French Leave Page 4

  There was a wobbly moment. Oh-God-what-am-I-doing wobbly. Then Mary smiled resolutely. ‘Listen! I have spent three whole days packing your stuff, so you are going to love France if it kills you! If it kills me! I will be over to visit next month, and you’d better be up and running by then, I will be expecting frogs’ legs for my dinner!’

  Yes, ma’am. Very good, ma’am. It hit me that I was going to miss Mary, miss all my lovely friends, very much. Why was it so difficult to explain why I felt I had to leave, to discuss it all in depth?

  ‘I’m going to rent you a car until you can buy one. That’ll be your house-warming present.’

  Crikey. People were being so incredibly kind. Even my elderly mother had battled her way into town to forage out a book called Living & Working in France, a colossally brave gesture given that her only daughter was ‘emigrating’, as she saw it. While France was only a short flight away, to her it was a den of foreign iniquity, and she was baffled as to why I would want to live there. Does everyone feel last-minute guilt and confusion before moving abroad? I certainly did, in spades.

  And then the removals lorry was arriving, and everything right down to the blender (well, French ones might blend differently), was being hefted into it. I might have wept had one of the cheery lads not distracted me with a query about insurance. Everything was insured, wasn’t it?

  ‘Yes. Why?’

  ‘Oh, it’s just we had a client once whose stuff wasn’t. He was moving to Spain and decided not to bother with insurance because everything was packed so tightly he reckoned nothing could break. He was right there. Nothing did break. Only the ship was in a collision, unfortunately, and sank to the bottom of the Irish Sea. With all its contents perfectly intact.’

  Oh, horror! Oh no!

  ‘Oh yes. His car. His furniture. His computer. His documents. His entire life. He rang the harbourmaster to demand that Dublin Bay be dredged and everything retrieved. The harbourmaster said: “Certainly sir, only that’ll cost you about twenty million.”’

  Reverently, I kissed my worldly goods au revoir and wished them bon voyage. In three days’ time, I would – hopefully – be reunited with them. My friend Anne, who happens to be a nurse, was coming too for moral support. I prayed that her professional services wouldn’t be required.

  A line from a song by Jean Ferrat floated into my mind: ‘qu’une vie entière puisse se tenir dans la main.’ ‘That an entire life can be held in the palm of a hand.’ Unless you’re moving house, in which case it can just about be crammed into a huge lorry, and costs twelve thousand euro to tote to Normandy, France.

  Yes, twelve thousand euro. And that was only the start: legal fees, agency fees and sundry other costs at both ends brought the final cost of moving to an eye-watering thirty thousand euro. Do not underestimate what a new life abroad can cost, because at prices like these you can hardly afford to get it wrong.

  ‘The tea bags, ma’am. Where are they? We can’t start without tea.’

  Fair point. It is eight in the morning and the lorry has arrived at my new house, filling the entire street of the hamlet in which I sense phones already ringing and tongues wagging. Our new foreign neighbour has arrived with the contents of a dozen department stores! Amongst which, somewhere, there are tea bags. But where?

  The lorry crew, three friendly, hefty chappies, look at me in a way that says hey, no problem, if you can’t produce the Barry’s tea we’ll just wait here while you fly back to Dublin to get some more. In Ireland I rarely drank tea, but in France, bizarrely, it is to become an institution.

  In lieu of tea, a revolution threatens to brew, but then Anne finds the tea and plugs the kettle into one of the kitchen’s few electrical sockets. For a country that manufactures so much electricity (even selling it abroad), France is incredibly parsimonious with power, and entirely disapproves of multiple sockets. Far-sightedly, heroically, my mother had given me a parting gift of fifty multi-plug adaptors.

  And then, leaving Anne to direct operations, I headed off to sign Pierre Yves’s stack of 7,985 (or was it 9,875?) documents, all duly witnessed by the notaire. Normally seller and buyer share a solicitor in France, but who’d trust that? I’d got my own notaire who, unknown to either of us at the time, was to handle the purchase of many more houses by Irish buyers. Ireland, cresting its boom and snapping up foreign property, was not going to quite be as far away as I thought.

  The paperwork complete, an urgent task awaited. A phone had to be installed. The idea of doing this immediately was presenting some difficulty to France Télécom, who seemed to feel that next December might be more convenient. After a preliminary skirmish with a reluctant official, I’d been handed a piece of paper with a number on it – to be contacted, I was told without a trace of irony, as soon as I could find a phone from which to ring it. So, barmily, I rang from my Irish mobile, and a man answered.

  ‘Hello? It’s about my phone. The man in the office gave me your number and told me to call you.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘My phone! I need it right now, today!’

  ‘I am sorry, madame, but I cannot help you.’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, not more bureacracy! I spent hours yesterday in your office and now you say you still can’t help. What kind of outfit are you running here?’

  ‘I do not know, madame. Perhaps my wife could enlighten you.’

  ‘Your wife? I don’t want your wife! I want a phone! What is so difficult about that? What kind of dimwit can’t supply a phone?’

  ‘All I can tell you, madame, is that I am Monsiour Dupont, the dimwit vet.’

  The … what? Oh no. Stuttering apologies, I realised I’d rung a wrong number and was indeed speaking to the local vet. Thank God I didn’t have a poodle that needed putting down.

  Under the circumstances, he was remarkably helpful. ‘What you must do is go to your local mairie. They should be able to help you with Télécom.’

  ‘Oh, right. I see. Er, thanks very much.’

  ‘Not at all. It is a pleasure to help a foreign lady.’

  Mortified, I returned home to find, as if by magic, the village mayor standing on the doorstep.

  Well, hello, how nice! Have a cuppa! And the vet says you might be able to explain how one extracts a telephone from Télécom?

  Chummily, blissfully unaware of the hostilities later to develop, he invited me round to his mairie where Télécom, he promised, would be tackled and conquered.

  Forty minutes later, after Télécom’s singing menu had apparently directed him via Japan to an asylum in Brazil, he slammed down the receiver.

  ‘Dolts! Idiots! This is absolutely scandaleux! Normally France is a most efficient country. I cannot understand …’

  No, nobody can. Only much later, after an ill-fitting, badly designed phone finally arrived (‘No, sorry, we can’t put an extension upstairs. Too difficult.’) did I discover the full extent of the company’s mythical powers. France Télécom can reduce grown men to tears. It can drive people out of business, out of the country, out of their minds. It can leave normally peaceable people contemplating new careers as suicide bombers. Nonetheless, up against increasingly stiff competition from private operators, it did make an effort with my new account. It invited me to nominate a ‘favourite country’ to which calls could be made at a reduced rate. Naturally, I nominated Ireland.

  Shortly thereafter, written confirmation arrived. Télécom hoped I would be making many happy calls to my favourite country, Iceland.

  No, the beds didn’t fall through the attic floors – or if they did, we were too tired to notice. Moving house, combined with country air as pure as cocaine, knocked Anne and myself virtually into a coma. We might be in it yet had we not been wakened one morning by a loud, insistent noise.

  ‘Somebody’s breaking bottles! Next door, in the neighbours’ garden! Dozens of them!’

  Crash, bang, smash … agog, we listened. It sounded as if the neighbours had had a massive party last night, and were now, for reasons
unknown, hurling the empties onto their back patio. Impressed, we listened. Crash, crash, crash!

  ‘Wow. That’s an awful lot of bottles. Why would they be breaking them, d’you reckon?’

  I had no idea, but as the noise continued intermittently throughout the day, an inevitable conclusion began to loom. My new neighbours, on whom I’d yet to clap eyes, were raving alcoholics, as well as rampaging louts. By nightfall, at least a hundred bottles had been smashed. Torn between horror and a kind of awestruck admiration, we were amazed, impressed, baffled and …

  And then, belatedly, enlightenment dawned. Discreetly tucked away behind the neighbours’ hedge, smothered in roses and clematis on the public side, lurked a bottle bank. It was passing drivers, not the neighbours, who were chucking in their empties.

  ‘Well,’ said Anne, grinning, ‘if you can’t beat them, you’ll just have to join them.’

  Oh, no. No way. First rule of ex-pat life in France: three or four bottles of wine a week, no more. With meals only. Much later, I met a British chap who, with considerable regret, was returning to Britain.

  ‘It’s either that,’ he said sadly, ‘or cirrhosis. I’ve got to get back to where a nice bottle of wine is a treat, not an item of furniture. France is ruining my health.’

  But so far, it wasn’t ruining mine. Au contraire. The sun was blazing, the country air intoxicating, and down in the basement the bikes awaited their first outing. It was time to go exploring.

  Where, and what, is Normandy?

  George W. Bush isn’t the only one to ask this kind of question. If it weren’t for its D-Day beaches, the paintings of Monet, the novels of Victor Hugo and the gloomy Gustave Flaubert, nobody might ever have heard of this quiet, modest region of France, even though it’s the size of Ireland and has roughly the same population of four million. Divided into five départements – the Eure and the Seine Maritime in Upper Normandy, the Calvados, the Orne and the Manche in Lower Normandy – it lies flat as a crêpe a hundred kilometres north-west of Paris, tranquilly producing the nation’s barley, apples, cream, cider, lamb and (completely uncontroversial) veal. Stretching from Le Tréport in the east to Cherbourg in the west, gently riffled with forests and streams, it is almost in sight of Kent (on clear days you can see Dover from Calais, a little further up the coast), but it is conservatively, profoundly French, peppered with points from which William the Conqueror allegedly set out to teach the rosbifs a thing or two. Despite the hordes of day-tripping Brits now merrily stocking up on cheese and wine – and holiday homes – Normandy doesn’t do tourism the way Provence does: little Dieppe will never rival Nice or Cannes for glamour. Only once a year, for the film festival in Deauville, does Normandy pick up its skirts and shake its booty. But even as Johnny Depp or Brad Pitt is cutting the festival ribbon, tractors continue to chug barely a mile away, inexorably ploughing, sowing and reaping the crops that are the region’s livelihood. And its beauty. In summer, the corn is almost literally as high as an elephant’s eye. Cars are swallowed up in it, lost between rolling golden waves, and cycling the tracks that bisect the fields is sheer, perfect pleasure. An honest, God-fearing region, in winter Normandy is asleep by ten o’clock and anyone who likes pubs, clubs or nightlife should factor in this crucial information. Not only can you not find a bottle of beer at night, you can’t even find a bottle of milk. Normandy doesn’t do 24/7. In fact, France as a whole doesn’t really do it.

  What Normandy does do, in spades, is peace and quiet. At first I thought there must be something wrong with me – nobody could possibly need so much sleep – but after a few weeks the truth dawned. I was drugged, completely zapped, by a new rhythm of life devoid of urban stress, a new environment unpolluted by car alarms, burglar alarms, screaming sirens, crammed buses or toxic fumes. Instead, the scarlet sun slipped silently below the horizon each evening, an owl hooted in the night, a church bell chimed midnight and all the village lights were extinguished on its stroke. It was, and is, like a time warp. Moving from an Irish city to the French countryside is like moving back in time fifty years. Like moving into one of Flaubert’s novels, or a northerly version of Pagnol. With the exception of Rouen, Le Havre and the other large towns, where you stand a very faint chance of finding a can of Coke or a loaf of bread after dark, Normandy is for farmers and fishermen, for those who believe that ‘early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise’. (The natives, who have a reputation similar to that of the Scots when it comes to money, are particularly keen on the ‘wealthy’ aspect of that adage.)

  Inland, thatched longhouses far outnumber modern housing, black and white and beamed longhouses surrounded by slowly, thoughtfully chewing cattle. Remarkably big cattle, bison with horns like motorbike handlebars, huge white bulls built like tanks. Flirty little Friesians too, fat fluffy sheep strewn everywhere like scatter cushions, and the goats whose job it is to furnish Irish and British delicatessens with stunningly expensive cheese. About six weeks after I moved in, my neighbours’ goats gave birth to a fine crop of kids, which I was invited to see, to touch and even to feed: it took a while to digest that this was reality, not a theme park, that there would be no admission fee or souvenir shop or notices banning chewing gum. No guided tour, since the farmer was busy farming, and no CCTV security systems, since goats are just goats, non?

  And wild boar are just wild boar. As I was driving to the supermarket for groceries one morning, a massive boar sauntered across the road, tossing its tusks as if debating whether to engage in hostilities. All I could do was slam on the brakes, suddenly grasping why people carry stout sticks when they go walking in the forests. You would not want to be on the kebab end of those tusks. Red-eyed, the boar stared at me challengingly, fleetingly reminiscent of the aggressive biker in Dublin, only it was better behaved, it didn’t swear or throw any missiles.

  Gradually, you start geting used to Normandy’s abundant flora and fauna. A stag leaps over the bonnet of your car and you say: ‘Hey, bonjour, have a nice day!’ A fox chases a mole through your garden and you callously hope the fox wins, because the damn moles are a plague. (They dig up everything, including tennis courts, swimming pools and airstrip runways.) A kestrel hovers for hours over a haystack, a fleet of moorhens launches into the lake, two swans chivvy their cygnets up the river, an otter darts for cover, a goose tries to chew through your shoe … I’m no David Attenborough, but you can’t help enjoying it all, watching transfixed, sometimes for hours.

  In summer, everything changes, the beaches rev up and the action moves to the coast. But as yet it was only May and I found the inactivity captivating: the silence, the moon, the web of lilac in the woods, all those empty, shuttered chateaux. Being near Paris, Normandy is a favoured retreat of wealthy Parisiens whose pleasure it is to maintain a little chateau or manor house for use in August, for a week’s shooting at Christmas and a week’s cycling at Easter; for the rest of the year they lie dormant, dust-sheeted, deserted. Unlike the sexier, ditsier chateaux of the Loire with their Disneyesque twirls and turrets, Normandy’s castles are sombre, restrained and – to those of us who’d love one if it weren’t for the soaring property taxes – a sorry waste. Usually in excellent condition, immaculately maintained, they command all the best views but are rarely enjoyed. They’re rarely burgled either, although there has been the odd little incident. An Irish friend who bought a holiday home near my Normandy house was annoyed one day to find his bikes and lawnmower stolen by youths who had also helped themselves to his cornflakes for supper. ‘But mind you, they did wash the bowls and spoons before leaving.’

  Indeed. Normandy is very house-proud.

  In summer, the fields sing with sherbet-sharp yellow rapeseed. In winter, the ploughed earth is the colour of chocolate, the texture of herringbone tweed. In June, for four or five magical days, Normandy billows blue with flax, each field labelled by the fashion house for whom the linen will be woven (Hermès owns the most), the edges blazing red with poppies. At seven each morning and evening, the angelus
rings: Normandy is studded with abbeys and churches, all of which are illuminated at night. After just a few weeks an electricity conservation drive reduced the glow of the village church steeple to a haze, but by then I could already identify it in the dark by its silhouette. Why does the bell ring at seven, not six? Because this working angelus marks the beginning and the end of the labouring day (plus noon for lunch, of course), even if it’s not quite accurate in August. On hot August nights, tractors chug up and down the fields through to dawn, working by the light of their headlights, their steady nocturnal thrum wafting in the open windows on the warm breeze … when my first batch of Irish friends came to visit, they slept so soundly that I feared they were dead.

  ‘Wake us at seven,’ they said. ‘We want to go to the market.’

  So I did. I knocked on their bedroom door, turned on the radio, made coffee, knocked again, turned on the television, loudly whizzed smoothies in the blender, knocked again, started up the lawnmower …

  Finally, at a quarter to one, they emerged, furious. ‘We’ve missed the market! You never called us!’

  Call them? I was nearly calling the undertaker!

  But then, people do sometimes die in strange ways in Normandy. One of the unluckiest was the lorry driver who, shortly after my arrival, plunged off one of the three huge bridges that span the River Seine. I wasn’t supposed to hear about this (I have vertigo, and talk of such incidents is banned), but I wasn’t surprised. It’s bound to happen when you have rainbow-height bridges arcing across the sky, coupled with sometimes violent winds. Such is the tremendous drop from the biggest bridge, the Pont de Normandie, that you’d have quite a while to contemplate your fate, rather like a parachutist who, in freefall, realises he’s forgotten his parachute. A French friend of mine, who also suffers from vertigo, has a strategy for driving over the Pont de Normandie, the Pont de Tancarville and the Pont de Brotonne: ‘I always try to arrange myself on the inside.’