French Fried: one man's move to France with too many animals and an identity thief

by Chris Dolley

  We toyed with having them redone. But did we have the time? Not really. So off we rushed to the Mairie at Cassagne.

  Which was closed.

  Opening hours were 9:00 am to 11:00 am. This was late afternoon.

  The next morning we descended upon the Mairie. We were desperate and only a few hours away from being criminalised. Our only hope was a carte de séjour. Could we have one?

  “Oui.”

  “How long will it take?”

  “Three months.”

  oOo

  I waited to wake up. I sat back and mentally nudged myself a few times. Come on, snap out of it. This had to be one of those frustration dreams where nothing went right and every attempt at escape was thwarted in helpless slow-motion.

  It wasn’t.

  I was wide awake and staring across a desk at a wiry little man I’d dreamt was the Mayor of Cassagne.

  He still was.

  I wondered if Spain took political refugees. It was only fifty minutes away. Would driving without a current tax disc be considered political?

  We threw ourselves upon the mercy of the Mayor. Told him about the roadblock, the garage, the problem with the documents, the Giant Elk. I didn’t need to consult a script, I knew all the words off by heart. I’d rehearsed them so often, going over and over them in my mind. I’d even stop passers-by in my dreams and rant at them about cars and missing tax discs.

  The Mayor was brilliant. He picked up the phone and with a, ‘This is the Mayor of Cassagne speaking,’ proceeded to intervene on our behalf with the Sous-Préfecture.

  But the Sous-Préfecture refused to budge. Rules are rules and they had a lot of them.

  The mayor offered to vouch for our identity. They refused. He suggested another type of residency permit. They refused. He hung up.

  But he wasn’t beaten. Next in line for ‘This is the Mayor of Cassagne speaking’ were the gendarmes at Aurignac.

  We listened avidly, trying to cull sense from the few words we understood. Was he plea bargaining? Or was that something about the weather?

  He replaced the receiver. We waited, hearts thumping, what was he going to say?

  “Bon,” he smiled.

  And that was enough.

  If we took all the papers we had to Aurignac that morning, they’d wait for the rest.

  Which was a considerable relief. And in the meantime, we’d begin the process of applying for our cartes de séjour.

  Which turned out a lot easier than my notes suggested.

  “Don’t you want to see our marriage certificate?” I enquired.

  “Non, pas nécessaire,” he said and told us that, although gendarmes were naturally inquisitive and would want to see the marriage certificate and anything else they could lay their hands on, Mayors weren’t.

  I liked the Mayor.

  We completed our applications in triplicate, had our passports and birth certificates photocopied, handed over our embarrassing photographs of Mr. and Mrs. Mungo and left.

  Outside, we breathed the fresh air of freedom. Things were indeed looking up.

  We found the gendarmerie on the outskirts of Aurignac. It was a small single storey building, so small it didn’t even rate a car park. But there was a lay-by outside – just large enough to take three cars – and we parked in the middle.

  As we walked inside the station, I couldn’t help but notice a board full of wanted posters running along one of the walls. I had to have a look and ... phew, mine wasn’t there – though I think we’d all used the same photo booth.

  Out came my prepared speech. Not quite the one I’d wanted to give – I thought ’Nous sommes banged to rights’ was an excellent opening line. But I’d been out-voted by Shelagh and the cats – the iniquities of living in a one paw, one vote democracy.

  Still, we presented our documents and they ticked them off their list. They saw our passports, driving licenses, marriage and birth certificates. They thumbed through our car’s papers, glanced momentarily at the ’Get out of jail free card’ ... and then asked, “what is your father’s date of birth?”

  There is something obsessive about this interest in birthdays. I read somewhere that the Mormons have a similar obsession – some enormous database of family trees they hold in Salt Lake City – something about needing to trace everyone’s ancestry back to the original Osmonds.

  Maybe the gendarmes had a similar fixation. Certainly, I now know where to go if I ever forget a birthday.

  Besides dates of birth, they were particularly interested in what we intended to do in France. We weren’t retired, we weren’t working. What were we doing?

  We did our best to explain in halting French but nothing we said seemed to be understandable. Guide-books again – plenty of entries for ’I am a postman’ or ’my husband is a doctor’ but nothing under ’well, we kind of gave up working to live self-sufficiently, grow our own food and write science fiction.’

  But gendarmes are persistent and need to know.

  “La Chasse?” he suggested.

  Yes, we agreed – very swiftly – La Chasse. That’s exactly why we came to France. For the hunting. Well, why not?

  He sounded envious. A faraway look formed in his eyes. I could see him thinking about such a life. Days of endless hunting. A man and his dog. Utopia.

  “Bon,” he concluded with a start. And then dropped his bombshell. He’d see us again when we produced the vignette – the tax disc. In the meantime, the car would have to remain off the road. It took several repetitions and a few words written down and looked up in the dictionary but eventually we understood.

  Aha. We can’t drive the car until we have a tax disc. The car parked outside the gendarmerie. Our only means of transport.

  It was a five mile walk home.

  Or at least it would have been a five mile walk, but we were hardened criminals by then.

  “Why did you have to park right in front of the gendarmerie door?” hissed Shelagh as we walked outside. It’s one of the many lines of small print in the marriage contract – the partner is always the one at fault. Shelagh tells me it’s somewhere after ‘in sickness and in health.’

  We casually walked past the car. How visible was it from the gendarmerie window? It was about thirty yards away and there was a slight hedge. And no one was looking out the window. And the alternative was a five mile walk. Perhaps if we gave it a few minutes, wandered into Aurignac for a window shop and waited for the gendarmes to change shift?

  Five minutes later we were speeding along back roads, feeling as guilty as any hot-wirer in a stolen car.

  An hour later I was on the phone to my sister.

  “Can we borrow your car again.”

  “What happened to your own?”

  “Don’t ask.”

  oOo

  A week later we received a call from the Mayor. There was a problem. Apparently the Préfecture at Toulouse had returned our application forms. They wanted more information. How did we intend to support ourselves? Did we have health cover?

  This did not seem to accord with the European ideal of equal rights for all member citizens.

  We rifled our document case. Would they accept the E111 health form as proof of health cover? And as for supporting ourselves, would they need an attestation in French from an accountant? Or would they accept a photocopy of a building society pass-book?

  We took what we had. The mayor liked our freshly issued and stamped E111 forms. And he took a photocopy of our pass-books. Everything was bundled up and re-submitted to Toulouse. Leaving us to do what we had most practice at – wait and hope.

  Time dragged as only time can. The car continued to sit outside our house. We’d see it through the window, we’d see it every time we opened the door. It was like having a Christmas present you couldn’t open until Easter. Look but don’t drive.

  So we had to borrow a car once a week, which wasn’t ideal for anyone. Jan lived ten miles away, ten miles of winding country lanes and we seemed to spend more time ferr
ying the car back and forth between the two properties than actually using it.

  It was ridiculous. The vignette only cost 100 francs. I had the money. I wanted to pay. But no one would accept the money!

  Then I had an idea.

  If it was only the vignette that was preventing us from using the car, could we buy one without re-registering the car?

  It was worth a try.

  Off we went to the Carte Grise office. We joined the same melee of people, waited the same amount of time. But came up with a new question.

  No more nous voudrons une carte grise, this time we wanted a vignette.

  “Non.”

  “Pourquoi?”

  We couldn’t catch what he said but it didn’t sound good. Our script for alternative replies wasn’t very helpful either as we’d gambled everything on a successful response to the opening line.

  I tried handing him the money but he pushed it back – probably thought I was trying to bribe him.

  “What are we supposed to do?” I asked, more in frustration than expecting an answer.

  “Go to Tarbes,” he said. At least, I think it was Tarbes. Whether that was helpful advice or a well-known Pyrenean insult I couldn’t tell.

  I thought it best to leave. I didn’t like the way Shelagh was clenching her fists. We already had one felon in the family and I didn’t think a brawl in the Sous-Préfecture would help our application for residency.

  But had we found a solution to our immediate problem? Was it possible that the Sous-Préfecture at St. Gaudens couldn’t issue us with a vignette because the car was still registered in the Haute Pyrénées? And did that mean that the Préfecture at Tarbes, the capital of the Haute Pyrénées, would be able to sell us one?

  And what was worse, it was all beginning to make sense. I was becoming attuned to the local bureaucracy.

  We debated the pros and cons of going to Tarbes most of that evening. Perhaps we were becoming defeatist but I couldn’t see any outcome other than failure. We would ask for a tax disc, they would ask for a carte grise, we would show them our cancelled one with the corner clipped off and they’d show us the door.

  That was one of the better scenarios. Others had us being arrested for trying to tax a stolen car – why have you got someone else’s carte grise, where is your carte de séjour, what is your father’s date of birth?

  And to make matters worse, the next day we met another English couple and cartes de séjour casually cropped in conversation, as they frequently do amongst the newly arrived. And we found to our horror that they’d been one day away from being deported. They’d lobbied the Mairie, the Sous-Préfecture and the Préfecture. It was only a last-minute trip to Toulouse and an insistence on seeing the person in charge that resulted in their cartes de séjour being issued and their deportation order rescinded.

  This was not news we wanted to hear. They’d been law-abiding citizens, I was Mungo, the man with the forged ‘Get out of jail free’ card.

  What had started out as a simple matter of buying a second-hand car was rapidly advancing towards deportation and the loss of our home.

  oOo

  March disappeared into history and we met April, car-less and potentially stateless. Surely something had to happen soon? How long did Toulouse need?

  On the Fourteenth of April we received a letter.

  I hardly dared open it. I could see it was from the Mairie. I slowly began to peel back the flap of the envelope, until I found a patch so firmly glued that it refused to budge, so I ripped the envelope to shreds in a passable imitation of a shark at the height of a feeding frenzy.

  I was desperate. We both were. We read the letter, our hearts beating wildly.

  There was something waiting for us at the Mairie. We read it again, comparing our translations. It had to be the cartes, didn’t it?

  Back on the phone again.

  “Jan, we need a car. The Mairie closes in less than an hour. But don’t worry it’ll be the last time we ever have to borrow a car.”

  I could feel Nemesis shuffling on my shoulder the moment the words passed my lips. Didn’t I know better by now? Had tempting fate become an obsession?

  We arrived at the Mairie with minutes to spare. I was already calculating how long it would take to drive to St. Gaudens, park and then walk to the Sous-Préfecture and could we do that before the Carte Grise office closed for lunch?

  There were two blue A5 cards on the Mayor’s desk. Was that them?

  Not exactly ... they were récépissés.

  What the hell was a récépissé?

  Apparently it was an interim carte de séjour valid for three months and issued as a receipt to acknowledge the fact that a carte had been applied for and would be issued in due course. I was on the verge of asking why they didn’t just issue the cartes de séjour if they’d accepted the fact that they were going to, when I realised that I was dealing with a bureaucracy. Why issue one card when you could issue two with different names?

  But they did look official. They had our photographs on them. And the stamp of the Préfecture at Toulouse. Would that be enough for the Sous-Préfecture to accept them?

  The Mayor rang and asked.

  “This is the Mayor of Cassagne speaking,” he began. We waited. The bon took a while but there it was. They would.

  Back inside the car again, out the village, through the countryside, into the suburbs, the car-park, the Sous-Préfecture, the Carte Grise office.

  “We have our récépissés. Give us our vignettes!”

  “Non.”

  “What!?”

  Apparently our Certificat de Situation – a certificate to prove there were no outstanding loans against the car – had lapsed. It was only valid for a month following the date of issue.

  “But you saw it when it was valid,” I shouted.

  I showed him the tick he’d made in pencil on the form.

  He wasn’t interested.

  There was so much more I wanted to say but couldn’t. It wasn’t so much that my French had deserted me but all the verbs were having to be restrained by the nouns. They wanted blood.

  How could our car’s situation have changed in the last month? It hadn’t moved. We couldn’t drive it. We couldn’t tax it. We couldn’t register it. And we had all the documents. So how the hell could anyone secure a hire purchase loan against it?

  I think the Carte Grise man was starting to weaken at this point. Perhaps he took pity on our plight. Perhaps he was fed up with seeing us. Perhaps he saw the look in Mrs. Mungo’s half-lidded eye.

  He stepped over to the back of the office and pulled an application form from a tray on the shelf. It was a request for a new Certificat de Situation and he filled it in for us. He even wrote down the address of the Préfecture in Tarbes for the application to be sent.

  We returned home in a subdued mood. The optimism of the early morning replaced by a quiet determination.

  We posted the application and waited. It was Easter week-end. The Préfecture probably took three weeks off to paint eggs.

  But on the Tuesday, the glorious eighteenth of April, the new certificate arrived. What a surprise, there were still no outstanding hire purchase agreements on our car.

  Back to the Sous-Préfecture. We had our récépissés, we had our passports, the old carte grise, the bill of sale, the contrôle technique, two Certificats de Situation and a sawn-off shotgun.

  Well ... strike the last item. We didn’t actually have a sawn-off shotgun but I think he could tell that we were just the kind of people who would the next time.

  He took all our documents, ticked them again, and ... gave us a new carte grise.

  “Et la vignette?” I ventured, determined that we were not leaving until we had everything.

  “Non.”

  What! This was not happening. Not again. The nouns were wavering, reinforcements from the adverbs and pronouns department were drafted in to keep the verbs from shredding the Carte Grise man where he stood.

  “Pas ici,�
� he continued very quickly as Mrs. Mungo advanced upon him. And then he started pointing and saying something about the Centre des Impôts.

  Ah, I’ve heard of that, the tax office.

  As we left, I began to experience a worrying thought that perhaps we’d been enquiring at the wrong office all the time. That perhaps if we’d known that vignettes were issued at the Centre des Impôts we could have gone there earlier.

  It was not a pleasant thought.

  Luckily it wasn’t an accurate one either. The first thing the woman at the Centre des Impôts did was to ask for our carte grise. I doubted if she’d have looked very favourably upon a cancelled one from a different department.

  A few seconds later back came a shiny tax disc. We were legal. We could drive our car.

  Well, almost. We had to buy new number plates and change the insurance to reflect the new plates. But that was hardly a Herculean task.

  It was something of an anti-climax after that. After months of frustration and hitting brick walls at great speed, suddenly everything was easy. We showed our carte grise at the auto-shop and there were no supplementary questions or requests for extra papers or birthdays. We didn’t need a script or a phone call from the Mayor. It was: thank you very much, and back five minutes later with a pair of yellow and white plates.

  A similar story at the insurer’s. A quick update of the file and out came a new green disc from the printer.

  It’s amazing how easy life is when you have the right papers.

  And how impossible when you don’t.

  Logs, Language, Fires and Flues

  Although the days were warm that first February, the nights were not. By six o’clock all warmth had disappeared with the sun and a star-lit cold descended upon us.

  It wasn’t a freezing cold – we weren’t in any danger of hypothermia. But it was persistent and always a few degrees below anything approaching comfort level. Spending the evening wrapped in blankets watching your breath steam was not conducive to a happy frame of mind.