by Tommy Barnes
The brewery arrived three weeks later. I knew of a delivery man called Stephen who ran a removals firm based in the north-west of England that specialised in taking things to France and back. I had met him when I was gardening over at the Johnsons’ and he had turned up to remove some of their stuff. Stephen’s motto was: ‘My nan always said I could do anything I wanted. She just didn’t tell me how.’ I knew he’d be the man to bring the brewery to France. He reminded me of a character from a Douglas Adams novel.
Antoni had impressed upon me the importance of getting a removals firm with a truck with a tail lift, as the equipment was extremely heavy, but whenever I told Stephen this he told me not to worry, he didn’t have such a truck, but he wouldn’t need it anyway – his nan had told him he could do anything, etc. And lo and behold, on a lovely May morning his truck arrived all the way from Wales and reversed through our gates in Braslou, taking with it several branches of the overhanging laurel. I later found out from Antoni that the only reason they had managed to load the brewery equipment at their end was because some lads from the factory next door had seen them struggling and had lent them a forklift truck. It was therefore unsurprising that Stephen appeared to have no idea how he was going to unload it at my house.
Eventually, after several cups of tea, Stephen and his mate decided to set up two long, thin metal ramps close together, the sort of ramps you use to get cars onto trailers, and roll the equipment off the lorry and down the ramps on a pallet truck, which Antoni had kindly donated along with the brewery equipment, with me and his mate in front stopping the pallet truck from moving too quickly. For the first two vats – the mash tun and the boiler – this was fine, but the last vat – the hot-water heater – weighed half a tonne. As Stephen tipped the pallet truck onto the ramp, it immediately picked up momentum. Courageously, we all let go and dived for cover. It shot down the ramp on the pallet truck and smashed through the gate to the back field, eventually coming to a stop next to a startled Cameroon lamb (did I tell you a Cameroon lamb had arrived? I assumed it was something to do with Rose’s pregnancy cravings, which was odd because Albert was almost a year old). There was a pause while the giant vat teetered on the pallet it was sitting on before coming to a stop, mercifully still upright.
‘OK, that seems to be everything,’ said Stephen, satisfied with another job well done. ‘Good luck with the brewery. We’ll pop by for a pint next time we’re down.’ And off he went on his next absurd adventure.
Using the pallet truck, Rose and I shifted the vats across the garden into the little outbuilding that sits maybe thirty metres from our house as a miniature horse, a sheep, a Cameroon lamb, two chickens and two dogs watched curiously.
It actually made more sense for the brewery to be in the barn attached to the back of the house, rather than the outbuilding over the other side of the garden. There was already running water and electricity in the barn and there was loads of space, and that was where I had been brewing with my little GrainFather brewery, but I am nothing if not an all-round selfless guy.
‘No, Rose. You should take the barn at the back for your art studio. With its space, high roof and bare stone walls it will make an ideal place to house your artworks. I’ll set the new brewery up in the outbuilding,’ I had said when we were deciding where the big brewery would go. ‘And besides, if I am all the way over the other side of the garden, it will be much easier for me to drink morning beers without being told off,’ I didn’t add. But that was basically the driving force behind the move. And so it was decided. My new brewery would be over in the outbuilding on the far side of the garden, away from the house.
It was currently full of old gardening equipment, logs and woodworm. Incidentally, I have never seen a woodworm, and I don’t know anybody who has. Make of that what you want. The outbuilding was built out of irregular blocks of white stone; it had two rooms on the ground floor, of which I would take one, and a hayloft that was only reachable by ladder.
I set about tearing out all the crap that was in there. The further back I got into the room the older the stuff was, until finally I was pulling out huge wooden rollers, cogs made of iron and other bits of machinery, which, I realised eventually, were parts of an old wine press. It felt like an archaeological dig. I was pulling out genuine relics from a time gone by. I chucked everything in the dump.
Next, I needed to get electricity and water into the outbuilding. I had no idea how to do this, but luckily Damien once again came to the rescue. He explained we would need to dig a trench about a metre deep from the house to the barn and lay the pipes and cables from the house to the outbuilding in the trench. Damien’s friend Pascal, the local builder and one of my most loyal black-market customers, lent us a mini-digger on the proviso that I gave him lots more beer. Damien’s other friend, Bastien, would connect the mains water pipes for us. Damien dug the trenches with Pascal’s digger a week or so after the brewery had arrived. Everything was on track. After that, we had to plumb the brewery in. I asked Damien if he knew a good plumber and – I’ll never forget this moment – he turned to me and said: ‘Yes, I know a good plumber – you.’
‘What do you mean, Damien?’
‘You are capable of this, Tommy. You can do it. I believe in you.’
I was almost moved to tears. Damien actually thought I was capable of doing something practical. Warm with pride, I waited till Damien had left and then I phoned Hervé the plumber.
Once Hervé had done all the plumbing, things were progressing very well. I thought I’d probably have the brewery up and running by the end of May, maybe mid-June at the latest. All I needed to do was get a more powerful electricity supply to run the brewery. I assumed a simple phone call to EDF, the electricity company, would suffice.
Three months passed.
‘You didn’t validate the rendez-vous. That’s the problem. That’s why the engineer didn’t turn up,’ said the man from EDF. It was now August. The brewery had been ready but for the electricity for almost three months.
‘But you didn’t tell me to validate the rendez-vous. How do you validate the rendez-vous?’
‘You have to phone us up.’
‘But I phoned you up last week and the week before and you said it was all OK.’
‘That was before I knew you hadn’t validated the rendez-vous.’
‘You didn’t what the what? Now, listen to me. You’ve been messing me around for months. Please, please send someone over. I just need you to increase our electricity. I have a family to feed.’
‘Absolutely. Once you go back and make a fresh application online. We should respond within six weeks.’
‘I can’t wait another six weeks!’
Although we were on the phone, I knew that his reply to this would be a Gallic shrug. Gallic shrugs are one of a French person’s most powerful weapons. I remember my first telling encounter with a Gallic shrug was a month or so before. We’d had a problem with the 1999 Renault Mégane estate. The battery had stopped recharging. I bought a new battery, but it still wouldn’t recharge. I replaced the alternator but it still wouldn’t recharge. I took it to the garage.
‘The problem is your new battery. It’s faulty,’ said the man at the garage. ‘You need to take it back to the shop.’
I took it back to the shop. They tested the battery.
‘The battery is fine,’ said the man in the shop. ‘It’s probably your alternator.’
‘But the alternator is new and the man at the garage told me the battery was faulty,’ I said.
Now here’s the interesting thing. If it was the UK, the man at the shop would have done one of two things – he would either have accepted responsibility and swapped the battery, or he would have blamed the garage owner for making a faulty diagnosis. My guy, however, simply shrugged. A Gallic shrug! And that was it, end of conversation. Before I knew it, I was back in the car with the battery on the passenger seat next to me, in a queer state of perplexedness. I drove back to the garage.
‘Did you
get a new battery?’ asked the man at the garage.
‘No. They tested the battery and they said it was OK,’ I said.
Now, here’s the other interesting thing. In the UK, the man at the garage would have said one of two things, either:
‘Your man at the shop is in the wrong.’
Or:
‘OK, we’ll have another look. Perhaps there’s something else going on.’
However, my man said neither of these things. He simply shrugged. A GALLIC FUCKING SHRUG! And that was it. And as far as I can see there’s no counter to it. The way they do it, and it’s very clever, means that’s automatically the end of the conversation. It’s so powerful that you just sort of walk off, and by the time you realise nothing has been resolved, you’re half a mile away. And so, sandwiched between Gallic shrugs, the car went into semi-retirement. The only way to get it going was to manually charge it the morning before you wanted to drive it. A crazy situation, but, thanks to the Gallic shrugs, no other options existed.
Now here I was on the phone to EDF, once again banjaxed by a Gallic shrug. I was at my wit’s end. I hung up.
‘Mama,’ I whimpered, slumped on the living room floor. ‘MAMA!’ My mother, thankfully for her, was several hundred miles away in England. But that gave me an idea. My mother wasn’t here to make everything better, but there was somebody similar who perhaps could. Madame Leclerc! The Mayor of Braslou!
Ever since we’d moved in, Madame Leclerc had been extremely supportive. Yes, there was a period where she had started trying to avoid me, but this was my fault. We had been told by several expats that the thing to do when you move to a new village is to go and introduce yourself to the mayor, so when we first rented the house in Braslou we went and introduced ourselves. Back then we spoke really bad French and the conversation ran as smoothly as a sledge ride through a speed-bump factory, but she was still very friendly and pleased that we’d made the effort. But then, a few months later when we returned to the village to actually buy the house, I thought to myself, Well, we’ve bought the house now; that means I should probably go and see the mayor again. Rose refused to come this time. She couldn’t understand why we would need to introduce ourselves again, but it was clear to me that our status had changed, therefore another meeting was required.
It turned out Madame Leclerc couldn’t work out why I had come to introduce myself again, and soon after I sat down in her office, I couldn’t understand why I had either. There was nothing to say that hadn’t already been said, so we sat there in silence for several excruciating minutes. Finally, she managed to persuade me to leave. For a few months after that if she saw me coming she would duck into the nearest doorway, terrified no doubt that I would try and introduce myself to her again. She must have thought I had suffered a brain injury that had destroyed my short-term memory. But that was all in the past. Now I had something very real to talk to her about.
When I walked into the office, for a brief moment Madame Leclerc thought about hiding under her desk, but once I explained my problems with the electricity company she was enraged on my behalf. Nobody fucks with a citizen of Braslou when Madame Leclerc is in charge. She phoned EDF immediately. From the look on her face it seemed they started giving her the same spiel that they gave me. And this is where it turned wonderful.
‘OK, I am going to stop you there. I am the Mayor of Braslou,’ she said firmly. Not aggressively, because she didn’t need to be aggressive. The hardest man in the pub isn’t the one that walks around shouting at people and tearing off his shirt. Everyone knows who the hardest man in the pub is because he as an aura. The mayor has that aura. I could tell that the temperature in the office of the guy on the other end of the phone suddenly dropped by a couple of degrees.
‘That’s better,’ said the mayor as the phone conversation continued much more to her satisfaction. I could only hear her side of it, but it was clear she was now on top.
‘Yes, he doesn’t speak very good French.’ She winked at me.
‘Yes, perhaps he is a bit simple.’ She winked at me again.
‘OK, thank you for your cooperation.’ She put the phone down. ‘They’ll be over on Monday,’ she said.
I don’t suppose there are speed-bump factories, thinking about it.
Over those three months, the EDF months as they will be known in history books, I gardened badly, I spent time with my baby son, who incidentally turned out to be a right laugh, and I brewed with my GrainFather.
We held Albert’s first birthday party shaded from the heat of the June sun by the walnut trees in the dingly dell between the house and the brewery, our friends and neighbours gathered either side of two long tables covered in red-and-white chequered tablecloths, a wheelbarrow full of ice and bottles of Fred’s fizz, and an absolutely extraordinary spread of cakes and scones assembled by the combined force of our two mums, the likes of which could summon type 2 diabetes from the clouds. After the party, Monsieur Richard, David Kimber Bates, Michael the English builder, my father and I, directed both spiritually and physically by Damien’s dad, Claude, dismounted the heavy brewery equipment from the pallets and set it in place.
Throughout July and August, we spent glorious days canoeing down the Vienne from Ile Bouchard to Chinon with Ali and David, willows overhanging the river concealing sandbanks and beaches perfect for picnics, stopping off to swim in the river, which is wide enough to divide countries and yet shallow enough that you could wade from one side to the other, gently burning the upper dome of one’s beer belly in the endless run of sunshine.
We had dinner parties in Mishi’s converted barn in amongst oil paintings and dozens of old kitchen dressers that Mishi had bought and painted and subsequently forgotten what she was going to do with them.
We knew enough people that someone always needed unskilled labour. Apart from the gardening, I did other bits of work wherever I could find them. Mostly lifting things, cutting things or smashing things.
I focused on the brewery and did all sorts of work I never thought I would do – fixing up insulation, knocking holes in walls, constructing evaporation pipes, pointing stone walls and various other tasks that are actually fairly straightforward.
Nick showed me how to do the pointing. Nick is obsessed with pointing. He’s repointed miles and miles of walls round his house in Faye-la-Vineuse. I worry that one day he’ll run out of things to repoint and he’ll start repointing things that shouldn’t be repointed, like air vents and plugholes and the entrances to mineshafts. I could sort of understand the addiction. It’s a bit like messy play. You mix up your pointing concoction of sand and lime with a bit of water in a wheelbarrow, and then you splat it all over the walls with your hands, filling in all the holes. Then, after an hour or so, once it’s started to dry, you brush off the excess pointing concoction with a wire brush and slowly the stones beneath it are revealed in all their glory, like relics in an archaeological dig. Having said that, I tired of it after a day or so, so one wall of the brewery looked brilliant and the rest looked like turd. But what can you do?
Perhaps my most surprising achievement during the EDF months was the construction of a wall. We’d had to knock down part of a three-foot-high stone wall that runs through the front garden when we dug the trench from the house to the outbuilding so, with a little instruction from Damien, I attempted to rebuild it myself. The results were extraordinary. I managed to rebuild it to such a poor standard that it if you stared at it for long enough it actually looked like it was tumbling down before your eyes, and yet it remained standing. It was a sort of Magic Eye picture. Many a passing Frenchman found this hilarious and, added to the worst fence in Braslou, I realised I was starting to turn the house into a theme park for bad DIY. If the brewery didn’t take off, I could start charging an entry fee to local tradesmen to wonder at my crap building projects.
My beer, however, was improving all the time. I developed the ‘Biscuit’ beer that I’d promised my Aunty Maggs I would. It was based on the Belgian-style amb
er ale I had been making. I added Biscuit malt, a Belgian speciality malt that adds a bready taste to the beer, making it fuller, and I found if I dry hopped it with a little bit of a hop called Huell Melon, it gave it an extra dimension.
I gave beers to Damien to try, I gave beers to Pascal, I gave beers to anyone I could. Generally, people liked the beers. My IPA was still too bitter, apparently, even though it wasn’t, and Damien and Monsieur Richard kept telling me I should make a blonde beer, but apart from that the feedback was good. I changed the grain bill – the quantities of malt – for my porter beer so that it was less bitter and more chocolatey. I was desperate to get out and start making beer to sell, but the EDF months were proving to be a financial catastrophe. Once again, our money was being stretched to the limit. My nan’s alarm clock returned.
‘Darling, now really, you must listen to this. I’ve bought a traditional flat-bottomed Loire river boat from a guy near Chinon who smokes the most extraordinary amount of dope.’ It was Mishi on the phone.
‘Oh, right. I see. You’ve bought a boat?’
‘Yes, a boat. That’s not why I’m phoning, of course.’
‘No. Right. What can I do for you.’
‘I’m phoning because I’ve also bought a tower.’
‘You’ve bought a tower?’
‘Yes, sweetie, a twelfth-century tower in Chinon. Would you be a sweetie and move some furniture up to the top? I’ll pay you, of course. And there’ll be bacon sandwiches.’
‘OK. No probs, Mishi.’
Mishi had indeed bought a tower. I spent a day lumping antique furniture to the fourth floor and back down to the bottom as Mishi changed her mind several times a minute in between making bacon sandwiches and chai, this incredibly strong, sweet tea that she’d discovered when she lived in India.
