by Chris Dolley
Steam rose from the backs of the cattle as we took out our script and launched into our prepared speech. Did they have any hay or straw that we could buy?
Claudine shook her head and then burst into a stream of tightly packed and indecipherable French.
It was the longest ‘no’ I’d ever heard.
Or was it a ‘yes’?
Gradually the odd word untangled itself from amongst the ‘r’s. They couldn’t sell us any hay or straw because we were voisins – neighbours. They’d give us a couple of bales instead.
We tried to press money on them. More head shaking, more ‘r’s, lots of voisins. This was the campagne, a land where neighbours helped each other out.
And did we want any milk?
Before we could answer, Roger came out from behind a cow with the milking cluster and Claudine was off looking for something to put the milk in.
Did we want any cows?
I looked at Shelagh, had I heard that correctly? Had Roger offered us a cow? Were we about to walk back up the hill carrying a bucket of milk and leading a cow? Would it be bad manners to decline a voisin’s gift? Or were we supposed to offer something in exchange? Gypsy, for instance.
I was just warming to the idea of an animal exchange, when Claudine launched into a glowing account of Samatan market. You could buy anything there. If we wanted to have cattle, that would be the place to go.
Aha, now, I understood.
By this time our French conversational skills were pretty much exhausted. We managed a few more sentences about cows and weather but that was about it. To me, conversing in French is very much like holding your breath – after a minute, I’m spent and speechless. Words and phrases were flying over my head as Roger and Claudine chattered on about this and that. I looked at Shelagh, she looked at me. What were they saying? Claudine and Roger tempted us with a few more sentences but even after three repeats I was still lost.
A silence descended.
An awkward silence that I felt compelled to fill.
Always a big mistake.
I thought I’d try and work horses into the conversation – find a common subject we could talk about. I wondered if they’d ever used horses on their farm.
“No, never,” they said.
I should have quit at that point. I’d asked a question and received an answer I understood. My daily quota had been filled. But my interest had been piqued. What had they used on the farm before the advent of the tractor? Oxen? I’d seen a picture showing a working oxen team pulling a plough in the Central Massif as late as 1970. Had they used oxen here?
The conversation went downhill from that point. What was the French for ox? Guidebooks won’t tell you. They don’t cover rural small talk. Plenty of phrases for ’Where is the station?’ and ’Can you tell me where the toilets are?’ but ’Where are the oxen?’ – don’t even bother to look.
I tried grande vache, rationalising that a big cow was worth a shot.
It wasn’t.
Shelagh’s eyes had rolled into the top of her head and she was slowly, sidling away from the conversation. Claudine and Roger were transfixed. Big cow? What was that about the big cow?
I pressed on, if I couldn’t find the words, I’d mime them. I fastened my wrists to the top of my head. But before I could stop myself my fingers splayed and my hands started waggling. My horns had evolved into antlers.
And immediately frightened off the few French nouns that I had left.
And in between the waggling, came the babbling.
I tried to say, ’In England, before tractors, we used to have oxen.’ It came out more like, ’In England, all tractors are preceded by giant elk.’
If not a man with a red flag.
It was time to go.
Shelagh grabbed hold of my left antler and tugged me towards the door.
oOo
As I stood at the roadblock, blowing into a little plastic bag, I couldn’t help but reflect on how sporting the police were being. Breathalysing motorists at 10:00 am on a market day was not going to provide a rich catch of drunks. Whereas, if they’d waited a few hours until after déjeuner and the mix of market day enthusiasm and cheap wine had reached its peak ... well, they would have filled the cells.
Which, on reflection, was probably why they timed their roadblock earlier. A police station crammed to the ceilings with drunken farmers and a car park full of abandoned tractors was not something to be solicited lightly.
The bag blown up and the crystals scrutinised, I was taken inside for processing. The roadblock being outside the police station, I didn’t have far to walk. And then came the interrogation.
Where was my identification?
“Er ... à la maison?”
Much shaking of heads. All French citizens were obliged to carry identification at all times. Even when drunk in charge of a tractor.
Where were the car’s papers?
“Er ...” Now that was a long story, crammed full of nouns, verbs and several adjectives – all of which had fled the scene the moment the first gendarme’s hand had alighted on my shoulder.
I pulled out my ’Get out jail free’ card and slid it over the counter, adding a nervous smile and a telepathic onslaught. ’This card is not forged. This man is not the man you are looking for. Let him go.’
I’d seen Star Wars.
The police sergeant hadn’t. More shakes of the head. And a tch tch.
The Force was strong with this one.
Then he hit me with a question I wasn’t expecting.
What was my father’s date of birth?
“Pardon?”
He repeated the question. I was thrown. It was thirty-five years since my father’s death. I’d been five at the time. I had no idea what day he’d been born.
I shrugged. He looked dumbfounded and glanced at his colleagues. They shrugged. I shrugged. We looked like a room full of marionettes on elastic strings.
And then he asked me another question.
What was my mother’s date of birth?
I couldn’t believe this. I was without a dictionary, I had no script and I was being asked to recite all my family birthdays! Surely this was against the Geneva Convention?
Never cease to be amazed by French bureaucracy. It took half an hour to be processed. I filled up a whole page in their ledger. Most of it with birthdays.
And I had to return to my nearest police station – Aurignac – within three days, complete with passport, birth certificate, carte grise and tax disc.
And I had to tell Shelagh.
oOo
In all my years of driving in England I had never been stopped or breathalysed. One month in France and all that had changed.
Although, on further recollection, it wasn’t exactly my first encounter with a French roadblock. That honour having come a few months earlier. But then I hadn’t been the driver.
I was with Peter, a South African chef cum estate agent. A rather novel combination but indicative of the frequent plight of the newly-arrived in France – the need to augment one’s living with a second job. Which meant he occasionally showed people around houses in between cooking meals at his restaurant.
And on this occasion he was having some difficulty locating the property I’d asked to view. We’d toured a particular area for a growing amount of time without success when we turned a corner and ... there it was.
A roadblock.
Two police cars blocked a junction between two single-track roads in the middle of nowhere. The obvious place for a roadblock.
We stopped and out came the documents and back came the questions – what are you doing here and why? They were very inquisitive. And they were armed.
But very helpful. They asked to see the picture of the house we were looking for and peered at it a few times, took it over to the officers in the other police car, conferred, brought it back. Shrugged.
And then out of nowhere appeared an ancient cyclist. A gaunt old man in a beret struggling with heavy pedals
and weaving from side to side as he crawled along the road on his vintage bicycle.
Within a flash, a policeman was out into the middle of the road, arm upraised and hand resting on his gun. I wasn’t sure if the cyclist would be able to stop – he didn’t look very safe as it was without the additional pressure of a police roadblock and an emergency stop. I saw the ditch on the side of the road beckon for a good few moments as in panic he threw in a few extra wide swerves.
But he stopped, after a fashion, standing astride the cross bar looking less than comfortable and distinctly shaky. I wondered why he’d been stopped. Surely they weren’t going to breathalyse him or search his bike?
They didn’t. Instead, they showed him the picture of our house.
The next we knew, we had a smiling policeman waving us on and telling us to follow the cyclist – he knew the house and would take us to it.
I wondered if anyone had given him the opportunity to refuse.
We followed the cyclist for some time, omitting the more eccentric swerves but otherwise exactly matching his snail-like lead. And it was during that epic slow-motion pursuit that we decided that whatever house he led us to, we’d agree it was definitely the one in the picture and thank him profusely for all his trouble.
Eventually he pulled his machine to a stuttering halt and pointed down a hill towards a farmhouse obscured by trees. We quickly agreed that that was undoubtedly the place and thanked him for all his help.
Amazingly it was the right house, but after a few minutes inspection I could see it wasn’t the place for us – there was too much work to do for the price and the location wasn’t ideal.
So, slightly disheartened, we climbed back into the car and headed off for the next property. Hopefully without finding any more police roadblocks.
But we were lost and the roads were winding this way and that and so narrow that they all looked the same. And, as tends to be the case in the France, all were completely un-signposted.
It’s one of those unwritten laws – that when you’re lost, places you’re trying to find never appear and those you’re trying to avoid keep coming back.
We saw the police cars first, then the cyclist.
We were back.
As we passed the cyclist I could see the worried onset of a bout of deja vu form upon his weather-beaten face. Did we have any more houses for him to find? Would he ever see his own home again?
And then we were stopped and the smiling face of the law leaned into our car. Had we found the house? Yes? Were we going to buy it?
I wondered why he had his hand on his gun as he asked me? Perhaps I should buy it. Perhaps I should buy it now. How much cash did I have with me? There’s nothing like an armed police roadblock to bring out the paranoid in the law-abiding.
Peter smiled and said his clients were considering it and could he tell us the way to Tarbes. I think I heard a groan from the cyclist. Tarbes was over twenty miles away, he’d never be able to make it.
The gendarme was only too pleased to give us directions. He waved and pointed over various fields and clumps of trees and sprinkled his speech with plenty of rights and lefts. I didn’t have a clue what he said but Peter seemed to be nodding in all the right places.
With a wave and chorus of farewells we eventually left the roadblock. I think we could have held out for a police escort.
oOo
Shelagh did not take my news lightly about being stopped on the way to Samatan market. She wasn’t sure whether to blame me, the garage or the fact that the car was red.
The debate continued into the car as we headed back to the garage armed with my police summons.
“Ah,” said the manager as we told him what had happened. Apparently, the car’s documents weren’t quite ready yet. I waited to hear ’computer error’ or ’the wrong kind of leaves on the line outside Clapham Junction’, but neither excuses were forthcoming. Instead, it was the wife’s fault – far more plausible – she was supposed to have taken the forms in that morning but had forgotten.
I waited to hear pas de problème and was not disappointed. He would take the documents in himself.
“And when would they be ready?”
“Demain.”
“Morning?”
A shrug. “Après-midi.”
We’d be back.
oOo
The next day came and the afternoon saw us on familiar territory – in the manager’s office at the garage.
“Une problème,” he said. I didn’t like the way he said that. What had happened to pas de problème? It had a much better ring to it. More lyrical. More comforting.
The Sous-Préfecture had refused to process our documents, he explained.
“What! Why?”
Because we didn’t have a carte de séjour.
This was not what my copy of Living in France told me. It clearly stated that you needed either a passport or a carte de séjour. Not both. Something was wrong.
“How do we get a carte de séjour?”
He shrugged.
But the police...
He shrugged again and pushed our pile of documents – Shelagh’s passport, the contrôle technique, the old carte grise and the bill of sale – across the desk towards us.
It was now our problem. And far from pas.
As the days progressed I began to think that perhaps pas de problème was best translated as the father of all problems. If not a mother as well.
First we decided to confront the Sous-Préfecture. Surely there had been some kind of mistake. Perhaps, they didn’t like a third party trying to register a car with someone else’s passport?
Our trip to the Sous-Préfecture underwrote everything ever said about French bureaucracy.
It started well. We’d tracked down the Sous-Préfecture with the aid of the Tourist Information Centre. It was open and we even found a small building with Carte Grise written on the door.
But then we opened that door.
The place was packed. A room full of people clutching handfuls of documents and cheque books. But where was the queue? It looked more like a melee.
And, of course, there was only one person on duty and he wasn’t in a good mood.
Minutes passed. We stood at the back of the nearest thing resembling a queue and waited. Somehow the wedge of people ahead of us didn’t diminish. Instead they seemed to rearrange themselves. People would reach the counter, chat a while then move towards the back. No one seemed to want to leave. And then other people would walk straight in, force their way to the front and somehow be served immediately. It was chaotic. But no one seemed to mind. It was as though everyone knew the system except us.
Eventually we began to discern a pattern to the behaviour. People were being processed in several stages. One to hand over their documents, and another to receive and pay for the newly printed carte grise. I didn’t know how the man kept track of who he was serving. To confuse matters more some of the customers appeared to be dealers registering large numbers of cars who flitted in and out of the office and appeared to have their own fast-track queuing system.
We attached ourselves to the back of someone who looked as though they knew what they were doing and inched forward behind them. Very slowly.
As the counter approached we went over and over our prepared phrases. I felt like I was reciting a mantra. Nous voudrons une carte grise, nous voudrons une carte grise. But wasn’t that superfluous? We were in the Carte Grise office, what else would we be asking for?
After a hasty script conference we decided to stick with the original opening line. And out it came, on cue and perfectly enunciated. I handed over the documents, he took them, ticked them with his pencil, clipped the corner off the old carte grise and said:
“Carte de séjour?”
“Non. Passeport,” I said pointing to the passport I’d slid towards him.
“Non. Carte de séjour,” he said, pushing my passport back.
I tried to reason with him. After all, the only reason for the c
arte de séjour was proof of identity. If I’d been French he’d have asked to see my identity card. And what better proof of identity was there than a passport?
“Non. Carte de séjour.”
We showed him our birth and marriage certificates. We pleaded, we babbled, we mentioned the gendarmes.
“Non!”
We left. It was Wednesday morning. I had to have a carte grise and a valid tax disc at Aurignac police station by Thursday. God knows what they’d do to me if I didn’t produce them on time.
Driving home we began to put the matter into perspective. If they wanted a carte de séjour we’d have to get one. After all, we’d need them soon. We’d read that you could only live in France for ninety days without one. But we’d planned on waiting for a month or two as tax residency was determined from the date of application for a residency card and I wanted to push that date as far back as possible to make sure all the house sale proceeds were dealt with under the British tax system.
But given the choice between that and the gendarmes...
Back home, I dusted off the notes I’d made on cartes de séjour. I’d culled the facts from several sources and all seemed to be slightly different – the confusion being caused by recent European Community moves to give equal rights to all member citizens. Some argued this included the right of abode – in which case the carte de séjour was unnecessary. Others argued it didn’t and warned of deportation unless the card was held.
No one said you couldn’t buy a car without one.
We read further and collected together all the supporting documents we’d need – birth certificates, marriage certificate, passports. The only things we didn’t have were passport size photographs.
So off we went, carefully avoiding all police cars and roadblocks, on our search for a photo booth. Unfortunately, we found one of those booths with the built in blink detector – Shelagh always finds them. They’re designed to catch you in mid-blink or, failing that, to install such fear of being caught in mid-blink that your face takes on a fixed wild-eyed stare. It worked – out came eight perfect pictures of a demented half-lidded psychotic and her husband, Mungo – just the kind of couple you’d want to grant residency to.
