly – and fitting in a hard ‘h�
�� would make it ’orrible. Delphine also told me they even have a sort of language police in France, guardians dedicated to protecting the French language – mostly from foreign word invasion! The Académie Française was created in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu in an attempt to make the French language ‘pure and comprehensible to all’. Ever since then, except for ten years when the French Revolution put them out of business, their forty members, known as ‘the immortals’, have looked after French words – both new and old. They are based in a beautiful building in Paris, opposite the Louvre, and have an official uniform, a long black coat with gold embroidery rumoured to cost £40,000, and that doesn’t include the sword they have to carry for official engagements – presumably to cut through the claptrap. It’s a very elitist group made up of writers, historians and even politicians. If an English word creeps into popular usage, the Académie Française will come up with an alternative and urge everyone in France to use it. ‘Parking’ for instance, which is what Frenchies say when referring to a parking space for a car, should, according to the Académie Française dictionary, be ‘Aire de stationnement’. But it’s a bit of a mouthful, isn’t it? So everyone just says ‘le parking’.
Bread Man told me he’d read in that day’s newspaper that forecasters were predicting ‘the coldest winter on record’.
‘They say that every year,’ I said.
‘One of these year’s they’ll be right,’ he replied.
Last winter’s prediction for the snowy apocalypse couldn’t have been more wrong. It was positively balmy in the north of France. Not like our first winter in this old house when the temperatures plummeted to -20°C. The fire wasn’t working properly and at night, huddled around an oil heater, wrapped up in duvets, we watched our breath make frost patterns in the cold air inside the house.
Later that afternoon, Jean-Claude was passing as we returned home from a visit to the Wood Man to order more wood for the winter, adding to our supplies from the Wood Club. His squeaky wheelbarrow was filled with pumpkins – big orange ones, ornate green ones and long creamy-coloured ones. His garden is full of them at this time of the year and he’s extremely proud to hold the title for ‘Biggest Pumpkin of the Valleys’.
‘Got to get these into storage,’ he told us as we were unpacking the wood from the car. ‘It’s going to be the coldest winter on record.’
OCTOBER
To bise or not to bise …
BACK HOME, A delicate breeze swished through the valleys and spun the golden leaves, which fell from trees starting to prepare themselves for colder weather. Fluffy clouds floated across a clear blue sky, and the light had a mellow lustre, the sort you only get on a sunny day in autumn in the north of France. The scent of fermenting apples hung in the air as, all around the village, spirited cider-making sessions were taking place in barns and cellars. Winter was on the doorstep. When Belle, one of the two female ducks we had left, hatched two eggs, I was flabbergasted, and not just because it was the wrong time of the year. The two girls had been separated from the boys, and we had thought that there had been no more fraternizing. We could only assume that they had managed, ninja-like, to scale the fences in order to have their secret moment of passion before sneaking back into their respective pens. The Juliets and Romeos of the poultry world.
When Jean-Claude stopped by for a chat and a glass of wine, I asked him how he thought the affair of the immaculately conceived ducklings could have happened, but he didn’t seem surprised. ‘Where there’s a will there’s a way,’ he told me. I also quizzed him about what to do with Psycho Ken, who was worrying me more and more. The sweet abandoned chick we’d found in the woods in the spring had long since gone, and it seemed his feathery body had been taken over by a demon.
I had tried everything I could to get him to behave. I’d even spoken to a specialist chicken vet who advised me to try to soothe him, talk to him and pick him up to get him used to contact. But this just seemed to enrage Ken further and he pecked at my face. He was now chasing Mark, too, as well as the cats and dogs and anyone who came into the garden. I tried keeping him in a pen with high fences, but he was like a winged Houdini, and nothing seemed to be able to contain him. I was worried that if we had kids in the garden, he could cause a serious injury.
‘Have you ever had a bird gone bad?’ I asked Jean-Claude.
‘Many times,’ he replied. ‘Sometimes male birds are just naturally aggressive and there’s not much you can do about it. They have to be let go.’ I gulped. I knew what he meant by letting go.
I took Jean-Claude to the pen where I was keeping Ken, but he’d escaped again, and he began stalking us around the garden like the cunning velociraptor in Jurassic Park. He seemed utterly incensed that there was a trespasser in his territory and flew at Jean-Claude feet first. Jean-Claude might be on the wrong side of sixty, but he’s a wily Frenchman. He moved swiftly to one side and deftly caught the screeching Ken, tipping him upside down to calm him.
‘No, no,’ he said gravely, ‘this one you cannot keep. He’ll have your eyes out.’
My lips quivered. I couldn’t bear the thought of Ken being put down. For all his faults, he had the most amazing cock-a-doodle-doo, a high-pitched screech and always a low hum at the end, like a sigh. ‘He’s very beautiful, though,’ said Jean-Claude, and then left with the bird before I could change my mind. I felt very bad about Ken for a while, but it was nice not to have to wear protective clothes to peg out the washing.
Three weeks later I heard a familiar sound, a high-pitched cock-a-doodle-doo … le sigh. It came from Jean-Claude’s garden. I got a chair and climbed up to look over the high hedge. There was Ken, in a large maximum-security pen with no chance of parole, but his good looks had won him a reprieve and a couple of female companions.
Over the last few years, Halloween, which used to be largely ignored, especially here in the rural far north, has become much more popular. Go back five years and you’d hardly know it existed apart from in the boulangeries and chocolate shops, but now you’ll find a few local shops decked out with festive spider webs, cardboard witches on brooms and singing pumpkins – the influence of US TV shows and Disney, I suspect. I don’t mind any of it apart from the cobwebs.
The warm, wet autumn weather of the north is good for spiders. I’m not a fan of them. It was my dad’s fault. He would run a mile if he saw one, screaming for my mum to come and deal with it. He was a master bridge player and once, overnighting in a posh hotel in Edinburgh in Scotland where he was to play a bridge tournament the next day, he was getting ready for bed when he spotted a small spider. He fled the room in his underpants. Security were called, and they searched the room, but the spider was nowhere to be seen. My dad swears he stayed awake all night with the light on, scanning the room, fully dressed by now, ready to flee again. He still won his bridge match, though.
I too am terrified of spiders even though I know it is ridiculous. We don’t, as far as I know, get poisonous spiders in the north of France but mon Dieu, that October they were enormous. I’d never seen them that big before. Mark is not afraid at all: he picks them up and doesn’t care if they run up his arms before taking them out to safety in the garden. I took to eyeballing a room before I entered. Some of the spiders were almost as big as the palm of my hand (admittedly I do have small hands) so you can’t really miss them. Claudette told me to put piles of chestnuts around the house – the spiders crawled over them. I bought one of those machines that you plug in and is supposed to make them run away – within a week it was covered in webs.
Here in my little village we’re not quite at the trick-or-treat stage but it can only be a matter of time before the kids brave the cold and the muddy paths to knock on doors. Quite what Claudette will make of it, I don’t know. I’m pretty sure she has no idea that Halloween is widely celebrated as a festive occasion around the world. Although she watches her ancient TV, it’s only to listen to the news or programmes that feature the British royal family, whom she adores. Halloween to her is the n
ight before La Toussaint, All Saints Day, a time to remember loved ones no longer with us.
If you walk up the hill that leads past the home of Jean-Claude and Bernadette, you might well think this is a village of the possessed since the fields at the top are peppered with gloomy-faced villagers waving mobile phones around. It’s not some weird custom – it’s due to our lack of mobile phone signal, which makes people very tetchy. You can hardly bank, buy or do anything online these days without getting a text message with a code that is essential to complete the deal. In the middle-of-nowhere Seven Valleys, this is a big problem. In our house, we draw straws for which of us must wander the fields, like the ghost of Mary Malone, until we hit a hotspot and can retrieve the coveted code to convey to the other one, sitting resignedly by the landline, waiting for numbers to type into the PC confirming, yes we did send a bank transfer/amend a standing order/purchase something. We never thought when we bought this house in 2004 that all these years later we would still be waiting for a mobile phone signal or fast internet.
The new mayor is valiant in his efforts to improve things. It’s not an easy job. He updates us regularly on progress and puts copies of letters from those he petitions into our post box: ‘We will review your request in about six weeks’ time … or maybe early next year … We hope to make a decision sometime next year, or maybe the year after.’
The Bread Man wanted to know if we did anything special for Halloween. Not really, I told him, and wished him ‘Happy Halloween.’
‘Appy Alloween?’ he queried.
