French Leave

by Liz Ryan

  Evening is falling. My mud-spattered neighbour and his friends have bagged twenty partridge. Shouldering their guns and bulging sacks, they head home, bandoliers of ammunition looped across their chests as they wade through the black drills of ploughed earth, looking like … well, looking like men. Not old men, but not new ones either. Looking like men of the region and of the land, which is exactly what they are.

  No doubt the partridge are peppered with shot. No doubt one of the hunters, eating dinner tonight, will spit out a few splinters of ammo or, if he’s hardy enough, blithely wash them down with some Burgundy or Bordeaux. The meal, literally fallen from the sky, will be whisked from muddy field to scrubbed table in a matter of hours, and it will taste like a gift from the gods to those who have spent their day in search of it.

  And no, madam, sorry, it won’t be shrink-wrapped.

  Fast-forward two months, and once again Christmas is approaching. I have been to visit my neighbour with a crate of empty bottles, and his fat sheep, scattered like toys around the orchard, have paused in their munching to watch him fill them with the fiery calvados he makes from his own apples, to sell on the side to one or two friends. He siphons it from a keg into a funnel, and thence into the bottle, with the practised hand of decades, and not a trickle, not one drop of the apple brandy is lost. Yes, of course you can buy official calvados in the supermarket, properly bottled and labelled, and it’s very good; it just doesn’t have quite that tang of autumn mist mixed with apple pips and blades of grass and stray leaves, that heady hint of wood and wool. It doesn’t carve quite the same dramatic canyon in your tummy midway through a ten-course meal, which is what calvados is designed to do. The trou normand, knocked back in one gulp, works on the scorched-earth principle, clearing everything in its path, leaving the committed gourmet ready and raring to tackle the second half of his or her humungous Christmas meal (often eaten on Christmas Eve) with revived gusto.

  However, before we get that far, the meal must start somewhere. Traditionally, it starts with plump tangy oysters from Cancale, Arcachon or St Vaast – lemon juice or shallot vinaigrette being the only desirable dressings, ask for Tabasco and you might well be asked for your papers – but we have decided to blaze a new trail. With radical daring, we foreigners are going to start with scallops.

  And so I pack up my crate of moonshine calvados (apart from flaming the pud, it makes an ideal Christmas gift), get in the car and drive on to the home of m’sieu le pêcheur. Very possibly, he has some other real name – surely it can’t actually be Mr Fisher – but I have never been able to ask him, because whenever I come to collect my scallops he is, logically enough, away at sea. I first heard of Mr Fisher from a neighbour who works on the cross-channel ferry, who told me, scandalised, about tonnes of scallops being dumped into the English Channel because nobody wanted them. Whereupon I leaped up, hand in air, shouting that I wanted them, I would take them all! Well then, he said, go see Mr Fisher, he will procure you some straight off his boat, fresh out of the ocean. And out of their shells too, he even does all the preparation for his little circle of cash-paying customers.

  Terrific. Terrible. And so I have since visited the Fisher home many times, as again today, to pick up my sack of cushiony scallops and pat the heads of the five little Fishers, who line up to say ‘allo m’dame’ in chorus, each one a head taller than the next. (I suspect they sleep Russian doll-style at night, the smaller ones tucked into the larger.) Despite his perpetual absence, Mr Fisher must get home now and again, because the eldest of these steps-of-stairs is only six, while the baby is barely teething, and madame is pregnant, eh oui!, once more.

  After due banter about impending baby Fisher, and an appreciative nod at the scarlet sunset behind farmer Marcel’s pigeonnier (dovecote) in the nearby field, the booty is duly produced. Two kilos of silvery scallops are slipped to me (I feel as if I’m buying cocaine), and even in the dusk I can see that many have their sacs of orange coral still attached … which may explain why scallops taste so good with a certain orange sauce that is, alas, particularly difficult to make. My own method, less dramatic but nonetheless delicious, involves Noilly Prat and crème fraiche. But not yet. Not yet.

  First, the glistening scallops are to be chilled and rested overnight. ‘Shake them,’ advises the perpetually harassed, albeit kindly, Mrs Fisher, ‘in a drop of milk. They keep better and they fill out, plus the flavour is enhanced.’

  How they could possibly fill out much further without bursting, or how flavour can be much better than ocean-fresh, I do not know, but I take her word for it. The scallops will be cuddled and cossetted and given every possible care en route from this world to the next. After all, they do cost 60 percent of the price of the ones in the supermarket; even in France, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

  And now it’s almost dark, and it’s time to meet up with my English neighbour Tim, who has requested my assistance on a little mission. While his wife is away in England working for a week or two – somebody’s got to earn a crust somewhere – he has been issued with instructions to procure a turkey. Like the calvados, turkeys are available in the supermarket, packed and prepared, but he and his wife have decided that they will have a proper local beast, fresh from the farm, and we have already sourced it at a farmer’s stall in our local market earlier in the week. Now, it is ready for collection; the only stumbling block might be the directions to the farmhouse, because he’s not quite sure he understood Mrs Farmer’s crunchy accent. Something about a crucifix, apparently, something in patois that entirely defeats his sat-nav.

  So, armed with our mobile phones, we drive off into the Stygian night, only to discover that it’s rush hour in farmland. There is not only a car coming at us, but a tractor a few hundred metres behind as well. Good Lord, don’t things get busy round here at Christmas, next thing it’ll be road rage!

  No matter. Soon we shake off all this traffic and slew up a road – well, muddy track – to the left. We know it isn’t far to the farm, but there’s still no sign of it … on and on we drive, only to eventually arrive, baffled, at the crossroads of a main road. No, definitely not. We must have passed the turn somewhere without realising it – not a difficult feat in this comprehensive, all-enveloping darkness. At night in Normandy, all is pitch black, and the sky is shimmering with stars.

  ‘Ring madame,’ Tim finally concedes, ‘or we could be going round in circles till Christmas.’

  So I ring her, and she says what did I tell you, you turn left at the calvaire, it’s in a grotto, you can’t miss it (you fools) … while I relate this to Tim, he reverses and hey presto, yes, there’s the crucifix! Now we’re motoring. A few hundred metres on up a dirt boreen, we spot the battered old car which is our next landmark, and we’re home and dry on turkey turf, madame’s husband waiting to meet us at the door with a hefty child in his arms, nodding sleepily off over his shoulder.

  No. On closer inspection, it’s not a child, actually. It’s the newly deceased turkey. The biggest, sturdiest turkey imaginable, its paws dangling down the farmer’s chest and its wrung neck dangling down the farmer’s back, its beak agape in shock, a beady eye fixing us reproachfully as if to say: ‘I was running round this farm only five minutes ago, you know, until you ordered my execution. How can you have done this to me?’

  Naturally, credit cards don’t work for this kind of transaction. A rumpled wad of cash is fetched up from the depths of a grimy pocket, and Tim staggers as the turkey is transferred to his grasp. It is enormous, and its very integrity is a problem for him. Briefly he wrestles with the prospect of trying to say something in French, but then he chickens out and turns to me. ‘Would you ask m’sieu here if there’s any chance he might chop off its head for me? I, uh, don’t like to be the one to do it …’

  So I ask Mr Farmer, who rather unexpectedly says no, no chance. He doesn’t like to be the one to do it either, he adds with a touch of asperity. After all, this creature was a friend of the family up to five minutes ago. Here’s
your bird, thanks for your custom, and now goodnight. Goodbye. Firmly, the door closes.

  So we clump to the car, Tim heaves the bird into the boot and wrestles the lid down over its boulder-size chest, and we head for home, wondering how exactly you brace yourself to chop a … uh, maybe a little shot of that calvados might help?

  Scarcely is he home when his wife rings from London to find out whether the proper, authentic, cornfed, free-range organic turkey has been got?

  ‘Yes,’ affirms Tim, a little crisply after his somewhat traumatic odyssey to turkey Mecca, ‘it has. It’s out in the garden. I’ve tied it up on a long rope and it seems quite happy. When you get back, dear, you’ll only need to sharpen the axe and kill it.’

  Yes, well, this kind of Christmas shopping makes a refreshing change from Tesco. Now all that’s left is the monks, who should have our cheese ready and waiting for us over at the moonlit abbey, its rind washed by their very own gnarled hands. Rumour has it that they give it a good flaying with their rosary beads at Christmas, to get the bumps out and maintain the religious aspect of things … and then there’s the lady who hand-stuffs her squawking geese to make the foie gras, but maybe you don’t want to hear about that. Not unless George is standing by with a stretcher.

  12.

  Santé!

  It is two days after Christmas. Christmas can be tricky in a new country; but then Christmas can be tricky in the old country too. Hearteningly, this one turns out to be delightful, thanks to lifelong French-Irish friends who invite me to participate in the oysters, foie gras, presents and general merriment. There is even smoked salmon from Ireland, plus a Christmas pud somehow smuggled through security, and the craic is every bit as good as ever it was ‘at home’.

  However, I now have a minor injury which needs ointment from the pharmacy. It is a whistlingly cold day, and on arrival in the village I am surprised to find throngs of people milling around. What can be going on? The atmosphere is restive, almost as if some kind of riot is brewing. Perhaps one of the shops is having a particularly exciting sale, like Harrods, and people have been camping on the pavement overnight in their sleeping bags?

  Mais non. The village has three pharmacies, and as I approach the first of them I realise that it, along with the other two, are the focus of the excitement. All three pharmacies are crammed to bursting, and long queues are snaking out onto the pavement. Oh no! A leak at the nuclear power plant! They’re here for urgent iodine supplies!

  But no. Nothing has leaked or exploded, except for a highly contagious outburst of post-festive hypochondria. After a long wait in the queue, during which everyone is excitedly discussing their grippe, their crise de foie, their mal de tête, and various other cherished ailments, I finally near the counter. The pharmacist has whittled down the seething hordes until only one woman remains in front of me. She is brandishing four prescriptions.

  Four? Even the pharmacist, standing as he does to make his third million of the morning, looks somewhat dazed by this. Frowning, he peers at her over his spectacles. Four, madame?

  Eh oui. She has la grippe, she explains, as have her husband, her son and her daughter. Toute la famille. The doctor has made a house call and issued an identical prescription for each of them. She is here to pick up the resulting twenty or thirty medicaments. Taking the paperwork, the pharmacist sets about filling a bag – a veritable sack – with industrial quantities of lotions and potions.

  And another. And another. And another. Each bag is stuffed to bursting with identical quantities of identical medication – no, not generic, brand names only, merci beaucoup – and, by the time the lady leaves, she is all but swaying under the weight of the taxpayer’s purchases, festooned like a Christmas tree, lumbering as if emerging from the hypermarket with a week’s shopping.

  Fascinated, I ask the pharmacist if it’s always this busy at this time of year. After all, his shop has only been closed for two days over the Christmas break.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he nods, not entirely displeased (his children will be going to the Sorbonne, possibly Harvard), ‘everyone has eaten too much, has a headache or sick stomach, then there’s the cold weather …’ Handing over my tiny tube of ointment, he eyes me with pity. By comparison with all the others, my two-euro purchase looks pathetic. And I paid for it myself: both euros!

  I couldn’t believe it. Everyone eats and drinks too much over Christmas in most countries, gets a touch of winter flu, but France must be the only place where – in the secure knowledge of reimbursement by social security – everyone buys such vast quantities of medication. If an entire family had flu, it seemed logical to me that they should share one prescription, and then get another if necessary?

  ‘Not at all,’ says Philippe, my friendly physio, when I relate this story. ‘They’d feel deprived if they didn’t get one each. France has a famously excellent health care system, but it is being destroyed by abuse. Soon, it will collapse. Pooff! All gone.’

  Apparently the government shares this viewpoint, because it has started to run ads encouraging people to opt for generic medicines, which are 30 percent cheaper than branded ones, to visit the doctor rather than call him out and to economise in numerous little ways. But when it comes to health, the French don’t believe in economising. Au contraire, they feel they are getting value for their taxes. They are entitled to waste as much as they want. Anyone leaving a pharmacy without at least five or six tubes, packets and bottles feels cheated. The ever-spiralling cost of it all simply doesn’t concern them.

  And besides, what would one talk about then? The French love, absolutely adore, discussing their health. Ask someone how they are, and they will tell you, in detail. Blow by blow, every nut and bolt, for a full hour. The phrase ‘Oh, mustn’t grumble’ is unknown. Grumbling is part of the fabric of France, and to be in full health is as disappointing as holding a losing lottery ticket. Sometimes when people ask me how I am and I say ‘Grand, thanks’, I feel I’m disappointing them, letting the side down in some vague yet definite way. Perhaps I should invent an affliction, to be trotted out on festive occasions?

  At the weekly market, there is a herbalist’s stall. Every Monday, it is thronged with local farmers’ and fishermen’s wives eagerly comparing ailments. Their aches, pains, bunions and migraines; their husbands’ aches, pains, bunions and migraines; their poorly grandchildren and (the bit they love best) ‘heavy legs’.

  ‘Heavy legs’ is an affliction unknown in Ireland, where legs weigh roughly the same as in most other countries. As is a ‘liver crisis’. If you feel off, you take an aspirin or a bit of Bisodol, and that’s pretty well that. In France, you can get a whole week or more out of either legs or liver: buckets of sympathy, buckets of advice and buckets of nearly ‘free’ medication. Amidst a veritable litany of ailments, hypochondria is by far the most virulent. Recently, some of the more obscure afflictions have been removed from the list of things you can claim for, and the government has begun to plead with the populace to shape up and cut down … A deeply unpopular attitude, this is decried and denounced by the legions of women waiting their turn at the herbalist’s stall. In retaliation against the government’s demand that everyone nominate just one family doctor (many had several), the nation staged a protest by nominating then-minister for health Dr Douste-Blazy, with the result that the doc-turned-politician ended up with over four million patients.

  Ironically – touch wood – I have never felt healthier in my life. The pure air, fresh food, exercise and deep sleep seem to be all the medication I need. But one day, later when the weather warms up, I take my visiting elderly mother to the beach, where her hat blows away and she subsequently gets a little touch of sunstroke. Sinking onto a bench, she confesses to feeling unwell.

  Mere metres away, there is a lifeguard’s hut. I run to it, and there, incredibly, is a fully qualified nurse. Within seconds, she is kneeling at my mother’s side with a rucksack full of medical equipment, taking her blood pressure, at once soothing and extremely efficient. Later, a doc
tor confirms the very simple remedy: a lie-down in a dark, cool room, and lots of water. No, no truckfuls of pills, madame, just a quiet little rest. My mother is astonished.

  ‘They were so helpful! So nice, so kind! I can’t believe that nurse was available immediately. And the doctor only charged half what he’d charge in Ireland!’

  Other foreigners, both resident and visiting, confirm this. The medical service is startlingly good. A nurse even visits the home of one English lady to take regular blood tests, and visits another to dress a finger wound, whereas ‘in England you’d have to go to her, whether you were able to or not’. Some doctors still make house calls, and take great pride in the quality of care they offer. An English acquaintance, terrified of having to go into a French hospital for the removal of a troublesome bunion lest ‘they might experiment’ on him (well, he is English, and the French do have the upper hand here, and they will eat pretty much anything), emerges ecstatic. Wonderful, fabulous, a four-star holiday camp! When I tell some French friends the story of an Irish man who, at the age of ninety-four, spent three days on a trolley in the corridor of a Dublin hospital waiting for a bed (before dying), they literally clutch their chests, aghast. But is Hireland not in Europe? What is this tale of primitive horror? Is Hireland not very rich? (It was at the time.) Such a zing would never ’appen ’ere in France, they indignantly assert: ah non. Nevair, evair.

  Except, that is, on the night of the fright.

  It is now a warm summer’s evening, and I am reading in bed. Suddenly, my right leg begins to itch. To throb. To swell. To turn traffic-light red. Within minutes, it resembles a giant salami, puffing up like a balloon as if about to burst. Perturbed, I seize the phone and ring my doctor cousin Mary in Ireland.