A Year at the Chateau

by Dick Strawbridge

  In the end though it was very special being together without the list of jobs hanging over our heads and we had a great time. We tried not to do too much – though the park itself is an endurance test. That said, we had a ball. Looking at the magical world of Disney through the eyes of our children who believed everything and loved it all was so worthwhile. After the park, we would go back to the log cabin so the children could nap and then to the swimming pool for hours, followed by more eating, then sleeping, then up and out again. As we were staying at one of the resort hotels we had early admission to the parks, so we would get in early and have fun on the teacups and then maybe go around the Small World ride a couple of times. I had never heard of the Small World ride but by the end of day one the song was inside my head, to stay for ever. Disney definitely know what they are doing!

  We returned to our version of reality surprisingly reinvigorated and ready to tackle our to-do list. Which was lucky, as we had recently come to realise that there would be at least 150 guests for our wedding! Catering for them all meant we were going to need all the crockery, glassware and cutlery that had been safely put into storage when we packed up all the kit from Angela’s vintage events company. As storage costs are high, we had made the decision to send everything to Northern Ireland to be stored in the recently reroofed outbuildings of the Strawbridge family home. It saved us a fortune and we knew it was safe but the only slight issue was getting the many treasures to France. For once, we had time on our side and, after some research, we put the task onto a ‘man and van’ website, allowing people with an empty vehicle on the way to France but a load coming home to bid to bring us our load. It was surprisingly easy and reasonably priced as the van was taking the ferry from Ireland to France anyway and would practically be passing us. Though, typically, not everything ran smoothly. The van was not quite as big as advertised so when the team turned up to collect everything it was obvious that it would not fit … The Strawbridge ladies came to the rescue and we inherited the old family trailer that was hooked onto the back of the van loaded with all the items that would not fit!

  When the van arrived with all its contents it was like a Christmas party. Everything was unloaded into the tack room in the stable block as it was dry and clean and in good condition. There were toolboxes of hair and make-up equipment, cast-iron vintage tables with display cases full of vintage ornaments, magazines and displays of memorabilia going back to before the Second World War. There were urns, top hats, feather boas and hundreds of vintage teacups, side plates, teapots, milk jugs, sugar bowls … the list went on and on. The Vintage Patisserie had come to France.

  I was smiling and remembering the hundreds of hen parties and celebrations I had hosted over the years in London. I hadn’t forgotten how lovely all my kit was, I just hadn’t remembered how much wonderful stuff I had. We didn’t have time to get everything out but while we stacked it away, I was making mental notes about what was to go where. Thinking about the future celebrations that would happen in the château was an escapism I loved. The first would obviously be our wedding – what a great way to start! But I was also picturing Arthur and Dorothy’s weddings here one day … It would all look beautiful. All my kit would be clean and organised and I would know exactly where everything was. I could almost taste the laughter and it made me smile.

  Back in the real world, our November deadline was fast approaching and there were a number of longer-lead-time items that needed sorting. As we were going to get married in France we needed to do all the paperwork well in advance. We left ourselves what we thought was plenty of time and after a quick visit to the mairie we started to pull it all together.

  I knew I was going to be responsible for this task, so I accepted with only a little bit of chuntering. We booked the date with the mairie; he was going to marry us on 13 November, exactly five years after what we consider to be our first date. That could be classed as romantic but for me it was efficient as it meant we just had one date to remember! We chaps are always getting ourselves into bother by forgetting something important, so it was completely irrelevant that the date was Friday the thirteenth …

  The file of paperwork grew very quickly with requests for information (in French, obviously). The next months were filled with a steady to and fro, getting information then getting it translated by a court-certified translator. It wasn’t slow, it wasn’t fast, it was just a relentless grind ensuring every document was found and processed in good time. One of the challenges was to get a certified-copy of an entry of my birth from the consul general at Rangoon from 3 September 1959. How many people can say they have a French version of their birth certificate from Burma? Angela needed forms to say she could get married: a ‘certificat de célibat’ and a ‘certificat de capacité matrimoniale’. I was worried about the certificate of celibacy, but in the end it was meant in the past tense. The list was endless: from my divorce documentation in French, to the ‘déclaration des témoins’, which was a full documentation set for each witness. As we wanted my mother and Angela’s parents, Jenny and Steve, to witness our marriage, we had to fill out lots of different documents for them too, including proving that our witnesses were alive. That was a novel challenge. My mum was all for speaking to someone and telling them in no uncertain terms she was alive and kicking! Being new to the village, I felt that was probably not a great thing to do.

  We were also introduced to France’s Napoleonic inheritance laws and were advised that we needed to sort out a prenuptial agreement. I had no idea about the Napoleonic Code*. Amongst other things, it sets out rules in relation to divorce, inheritance and property ownership. The idea was to get rid of privilege based on birth and to establish universal property rights and freedom of religion. The code imposed a uniform civil law on France, which previously had had more than 400 separate legal codes in the different regions. Because of piecemeal amendments, the laws are sometimes unclear and inconsistent, which goes a way towards explaining our feeling that the French legal system is complex and impenetrable. It would appear that real estate in France was governed by French succession laws dating back to 1804, which include compulsory inheritance provisions. It is not all bad. It’s just confusing. For example, children are ‘protected heirs’ and cannot be disinherited, they receive a certain proportion of the estate, depending on their number and on the existence of a surviving spouse. As we are a modern family, with my older children and grandchildren, we had to understand the system and the implications for us.

  I have always used notebooks and they often end up containing lots of valuable information, but a subject can be spread over several months or years so the info can be in several books. In an attempt to understand our new life, I dedicated a notebook to ‘The System’ and have collected information about the many taxes and payments made through the year. There are lots of websites that help to explain life in France, but it was only when I started writing down what was to leave our bank account and that I started to come to terms with how it all worked. Without even trying to navigate running a business over here, we needed to ensure we kept paying our ordures ménagères, eau, foncière and habitation taxes as and when they were required *. We managed to stay on top of our commitment to the commune* and to the government and, over the next months, collated many documents and processes.

  As the wedding approached, the demand for documentation grew, despite having a what I believed to be a definitive list that I was working to. Our parents’ ‘witness’ dossiers were almost as thick as ours and it was when, the week before our wedding, we had a request for Arthur and Dorothy’s birth certificates in French at the last moment that enough was enough. My head popped a bit and I explained in that slow and rather menacing tone that says ‘this is the end of any patience I may have had’, that they were not getting married! After only the briefest of pauses the administrator collating our documentation just shrugged and replied, ‘OK’. Which immediately raised the question of whether or not I should have pushed back weeks earlier and how muc
h was actually needed.

  Our experience of doing all that was necessary to get married in the French system and get our Livret de Famille* reaffirmed the plans we had had before we left England: that we should only host wedding celebrations at the château and not attempt to do official civil ceremonies. We now knew first-hand that the paperwork, and the requirement for bride and groom to be resident in France for more than forty days, would preclude this from happening.

  If we were to do all we needed to before the wedding it was important that we complete some of the projects as soon as possible, but it was proving very difficult to get to the stage where we could decorate and then close the door and say a room was finished. Across a very wide front, we were making progress but also causing a mess. We tried not to chase out the walls to hide the electric cabling and instead looked at positioning switches and sockets so that the path for the cables would be behind panelling or, in the case of the rooms on the main ground floor, we took the cables through the cellar and then popped them up where necessary. And it is fair to say we were erring on the side of less rather than more when it came to sockets. But even with the minimalist approach, there were still many holes in the walls and lots of floorboards lifted up. Next we had to address one of the major tasks in our quest to get the ground floor ready for guests: to plaster and decorate the main staircase and the walls around it.

  The stairway and landing above must have been cold during the winter months so, at some point, someone had decided to install a wood-burning stove beside the stairs. We deduced this from the sheet of metal on the floor beside the stairs; the hole in the wall in a beautiful ornamental alcove that sloped upwards and was about the diameter of a flue and finally, the tar dripping down the inside of the wall of the main entrance hall. But that wasn’t all. If you looked up through the two-foot-thick hole in the wall, you could see another hole cut through a stair on the final stairway leading to the attic and, through that, a charred hole (the flue must have been hot!). Then if you looked up a further thirty feet you would see a very badly patched, slightly burnt hole in the roof. All the evidence suggested that it must have been a sizeable stove complete with a bare metal chimney that went up through four floors and out of the roof. It would probably have been effective, but it definitely wouldn’t have conformed to any modern regulation!

  We had not been successful with plasterers previously and decided once again to try to find French artisans to help us, as they should have the expertise to patch and tidy up the eight-metre-high ceiling and large expanses of wall. We found a company who came recommended and were based just under an hour away from us. We had a visit from the owner and discussed what was required and agreed that it was mainly patching and skimming over the walls, so he headed off to get us a quote. It arrived quite quickly but it just didn’t make sense. As they were nearly an hour away, hotel accommodation had been added so the poor little poppets didn’t have to drive. This accounted for €4,000 of the total bill. When you added the €6,000 scaffolding hire they had included for the two-week job, the total bill was over €20,000. OK, the ceiling was high, but this was taking the mickey, so it was back to the drawing board.

  But it did motivate me to immediately start looking for scaffolding on Leboncoin*. Within a week, I had a trailer and roof rack full of échafaudage* and a plan to build an island in the sky. Then the roof could be plastered by anyone with plastering experience. The plan was simple: from the first landing I would raise scaffolding to within two metres of the ceiling. I would then take that as my level and build scaffolding up the other two secondary flights of stairs and across the upper landing. So I would end up with a square of scaffolding round the edges that could not fall inwards because it was all connected and couldn’t fall outwards because of the walls. All that left was a great big hole in the middle. After a little head scratching, I had a chat with Jacques and asked where I could get some seven-metre beams from. Serendipity to the fore and Jacques pointed to the eight he had lying in his barn. There followed some humping and dumping. And, to cut a long and slightly painful story short, I had the beams screwed down with plywood over the top two metres below the ceiling. We had an island in the sky. Over to Angela to find our plasterer …

  The monstrosity that Dick built to allow us to plaster the stairway was definitely strong. I watched him test it by bouncing right in the middle with a pile of 40kg bags of plaster. What didn’t seem to register with him was the fact that the scaffold also came halfway up the door of our suite and blocked most of the stairs. Access was definitely an issue, especially with the children in tow. To give him his dues, he did smile as he gave me one of the Gallic shrugs that annoy him so much when other people do it.

  Before I started the search for a plasterer, I wanted to assess our decorating options and ensure we needed one. The original wallpaper in the entrance hall was yellow, green and brown. The pattern was regal and very attractive but the colour felt heavy and depressing. It didn’t have the light airiness that one would expect when one enters a château. This wallpaper continued all the way through to the back of the grand entrance and under the stairs and because of the shapes of the walls here, it made your eyes go funny. I can’t lie; there was a part of me that loved it, but it was not right for our wedding venture.

  The second big issue, apart from the black tar damage on the walls, was the dark green geometric wallpaper that covered the grand staircase, all the way to the high ceiling. Again, I quite liked it, but it was far too dark and depressing for the staircase and it was also very tatty. I could not see how to bring this back to life.

  Julian, a local ex-pat handyman, had stripped most of the wallpaper in the rooms now – a terribly messy but satisfying job. I love stripping walls of their paper. It’s something that you can’t rush and it always gives me such satisfaction when a piece comes off in a big roll. But there were weeks and weeks of work to strip our château, so where possible we had to find grafters that were on our side. So now Julian moved on to the entrance hall and the staircase.

  The uncovered lime-plaster walls were a thing of beauty. The patina was like a work of art. I actually loved it and quickly imagined the woodwork round the windows looking glossy to frame the ‘art’. I was also falling in love with the natural light that reflected from the walls once the dark paper was no more. The whole château felt different. Calmer.

  The salon also really suited the lime-plaster look. With its high ceilings and gold plaster coving, it was a visual feast. It felt inauspicious to cover it up with new plaster. Dick and I had a several words on this matter. When I looked at the walls, I saw history and the pattern of history. Dick saw unfinished walls.

  One of my favourite haunts in London is Wilton’s Music Hall. It is located in my part of the city, Whitechapel, in east London, and became a music hall around 1850 when John Wilton turned a row of houses into the Great Music Hall. Many of the original features still exist and the hall is stunning. I particularly love that, in parts, it is really dilapidated. The hall is still going strong with concerts, plays and weddings, but I always thought if someone had covered its history and got rid of its Constantine furniture it would have lost its magic. I felt the same about the château. But Dick still stood by the walls looking unfinished.

  The compromise came one evening when one of our friends called. He was Dick’s friend actually, an artist called Dhirmad. He has been commissioned to do lots of rather amazing projects – he sculpted the bronze Peter Pan and Tinker Bell sculpture outside Great Ormond Street Hospital, for example, and he was currently working on a design for a restaurant owned by a famous chef. I knew if anyone would understand my vision it would be him, so we FaceTimed and I showed him around. Now, I quote: ‘Dick, I’m getting paid millions to create the look of age and cracks you have naturally inherited.’ And with that information, I managed to retain that natural plaster look on the undamaged side of the salon and under the stairs. For the rest, the search for a plasterer began.

  I am a member of an
ex-pat business advertising site and this is where I spent a great half hour contacting everyone under the heading ‘plasterer’. That was how we found Steve. His wife Denise answered when I first called; Steve was working away at the time but she said he would get back to us by the weekend and, just as promised, he did. The following week, he came to have a look at the work and we knew straight away that he was the right man for the job. ‘I’m a real plasterer,’ he said when I told him the horror stories of our previous plasterers complaining their arms hurt. I burst into tears and hugged him. He didn’t seem that comfortable at my outburst of appreciation but I knew he was going to play a massive part in helping us meet our deadlines. Steve was the knight in shining armour we needed.

  The first task Steve did for us was to plaster what was to be the children’s playroom. The installation of the wood burners with back boilers had meant the pipework associated with it had come out of the back of the fireplace into this room that was described as a ‘chambre’ on the plans, but was what we would have classed as a ‘snug’ off the main sitting room. We had routed it behind the wooden panelling to the corner of the room and from there it headed up four floors but also downwards to the basement, in case we needed to connect it to a future biomass system. As the room was now to be a playroom for the children, the heating pipes needed to be boxed in and boarded over. We also decided to remove the marble fireplace and board that over and then the whole room needed to be skimmed. The task was made more interesting by the ceilings being the best part of five metres high. But with no fuss, and a good work ethic, Steve cracked on and, within a couple of days, we had a room with walls ready to decorate. The woodwork needed more attention but it was a major step in the right direction.