by Jean Gill
I think about badgers, never having managed to catch sight of one living, but often told of where they’d been. In Crwbin there was supposed to be ‘the nine o’clock badger’ crossing the road punctually each night, but I never saw him. Then there was the pub tale of one local man’s kind-heartedness; he’d run over a badger on a back lane so he tried to reverse over it to make sure he’d killed it. When he looked in his rear-view mirror, the badger had gone. ‘Bloody tough, badgers,’ was the moral of this tale. One of our walk leaflets tells me that the nature-lover will see ‘evidence’ of badgers, among that of other wildlife, and I regret my missing education once more. What does badger shit look like? And what’s the posh name for it?
Over a coffee I do not ask Monsieur Dubois about badger shit but I do tell him that John would like a chopping block and he charges off across the road to where the council workers have entertained us by setting up a contra-flow, parking a digger and attempting to reach kiwi-fille via drainage channels.
It does at least mean we still see workmen, even while those who should be in our house – yes, they have succumbed to their Peter-Mayle image – are missing, presumed working away. The council workmen seem cheerful enough when asked to donate a tree trunk to our deprived household from the debris they have stacked across the road.
‘Does your husband have a chainsaw’ causes a moment’s embarrassment. We all know that my answer means that he is not a Real Man.
The moment passes and Monsieur Dubois says he will bring his round. All goes to plan. A tree trunk appears outside our shed, followed the next day by an efficient Monsieur Dubois with chainsaw. The chopping block is cut to exactly the right size (no protective clothing anywhere in sight, not even goggles, and I tell myself that Real Men here regularly shoot their friends in the woods while out hunting) but all goes well until John casually puts the smaller block onto the bigger block – and traps his finger. He exits for a plaster and Monsieur Dubois produces his laptop computer for the help we offered in using the new toy.
Two hours later I am very pleased with our step forward in social integration. John has given Excel tuition, I have set myself up as the Word expert and we have learned more about cycling. As enthusiasts of the Tour de France, I include in my limited social chat the fact that it is coming this way in July.
I am telling this to someone who has, on several occasions, been part of the ‘cadre’, the police escort for le Dauphiné Tour, which he considers to be better than The more famous Tour; less money equals more sport. It is apparently very difficult accompanying a tour as a motorbike cop because you have to go faster than whizzing cycles to stay ahead downhill without heading off a cliff on the bends, and you have to go slower than wobbly-moto-slow uphill, just ahead of the cyclists. I believe him. I am confused by the Alpine connection and John is quicker than I am to realise that le Dauphiné is the newspaper sponsor, not the region, and that le Dauphiné tour is a huge event.
After Monsieur Dubois has left, I am still congratulating myself on us being such pleasant well-integrated Dieulefitois when I remember John’s poorly finger. I take him to the first aid cupboard and only then do I see that it is horribly mashed, cut, bruised and he is certainly going to lose the nail. I realise what a Real Man is; it is someone who spends two hours trying hard to understand and speak French and to solve computer problems with a beginner, while he is thinking ‘Ow, ow, ow’ or words to that effect.
15.
Over-sexed Foreign Bees
The first cuckoo of spring has an ‘aaaaw’ effect; twenty ‘cuckoos’ later and it has all the charm of the Carwash song on a Cardiff airport slot-machine. Perhaps I’m a little edgy from having faced the xxxxxs on the calendar which tell me that vast quantities of family will arrive in three weeks - and it is as many months since we last saw the electricians.
Patience is not one of my virtues. In one job interview a perceptive governor asked me, ‘Would you say you were a patient person?’ and I snapped back ‘Yes’, mentally adding, ‘Or I wouldn’t be answering questions from a stupid old git like you.’ He read my eyes - I didn’t get the job. I consider the words ‘Wait and see’ to be a form of mental torture so, all in all, I am close to sainthood in response to French workmen. Half the house is without electricity so we’re worse off than when we moved in; agreed, it was lethally dangerous, but I’ve reached the stage where I’d rather risk death by switching on dodgy lights than by tripping over a cat in the dark. Was there really a time when the workmen turned up at all, never mind on the due day?
Monsieur Dubois recommends locking their tools in the cellar at the end of each day they are working here but first I have to get them back at all. I make phone calls, expanding my dramatic range from long-suffering, to pathetically inadequate and tearful, to ‘explosive’ (this apparently works for Monsieur Dubois).
‘This is not a second home!’ is my favourite phrase. I quite like ‘explosive’ – this could be my new, French personality, and thanks to the workmen, I do have some of the necessary vocabulary.
Not all the new birds are as irritating as the cuckoo. A field nearby sprouts long-legged egrets, dozens of them, stalking the green rows like old-fashioned teachers on corridor patrol. Perhaps, like our recent visitors, they left Llanelli’s wetlands for a break in the sun. We don’t see a single egret anywhere else, despite a false alarm over a row of plastic-bag-scarecrows, glinting white in the sunshine, and we wonder if we dreamt them, a mirage of waterless herons.
We pass that way again and yes, the egret field is real, so we add it to our mental map, along with the precise spot on the main road where we are likely to see a hobby hovering overhead, unmistakably hawk despite its swallow-shape.
We also add the curve of the narrow footpath along the gorge where one Sunday morning we met a solitary rider, dancing his white Arab past us, smiling ‘Bonne journée’ at us beneath his gaucho hat, and strolling on, in and out of the shadows above the ravine. We know where to stop on the road to Eyzahut, and look up at the wind-eroded cliffs to see the ’Trou de Furet’, a hole full of sky, and we know where, a few steps later, the rock’s eye winks shut and there is no sign of the ‘Trou’.
Landmarks of our short history here blend with landmarks of long history, like the ancient Knights’ village of Poët-Laval, which catches the sun impossibly even when you would swear there is not one ray. John’s scientific explanation is that a past Master of the Order of St John sold his soul to the devil for eternal sunshine.
This is as rational a hypothesis as we manage and we do see a few who would sell their souls to the devil for some sunshine – or at least sell their children to the campsite ‘animateurs’, or funleaders - as the tourists start to arrive in their campervans and are frustrated by the unseasonal grayness. Our hairdresser is philosophical; bad weather means more customers.
There are now dozens of bee orchids and I am disappointed with modern British sex education which tells you how to roll a condom onto a plastic penis, and nothing whatsoever about the birds, bees and flowers. This means that I don’t know if what I read is true, and whether Mediterranean bees will try to mate with bee orchids whereas British bees will not. You can imagine it, can’t you, the British bee bumbling along, zinging to itself as it checks out a sexy fake-bee-on-a-flower; ‘Sex toy huh? We Brits don’t do that sort of thing’ and onward it? he? she? flies. Whereas your Mediterranean bee now, high on sun and flowers, enjoys what’s on offer and doesn’t look too closely. Do you have a better theory?
Despite frequent dog-walks among the bee orchids, we don’t see one amorous Mediterranean bee; instead we see approximately twenty thousand in their annual reproductive ritual. I scramble down from the woods, attached to a Pyrenean, and spot a shimmering black cloud hanging from a branch a dozen yards away.
It is shaped like a rugby ball but bigger, about two feet, and it is not far from the old beehives. I know that at least two of these are active and I suddenly register what I am seeing. It is strange how you can suddenly percei
ve more detail once you have identified what it is that you are looking at and I now see individual bees around the edges of the dense community ball. Dogs in tow, we take no risks, but head off in the opposite direction. It is only later that I want to go back to investigate.
Although I explain to him that bees are at their most docile in a swarm, gorged on honey and contented in the company of their old queen, John disappoints me by refusing to dress up in the antique beekeeping outfit (still in the garage).
I was hoping to get one of those photos, ‘Man with bee-beard’ but I suspect I would have been lucky to snap ‘Man running away very fast.’ By the time we go back without dogs and with camera, the swarm has moved on, so presumably the scouts returned and gave the all clear to move into the new home. In the old hive, the new-born virgin queens are fighting to the death until the sole survivor can get on with the job – breeding.
It is of course That Time Of Year and there are new inhabitants in the old nest in our porch. Our back entrance has an old stone porch like a mini-version of the gateway to Cawdor Castle, even down to the wooden shutter-window through which Macbeth’s porter could inspect visitors, and it is in an ancient niche near the roof that we see a flicker of movement.
The birds are brownish-black, finch-shaped with orange-red beneath their tails, and they chirrup with irritation when they return from foraging to find that we are feeding our pets between the birds and their nest. One will hover in the doorway, using tail feathers as a fan to stall its flight, then retreat to the wisteria until feeding time is over. There is no sign of the goldfinches, called ‘chardonneray’ because they eat the ‘chardons’, thistles, a species that includes the ‘cardons’, those winter vegetables that puzzled us so much.
In place of the goldfinches, the swifts and house martins are moving in. Everywhere there are birds carrying twigs and even the ladybirds seem to turn up in pairs, so it is not a huge surprise when we hear that another grandchild is on the way. We just hope that we can make our nest a little less of a death-trap before the children come.
After a gray, wet Welsh-style spring, we suddenly find the garden drying out and the hose system is tested. John cannot understand why all his neatly laid new hosepipes, with regular holes to water ‘goutte à goutte’, drop by drop, are not watering at all. He picks an ant out of one hole. Then another... then another... ah. The ants are using the pierced hosepipes as undercover highways and blocking every single drip outlet. As John contemplates his blocked system, he sees more ants carefully collecting the grass seed I sprinkled yesterday. They amass it into a pile, leaving not one seed on the area I was trying to patch.
Two mushrooms have grown so far and, although I spray water daily on the spawn, and I know the wine cellar offers the perfect environment, there are only a few white threads visible. Undaunted, I try shiitake mushrooms, carefully germinating the granules in a wardrobe, then choosing an airy, shady place to grow my sheets of mouldy cardboard into gourmet produce. Unfortunately, John chooses the same place to dump the pasta maker and several bottles of tonic – on top of the shiitakes-to-be. How was he supposed to know that wasn’t rubbish?
Lessons in patience are everywhere, for both of us. I green-gloss-paint some more shutters. I know what I said but I’m only going to paint the ones overhanging the septic tank so how much care does that need? More, apparently. John summons me and he opens the bathroom window to show me a screwdriver glossed to the shutter, swinging out with it. I wondered where that had got to.
The good news is that the plumber has re-routed the sink so that it no longer empties onto the main road but into the septic tank. The bad news is that no-one can work out where the toilet empties.
The very bad news is that the septic tank is cracked and needs replacing, soon. We deal with one disaster at a time while the electricians work happily (it’s not their ‘putain’ nor, more literally, ‘merde’). We phone Monsieur Dubois, who knows exactly where the toilet drains and who calls round to show the plumber – and us.
Do you remember that the green dye sent down the toilet didn’t come out on the road, so we thought we were OK? Then the plumber found out that it didn’t come out into the septic tank, so we weren’t OK. Well guess what. The toilet emptied all its green dye into its very own centuries-old septic tank underneath the workshop floor – and if that tank fills up, then an equally old pipe carries the gunge under the house and out onto - you guessed – the main road, a bit further along than the sink pipe.
Three plumbers get excited as they lift the old hatch in the workshop. One calls me to come and have a look, knowing I will appreciate the finer aspects of workmanship. ‘Beautifully constructed’ the plumbers agree, as two of them are upside-down, shining torches into the green waters of our newly-discovered septic tank. One hundred? two hundred? years old, big and clean, solid stone – and no use to us whatsoever.
So, if I’ve got this right, we need a new septic tank, plus a filtration tank, all meeting the new national regulations, and then we need the toilet re-plumbed to empty into the new septic tank. John has glazed over; the plumber is already organising the hole through the wall from the toilet to the outside world and a quote from a septic-tank-installer. Our builder calls round to see if we can find a solution that does not require using our neighbour’s land, and walks the problems through with me. We stand by the condemned septic tank; the builder, a man of few words, pronounces that it’s ‘foutue’. My dictionary translates this as ‘buggered’, or ruder, which I had kind of worked out. It’s a pity someone didn’t mention this a year ago. I email a friend; in deep shit – don’t mention the septic tank.
There is progress; I keep turning on the lights, unable to believe that if I press this switch – here – then that thing on the ceiling lights up – in all the rooms of the house. Not only that but there are actual lights, after months of living in torture chambers with bare bulbs swinging from cables. I have discovered that in 1888 Dieulefit was (along with Valrèas) the very first town in France to have electric lights, powered by the hydro-electric station at Beconne. So who put in the electric lights before electricians were invented?
The locksmiths, of course. In Dieulefit these were the Sestiers, who installed sixteen public lamps and ninety-nine private ones, and presumably can be considered the first electricians. I try to imagine there being electricity available somewhere but no electricans - not an entirely new experience. On the other hand, the electricans seem to have done better historically than the builders; the Dieulefit fortifications planned in 1345 were finished in 1425.
It might not be to create fortifications this time but the village centre has even more cranes and diggers than the road outside our house, as the council removes and replaces all the old mains water pipes. Perhaps we didn’t choose the right place after all - we definitely didn’t choose the right time. Dieulefit’s Council considers this the ideal opportunity to create new road surfaces and pavements so a trip to the bank becomes just that, an ankle-breaking scramble through hard-core, tugging down the helpful red-and-white ribbon when you trip. We get cheerful newsletters thanking us citizens for putting up with the chaos in the interests of a new and better Dieulefit; the spirit of the Revolution is alive and well but not necessarily in my house.
We were good Llanelli citizens for three Christmases when the pedestrianised town centre was a building site, once because the previous new surface had completely and unevenly sunk. I mutter and scuff stones, only marginally cheered up by seeing that Jean’s law of wet concrete remains universal. A man, a child and a dog are approaching their own front door and to reach it they will have to cross a wooden plank erected over the wet concrete pavement. Two red-and-white ribbons flutter as trick hand-rails, asking to be grabbed so they can collapse and ensure that a trip becomes a fall.
But Jean’s law has yet to be confirmed . For a moment, it looks as if I will be disappointed as the dog sits on command, before the gangplank. Then ‘Viens!’ (‘Come’) and woops! there she goes, one foot s
traight over the edge into the wet concrete.
There is a real sense of history about being there at the precise moment that the inevitable pawprint is fixed as a Dieulefit landmark. There is a pub in York unimaginatively called ‘The Roman Bath’, because built on one, and in the good old days you could look through a glass circle cut in the floor of the lounge and see the old paving of the baths. It took me a while but I spotted it; an ancient Roman dog-print.
When I get home, I find that the council workers have dug a trench from across the road to a spot under my sitting room window. I smile at the nice men in hard hats, who have a good view of our furniture from their swivel seats in their red and yellow dinky toys.
Then a nice man in a hard hat calls to tell me that they can’t find the mains water pipe to our house. We cannot help. Then he finds the pipe. Loudly. I think that was when one lot of ‘Merde’ and ‘Putain’ could be heard. He comes back to tell me that they have broken the pipe but that they will make a temporary replacement and fix it permanently tomorrow.
Why does the word ‘demain’ not reassure me? He is now very very nice and when he comes back again to help us stop the tap spurting brown fluid, he is upset when I aim the hose into the flower bed. ‘Your beautiful flowers,’ he says, pained, and takes the hose away from me, pointing it over the less delicate lawn, ‘It would be a pity to spoil them’.
I negotiate the roadworks to get in vital supplies and make contact with the outside world. I buy le Dauphiné at the supermarket and know when I am queuing at Fleur’s checkout exactly what will happen. Sure enough, despite eight people waiting behind me, Fleur stops totalling in order to read the paper, at her own pace.
‘What are you doing?’ asks the man behind me in the queue and, as the French are less prone to sarcasm than the Welsh, Fleur looks up innocently and tells him, ‘I’m reading the paper.’
