It happened like this…an English family moves to France. Part 10

 

The road through the little town of Pont l’Abbe d’Arnoult.  That basket shop is no longer there, but I used to pop in regularly as it sold all sorts of odds and sods.  Opposite was a small supermarket.  The post office was at the other end of the place, boasting the most unfriendly and po-faced post mistress in the world!  The arch and the church on just the other side date back to the 14th Centuries; the church has a very ornate portico which is unusual because most of the churches in the area were fortified against the English during the Hundred years’ War and look somewhat bulky and plain.

We moved the children to a little privately-run Roman Catholic school in the small market town of Pont l’Abbe, which was to be some 15-20 minutes’ drive from our new house.  We had rapidly learnt that, although the village school we were leaving was undoubtledly quite excellent in its own way (despite only 2 hole-in-the-ground toilets for 105 children), it taught the children very little apart from how to speak bad (ie local) French and how to aspire to becoming a farm labourer.  We decided therefore that the village school in our new village, Ste Justine, although it was probably all very sweet and delightfully dated, was not for our kids.  I have to confess that we didn’t even look round it.

 

 Driving the children to school in the winter was often so lovely, with a mist shrouding everything but the church spire.  The name of the town has nothing to do with an abbey, as one might suppose, though there is an abbey in nearby Trizay, about 5 miles east.  Apparently there used to be a bridge (pont) at a homestead either named Abe or the owner was named Abe, circa 1200 or so, before the town was built.  That is how the name evolved, l’Arnoult being the name of the river.  

The Pont l’Abbe d’Arnoult school was not a fee-paying school in the UK sense, where independent schools can be excruciatingly expensive.  This was not the same thing at all – the fees were really nothing much, even for three children.  It did, however, have a better standard and the children started to mix with “better” other children – note use of inverted commas.  The fact that it was RC was by-the-by.  There was a chapel, and a couple of nuns fluttering about occasionally, but it was otherwise an ordinary school.  As is the way in most schools on the continent, there was no uniform, and it was particularly from the children’s clothes that one could tell we were in a completely different social bracket.  Here the kids wore Rip Curl and similar makes, good quality shoes, and were always clean.  At the school we had left the children were frequently grubby and their clothes even grubbier.

A bonus was that there were a few other foreign children already there – and English girl by the name of Charlotte, I recall, a couple of Australian girls and an American boy.  This was a bonus not because we wanted the children to be able to speak in English but because, no longer being the only foreigners, they didn’t stick out like sore thumbs any more.

 

The last summer at Primrose. Me standing outside the kitchen/utility room door, with the 3 children and two friends. William always had zillions of friends round, these two being Guillaume (in red and blue), who now lives in Germany with wife and child, and Benoit (in the middle), still living nearby and still in regular contact.

Security for children

The most important thing for children is to feel loved by their parents, to feel that their parents are united in the face of any childhood traumas and decisions, and to feel safe.  It is important that children feel their parents are going to protect them from danger and look after them if they are sick.  Wipe away the tears and be ready with cuddles.  So moving your children from school to school is not necessarily a good thing, but it is not a bad thing either.  In fact, it can be very good for them and it promotes sociability.  This was the fourth school our children had attented in as many years.  Although I’m not going to pretend that our children shone academically at school – though they held their own – they are now, as adults, all in above-average situations, have plenty of “nouse”, are multi-talented and socially adept.  They are also, as the French say, bien dans leur peau.  Really, one cannot ask for more.

It goes without saying, perhaps, that they put us through a whole world of teenage traumas, but the main thing was that we always stuck together, through thick and thin, and they always knew and understood their places within the family network.  We did things en famille.  Moving around gave them broader horizons and an ability to soak-up different situations as and when the needed arose – and they have carried this forward in to adulthood.

 

Jake holding a kitten named TD, which stood for The Dragon.  It is a funny thing, I have never been particularly keen on cats or dogs, but we have almost always had them.  The children also had a hamster for a while.  It died and I had to dash in to Rochefort to buy another one.  One of them commented the hamster looked different … “really ?  Hmmm … well, hamsters do change sometimes …” I muttered.

As a child myself I went to fourteen different schools, all over Africa and the South Pacific, Switzerland – and the rest.  It never did me any harm, and quite possibly did me a power of good.  I always had my parents and my numerous siblings: they were the security net, the familiar faces and the tradition.  We made sure it was like this for our children too.  The network of the extended family also plays a big role in the life of a child and, bless them, both our families paid regular visits.

Children in France

Quite a lot of things in France were also so different in the handling of children.  On the whole French children are polite, know how to behave in a restaurant and, from an early age, are taught how to greet people when they meet – a little hand shake or, frequently, a bisou.  This habit of expecting to get a kiss every blessed time a child comes in to contact with an adult (though I don’t mean more than once a day, of course) can, even now, be slightly irritating.  Neither Bruce nor I want to kiss children willy-nilly, least of all if they have got a cold.  At the first village school children lined up regularly for theirbisou, as childhood good manners dictated, and I decided at a very early stage that, rather than spend most of the morning kissing a row of grubby and snotty little faces (or even darling little faces, because I do like children), I’d simply do an all-British wave.

Our sons, now adults, still kiss-hug their French men friends.  They also know about the British manly hand-shake-clap-on-the-shoulder, something which Bruce has always doggedly stuck to (quite right too) regardless of the nationality of the man in question.

 

 Morning view from the patio at Primrose

We moved in to the Chateau des Cypres a few days before Christmas.

I had planned Christmas carefully, and it was supposed to be in Primrose because, although the sale had completed, it was OK by the buyers for us to stay there a few weeks.  This was essential to us because Les Cypres was in such a state, and there were fourteen of us for Christmas.  At Primrose there was full central heating, bathrooms and toilets, fitted carpets and an operational kitchen.

So it was arranged that Christmas stuff would stay at Primrose for now.  Apart from the beds, essential bedding and towels, the Christmas presents and the Christmas food Bruce’s men moved everything, one trailer load at a time to the new house (almost 2 hours’ drive),  back and forth, back and forth over two days.  I labelled everything carefully, clearly, and stacked things that were to stay all in one place.

But men!  You have to love them!  Bruce forgot to explain this to his team, and last of all they moved the whole lot, frozen turkey and duvets, Christmas tree and custard, toothbrushes and pillows and saucepans and wine, all piled higgeldy-piggeldy on to the trailer in such a way that Father Christmas himself would have been fazed.

Cross?  Oh yes, ooooh yeeees ! I was cross.

 

old photo of the property, found in a cupboard

It was extremely cold and I declared grimly that I was going to bed and would not be getting out of bed again till there was some central heating.   And I meant it!   Although I could cope with sacks of plaster where furniture should be, endless wires and pipes and tools, thick dust where stone and brick and timber had been hacked away for whatever reason, I could not cope with the cold.

“I am an African!”  I roared down the stair well.

I could deal with walking on planks over the many trenches both inside and out of the property; I could deal with no kitchen of any note, only cold water in the sink, no dishwasher or washing machine yet plumbed in; I could put up with hair like straw because of the dust and children charging around carrying dust even further and adding to the infernal noise of hammers and saws and drills …. but I could not cope with the cold.  And it was extremely cold.  The house had not been heated for many years – indeed, have never ever been heated thoughout – and the cold permeated the very core of it.

I got in to bed with a hot water bottle and sat there, staring furiously at the wall opposite where forty year-old wallpaper hung in great strands of dusty brown, interspersed with cobwebs and dead insects.  Jake clambered in to bed with me – clearly the best place to be.

William, who was then 11, and Bruce had already started on the central heating a few weeks earlier and had promised – PROMISED! – it would be operational by the time we moved in.

“We have accidently moved in two weeks earlier than foreseen,” Bruce tried to reason with me.

“That,” I replied with furious logic, “does not make it any warmer!”

They worked almost all of that first night.  Every now and then I was aware of one of them in the room putting a saucepan under a dripping pipe, the sound of electric screwdrivers and drills, and sometimes Bruce cursing.  And then – at about four in the morning, the wonderful sound of radiators filling …

 

 Chateau des Cypres when we first saw it.  We bought it in 1995 and paid the equivalent of £70 000 for the house, masses of large out-buildings and five acres of land.  It had been empty for a very long time and the roof was on the point of going.  In fact, Bruce insisted he be allowed to put some trusses and acrow-props in the roof to maintain it before we even signed the initial offer (Compromis de Vente) because it would not have survived another winter.

 

My mother-in-law and the children on Christmas morning.  Several bits of fine old furniture, like the bed in this photo, were abandoned in the house.  At that time these items were worthless on the French market but almost gold dust for the likes of us.  That changed within a year or two and these wonderful old beds and wardrobes are now quite expensive, though anything really big still goes for a song simply because it is generally too big for today’s houses; antiques on the whole now cost considerably more than they do in the UK. 

  The front of the house when we initially viewed it.  One of the first things we did after Completion was open those shutters and leave them open!  Many of them were dangerous and had to be removed, almost all were broken – in fact the ones at the two balconies never got put back because re-making them was such a major – and fundamentally unnecessary – chore.

 Click here for Part 11

 

Catherine Broughton is a novelist, a poet and an artist.  Her books are available on Amazon/Kindle worldwide, or can be ordered from most leading book stores and libraries.  They are also available as e-books (£1.99) on the home page of this site.

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It happened like this…an English family moves to France. Part 9

 

Although we found a buyer for our house relatively quickly, Completion dragged on for over a year.  He was buying, he wasn’t, he was buying, he wasn’t … I packed things and unpacked them, phoned the notaire, faxed him, stared at the telephone, stared at the fax, stared at the sky.  We heard that the buyer had moved to Hawaii.  We heard that he was now in Portugal.. We heard that he was moving here after all.  I put the property back on the market, showed more people around it, heard good news from the notaire and took it off the market again.  Another long silence, so I put the house on the market once more, showed people around … on and on till finally Completion, well tattered and almost unrecognizable, limped through the door.

A peaceful haven ..

Like most women, my heart just went out of the house as soon as I knew we were selling.  All the work we had lovingly put in became irrelevant, and all I could see was a monster in need of constant maintenance.  What had once been a peaceful haven for me where I could lick my wounds, became an isolated and cold wind-swept batisse that I no longer wanted to live in.  A large damp patch developped near the front door, the upper stair carpet started to fray in one corner, the fleur-de-lys floor tiles in the hall became too tedious to clean, and the flower beds were just fine with weeds  in ….

 

Pippa waiting for the school bus outside our front gates. One year when we were camping in Spain we bought two concrete lions and, with the aid of a digger, hoisted them up on top of those pillars.  As far as I know they are there to this day.

I wanted to go home …

… more than anything .  We sat down and did the sums over and again, and it didn’t matter which way round we calculated it, we would be utterly broke if we went back to the UK, would have to find work somehow, the children would have to start all over again in the UK system … it just didn’t make financial sense, nor practical sense.  And any emotional sense would soon be thwarted by the practicalities of life.

I had access to a lot of properties because of my business.   I had seen every kind of property under the sun, both inside and out, and had negotiated every step of every element in a hundred and one deals.  I knew what we were about, what the values were, which loans were available, who to contact.  I could tell at a glance anything that was a quick camouflage job, indoors or out, I could judge the state of the roof, I could spot termite trails a mile off.   I knew all about the little hitches that could wreck a potential purchase, where and how to check the title of the vendors, where and how to check the boundaries of the land.

I was no longer the young woman who thought she was busy because she had a baby and two children.  I knew what real busy was, and I knew all about stress and disappointment.  I had changed.  And although I was aware I had developped a kind of hardness, a water-off-a-duck’s back attitude to so many things, I felt I was probably a better person.  A wiser person, certainly.

 

 We both liked the old Roman town of Saintes, and toyed with looking there.  I had never lived in a town, though Saintes is not big.  It is still my favourite town in the area.  Until 1810 it was the “capital” of what was then called the Charentes-inferieures (Charente Maritime) but, like so many towns of its ilk faded in to grubby obscurity till it was restored and put on the map, as it were, in 1990.  The river Charente runs though it, lovely for boating or walking, and there is an excellent pedestrianized area with lots of shops and restaurants.

Red tape.

In the meantime, if I was to work, which I was, I still had to obtain my Carte Professionelle.  I hurled myself in an impressive variety of somersaults as I found the torturous routes through the system, which seemed to be designed on purpose to make everything as difficult as possible.  I became an expert acrobat, brilliant at walking a tightrope.  Nothing phased me any more.  I had been there.  Done that.   At the time it seemed to me that France wallowed in bureaucratic nightmare, but I now know that Britain is the exception – Britain, the US, Australia and other English-speaking countries.  We are “free” and, providing we obey the law we may do as we wish, within reason.  On the Continent it is the opposite – you may do as you wish providing there is a law permitting you to do so.   That is why the French use expressions such as “je n’ai pas le droit” which you would never hear in English.

I have no idea how many phone calls I made, nor how many letters I wrote, but I had to drive to La Rochelle (almost an hour) on five or six occasions and eventually met the Mr Valtel I had been told about.  Actually, he was very kind and really wanted to help me.  He was the first to admit the system was ridiculous and that I had been badly served.  He helped me through several loop holes as I got my dossier ready.  This included, I recall, having an “official police translater” translate my papers – which cost me quite a lot of money, but was a requirement.  She translated “estate agent” as Agent of the State, which caused great hilarity in Valtel’s office.  Another police official had written that I had been born in Cape Province, South Africa, Angleterre.

Not that I wish to ridicule the police – I am a great admirer of the police.  But I think the point is perhaps that they are precisely that – the police, invented for catching criminals.

The red tape was such that even Valtel had to make phone calls to obtain information.  On one occasion, with me in his office, he phoned the Minister of Somethingorother in Paris.  He flicked the phone on to loud speaker and explained my situation.  The Minister listened.

“Ecoutez,” he said after a while, “il ne faut pas trop leur aider, les anglais.  Qu’elle rentre chez elle si elle n’aime pas.”

Translated: Listen, you musn’t help the English too much;  if she doesn’t like it she can go home.

Valtel was mortified.

To cut a long story short, and after months and months and months, my Carte Professionelle was refused by the Powers That Be in Paris.  The reason was because I was a foreigner.  I was certain that was discrimination and that I could have kicked up a fuss.

“You are, in effect, forbidding me to work!” I exclaimed.

 

  Our delicious boys!

Exhaustion

But, truth be told, I no longer cared.  I was seriously exhausted.  You wouldn’t think it but clients are very demanding.  Perhaps any job where you work with the public is demanding in a way that it isn’t when you work with a colleague or two, or an inanimate object of some kind.  I had to keep up a pleasant and smiling facade, be interested in what they were saying, not mind their children filling my car up with crisps and screaming in my ear … hour after hour, day after day, and all in the hope they would buy something.  And then I’d be so pleased because they wanted to buy something, I’d let the notaire know, let the vendor know … pat the whole thing through months of paperwork to Completion, be available on the phone for idiot questions and requests, (“Oh Catherine!  So glad to catch you!  Would you mind popping over to our place … he he, well, the one we are buying, and measuring the skirting boards for me?”) keeping my clients happy with their purchase till I got my commission cheque.  But often enough, for no good reason, the clients would change their minds and the sale would fall through.  Nobody paid me.  I had to create my own money.  Often enough it was exhilarating but sometimes it was gutting.

These things don’t sound so bad in themselves, I know, but it was continuous.  After a full day’s work and with three small children, it was sometimes as much as I could stand.

And so I stopped.  Just like that.  I was not willing to battle for the Carte.  I was not willing to exhaust myself any further.  I wanted to be at home with my children.  We were selling up and moving to the coast where, I hoped, there would be a bit more life and laughter.  I took out the last few of my clients (breaking the law utterly) and then handed them over to the notaire.  Waved. Said goodbye.

 

  Jake playing in some drains on a building site.  Isn’t it funny how, thirty years later, you can still recognize the clothes your children wore ?  I remember that little sweat-shirt; it had baa-lambs on it.

 Health matters.

We found that Bruce’s Meniere’s would come and go.  There was no two ways about it, but the arrival of the post, which could quite plausibly herald some dreadful letter from some authority somewhere, triggered it off. The phone ringing.  People rang in the evenings, when he was home and the calls were cheaper – giving him no rest once he got home.  It drove us both mad, trying to get supper, get the children off to bed, tidy up, rest a bit – and that phone kept ringing.  We were obliged to answer it.  That was how we made our money.  Sometimes it was one of Bruce’s clients to say he was delighted with the mezzanine, or another client to say he was furious the electrics were not finished.  Frequently it was somebody being thoughtless, all wrapped up in their own project of a house in France and totally forgetting that we were real live human beings that needed time off.

Sometimes Bruce was so ill all he could do was lie on the floor.  He said he couldn’t fall off the floor.  At other times it was just a maddening buzzing in his head.

Something had to change and we had to find a different way of earning money.

 

  We cycled almost every Sunday unless I had clients.  The roads around Primrose were very quiet and fairly flat.

Finding a suitable property

Of the thirty or forty properties that I knew were for sale, none was suitable for us.  We had become accustomed to large, airy rooms and big windows.  We were used to a lot of space and plenty of quiet.  With a limited budget (despite selling Primrose at a juicy profit) there were not that many houses available for us to look at.  Furthermore, property near or on the coast was more expensive – still very cheap compared to Britain, but almost beyond our budget.  To top it, there was very little indeed in the way of buildings for renovation and the few that there were tended to be village houses in run-down little streets, or grotty farm dwellings with no architectural relief, never mind pleasant views, and surrounded by nasty modern bungalows.

We both had a wild idea that we could perhaps buy a modern property in need of no work.  That appealed to us for a while, and Lord knows there were plenty of recently-built properties all along the coast, most of them square and unattractive boxes.  I love the turn-of-the-century, ie 1900s, seaside architecture but anything we liked as also too expensive, though for a while we did consider a magnificent house on a cliff, overlooking the sea, near Royan.  It had been “restored” in the 1960s and everything needed re-doing, so it was just up our street.  Some bright spark had even removed the original staircase and replaced it with a “modern” concrete one, complete with duff-coloured tiles!   But no, that sea view, so lovely, so hypnotic in the summer, would become a fierce and icy enemy in the winter.  So the hunt continued.

And it was one day, as we returned from a day trip cycling with the children on the island of Oleron, that we drove past a huge old house with a For Sale sign.

“Talk about a white elephant!” I exclaimed.

“Hmmph!” agreed Bruce, “I wonder which idiot is ever going to buy that?”

 

Part 8

Part 10 to follow.

Catherine Broughton is a novelist, an artist and a poet.  Her books are available from Amazon/Kindle or can be ordered from any leading bookstore or library.  They are also available as e-books on this site.

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It hapopened like this…an English family move to France Part 7

 Most years we skied in Andorra, though we did also go to the Alps and, later, Bulgaria, Austria and Italy.  One Christams in the Alps we couldn’t get in to a restaurant because everything was booked out; the waitress explained to me (but in French, of course) with all seriousness: “we are full, because here in France it is Christmas Eve”.  Jolly good, I replied, I wonder what the rest of the world is doing ce soir?

I will not make out that everything was high stress and misery, because it wasn’t.  On the whole, life was good and, had it not been for the upsets caused by the system’s inability to provide us, who were willing to work hard, and who created employment for other people, with the correct information, we’d doubtless have enjoyed life to the full.  Not only was nobody able to provide the correct information, but half the rules and regulations appeared to have been thought-up by Napoleon.  La loi Napoleon, they call it.  He died! I wailed.

Stressy situations

Anybody who has ever been in a stressy situation knows that it encompasses you.  Whether the problem is big or small, for you it is 100%, and it is nigh-on impossible to lay it down to one side and know that one day it will go away.  Perhaps tomorrow, perhaps next week, but one thing is for sure and that is that one day it won’t seem so bad, and you may have forgotten about it altogether.  A problem that seems so big when you are in it can reduce to a nothing after really quite a short time.  I can remember taking a friend to one side and confiding a terrible problem to her and, a year later when I saw her again, she asked me how I had got on and I couldn’t even remember quite what the problem was.  More importantly, what is a big problem to one person is water off a duck’s back to another.  It is all relative and most of it is just passing.

But it is difficult to remember that when you are in the middle of a maelstrom of hassles and worries.

It transpired that I had been “shopped” to the police by a French estate agent in Rochefort.

• One of Bruce’s men, Michel.  He worked for us for years and years but in the end we had to let him go because, as he got older, he became dangerous – and therefore a liability.  He was really angry and bitter about that and held it against us for years.

The gendarmes.

The gendarmes sat me in one room and Bruce in another.  He told me later that he shrugged and grinned and kept repeating “I don’t understand”, while the gendarme made copious notes.  Actually, I greatly admire the police force, but in this particular situation is was a bit ridiculous to say the least.

The building was on the outskirts of Rochefort, a dank and featureless place with pale green gloss paint on the walls and a lot of notice boards with various bits of paper attached to them.  I remember feeling slightly non-plussed, as if this was a scene in a play or a weak joke.  Nowadays, if ever such a thing happened again, which I trust is highly unlikely,  I would know to tell them nothing and let my lawyer take over.  But I was an innocent and have never come across a situation remotely like this before.  I sat politely, trying my best to look serious when I had an almost overwhelming desire to laugh.  Nerves?  I don’t know.  I am not the nervous type.  But  I dutifully related everything I could think of and told them about the difficulties I was having trying to even find out about a Carte Professionelle, let alone obtain one.  This, however, counted against me:

“So you knew you were working illegally, otherwise you wouldn’t have enquired about the Carte?”  !!

I wanted to ask them if they had nothing more important to do.  I wanted to ask them why they were doing this to me – somebody so willing to work and so willing to oblige?  But I said nothing, and after … I suppose it was 2 hours or so … we were both “released”.

“We’re leaving!” I declared as we drove home.  ”That’s it!  I’m starting on the packing tonight!”

But we stayed.

 

• The rear of the house, winter.  

We could not throw away what we had built up because of some hiccup in the law and we had the good sense to know that it was neither France nor the French that was doing this to us – the same problems, or varying versions of them, exist in any country.  For us it happened to be in France.  It was a great shame for it coloured France and the French for us both – an unpleasant colour that took us a very long time to wipe away.  And even now, after all the great things that have since happened, that nasty colour seeps back in to view, like ink spilt on a page, from time to time.

We had improved our situation so much

Having been bankrupt when we left England, now almost five years ago,  we owned an amazing house, a smart car (each), we went on skiing holidays and fun camping holidays.  We had built up a small circle of friends and had a bit of a social life.  The children were doing well at school and had lots of chums.  It was crazy to throw it away – not least because, if we did decide to go, the sale of our house would bring in no where near enough to get us home and buy a new house.  Had there been more that enough equity in the house, yes, I think perhaps we’d have gone.  Perhaps.  Nah … almost certainly.

We had to be sensible, and the sensible side of us knew that whatever happened, it would almost certainly work out fine.   I am very positive, almost always.  There is invariably a way round things.  I taught my children, and as adults they all quote it: “there is always a solution; it is just a question of finding it.”   We located a lawyer, a dear young man by the name of Vincent, who looked to be only about fifteen years old.  I went to see him and, Jake on my lap, told him the tale.  He smiled reassuringly, nodded, put his finger tips together the way lawyers do when they are listening.  He assured us that it was most unlikely I would be sent to prison, and that if I was it would probably be only for a week. I smiled.  That’d be most interesting, I said, I have never been in a prison.  I shall look forward to it.

• In those days Andorra was an inexpensive option, though that has no longer been the case for many years.  The snow there is more-or-less guaranteed, Pas de la Case a really fun little town, and I enjoyed speaking Spanish.  Furthermore, we could drive there in about 7 hours.

Meniere’s

It was at about this time that Bruce started to complain of a bizarre sensation in his head.  Sometimes it seemed to be a ringing in one ear, sometimes a buzzing in his skull.  Often it was a heavy sensation in and around his entire head, and his hearing seemed affected. He often felt nauseous and dizzy.  He put up with it in silence for several weeks then, as it was clearly not going to go away, we went to the doctor.

Meniere’s Disease is a malfunction in the inner ear, where excessive fluid causes a blockage which in turn creates loss of balance.  It varies from person to person, ranging from dreadful symptoms where the patient simply cannot stand up without falling over, to an unpleasant buzzing, and everything in between. It can be a temporary condition, or a permanant one, and can be difficult to diagnose because the patient does not necessarily show the same symptoms as a different patient, though the general ones are deafness, buzzing/heaviness, and dizziness.  It is thought that it is triggered by stress, and there is no known cure.   Bruce’s Meniere’s steadily got worse, a little bit each year, with bad and good patches throughout.  He has never recovered.

It was at about this time that Tim died.  I cannot write about it.

A close girl friend in England, somebody I used to spend a lot of time with,  and who I had known in South Africa, also died very suddenly.  She was doing a work out at the gym when she had a brain haemorrage – she was dead before she hit the floor.  Our children had played with her children many many times.   Dead.   It is an odd word when you think about it.  Her husband and the children returned to South Africa soon after the funeral.  I have tried to look them up several times when we have been over there, but to no avail.  Shock waves went through our household and for a long while everything seemed to be out of kilter and I felt almost as though there was a jinx on us.  Headaches, weepiness and nightmares continued.

The French medical system.

One thing I will say for the French is that they have a fantastic medical system.  I am a great champion of the NHS in the UK and feel we are incredibly lucky: as good a treatement, and frequently better treatment, than you can get anywhere in the world and all for free.  In France you have to pay a top-up insurance as only 75% is free.  Actually even then it is not free, it is refunded, which is slightly different.  Gosh, imagine the outcry in Britain if the government suddenly decided that everybody had to pay the doctor and then claim it back!  Never mind if the government declared the British had to also buy a top-up insurance!   The complaints, a favourite pass-time of the British who do not understand the system, would soon stop.

For our family of 5, this insurance cost something in the region of £30 per month – that was then.  We could afford it and on numerous occasions were glad of it, but some people cannot afford it and so only get 75% of their medical needs paid for.  The rest they have to finance themselves, though there is a system in place for people below a certain income…

• Winter walk on the beach at Fouras.  The fort is Napoleonic and several battles between the French and the English were fought here soon after the turn of the XIX century.  Fouras was the last French town Napoleon ever saw as he was transported by the British to the nearbly Ile d’Aix, where he spent one night before his incarceration at Ste Helene.  The fort was used as a prison for a while and when the railways came it changed rapidly in to a fashionable sea-bathing resort for the bourgeoisie.

… and the NHS

The system in France has changed in recent years, for you now have to (perfectly sensibly) get a letter of referral from your GP if you need to see a specialist, and you also have to keep the same GP.  In those early days you could go to as many different GPs as you wished, and as many specialists as you wished, getting refunded all the way.  The abuse of the system cost France a fortune and it was crazy.  If a patient didn’t like the treatment or the verdict of one doctor, they would simply go to another – and the French tax payer picked up 75% of the bill, from GPs to specialsts and back again.  Where our UK system falls down is that referrals to specialist doctors are done by the GP and/or the GP’s secretary and that is where the huge delays come in.  In France the GP gives you, the patient, the letter and it is up to you to make your appointment.  Cutting out the middle man, ie the secretary, saves a great deal of time for all concerned.

My nerves frayed almost beyond endurance and Bruce’s Meniere’s regularly laying him flat, we were well looked after by French doctors.

And that was just as well because it was also at about this time that a letter arrived in the post, from the land tax authority, stating that we owed them 650 000 francs – about £65 000.

 

Part 8 to follow.

Catherine Broughton is a novelist, a poet and an artist.  Her books are available on Amazon/Kindle worldwide, or can be ordered from most leading book stores and libraries.  They are also available as e-books:-

 

It happened like this..an English family moves to France Part 6

Main picture: back in England celebrating my father’s birthday at Cliveden; me sitting  (in white) with my lovely old daddy, one of my sisters, and my brother-in-law, Brian.

It was a cruel irony that during the summer months, when I was terribly busy, friends and family would pour out to see us.  I am from a huge family, and we are all closely-knit.  Goodness, we were happy to see them, all those brothers and sisters and cousins – loved seeing them – and there were times we’d have as many as 9 or 10 extra people in the house, which was fun, exhausting, hilarious, entertaining, loving, appreciated hugely … and bloomin’ knackering!  I learnt that all meals, breakfast included, need to be outside. You’d be amazed at the difference it makes to the order of the kitchen and dining areas.  Sometimes I could barely get the sheets off and on the beds in the guest rooms in time for the next surge of visitors.  Everybody mucked in and we were a noisy, active, fun-loving household, playing silly games and probably drinking too much.  We all love good food, travel, literature, quick-witted conversation.  They were excellent times where I could enjoy conversation and laughter the way I had before.

During the winter months, however, when my loneliness was huge, and the Atlantic wind whipped in over the fields, nobody came.  The views that were so gorgeous in the summer, turned to expanses of wet grey and brown, lit by the occasional winter sunset.  I used to stand at the living room window and scour the muddy fields for a sign of life – a car in the distance, perhaps, or a bird in the sky.

I remember commenting to somebody – or was it just to myself? – that a huge view like that had a few disadvantages, and one is that when the weather is bad, you can see the bad weather for miles and miles and miles.  It was disheartening to say the least, and I longed and longed to go home.

I did make one friend, an English woman with seven – yes, seven! – children.  I sold her a house in the village.  Her husband was in prison, a Frenchman, and her youngest was just a toddler.  What in the world she imagined she was doing moving to rural France with all those children, I have no idea.  It was lunacy.  But she needed me in a practical sense, so I helped her.  And I needed her in an emotional sense, and she helped me.  We were two lost English women surrounded by windy fields and foreigners, and we huddled together, so to speak, in our Englishness.  I cannot even remember her name now.

 

• My wonderful parents in our garden at Primrose.  I loved my parents very much indeed.  The grass is scorched yellow.  We had a pool installed during our third year there and I drove Jake the 40-minute drive to the public baths in Rochefort every day after school, five days a week, determined he would swim before the pool was finished.  

It was at about this time that, spurred on by a word of warning from a young notaire I was slightly friendly with, I made more enquiries about the legalities of my activities.  To date, everything had been fine.  I couldn’t for the life of me think I was doing anything illegal.    The incident with the “Gestapo”, however, made me ever-cautious and, following the advice of a British Consular representative, I placed no ads anywhere and relied uniquely on the jungle-drums.

Not, I hasten to add, that I wanted to be illegal in any way.  Quite the opposite.

“French bureaucracy is a nightmare,” he told me, “miles of red tape, stupid office girls who don’t know anything, dozens of different rules and regulations.  Even I after 40 years in France find it difficult.”

That is why, of course, so many new French businesses start up in the UK.

Now, listen – this is something really important one needs to know about the French fonctionaires, ie the women (or men) working in all the government offices.  And that is that they will give you very good and precise information in answer to your question.  Providing you ask the right question, the system is very good indeed, with a great back-up team.  But unless you ask the appropriate question, you get no information.

 

• I used to half-jokingly and half-ostentatiously call this room the library. Really little more than an overgrown passage, which also housed the piano (which nobody could play), it led from the living room to the guest rooms.  The house was interesting and on the left, between the two book cases, was another door leading to another room, and above that yet another door to a “secret”, but spacious room, accessed by a tiny staircase which we removed.

And so I went round and round in frustrating and frustrated circles.   There is no CAB in France, though they do have something similar – if you know about it.  If you don’t know it is there and nobody mentions it, it is of no use, not least because it is not a high street presence but a section of an office system.  Like many words and phrases you cannot translate Citizens’ Advice Bureau in to French, and I tried asking for somewhere I could get information … Yes, Madame, bien sur, information on what ?

The British Consulate was friendly and genuinely tried to be helpful but even they had little idea, and could only advise me to find out.  Sure, I want to find out, I wept, but who do I ask ?!

Rochefort, which was the closest administrative centre, was over half an hour’s drive away – closer to an hour if the bridge was up letting a ship through. The river Charente runs through there, and in the old days it was the main – the only – shipping route to Cognac.  Some pretty big boats still go through.

 

old photo of one of the bridges on the Charente, next to Rochefort

Although the internet had by this time seeped in to France, it was nothing like the internet access to information that we have nowadays.  We had a computer which was more for storage of letters and manuscripts than anything else – and that in itself seemed marvellous.  Seems odd now, but in those days being able to correct typos on the screen, just like that, was still quite a novelty, not to mention saving documetns.  So it meant that I had to drive in to Rochefort, or phone in or write a letter.  But as I didn’t know who I was supposed to contact, or even why I needed to contact anybody in the first place, it was a true wild goose chase.

I started, of course, with the places where I was already registered – the Chambre de Commerce, the Chambre des Metiers, the accountant (yes, the same one) and so on.  Nobody seemed to have the appropriate information, and I wasn’t really quite sure what that information was supposed to be anyway.  I spoke to a solicitor who looked something up in a huge book, and he was able to confirm that as estate agent had to, by law, have a Carte Professionelle, but he couldn’t say quite what that was, nor where I should get it.  All this took a great deal of time.  Trying to speak on the phone was even worse because, true to form, I didn’t know who I was to ask for and the switchboard therefore couldn’t pass me on to anybody.  I was frequently put on hold (ne quittez pas!) while Green Sleeves piped down the line at me, on and on and on.

 

• Rochefort-sur-Mer is an old military town.  When we first arrived in the area it was a gruesome blob of dirty grey stone but, once renovated, it rapidly became an extremely attractive town with a good shopping centre and good restaurants.  This picture shows the Corderie Royale – the rope works.

The police.

Eventually somebody suggested I contact the police.  What in the world have the police got to do with all this ? I wailed.  But I did write to them, at the Rochefort address, asking them about a Carte Professionelle.  Something like three months went by before they replied to say that they did not issue Carte Professionelles.  I phoned them.

“I am well aware you may not issue them,” I said (but in French), “I am just trying to find out what it is and if I need one.”

They didn’t know.

My friendly notaire friend eventually gave me a form he had dug out for me, in which it stated what academic requirements were needed in order to be eligible for the famous Carte.  A degree was the main thing, and that was fine, I had two degrees.  But it still didn’t tell me if I needed one.

 

• A cat turned up one blustery night and we took her in.  She was in an appalling state. She turned out to be pregnant and produced a litter of 6 kittens which we named: Je Mog, Tu Mogs, Il Mog, Nous Moggons, Vous Moggez, Ils Mogent.  We let her keep 2, we found homes for 2, and had 2 put down.  People with cats, if they are not wanted for breeding, should have them speyed/neutered as quickly as possible before they go out and spread even more feline misery.

 

After countless phone calls, countless trips back and forth, countless letters, I wrote to the National Association of Estate Agents in the UK.  They replied within a week, telling me to get a Carte at all costs – otherwise, they said, you could find yourself in prison.  They added that I needed to apply at Police Headquarters in La Rochelle.  There, I needed to contact the Highest of the High, a man by the name of Valtel.

I was frightened and nervous.

Normally an extremely self-confident and self-reliant person, I found myself sometimes in tears for no reason, or in a temper.  I seemed to have constant headaches.  I had confused nightmares about the Gestapo moving in to our house, gendarmes in my car and the hill our house stood on crumbling in to a wide red river.

One side of me felt that it couldn’t possibly be that bad, that serious.   All transactions went through the notaire, after all, all accounting went through a chartered accountant, I had my registration number with my activity clearly stated on it – where was the problem?  I kept a very strict and careful record of absolutely everything I did, frequently writing down completely unecessary – and sometimes daft – information, and I signed and dated each and every page.  Nothing got crossed out and Tippex was banned.  ”The house with the red front door”, my notes would read, “vendor named Jean-Pierre Dupon (middle names unknown at this stage – to be provided.)  Chipped paint on front door.  Requested sale price 300 000 French francs but that is crazy.  Nobody will buy it.”   I wrote it all down in neat columns and neat notes, even putting in little illustrations of flowers in the garden and sketches of the front of the house.   Facetious ?   Oh yes, it was facetious of me.   They want me to keep strict notes ?  Well, they’re going to get strict notes!   As it happens nobody ever asked for the cahier, or anything like it again.

But the other side of me kept remembering the Gestapo, and apprehension made its way through to the very core of me.

During all this, of course, I was raising my family, running the household, running my business, getting on with life.  I continued selling houses.  Not only did I bring in good money but Bruce’s business depended entirely on mine.  And some five or six men’s jobs depended entirely on Bruce’s business.  Furthermore, clients who had contacted me months earlier would turn up to view and I could hardly say to them “sorry, my dears, I can’t show you anything because am worried about the Gestapo” !

So when the gendarmes turned up and “invited” me down to the police station, why was I surprised?

 

• Jake, all dressed up and everywhere to go !

Catherine Broughton is a novelist, a poet and an artist.  Her web site is http://www.turquoisemoon.co.uk.  Her books can be ordered from most leading book stores and libraries, or from Amazon/Kindle worldwide.  They are also available as e-books:-

 

https://payhip.com/b/tEva    “A Call from France”

https://payhip.com/b/OTiQ    ”French Sand”

https://payhip.com/b/BLkF    “The Man with Green Fingers”

https://payhip.com/b/1Ghq    “Saying Nothing”

– See more at: http://www.turquoisemoon.co.uk/blog/it-happened-like-this-an-english-family-move-to-france-part-6-2/#sthash.JaplwbH0.dpuf

It happened like this…an English family move to France Part 5

Me in the kitchen, holding one of my nieces.

Months turned in to years.  We restored our house on our usual shoe-string budget, lived our lives, had streams and streams of family and friends in the summer months and put up with icy windy and lonely days in the winter.   France – this area at any rate – has none of the “cosy” atmosphere of pubs and villages in the south-east of England, and people don’t seem to invite each other round they way the British do.  I battened down the hatches, emotionally-speaking, and just got on with it.

 

• This was the dining room.  We went back to have a look at the house relatively recently, and the new (English) owners had hacked off the plaster to “reveal the original stone”.  But bare stone was only ever found in barns and back-kitchens, or very poor houses.  A place like this would have had plaster and wallpaper, and “the original stone” is a nonsense that a lot of people do when renovating.

We both worked incredibly hard.

Bruce had a non-stop stream of buildings to repair and restore, thanks largely to my sales, and he took on a team of between 2 and 8 men, some of them British men who couldn’t find work.

So many “builders” came to France thinking they would find work with the great stream of Brits buying-up property, but they rapidly found three major problems – one, that it was much harder than they ever imagined to learn the language and/or the bit of French they had learnt did not take them far; two, that everything was a long way away.  France is a big place and the nearest DIY shop can be bloomin’ miles and miles away, and when you got there, none of the helpful service you usually find in the UK was available.  Indeed proper service was unheard of, though it has improved a bit since.  Or have I just got used to it ?  And third – most of them were no where near as good as DIY as they thought they were; they thought they’d be able to handle this and that, but when it came to it they couldn’t.   Houses they bought as near-ruins remained little improved, everything took ages, life was disappointing and in no time their house was back on the market with somebody like me, and sold again so that the family could go home.  We saw it over and over again.

Bruce worked very long, hard, arduous hours and, as is so often the way with builders, his clients would start off adoring the very ground he walked on, but by the time the job was finished they were sick to death with inevitable delays, with shelling-out money and men crashing around their house.  I think that’s a given, all over the world.  Although his French remained bad, Bruce rapidly became familiar with all the building vocabulary and in no time was well-known at the various builders’ merchants.  The men who worked for him respected and admired him; one or two left and tried to set up in competition (and failed) and one or two  left because they wanted more money, and then came back six months later looking for work again.  We saw that over and again too.

•  This is pretty-much typical of the rooms in the houses I sold; larger or smaller versions of this, frequently in a vastly worse state.  This particular room eventaully became our bedroom at Primrose, and it was in here that I sometimes thought I could hear a piano. Many years later there was an article about the murdered man on the TV – indeed, he played the piano. Was very talented, apparently. Hmmmm …. well ….

The children

I worked excruciatingly hard in the summer months.  The first few clients would arrive at Easter-time and last through to the October.  There was almost nobody in the winter.  When the children were on holiday from school they either had to go to the chantier with Bruce, which the elder two frequently did, or to a childminder.  Jake quite often came with me.  Funny, the way my clients didn’t seem bothered that I’d got a toddler on tow.  He was always incredibly good and would spend the whole day strapped in to his car seat, being lifted in and out and carted round buildings.   I don’t think he ever cried, not even once.  I do remember, however, him suddenly declaring “poo!”  There was nowhere convenient to stop and I was extremely tired at the end of the day and eager to drop the clients off at their hotel.  ”Poo!  Poo!” insisted Jake.  Then, thinking I perhaps hadn’t understood he changed it to “caca! Caca!” till I pulled in and got him out of his seat.  As is typical in these situations, he did a poo about the size of a pea.

 

• Jake (on the left) and Chris, the son of an old school friend.  Chris now runs safaris in Tanzania.

I also remember those particular clients.  They were what I called “eternal lookers”.  These fell in to two categories – those who were looking around, at my expense, because it was fun and interesting to look inside other people’s houses, and then those who genuinely wanted to buy something, would love to buy something, talked all the time about buying something … but were never going to actually do it.

These clients, from South Africa, fell in to the first category but it was only the following year when I took them around again that I suddenly realized.  They were just enjoying a day out and had even had the gall to tell me they would like to look at much bigger properties when they came back next year!  I dropped them off quite suddenly, where they could get a taxi back to their hotel.  They were flabbergasted.

The other sort were the type who would always be so careful they would never get anywhere.  They loved the idea of buying, they had a dream of a little French house and eating croissants for breakfast … but it would always be just that. A dream.  As time went by I learnt to recognize these types and not waste my time – and, more importantly, my energy – on them.

I also rapidly learnt that just because a client may say he wants such-and-such a type of property, it does not mean he really does.  I’d say 50% of the properties I sold were the total opposite of what the client said he wanted.  Of course, many of them didn’t know what was available and would come out to see me with some pie-in-the-sky idea that lovely houses with long tree-lined drives and green shutters were available for a song at every corner.  One of the first houses I sold, while we were still at La Haute Perriere, was a small village house with a long narrow garden, built on three floors with all sorts of fascinating little higgeldy-piggeldy rooms and nooks and crannies.  It was on the little high street of a touristy village, one of a row of terraced houses with no front garden.  The vendors told me:

“We want something out in the countryside, detached, no neighbours.  We want views, views that stretch for miles, big spacious rooms, lots of land …”

I also learnt at any early stage to keep my opinions to myself.  People like to think they are making their own decisions.  An early client was a Sam Watson, aged in his early seventies, who came out to realize a long-held dream.  He chose a very isolated property in the middle of nowhere, and it needed masses of work.  I advised him against it.  He lived, in the UK,  in the same street as his daughter, somewhere north of Watford, belonged to a darts team, could walk to the pub … You’ll be lonely here, I said.  Stay with what you’ve got at home,  I told him.  He was furious, really furious and told me I was patronizing.  He bought the place via another agent, but not even a year later I saw that it was back on the market and learnt that Sam Watson had gone home.

• The children playing at dressing up.  Look at the views!

I also learnt to save time and energy by taking the client with me to view rather than view in advance.  They were usually as interested as I was.  I also rapidly learnt to develop a thick skin.  In the early days clients would regularly reduce to to tears.  Sometimes I would put in so much energy, so much time, so much thought … just to find that they didn’t like the area, and they would disappear from my life without even a thank you, leaving me to fill up again with petrol and pay the childminder.  And it certainly didn’t matter to them that it was my child’s birthday, or a French bank holiday, or I was half crippled with period pains.  It may be that they assumed some invisible entity somewhere was paying me and that this was my job … I don’t know, but on the whole I’m afraid clients were generally rude and thoughtless.

Of those that did buy, some became friends.

And that was great.  We still know some of them to this day.  Others would complete their purchase and we’d never see them again, and that was also fine.  But a third group seemed to want blood out of me.  I worry, as I am re-reading this, that I am moaning.  That is not my intention.  It was hard, very very hard sometimes.  People would come out, having bought their house, and expect me to do so much for them.  And if things went wrong it somehow became my fault.  Even the bad weather (we had three or four bad summers at that time) seemed to be my fault.  If I charged for my time and trouble they found me unreasonable.  A huge %, all over France, regretted their purchase, sold up and returned home.  Just as the removal man had said.

 Bicycles.

Coming from such a large family, and having moved all over the world – yes, all over the world – throughout childhood and well in to adult life, I had never learnt how to ride a bike.  Now, that’s a funny thing, isn’t it ?  So we bought bikes for all of us and I wobbled along till I got the hang of it, William running along behind me shouting “go mummy, Go!!”

Cycling for a year or two was a hobby that we all enjoyed together, almost every weekend, rain or shine.  We cycled all over the area, which was largely flat, and the only hill apart from our own hill was dubbed The Top of the World by the children.  We often packed up our things and went camping on the Ile de Re for the week-end, and that was brilliant, cycling along the latticed paths with the Atlantic stretching out to one side and pine forests to the other.  The Ile de Re has since become too touristy for us, but it was great in those days.

• Having fun and being silly on the Ile de Re.  Actually, almost all French beaches are topless, many of them naturist.

French friends.

We met a Parisian couple in the village, also new to the area, and have remained firm friends all these years.  Alain and Sylvaine.  Alain approached me at a Loto evening at the children’s school (I always tried to go along, show willing, be interested) and fairly recently he told me that I was so pleased to find that somebody was going to talk to me that I all but grabbed him by the scruff of the neck!

 

Part 6 to follow.

Catherine Broughton is a novelist, a poet and an artist.  Her web site is http://www.turquoisemoon.co.uk.  Her books can be ordered from most leading book stores and libraries, or from Amazon/Kindle worldwide.  They are also available as e-books:-

 

https://payhip.com/b/tEva    “A Call from France”

https://payhip.com/b/OTiQ    ”French Sand”

https://payhip.com/b/BLkF    “The Man with Green Fingers”

https://payhip.com/b/1Ghq    “Saying Nothing”

– See more at: http://www.turquoisemoon.co.uk/blog/it-happened-like-this-an-english-family-move-to-france-part-5/#sthash.Fl2uKCh2.dpuf

It happened like this..an English family move to France Part 4

• Me on the balcony of Primrose with our daughter

• Tonnay Boutonne, 1991.

We sold the house near Rochefort at the required profit – or close enough to it.  At the eleventh hour the buyer suddenly wanted to pull out, which would have been a disaster for us.  In France the system is so much better than in England, for when you choose a house you put down a deposit of approx. 10%, varying according to the value of the property.  If you pull out you lose that 10% unless there was a condition or clause in the initial contract.   In this case there was no clause, so it would have meant that we picked up the 10%, but that was not what we wanted.  The stress of it was huge.  Het-up phone calls back and forth, wringing of hands ….  We had already paid our 10% for our new house, organized a mortgage for the balance, and were due to complete later that same day.

The French notaire is like a god

The notaire handling the sale was one Mme Drouart.  She was brilliant, a fairly tall and wide woman with a mass of grey frizzy hair.  She was somewhere in her sixties.  Her office was in a narrow street with only the oval brass plaque sticking out of the wall to indicate there was a notaire at all.  I worked with her a lot.  She once told me she wished I was her daughter, and she looked after me during those first months of finding my way in and out of the legal system.  Notaires in France command a high level of respect, and I think that one of the things she liked about me was that I was so English, ie so casual, in my address to her.  I respected her, of course, but I was chummy rather than in awe.  It never dawned on me to be in awe.

Not that I’d have called her by her first name – to this day that just isn’t done.  I recently interpreted for some UK friends who were completing on a house and, to my horror, my English friend called the notaire by her first name.  My friend, of course, thought she was being friendly, but from anybody other than a foreigner who had not long been in France, could speak no French and was clearly not au fait with French good manners, it would have been astoundingly rude.

Mme Drouart had no children of her own and was married to a man considerably older.  She had lived in the same house all her married life, a huge batisse in the centre of a nearby, and she smelt of soap and lavender.  I learnt a lot from her, enjoyed her company, and in all those years she was the only woman I was to work with.  She took me under her wing with a gentle kindness that I very much appreciated though, of course, any sales were French francs for her.   She died three or four years ago and is buried in the village.

Anyway, she swung in to action and somehow managed to persuade the buyers that they did want the house after all.  How she did it I don’t know because the situation went from a very firm “we’re pulling out”, absolutely a dead cert, to buying again.

 

• The front of the house looked nothing like the back, almost as though there had been two different architects.  We were surrounded by farmland in all directions.  At first I didn’t mind the isolation.

Primrose, a manoir-cum-hunting-lodge.

We called our new house Primrose.  That was just our name for it and I have no idea why we chose it, though my father had had a motor boat of that name when I was a child in the South Pacific.   The house was really called La Petite Jarlee, a small manoir-cum-hunting-lodge perched on an isolated hill near Tonnay Boutonne.  It had a history to it, dating from 1800 or so, and being the hiding place of a WWII collaborator who was eventually murdered there.  We sometimes wondered if it was haunted … it had a kind of “feel” to it – not menacing in any way, but a constant feel that somebody else was there.  I don’t really take any notice of that kind of thing, but several times I thought I could hear a piano being played.  On the top floor there was an entire appartment with a secret door and a double floor so that he couldn’t be heard … the neighbour told us that he hid up there for several years after the war ended as French patriots sought vengeance, some of it brutal.

The property had been built as a hunting lodge, though it wasn’t clear to which Chateau it would have been attached or who the original owners were.  We imagine a hunting lodge as a timber cabin – well, I do anyway – but although this property had no exquisite features apart from fleur-de-lys tiled floors, it had been created with elegance and taste.  What was left of damp old wallpaper and curtaining was of good quality.  The rooms, although not large, were nicely proportioned, with big windows overlooking fields and trees.  Off to one side were the ruins of another building, way too far gone for restoration, though we did half-think of doing a new-build there.  The same neighbour, a farmer whose house was about three miles away, told us the old building had once been a chapel but that didn’t seem likely to us.

We chose the property for several good reasons.  One, it was incredibly cheap, even for those days – about £35 000 for a run-down seven-bedroomed property, five acres of land and unbroken views in all directions.  Two, it had potential – we would do it up and it would be worth considerably more, and also there was a wing to one side that we could make in to a holiday gite to supplement our income.   Three, we were surrounded by all the little isolated fermettes my clients hankered after and I would therefore have less travelling to do.  And last, but not least, it seemed to me at the time to be a little entity in itself, a sort of beacon, somewhere I could hide and lick my wounds.  I had wounds to heal.

 

• The front of the house when we bought it.

The job.

I remember one client asking me if I worked.  I had driven her and her husband round and round all day, showing them in to properties, explaining the conveyancing system, interpreting as and when required, pointing out features in the town … and she asked me if I worked!  Yes, I said, I do this.  Oh, she replied, I suppose it is a kind of job.  You have no idea, I wanted to say, you have no idea – the hours of driving people like you round and round, listening to whatever you are saying, showing you in and out of houses, all on the off-chance you will buy.

It worked like this, more-or-less in this order:

– I would find several houses for sale, drive over to see them (often quite a long way), take photos, go home and type up details (in itself stunningly tedious once you have done it several times), and then put a couple of ads in places like The Lady and The Telegraph

– in order to do this I had to use up precious funds on petrol, advertising, getting films developped etc., and I had to bear the children in mind. Frequently one of them would come with me; Jake, aged only 3, often came with me.  I decided he was my lucky mascot.

– enquiries would come in by fax or by phone.  Because in those days it was cheaper to phone in the evenings, people invariably phoned at night, just as we settled down to a film, or supper or both.   I would then post the details to the interested party, knowing full well that only 2 or 3 for every 100 would result in a sale

– this had to be done in a roll-on system so that I had a stream of new properties, a stream of new clients and a stream of new ads.  I could never be without clients or without properties.

– the client would usually turn up, but sometimes they’d make an appointment and simply disappear off the face of the earth.  This could be devastating for me because, in order to see them I had usually driven to 2 or 3 different places to pick up keys, phoned around to make the appointments, left Jake with a childminder (who had to be paid, of course) and then driven to wherever we had agreed to meet.  I would wait an hour or so before deciding it was a no-show and I would then have to take the keys back and phone the disappointed vendors who would tell me that les anglais are not serieux.  There were no mobile phones in those days.

 

• The whole area, for miles in all directions, was rich (or was it riddled?) with buildings for renovation.  This huge old barn was only £3000, with about an acre of land.  I always wore jeans because of the brambles and stinging nettles, and even where there were none, jeans were better for climbing in to lofts, reaching out to close shutters or whatever.

– as and when I had a client who wished to go ahead and buy, I then had to get him or her to sign a Compromis de Vente.  If I could possibly get this done in a notaire’s office that was great, but it was difficult to get a quick appointment and, to coin a phrase, I had to strike while the iron was hot.  It has always amazed me how my clients trusted me and signed in a cafe, or in the car or their hotel.  At that stage they would also have to give me a cheque for 10%, made out to whichever notaire was handling the sale.

– I also had to negotiate a price.  Sometimes the buyer would make such a low offer it was an insult to the vendor.  Either way, the difference between what the vendor was willing to sell for, and what the buyer was willing to pay – that bit was for me, whatever it was.  Sometimes it was a pittance, sometimes it was a lot.

– I then handed the whole thing over to the notaire and theoretically my role should have ended there.  But because my clients could rarely speak French, and the notaire virtually never spoke any English, my role continued, up and down throughout the various stages towards Completion.  I nudged it forwards, keeping the client happy, till I got my commission.

– then Bruce took over, if possible, with the house renovations – which is a different story altogether

– suffice to say it was a job fraught with hassles and stresses.  On the surface it seemed so pleasant to an outsider, but there were so many pitfalls along the way, so many loops to have to jump through, and the vast majority of my clients were selfish and demanding.  They didn’t think so, of course, but they were.  Believe you me, it was a high-stress job.  The competition from local French agents was vicious, truly nasty. Vendors were unreliable, and often enough just would not be available with the key for me to show my client around the house – my client that I had almost always gone to so much trouble to get.   And my commission was frequently the only income for the family.  Many a good sale would fall through simply because of some silly incident, or because of somebody cutting me out … And clients never seemed to understand this was my income, my only income.  They seemed to think that I was some kind of charitable bi-lingual taxi service and would become angry and unpleasant as soon as they realized there was money in it for me – in effect, their money.

• With one of my numerous brothers (far left).  Bruce, Pippa & Jake, my nephew Tim (seated in white T-shirt) with me sitting just behind him.  We called this the bri – or braai, to be more accurate – from braai-vleis, the South African version of a BBQ (literally burnt meat).

And it was a lonely job that I did alone.  Before this I had been a teacher.  I used to go in to school, teach the lessons, go home again.  Sometimes it was easy, sometimes it was not, sometimes I had marking to do, sometimes not.  But I got paid to do what I did, and I didn’t lose any pay if my pupils didn’t pass their “A” levels.  There were set books to work through and a fairly standard sequence of lessons and off-shoots of lessons to give. Standard things were provided – a staff room, coffee, colleagues, car park and a back-up system via the Heads of Department.  Now I had to create situations that in turn would create money.  I had to make thin air produce an income.  That is what running your own business is, just that.  There was no back-up system for me, nothing “ready” for me to use.  I knew nothing about price negotiation, documents, legal papers, cadastral plans, building permission, contracts … but I learnt it all very quickly and, rather to my surprise, found that I was not a teacher at all but a business-woman, and a good one at that.  I earned good money, did a great job, but the wear and tear on my nerves took its toll as the years tripped by …

• Jake sitting behind Tim in a home-made buggy.  Dear Tim.  He died the following year. He was only 19.

Part 5 to follow.

Catherine Broughton is a novelist, a poet and an artist.  her books are available from Amazon/Kindle worldwide or can be ordered from most leading book stores and libraries.  They are also available as e-books (£1.99) from http://www.turquoisemoon.co.uk

 

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It happened like this…an English family move to France, Part 2

 1989-1990. Lost in France.

As a family, we were happy in our own world.  We were closely-knit and all got along together.  The children joined in, we had little rituals and traditions that we stuck to, and family life was fine.  I am from a very large family, and both our parents and a variety of brothers and sisters, along with a collection of spouses/boyfriends/girlfriends, came to visit.   The children made friends at school and rapidly learnt to speak French, especially Pippa who learnt French extremely quickly – a matter of weeks.  Little girls are very receptive at that age.  William took  longer.  By the time Jake was seven or eight, he spoke better French than English, but as a toddler he spoke a delightful Franglish that only we could understand.

It is arguably terribly rude to not learn the language of your host country, and for me half the fun of being abroad is trying to speak the lingo.  But some people have a knack for it and others do not – it is like being able to sing, or draw or do Maths.  For Bruce it was very hard indeed and he just could not get his head round it.

 

 

• The boys in the kitchen.  The ceiling had started to fall in so we had to put an upright in to retain it.  The previous owners had “modernized” it, and we had all sorts of plans to create a more tradtional kitchen, in keeping with the house.  But we had long since moved on before we could even think of affording it.  All the rooms very huge, except for the bathroom with was pokey, smelly, dark and had no window.

Things were very different

It took a while to adjust to how different things were.  They were very different.  We had come from the most expensive area of the UK – Sussex – to a French backwater.  Even though we had both lived abroad a great deal, to include some third-world countries, we were nonetheless taken aback by the poor standard.  The village was essentially just a collection of dark grey stone buildings with a lorry-plagued road blasting through the middle of it and dangerously narrow (broken) pavements on either side.  The shops were very poorly stocked.  There were no cereals of any sort whatsoever, no tea, no fresh milk, and chickens were sold with their heads and feet still dangling grotesquely.  Christmas, so jolly and colourful in England, regardless of one’s opinions about tat and commercialism, was a non-event with one drab Christmas tree outside the Mairie (town hall) and the local radio blaring out of loudspeakers in the street, loud enough to drive you mad.

Another thing that was so different was the overall look of each village.  A lot of British people comment on it – everything looks so utterly dead, even today.  Shutters closed, nobody on the street.  Even the shops frequently looked shut when they were in fact open.  I hasten to add that this is not a criticism of France, it was just the way it was and I think many French people from Bordeaux or Paris or the Cote d’Azur would agree. It was terribly depressing.

 

• My office, or the Power House as I used to call it!

Our energies found their own levels, with me doing most of the viewing of properties and taking potential buyers round.  This was partly because I always know where I am – whether or not I am facing north or south, which side of the town I am on or whatever – so I found it easy enough to follow the directions and locate the property.  Also, of course, I spoke French, crucial when discussing the price with the vendor and working through the papers with the notaire.  Bruce worked on the house to make it more comfortable, and he also tended to do the shopping and fetch the children from school, look after Jake and so on.  It was a role reversal that I had no trouble with, but I think he sometimes felt a bit useless – which he was not.

We pulled out all stops to integrate.

We too made a few friends.  Not many. And they didn’t last. We discovered that for every ten couples we invited to dinner we would be invited back perhaps once.  I don’t know why that is.  Just a different way of doing things.  We got the children to join in – judo, ballet, horse-riding and so on, attended the Christmas fund-raiser and the parent-teacher picnic … and remained 100% outsiders.

Well, we were outsiders.

Sales were good and we both worked very hard.  My days were filled with driving people around, showing them in and out of houses, explaining to them how the system worked, pointing out the land boundaries, listening to them talking, smiling and listening some more.  The British snapped up properties on a regular basis, sometimes buying something idyllic and frequently (like us!) buying something completely unsuitable.  It has to be said that the British snapped up all those derelict little properties that the French didn’t want and as a direct result of this (according to an article in a French national newspaper) places like Bricomarche opened – and created employment.  And so on.  All and any business brings in trade, and our business was not an exception.

The red tape also kept me on my toes. I had to drive over to Chateauroux, the main town, about forty minutes’ drive away, over and again to fill in this form and that form.  I tried to do things professionally, properly, be correct ….

But we had been at La Haute Perriere barely four or five months when we accepted that this was not the place for us.  We fought against it for a while.  It seemed ridiculous to give up and move on already, but look at it from every angle as we might, it was clear this was not the place to be.

 

• There were seriously hundreds and hundreds of grotty little properties for sale.  This one was in a village, though the British usually wanted something out in the countryside.  It sold for the French franc equivalent of £6 000 !  Unlike a UK estate agent, in France you have to accompany your client – sometimes for miles and miles. This is partly because that is expected from the vendor but also because your client would never find the property, down little lanes in tiny hamlets, in a country that is double the size of the UK.  Furthermore, properties in France could be with 10 different agents, so if you wanted to nab that sale you had to keep that client close.

There were a variety of reasons we had to go.  We were very isolated was one.  Although the little town had all essential shops, doctor and so on, it was backward and slow.  The dated telephone exchange still closed for lunch.  Everything closed for lunch, even some restaurants!   It reminded us both of the UK in the 1960s.  In fact, I think that is why the British so loved buying in the area – childhood memories.

Anything that might be entertainment was miles and miles away.  In Sussex I had belonged to a health club, complete with pool and a fully equipped gym, restaurant, huge lawns … but the nearest I could get to it in France was a keep-fit class in Chateauroux, and the keep-fit was so slow and lady-like it was not worth going.

Nothing, nobody.

There was nothing. There was nobody. The climate was dreadful. There was nowhere to go.  Nobody to meet.  Worse, we couldn’t integrate.  There should be a badge available for people like us who tried so hard to build-up friendships.  Part of the trouble was that Bruce spoke no French, and keeping company with somebody who doesn’t speak your language is tedious.  On the rare occasion we were invited out the conversation depended entirely on me, and trying to include Bruce was a chore for all concerned.  And he felt miserable, desperately attempting to join in, and one has to give it to him – he tried really hard and kept up a good, cheerful front against all odds.  But there was more, vastly more to it than that. Even though France is just the other side of the English Channel, the cultural differences are immense and it is foolish to think one can just slot in, least of all in an area like the centre of France where nothing had changed for donkeys’ years.

I missed my friends terribly.  In England the mothers used to stand around the school gate to pick up their children after school, and we would all be chatting to each other, and we would get chatting even if we didn’t know each other.  Here, the mothers stood in silence. One or two spoke.  Nobody spoke to me. I am a very open person, easy to talk with, casual and at ease with almost anybody – but I could never get a conversation going beyond the rather formal “Bonjour Madame”.  I tried really hard, and in the early days I was determined to swing in to the French way of life.  But I just couldn’t.

 

•   Another house for sale.  I sold it to a Dutch couple who lived in London and who wanted it for holidays. It was a good buy and I hope they had plenty of lovely holidays there.  The lake was part of it and there were grounds of about half an acre.  I can’t remember the price but it was something in the region of £20 000.

In France in those days – and even now to a large extent – it is quite usual for a property to remain for sale for years.  La Haute Perriere had been for sale five years before we turned up. We were conscious that this was potentially a big worry.  We had decided to move on, so move on we must, but the thought of trying to sell the monster we had bought, was daunting to say the least.  But I found, slightly to my surprise, that I was now a business woman; I had experience; I knew the ins and outs of advertising; I knew how to present a property, what to avoid … we did a bit of cosmetic work, vases of flowers, a few artistic draperies, and sold the place within a few months.  The buyers were an older American couple who, years later, telephoned us and told me they had hated the place from Day 1, and asked me to sell it again – which I couldn’t, for I had long since moved on, and moved away.

• A rare moment of relaxation in our garden, that first swelteringly hot summer in France.  My mother commented that the heat was as bad as Nigeria.

In the meantime we talked about where to go.  We discussed returning to South Africa, where I was born, and a part of me will always wish that we had done that.  We discussed Australia, where Bruce had spent his youth.  We talked about New Caledonia where I had lived, or Spain and any number of other places.  Mostly I wanted to go home, but we had lost our house and we knew that raising the funds for another would take a very long time.

And as all parents know, the children have to come in to the equation.  We had removed them from a school where they were very happy and doing well in the UK.  Pippa and William were now fluent in French.  They were part of the French education system.  And we didn’t have the funds for a big move anyway.  Oddly enough a friend asked me just the other day where I would recommend living – where in the world, that is – for we have travelled a great deal and lived in a lot of different countries.  And I replied:

“While you are young and energetic, if you are going to go to the trouble of moving country and culture, for goodness’ sake choose somewhere a bit more exotic than France!”

Odd, isn’t it ?  Although I have come to love France, I still feel that.

Part 3 to follow.

Catherine Broughton is a novelist, a poet and an artist.  Her books are available on Amazon/Kindle worldwide, or can be ordered from most leading book stores and libraries.  They can also be bought (£1.99) as e-books from http://www.turquoisemoon.co.uk

Click here for Part 1.

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It happened like this…an English family move to France, Part 1

At the beginning, 1989.

Well, to be blunt, we were broke. We had been hit by the UK property crash in 1989 and we lost everything almost overnight. And that is why we moved to France.  No other reason.

In the preceding months, before we realized how serious the financial crisis would be, we had bought a little fermette, largely uninhabitable, in the centre of France, as fashion dictated.  The intention was to develop, as the British were hungry for cheap property in France and – goodness – it was cheap!   Although, before we met, we had both lived abroad a great deal, we were not immune to the British dream-misconception that life would be “different” in France.  Like so many of our compatriots we thought it could be an “escape” of some kind … in those days France was considerably cheaper.  Surely life would be easier ?  Surely it would be different ?

Well, yes, it was different – it was French!

 

  This was the first property we bought, more-or-less, for the price of a garden shed in the UK.  I am standing by the door with one of the children.  The centre of France was a big mistake, though we were not to know it then. Although property was amazingly cheap, the area was bitterly cold in the winter and stiflingly hot in the summer – a horrid, heavy kind of heat that was not pleasant at all. It was also a very backward part of the country, and seemed stuck in the dark ages. Many of the locals had no indoor plumbing and used an out-house, or even a bucket.

In the UK I had been teaching and Bruce ran a building firm, buying up the last of the run-down old houses in Hastings, splitting them up in to flats and then selling them.  It was exceptionally high-risk and hard work, but we were both extremely energetic, positive and determined people.

I taught French & Spanish

I had stopped teaching while expecting our third child, born in 1988. That was the happiest patch of my life, at home with a very good baby, with whom I was utterly besotted.  Pippa and William were aged 7 and 9 respectively and they went to a local prep school.  We had a lovely house that we had purchased when William was new-born.  We bought it as a two-up and two-down derelict cottage, probably the last one in Sussex.  We had enlarged and renovated it and we were rightly very proud of it.  We had good money, a smart car, holidays abroad. Even my teaching position had been pleasant enough.

 

We had bought this as a derelict cottage when William was just a few weeks old.  By then it was already very difficult to find something in need of work in the south-east of England and we felt lucky to have got our hands on it.  It had been a tiny two-up two-down with a small kitchen extension.  It was in such a bad state that a health visitor came round to see what sort of conditions I was keeping the children in!  We turned it in to a 5 bedroom, 3 bathroom house.  Our blood, sweat and tears were in it. 

 

• On the patio in Sussex, England.  I loved that house and left my heart there.  It took me a long time to recover.

 

Sometimes when I look back on that energy I can hardly believe it.  I used to pop home during my lunch break at school to mow the grass – at first a half acre of derelict shrubbery and scrub and, bit by bit, as I cut the growth back and seeded, mowed and re-seeded, it turned in to lovely green grass, English grass.  I don’t know why I mention it here, for I have never been interested in gardening, but I suppose because it was one of the things I missed the most when we were in France.  My English garden with London pride growing in the borders.

 

Me standing in the front garden in Sussex, the azaleas and rhododenrons in bloom, a few days before Jake, our third baby, was born.

 

• My rock garden with Pippa and William crouching at the top and the  London Pride in bloom.

I had loads of friends.  I have always been a chatty, up-front person.  I like girls, I like women.  I always had a chum with me when I went shopping or when I took the children out.  It is part of the very heart and structure of an English woman’s life, and another thing that I missed dreadfully once we moved to France where it was much harder to make friends, and to find the time to maintain any potential friendships.

We worked as a team.

Unable to meet bills or pay the mortgage on our home in England, we were just one more family amid hundreds and hundreds who lost out badly in 1989, many of whom reformed their lives around Council houses and menial jobs to survive.  What made us different was that we believed very strongly in ourselves.  We had had a lovely lifestyle and we wanted it back. We were hard-working and willing to take a risk.  We got on really well together and worked as a team, always.  We had huge energy, and we didn’t mind roughing it when we had to.  Bruce could turn his hand to almost anything, he was exceptionally skilled, and I could do the rest.  When I look back I realize we were multi-talented, but it didn’t occur to me then.  The main things were our enthusiasm, our determination and our energy.  We had three little children, but we scooped them up in to whatever situation we were in, and just got on with it.

We decided to let our lovely home, so we put a tenant in and we moved to France.  I will always remember the removal man telling me he moved a UK family to France every week.  As he made his notes he looked straight at me as added: “and every week I move a family home again”.  He was trying to warn me.

The tenant’s rent paid the worst of the mortgage.  About four months later he announced that he would like to buy the property and, although we’d by far have preferred to have kept it, we really had no choice but to sell.  And then, for no reason, he changed his mind, bought elsewhere, the bank forclosed and we lost the house.  I cried for weeks – for years.

Speaking French.

Periodically somebody will say to me “how lucky you could speak French!”.  Being able to speak French was, of course, a huge advantage compared to most foreigners trying to set up a new life in France.  Conversely, however, it was a disadvantage in more ways than one would imagine.  Had neither of us been able to speak French we’d have bumbled along together.  But as I spoke it well, thanks to childhood years in New Caledonia, everything fell on to my shoulders.  Talking to the teachers, helping with homework, opening a bank account, dealing with mortgage applications, insurance policies, the endless red tape provided by the French bureaucratic system, answering the phone, finding an accountant, applying for child allowance – all of a sudden I was no longer a housewife-cum-teacher.  It was exhausting.  Jake was still getting us up in the night from time to time, the children were confused and lost in school, and we had to find a way of earning money very quickly indeed.

 

• Bruce washing Jake in the kitchen sink – we had no bath, though there was a cold shower.

French banks

The other key to our success was the French banking system.  It was extraordinarily naive at the time, and in no time at all we were able to buy a bigger and better property called La Haute Perriere with 100% loan from a French bank.  They simply wanted to know how much we had earned the previous year, and that had been a lot.  They wrote it down on a piece of paper, got us to sign it, and were not interested in the fact that we had lost that income for good.

Now, one has to understand that, although on the one hand it was utterly crazy – crazy! – to buy such a big property, there were reasons behind it.  Folly, sure, but good reasons too.  Both Bruce and I always had a feeling of “just round the next corner … ” and “in just a month or two …”  We had complete confidence that things would work out well. Considering our ambitions, and the state we were in, that confidence sometimes beggared belief.  There was no question of things not working out well.  A possible failure didn’t enter in to the equation.  A big house like La Haute Perriere gave us a level of kudos, not for the local people but to our very selves.  It is a bit like looking smart when you go out – you somehow just feel better, even though you are the same person.  Our frame of mind, our mindset and our whole personal aura was go for it! Make it happen! get there!

That is what drove us on.

 

I love this picture because I can just see Jake toddling as fast as his little leggies would carry him, towards the camera. Behind him I am just moving forwards to catch him.  The middle floor of this property had been arranged as a 3 bedroom flat, and that is where we lived.  There was a top floor which was accessed via a steep staircase at one end of the property; we called this The Tower.  There was a new roof but apart from that no work had been done on that floor and it was just a huge long attic that the children played in.  There were all sorts of relics up there, the strangest of all being five or six massive oriental rugs, laid out on the floor, one on top of the other.  They were doubtless worth a fortune, but there was no way of getting them down the stairs and we puzzled as to how they got up there.  It must have been when the roof was removed.   The bottom floor was three massive, bare rooms, decorated and boasting 18th Century tiled floors and a huge fireplace at one end.  The property had full central heating which was unusual for that part of France in those days – and gosh, was that needed that first bitter bitter winter!  This huge house had just the one bathroom and toilet, which was also typical of French homes at that time.  There were several acres of fenced garden, a tennis court, and endless outbuildings to include a lovely 17th Century dove cote.

We sold our little fermette in Palluau to some ambitious Brits who were seeking “the easy life”, and we made a good profit.  Doing this was clearly the way to make some good money and to move forwards.  We had befriended a local notaire who was very keen to sell to les anglais, and thence very keen to see me set up an estate agency.  In those days it was more usual to have an office and a shop-front to give us a high street presence, but we didn’t even consider this as it was unwanted overheads.  We arranged one of the large and more comofrtable downstairs rooms as an office and, along with my old typewriter, a phone, a filing cabinet and a second-hand photocopier, we set up business.  Bruce built two long “desks” that covered two walls, and on these we were able to lay out the photocopies of the properties, address envelopes and so on.

 

• One of the ground floor rooms

Success.

We were successful right from the word go.  No, not big success, but enough to live on, pay for the house and run the car. Thanks largely to the notaire, the jungle-drums worked like magic and we soon had a big file of properties for sale, mostly run-down fermettes, which was what the Brits were generally after.  We ignored the French market – they had estate agents of their own – and concentrated on the UK market, placing ads in The Lady and the Telegraph.  There was no internet in those days, so enquiries came in by phone or by fax, sometimes ten enquiries in one day and then none for a month.  The property details had to be posted to the UK, and then after a few follow-up calls we’d wait for people to come to France and view.  For every 100 potential buyers I got in to my car, and drove them round the countryside showing them any suitable houses,  about 3 would actually buy something.  I took as large a commission as I could, for those that did buy had to make up, financially, for those who didn’t buy.

• The countryside was generally flat.  This was the view from the kitchen balcony.  Years later William told me that he used to look at the horizon and imagine England over there, beyond the trees.  He also told me that for years and years he slept facing England.  He and I were both very homesick.

My property sales were dealt with by the same notaire , who benefitted from the transactions, of course.  He, in turn, kept one ear to the ground for suitable properties for me.  He supplied me with sales papers in English that I should get my clients to sign, and was a good source of support and general information at a time when I was paddling in the dark.

He didn’t trouble to mention to me – and perhaps he genuinely didn’t think of it – that there are very strict laws about conveyancing in France and that, what you could at that time do in all freedom in the UK was illegal in France, and carried a prison sentence.

Part 2 to follow.

Catherine Broughton is a novelist, a poet and an aritst.  Her books are readily available on Amazon/Kindle, or can be ordered from any leading book store or library.  They are also available as e-books on this site

 

The French Language- the things you didn’t learn in evening class

Today Eden, who is seven, asked me if it was obligatory to go to the pool.

You would never hear this in English. “ C’est obligatoire d’aller a la piscine?” she asked after I suggested I accompany her there.

An English child would say “do I have to go?” or perhaps “is it important I go?” or something like that.  In English it is not obligatory and never could be.  The health club I belonged to in the UK had a sign in the changing room: guests are requested to kindly take a shower before using the sauna.  The health club I went to in France had a similar notice: douche obligatoire avant sauna.

It is obligatory you belt up when in the car.  It is obligatory you show your passport at customs.  But not to go to the pool or anything like it.

Likewise the French will use to have the right.  Eden again, and today again, asked if she had the right to an ice cream.  ”J’ai le droit de prendre une glace?”  An English child would ask “can I have an ice-cream?”  An American child, I am told, would just help himself!  I remember when we first came to France coming across a car crash.  One side of the road was blocked and there was a long long queue, as traffic passed swiftly and constantly in the other direction.  After quite a wait, I got out of the car and asked the young man standing to one side (aged 35 or so) to stop the traffic one way so that the others could get moving.  “Je n’ai pas le droit”, he replied.  I haven’t the right, he said.  So I did it.  When the police turned up they looked mildly surprised at me, but didn’t guillotine me or fling me in to prison.  Phew.

Then there is the word interdit.  Forbidden.  I think it has something to do with Napoleon.  Even though he’s been dead a long time.  At a nearby chateau is a sign “il est interdit de marcher sur l’herbe” – in English this would be please keep off the grass.

French is such a beautiful language, yet they do have this “hardness” to many of their words and ways of saying things.

As usual, just as the pop in to my head (accents missing):-

jeux de societe – board games

un point, c’est tout! – and that’s that!

quelquechose qui cloche – something not quite right

planetere – out of this world

joli – yes, it means pretty but it can be used in a way we would never use it in English, e.g something that is badly done: ce n’est pas joli.  The hem on the curtain is badly done – l’ourlet du rideau n’est pas joli

double rideau – (while we’re at it) is a curtain, whereas a net curtain is un rideau

epingle a nourrice – safety pin

au bout de la langue – on the tip of my tongue

bete noire – pet hate

queter – to ask for money, but not begging, ie to ask for money for a charity.  There is no word for a collection box, so I suppose one would say “une boite pour faire la quete”.  To beg is otherwise mendier

je connais comme sur le bout de mes doigts – I know it like the palm of my hand.  However, in French this does not really apply to, e.g a town or a street, more to a book or some other intellectual situation or item

ecole prive – public school, though in English we tend to say “independent” school these days.  The public/independent school in the UK is more-or-less unique in Europe.  Our children went to an ecole prive here in France, but it cost a tiny fraction of what it would cost in the UK and had no where near the same connotations or anything like it

c’est du jamais-vu – I’ve never seen anything like it

c’est plus fort que moi – I can’t help it

il y en a la-haut – sort-of equivalent to “she’s not just a pretty face” – you need to tap your forehead as you say it, indicating there are brains up there

manger a la pouce – to eat on the go

chair de poule – goose bumps

erreur de frappe – typo

Catherine Broughton is a novelist, a poet and an artist.  Her books are available on Amazon/Kindle worldwide or can be ordered from any leading book store or library.  Links below:-

 

https://payhip.com/b/tEva    “A Call from France”

https://payhip.com/b/OTiQ    ”French Sand”

https://payhip.com/b/BLkF    “The Man with Green Fingers”

https://payhip.com/b/1Ghq    “Saying Nothing”

 

or from Amazon (click below):-

http://goo.gl/XbkYVK  “Saying Nothing”

http://goo.gl/1RVEdr   “French Sand”

http://goo.gl/LZG63T  “A Call from France”

– See more at: http://www.turquoisemoon.co.uk/blog/the-french-language-things-you-dont-learn-in-evening-class/#sthash.nG92JA8I.dpuf

International Accents, Learning French

I was staggered one day last winter when in Belize.  I was talking with an American man and a young man from Liverpool.  The Liverpool chap had a very heavy Liverpuddlian accent.  My accent, I’m afraid to say, makes me sound like Princess Anne.  What staggered me is that the American couldn’t hear the difference.  Not hear the difference ?!    I found that amazing.  On reflection, however, I told him that – actually – I couldn’t hear the difference between the Canadian and the American accent.  I was assured there was very little difference.  By this time a Canadian woman had joined our group and she, rather to the irritation of the American, told me that her accent is softer.

The discussion continued in this vein for a while (we were sitting at the bar of our son’s budget hostel in Hopkins – lovely – the bar is up under the trees where it is cool and there are a lot of young people from all over the world) and an Australian joined us.  Surely, I said to the American, you can hear that his accent is different ?  Nope.  No way.

Having been in France many years I can now tell a “working class” accent, I suppose.  Certainly in this area.  I can also tell accents from the south of France where they have a delightful twang.  France does have regional accents, of course, but they are not as pronounced as the British ones.  Or at least so it seems to me.

As always, just as they pop in to my head (accents – the other sort of accent – missing):-

un clin d’oiel – a wink

rouler au pas – drive dead slow

une ordonnance – a prescription

en revanche – on the other hand

eternuer – sneeze.  In French this is a verb and not a noun.  We Brits have the luxury of being able to sneeze ( a verb) and to do a sneeze (a noun).

rien n’y fit – there was nothing for it

une petite voix – a small voice, ie you don’t sound on form: tu as une petite voix

abonnement – subscription (to a magazine for example)

au fond de mon lit – huddled up in bed

figure-toi – mark you

drolement – particularly, eg he was particularly rude: il etait drolement impoli

un particulier – an individual person (as opposed to a firm/company)

mere poule – motherly

le cadet de mes soucis – the least of my worries

chanceux – lucky. One would usually say “il a de la chance”, or “quelle chance!”

hot on his heels

la vache ! – blimey!

le footing – jogging

un beau coup de crayon – good at drawing

un beau coup de pinceau – good at painting (pictures)

sacre bon – this food is sacre bon – ie excellent.  Or sacre mauvais or whatever.

forte – fat.  Une femme forte: a fat woman.  This sounds better than une grosse femme/une femme grosse, which is unkind.  I suppose in the UK we’d say “a cuddly lady” …?

le grand trot – canter (for a horse). Trot is trot (pronouned tro) and gallop is gallop (pronounced gallo)

 

Catherine Broughton is a novelist, a poet and an artist.  Her books are available as e-books from this site, (click below), from Amazon/Kindle, or can be ordered from any leading book store or library.   Catherine Broughton spends her year in either the UK, France or Belize, and travels a great deal.  Her travel stories and sketches from around the world are on http://www.turquoisemoon.co.uk

 

https://payhip.com/b/tEva    “A Call from France”

https://payhip.com/b/OTiQ    ”French Sand”

https://payhip.com/b/BLkF    “The Man with Green Fingers”

https://payhip.com/b/1Ghq    “Saying Nothing”

– See more at: http://www.turquoisemoon.co.uk/blog/international-accents-learning-french/#sthash.L6jsqqev.dpuf