A Year at the Chateau

by Dick Strawbridge

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Introduction

  JANUARY

  FEBRUARY

  MARCH

  APRIL

  MAY

  JUNE

  JULY

  AUGUST

  SEPTEMBER

  OCTOBER

  NOVEMBER

  DECEMBER

  Afterword

  Acknowledgements

  About Us

  Picture Section

  Copyright

  To Arthur and Dorothy, you are the reason we do what we do!

  Foreword

  Firstly, thank you for buying this book and giving us the opportunity to relive our first year together at the château. This year, 2020, has been a year like no other and at times incredibly hard for many of us. We embarked on our first-ever speaking tour in February and arrived back mid-March. We travelled overnight to get home and hug the children. The next day, 12 March, the French president announced that schools and universities were going to close. By 17 March there was mandatory home confinement across the country … For us, this pause gave us the chance to reflect on the remarkable journey we have been on, as well as the opportunity to put pen to paper and capture our story of the first year in our new home, Château-de-la-Motte Husson. We have loved writing this book and it has brought back so many happy memories for both of us: we have laughed, cried and honestly felt every emotion again. It’s been beyond a pleasure.

  We will not lie to you, this is a love story – not just between us, but also with the château. This book celebrates what we have done to get our château habitable and turn it into a true family home. Our aim is to share both what we have learnt and what we have loved, as well as some of the details of our journey, from the food to the flies! There has never been a dull moment, and that first year was the most ridiculous of them all. It has truly been a rollercoaster, so buckle up.

  It’s impossible to tell the story of our first year – the adventures, the challenges, the highs and the lows, the whirlwind romance, the tears and the laughter – without first telling you a bit about how and why we ended up buying our château.

  This is our family story, our shared adventures, but at times we have slightly different memories of exactly what occurred, or exactly how it unfolded – you’ll find all that in here as well.

  Before we go any further, we should explain one thing: when you see words in bold that’s me, Angel, telling the story.

  And when you see them like this, that’s me, Dick.

  So, let’s get started, back to when we first set eyes on our dream home: October 2014. We hope you enjoy sharing our journey with us!

  Introduction

  I will never forget the moment we first saw Château-de-la-Motte Husson. We had been in France searching for our forever home when the details were emailed over to us. I had butterflies in my belly – the good ones that make you feel a little sick with nerves. I knew this was the one and I spent the next four-and-a-half-hour drive fretting that someone would put an offer in before we got to see it. The drive was painfully slow and with all the excitement we nearly missed the turning. As we rounded the corner for the very first time, we gasped. It was majestic, so much more than we could ever have imagined and most certainly the one. In fact, I would liken it to the very first time I met Dick.

  The château itself was beautifully balanced with the twin towers I’d been dreaming about; even the trees were symmetrical. Coming round the corner, we immediately focused on the château, but it took only seconds before we also became aware of the island and the moat surrounding it, then the abundance of huge old trees, then the outbuildings, each of which was a substantial stone building. And as we got closer the scale of the moat became apparent – it was a huge lake! Everything on our wish list was right there in front of us.

  That first impression, that feeling of finally being home, is imprinted in my mind’s eye for ever. As I write this, I have tears in my eyes just remembering the beauty of the surroundings. I have never tired of turning that corner – and I know with all my heart that I never will.

  I’ve never wanted to do the maths to work out exactly how many hours we spent looking on the internet, driving through France and visiting estate agents in search of our dream home, but four years on from when we had made the decision to move it must have amounted to weeks, if not months. It had been a long, arduous and at times incredibly frustrating process.

  The drive to view this very special château was beautiful. Driving in France is like a Sunday drive in the country used to be in the UK. In rural areas it feels like there is so little traffic. It’s a big country and the countryside is not densely populated. Unless we had a lot of miles to cover, we stayed off the autoroutes, three-quarters of which are toll roads. If you are near a large city they can be crowded, but in the country they tend to be quiet, so you don’t miss the sense of being somewhere different. Unlike motorways and many A roads in the UK, the Routes Nationales often take you through villages or around towns, so you get to see where and how people live.

  There are lots and lots of trees in France and no shortage of old deciduous woodlands. It feels peaceful and a little bit exotic as the houses and villages are so very different from anything back home.

  The idea of moving to France first came to us in 2012 while we were on holiday in the small fortified village of Caunes-Minervois near Carcassonne in the south of France. Dick had been living in Cornwall when we met in 2010 and I was based in east London. Relationships are tricky at the best of times, especially with over 300 miles between you. The old adage ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’ is all well and good at the beginning but it wasn’t sustainable for us. We were on a mission to find somewhere we both wanted to call our home, in the geographical sense!

  At first I moved up to London but I am definitely a country boy at heart – London isn’t my scene. Angela had been on Dragon’s Den and was very busy growing her elegant events company, the Vintage Patisserie. She had found run-down premises in Hackney, overlooking the St-John-at-Hackney church, and I was helping decorate and install kitchens so all her tea parties finally had a home. But even with all this activity going on we knew we had our life and family to build and the really big question was, where should we live?

  We could go anywhere as long as we had a plan. I must admit I had an aversion to being inside the M25 and even found all the home counties too busy and frantic. As I’d lived in Dorset and Cornwall before, the West Country would never have been ‘ours’, so we started to look further afield. I was brought up in Northern Ireland and know full well there is a very good reason for Ireland being ‘green’ – it rains a lot! Wales, Cumbria and Scotland have the same ‘soft’ climates, which meant we crossed them off our lists. There are some truly beautiful, vibrant places in the UK but none of them had grabbed us and made us think we must move there, so we were a bit stuck on where we would make our home.

  A solution to our dilemma as to where, and how, we would live came out of the blue when we took a holiday to the south of France. Neither of us had really had a proper holiday for many years and so we headed off for a romantic break to start 2012, all loved up. We stayed in a lovely little gîte in the old part of Caunes-Minervois and, having stocked up on wine, foie gras, cheese and other delicacies we settled down to chill and cuddled up on the sofa in front of the blazing log fire, watching A Good Year, a romantic comedy with Russell Crowe. If you don’t know the film, it’s about a successful city worker who inherits a run-down château and, after many ups and downs, ends up living happily ever after, forsaking life in the city for an idyllic existence making wonderfu
l wine. It’s fair to say it got us thinking.

  Who hasn’t been on holiday, relaxed and pondered living without the stresses, pressure or work of everyday life? The difference with us was that we took it a step further. Passing a local notaire’s * office, we discovered a small townhouse like the one we were staying in would cost about €30,000, which, at the time, was equivalent to about £20,000. Our gîte was not huge but it was in a beautiful setting. It was a terraced building with a cobbled street out in front of it. There was nowhere to park within about 100 metres but that was easily overlooked. On the ground floor there was a spacious sitting room, dining room and kitchen with a set of French windows (we did wonder, do they just call them windows in France?) that led to a small walled courtyard. Spiral stone stairs led to two more floors, each of which had a large bedroom and a stunning en suite bathroom. It was all beautifully French, with exposed stone walls and it raised some huge questions – did we really want to have a massive mortgage that needed to be serviced? What did we want from life? Did we want to live to work or work to live?

  We are lucky enough to have some incomes that are not tied to our current jobs or where we live: Dick’s small army pension and some royalties from books we have written. It isn’t a lot, but we knew it could help us to simplify our lives. We definitely wouldn’t stop working, but when work came in we could travel to do jobs, so we concluded that it would be relatively easy to change our lifestyles. Living in France would mean that we could buy somewhere outright and put some money in the bank, and, in addition, any future children we had would be bilingual. The simple life was calling us …

  However, the internet didn’t take long to disrupt our plans. For a while, searching for small elegant townhouses with a glass of wine in hand kept us amused, and we found lots of properties that were too perfect to believe. Though our understanding of French geography was such that we didn’t even look in a specific area; we did a search of the whole of France (did you know France is big? Four times the size of England, in fact!). This is when the internet changed our plans.

  We were looking at sweet little buildings, both in villages and in the country, when the first ‘manoir’ made an appearance on our screen. It may have been old, run-down and needed a lot of work, but it was only about £50,000 – for a manor house! Our search parameters changed and – guess what? Next thing you know we were ‘oohing’ and ‘aahing’ over amazing manoirs when the first little château appeared on our screen. It was for sale at about £100,000 and needed lots of work, but it was a castle! At that exact moment our lives changed irrevocably.

  Within ten minutes the screen was full of ‘château porn’ and we were gazing adoringly at multi-million-pound, truly amazing properties. Obviously those fantasies didn’t last long but the seeds had been sown and the simple life in a small, cosy French cottage never got a look in again. We needed a château. And we knew that if we found the right one – with Angel’s events experience – there would be the potential to build a business there as well.

  The rest of the holiday just reinforced our decision. We took trips to explore the country that was to be our future home. We went to a natural spa in Ax-les-Thermes, driving through stunning countryside up into the foothills of the Pyrenees. We ate out, usually at lunchtime. There is something so special about a couple of hours of unhurried dining and it must have been normal as everyone else seemed to be doing it too – even on a work day! We loved the diversity of the restaurants we found. One day we’d be in the Pyrenees in a small family-run café eating pommes aligot* served with duck breast and gizzards, from a very limited-choice ‘menu du jour’, then the next we’d pop down to a touristy restaurant by the Mediterranean and feast on a platter of fresh seafood.

  We discovered that eating out at lunchtime was a very reasonably priced way to experience great food. One of our forays led us to a little hilltop village called Aragon and, in the middle of nowhere, we found a very posh, totally adorable restaurant. We were there just a little after midday and we spent hours enjoying a menu of regional specialities. We loved the way little extras kept turning up in addition to the three courses we had ordered. The plate of little bites of fungi and truffle to tempt us with flavours from the local forest while we had our aperitif was amazing, then our amuse-bouche was a trio of dishes made from local sanglier*. After starters of tasty morsels of fish and barely cooked vegetables there was a palate-cleansing sorbet of cucumber and mint before our main courses of guinea fowl stuffed with chorizo, which made us realise just how close to Spain we were. Everything was cooked to perfection and when the dessert arrived it looked like we’d each been give a small chocolate football. When we smashed our way into the cold, crisp, wafer-thin chocolate, we found a velvety-smooth chocolate-orange mousse. After we had savoured every mouthful, and were too full for comfort, they placed a selection of irresistible petit fours in front of us alongside our espressos. It was no wonder that we rolled down the hill afterwards. Just to put this into context, this particular menu was less than £20 per head with a bit extra for the aperitif and glass of wine, but definitely not bad for an amazing experience that we still talk about. It’s fair to say we were falling in love with the French way of life.

  This was our first holiday together. And not only that but, while we had grabbed a few weekends away when work allowed, this was the first real holiday either of us had taken for years. That alone made it incredibly special. Though neither of us could have predicted how this holiday would change the direction of our lives. However, while we knew what we wanted, we also knew it would take time to work everything out and we needed to be patient. It was not a matter of just stopping our lives and changing everything. We are both planners as well as doers, so we were in total agreement that the transformation of our life had to be orderly.

  Once we got back to London, our search for the perfect home took some time every day, but life carried on and we kept working, trying to grow our pot and our family. Marriage was also on the cards, but when, where and how was never top of our urgent to-do list.

  With a thriving events company and other people’s celebrations taking up lots of our lives, Angela stated categorically – and on several occasions, m’lud – that she did not want a big wedding, just something intimate with our parents followed by a glorious honeymoon. To coin a phrase from my youth: ‘you little fibber!’ Above marriage, and right at the very top of our list was kids: on 29 January 2013 the wonderful Arthur Donald Strawbridge entered the world and, just over a year later, 8 April 2014 marked the arrival of the beautiful Dorothy Francis Strawbridge. We knew our family was complete (reinforced by Angela booking me into a clinic near Southend!) and we were in the process of organising the how and when of getting married, as well as searching frantically for somewhere to start the next phase of our adventure, when we found our château and everything changed, but that is jumping ahead …

  As yet, we had not narrowed down our search for a specific type of property or even location. It felt like we were looking at every doer-upper in every part of France. Every day I would send Dick a list of ten possible properties, but in my heart I knew that I hadn’t yet found one that ticked all the boxes – and most importantly one we could afford!

  We knew that location was key. It’s textbook, but it’s really hard to stay focused when there are so many temptations in France with stunning properties in the middle of nowhere! That was a major hurdle and it is very humbling to confront your ignorance, but we really had little idea about what sort of country France was. Neither of us were accomplished French speakers and, though Dick had a good grasp of the geography, we were completely unaware of the regional characteristics.

  Being British we ‘know’ the difference between, say, Yorkshire and Cornwall, for example, and we all tend to have our own views on the people and how friendly they are, the landscape and how desirable it is to live there. We know the people of Northern Ireland will talk to everyone, and in a doctor’s waiting room you can expect everyone to join in the
conversation and give you a diagnosis and reassurance long before you see the doctor. We know in London everyone is busy and there is a lack of eye contact, so saying hello to a stranger or thank you to a bus driver identifies you as a bit odd. We have a feel for what Lincolnshire is like compared to Cumbria, and what Herefordshire house prices are compared to Hampshire. Bournemouth and Birmingham are about the same distance from London but they are very different places, and we feel we ‘know’ the difference between Torquay and Scarborough even if we have not visited either. This is something we’ve absorbed over years but when we were thinking about where to live in France we didn’t have any of this. Our solution was quite simple, if a bit of a gamble: see what we find and then see what the area is like.

  For some reason we were more drawn to the western half of France – the properties seemed a touch more elegant, the countryside was rolling, and there were lots of châteaus.

  After months of intense searching and viewings of several châteaus, we found a property that was definitely worthy of a visit: a very special château near Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, the start of the famous pilgrimage route, the Camino Francés, that goes over the Pyrenees and across the north of Spain to Santiago de Compostela and the tomb of St James.

  The main house was beautiful and looked over the foothills of the Pyrenees. There were magnificent glass doors that opened onto a terrace where you could just imagine drinking your evening aperitif. In addition to the main house there was a perfectly habitable gatehouse and some outbuildings, all set in lovely wooded parkland. The château had once belonged to one of Napoleon’s marshals and that was probably the reason it was a ‘heritage’ building. It was beautiful but needed a lot of love, having been attacked by termites and suffering neglect. Over the last two winters, a large hole in the roof had got bigger and all the running water had caused significant damage, removing the majority of the plaster on the inside walls. Some lovely murals on the walls had survived, but even they would need lots of attention. We knew it would need a lot of work, but there is financial support for such buildings to help protect them, so we definitely felt it was worth exploring.