Once upon a time a long time ago I gave up living in the UK and moved with my family to Northern France. We had bought a house there so years before so it was not as much as a culture shock as we might of expected. I look back on it now and wonder just how we had the nerve. We had bought an ancient farmhouse with a huge barn attached. The timber framed ancient barn alone was twice as big as our house in England had been and was a truly wonderful construction. It was a source of amazement to me that it never fell down. Ancient timbers on a crumbling brick base soared into the gloom and even the inhabitants of the village would look wonderingly at it. We took this to be a pretty ominous sign of it’s incipient demise but when we sold the sold the property it was still standing. It is a common for the France to treat the English as simpletons on whom they could unload collapsing farm buildings before they themselves moved into purpose built bungalows down the road.
Our house was on a hill and at the bottom of the hill was a large spring which was claimed to be the source of a major European river system. It was a claim which we challenged as it appeared to us that it’s source was actually in one of our cellars. A friend of ours an English architect on his visit to our rural slum offered to bring over a damp meter. We considered this to be a bit unnecessary as we had a rare amphibian living in our cellar and was apparently flourishing. The Greater Crested Newt frolicked about in a small rivulet which entered at one end of the cellar and exited in the cracks in the brick work at the other. More worrying than our aquatic friends were the two large pipes which ran a shoulder height through the cellar. Our plumbing system was antiquated and was from time to time subject to some very unpleasant mishaps. One of the pipes did not seem to be attached to our primitive system but in rainy weather a sudden noise like an express train would suddenly emanate from the pipe as a great rush of water urgently departed through to a mysterious destination under our garden or perhaps beyond. We quite rightly claimed this to be the true source of the river. Our plumbing system was very infrequently but usually when we had guests present subject to violent emanations of truly epic proportions from our downstairs toilet. You would hear a series of loud bangs as the toilet seat was wrenched upwards and then a huge quantity of singular unpleasantness in volcanic proportions would come back up out of it.
Our heating system was even more problematical. One of our fire places was ten feet across and you could stand in it and look at the stars. Our house in one of the highest villages in Northern France was directly under the flight path of the giant American planes flying back from Iraq. On those occasions you would a loud continuous rumble very similar to the noise of our chimney catching fire. We would burn logs and the resin from those logs would build up and if we were over eager to keep ourselves from suffering hyperthermia in the winter our over exuberance with our combustible material was known to set the chimney alight. This was a truly frightening experience and we would stand waving our puny fire extinguishers upwards in a futile attempt to quell the conflagration. I remember one night saying to some guests that the planes were particularly noisy only to go into the lounge some twenty minutes later to see the last of the glowing soot descending from the chimney. In the winter it would snow in the lounge initially a very amusing experience but tedious after a few years of enduring the Christmas grotto like appearance it imparted to the fireplace. The winters generally saw us migrating upstairs and forgetting that we actually owned another fifty feet of house which disappeared during the winter months into the uninhabited and uninhabitable gloom.
Except for my wife gripping me on the shoulder in the middle of night and saying ‘what was that noise’ we tried to pretend the cold uninhabited bits did not exist. I tried not to look at the bits of masonry which would drop off our house from time to time. We used to purchase logs off a lady who for some unknown reason was called the log lady. She was of an enormous size and kept a herd of mountain goats which would frequently escape and wander round the lanes. If you liked her goats you got good logs. She had manic obsession with driving her truck as close as possible to her customer’s barns. Unfortunately between our barn and road stood a carefully cultivated English lawn. The French see lawns as simply pieces of wasted land which should be growing turnips or some other basic necessity. Nothing would stop her driving her truck with determination across our lawn plowing deep ruts into it’s manicured surface.
The property at the back of ours was originally occupied by an old lady who used to keep rabbits. She would wander the lanes uprooting anything that looked as though a rabbit might eat it. She kept her rabbits in discarded old bathtubs covered by similarly discarded doors. She would lift the door off the bath toss in the accumulated greenery from her perambulations round the village and put the door back on again. Sometimes in the dark you would come across her full length on a grass verge moving slowly with a sack on her back filling it with anything that came within her grasp. She looked like a very slow long distance swimmer who lacking somewhere to swim was practicing in the grass. At one time so I was told those suffering from circulatory problems rather paying for a doctor would gather nettles for the purpose of flagellating the offending parts of their bodies.
The French are extremely pragmatic when it comes to drink driving. Recognizing the difficulty of living in rural France after having your license removed as a result of the application of the breathalyzer they had developed a car for which you did not need a licence. Unfortunately they had failed to realize that it would not just be driven by those whose lives had been unjustly revoked by the State it would also be driven by those who had never driven at all. Very small and low powered we had two of these in our village. Both of which came to sticky ends and both of which were then put to use as chicken houses. One man who had never driven came round the bend near our house and simply drove into the telegraph pole. The other was rolled going down our hill.
One of the things about France is that it attracts a lot of eccentric English people and France itself offers much greater individual freedom than currently enjoyed back in England. It tolerates things which would never be tolerated in the UK.
One English couple who lived near to us had decided to move over solely as result of their one weekend visit to Paris. In the UK you book weekends in Paris with a show and from the south of England you are conveyed over and the coach drops you off at your scheduled hotel which can vary according to the amount of money you have paid for the trip. These two were dropped of in the red light district of Montmartre and their show was a sex show where they occupied the first row of seats. The star attraction was a leather clad crocodile wrestler and they would recount the story of how they came out covered in water having discovered that the front row was not the prestigious vantage point they had assumed. Not withstanding that they had purchased a house and moved over.
One of their ambitions was to own a pub and so they turned one of their outbuildings into a bar and set about transforming it into an East London pub equipped with drink dispensers and beer pumps. They used to argue abut whose turn it was to stand behind the bar and serve the drinks. I remember my wife asking them where they bought all the glasses and the lady of the house told her that she had a big handbag and stole them from the ferry company on the trip over.
A friend of ours was the Head Master of a school and he would take his charges on school trips to France. His pupils would loot the gift shop on the way over but before docking he would make them all empty their pockets of their accumulated ill gotten gains. Frequently the ferry company gift shop staff would just tell him to take the items away and on his school fete day he would set up a stall selling the stolen goods for school funds.
One of the hostelries we used to visit in France was known as the blind mans pub – so named because the proprietor who was also the bar man was completely blind. It was very popular with the English who would order spirits and he would put his finger into the glass at what he considered to be an appropriate level and pour until his finger got wet. You got very generous measures. One night when we visited the local hunting club were in lamenting or celebrating we were not sure which the accidental shooting of one of their own members and they re-enacted the event for us whilst very drunk. Another of the English residents was building his own plane in his barn. Very many years ago he had been turned down by the RAF on account of his eyesight and had pursued a career as an aeronautical engineer. He had no experience of flying but had gradually started to acquire the bits necessary for the plane on ebay and his plane was very slowly taking shape in his barn. We left France before he took to the air.
Of course the stories about French rural life are endless and these are just a smattering of them. One of our friends used to run a very large pub which had been converted from an old water mill. Again this place used to attract it’s fair share of eccentrics. It used to put on music on a Saturday night and it was usually jolly sing along accompanied by an accordion player. One of the accordion players would cavort round our table whilst we would be eating and suddenly ‘over the bridges of Paris with me’ would come blasting out six inches from your ears. An ethnic French experience I always found difficulty in coping with. I remember on one occasion to get away from the jarring cacophony I went to sit by the bar and immediately the greasy accordion player say down next to my wife and asked her in she fancied ten minutes in the back of his car. An even worse musical experience was the French bagpipe players. Nothing compares with the audio misery of having a team of French bagpipe players tuning up indoors. Mind you one of the high lights of the entertainment year in this establishment was a French version of Burns Night which came not just with haggis and bag pipe player but also Can Can dancers. It would be an all night marathon of sordid inebriation which descended into debauchery in the early hours. Our friend the proprietor always had issues with his musicians. In fact he intensely disliked not just most of his staff but his customers as well. He would express his contempt for his English customers by denigrating them in French to his French customers. He would express the firm view in English to his English customers that his French customers were almost as a body imbecilic.
Friday was French folk dance night and the patrons would shuffle slowing round what passed for the dance floor in circles and the dances were conducted by the dancers with complete indifference to the music. The accordion player had on Friday nights become an electronic organ specialist. The proprietor would sit with us and complain bitterly about the loudness of the music and on one occasion he made his way across the dance floor between the rows of elderly French dancers to ask the musician to play a bit more quietly. The musician then increased the loudness of the music and turned round and grinned at the proprietor who took this gesture of defiance very badly. After asking us to reassure him several times that as the owner he had control over the music he set off again across the dance floor and whispered something in the ear of the musician. The effect was truly electric and with a two handed crash on the keyboard the musician wrenched the electric leads out of the wall and told the assembled dancers that the English man had told him to stop playing as he wanted to talk to his English friends. It would have been difficult to think of a greater insult to French pride since the English had turned Joan of Arc into a kebab. Most of the customers simply left without paying for their meals a number surrounded our table their faces turned purple with rage simply verbally abusing us at the tops of their voices.
Stories of our time in Franceare simply endless and blend into one another. From this distance in time they seem not to be part of us anymore except of course in the middle of the night when some unexpected noise wakes us up and I wonder whether the cows have come into our garden or another brick has dropped down the chimney. French noises and smells are different to English noises and smells.
I now run a small internet business selling knives and scissors at http://www.euro-traveller.com From time to time visitors from France drop in and tell us the latest news but our life has moved on as lives do.
