It happened like this...an English family moves to France. Part 14

Jake in the hall.  I can tell he is aged seven simply because his front teeth are missing!  That means this would have been after June 1996.  We moved in to the house in December 1995, and the photo shows electric wiring still being chased in to the walls and the floors thick with dust – those tiles are in fact a beautiful red-brown.  I think perhaps almost a year went by before I was able to start cleaning in any proper sense.  On the left you can see the staircase which is made of stone.  Some of the steps had worn so much that there were dips in the centre, making it easy to miss your footing.  Bruce filled these dips with an ingenious concrete mix, so that it looks just like the stone.

I enquired about teaching.  I had already made a few enquiries when we first moved to France, now six years ago, and had been told that my teaching qualifications from the UK were not valid in France.  Despite an evolving “Europe” this was still the case and I was disappointed because teaching, compared to running my own business, seemed like a doddle!   On the other hand I had become accustomed to earning significantly more money, and that had to be taken in to consideration too.  Indeed, as a teacher I would earn no where near enough to help us realize our ambitions.

But it was also really rather irritating.  Being allowed to teach would have been a quick and easy stop-gap, if only a temporary one.  I don’t know how English is taught in French schools nowadays, though I think it is taken seriously, but in those days it was abysmally badly taught, and both the elder children used to come home from school with giggling stories about how their teacher had pronounced this word or that, not to mention entire nonsensicle sentences.  Anyway, the local education authority didn’t want me, wouldn’t even try me, and I declared somewhat loudly that it was thier loss.

So another business it had to be.

Visitors from home.

Meanwhile visitors from home came and went.  The guest bedrooms, of which there were 4, were the last to be decorated of course, and they were in varying states of repair with odd assortments of furniture in them, as and when we came across something to put in them.  One of my brothers-in-law, Big-Andrew, so named because he is 6’6″, slept on a child’s mattress on the floor for some time.  My mother slept on an old iron army bed and, right in to old age, long after the house was totally restored and good furniture installed, she preferred that old army bed.

• Big-Andrew is a sculptor, going by the name of Qadir.  He helped Jake make a model of George.  We kept it for years and years till, a bit at a time, a paw fell off, then an ear …

Visitors fell fairly neatly in to two categories – those who could cope and those who could not.   Or perhaps it is those who “get it” and those who don’t.  With a family such as ours was, it was essential to take us as you found us.  Dust, tools, planks, noise …. I remember some friends, Pete and Liz, who stayed a long week-end and who were really quite horrified at my odd assortment of crockery, not to mention the sheets I had rigged up at their bedroom window in lieu of curtains.  They were bemused and confused by the choices we made.  Things like faded old wallpaper hanging off the wall and broken window panes were the least of our concerns.  For several years my kitchen work surface was an old table, about 3′ x 2′ I suppose, with a small chunky drawer in the front.  In this I found a mouse with several new-born baby mice.  That sort of thing has never revolted me.  I’d rather not have mice, of course, but at that stage both the table and the house itself had been unused for a great many years, so the mouse thought she was in luck.  She had probably been nesting there for years.  I can’t remember what I did with them – I think I asked William to transport them somewhere more suitable.    The table turned out to be early 17th Century.  That mouse knew her antiques!

At week-ends we often set off with our bikes and our tents, though we soon progressed to a caravan.  Picnics (preferably not on the beach – I hate sand in my food!) and walks with George became a regular pass-time on our days off during the summer.  When you are working very very hard, and no matter how pressing the job in hand is, it is essential to not only take time off but to get right away from the work and do something totally different.

  The children growing up so fast!  Picnic at La Palmyre.  Our daughter, opening the picnic basket, already very tall.  I see I am holding a bottle of beer – I have never liked beer.  Perhaps I picked it up for the photo.

• This became the dining room.  Pipes for the central heating running under the floor.  We would love to cover the floor with oak parquet, but it is such a huge area (65 sq metres) that our budget won’t stretch to it easily.  We had a fitted carpet over it for a long time but, what with three children + all their mates, a dog and all the building work, it was soon replaced by vinyl … yes, yes, heartbreaking, but there you have it …

Buying property in France

We decided to buy a second property in a nearby village called Corme Royale.  The aim was to let it.  At that time it was just another backwater, but sufficiently close to Saintes to attract lettings.  There was the inevitable boulangerie and a small post office – nothing else I think.  Like the other villages in the area it was grey and brown and dead.  But also like the other villages, it soon entered the appropriate century and got modernized and cleaned up.  Corme Royale is nowadays quite a sweet little town with all essential shops and an exceptionally good restaurant on the place there.

We needed 100% loan from the bank plus the money to convert the building in to three self-contained flats.  The money for the building work would have to cover a “commission” for me and a good wage for Bruce and his team for doing the work.   We would then sell one flat to pay-off the bank and let out the other two.   It needed some careful calculations and some clever ducking and diving.  It was crucial that there was enough to live on immediately, crucial there was enough to pay for the building work, and crucial the building work be finished, advertisements placed and the property tenanted as quickly as possible.  Speed was of the essence because the first installment at the bank was only a month after the loan – and we couldn’t pay the first installment till we got a tenant … and we couldn’t get a tenant till the place was finished.  And so on.  This sort of juggling of figures and of situations was something I became very adept at.

If we could pull this off – this would be the way forward.

The church of St Nazaire in Corme Royale was a damp and cavernous lump of masonry for a long time.  Nowadays you can see how pretty is this 12th Century church which was originally built as a monastry for Benedictine monks, attached to the Abbey Notre Dame in Saintes.

I don’t know why we didn’t first go to our own bank.  There must have been a reason, though for the life of me I can’t remember what.  Perhaps they didn’t do “buy-to-let” loans, though as far as I recall French banks in general didn’t categorize their loans in the same way as their British counterparts.   The Societe Generale, after some 3 or 4 weeks of examining our dossier, gave us the loan for the Corme Royale property – 100% purchase + notaire‘s fees, plus enough for Bruce and his men to convert the building.  The call came through on my mobile phone while I was in a book shop, and I remember a feeling of elation, of “we’re getting there!”, of making great strides forwards.

 Mobile phones in France

Mobile phones hit France a long time after the UK.  The first one we looked at was in 1990, while we were still living in House Number Two.  It is funny to think of it now, but the whole concept of a mobile phone seemed odd to us and, more surprisingly, we couldn’t imagine that it was really particularly necessary.  However, as my job at that time involved a great many miles on the road, we decided it could be a good thing.

It took a lot of effort to locate a person who knew something about mobile phones, but after some time he and a colleague turned up at the house and opened the boot of their car.  Inside sat a large contraption, using up most of the boot space, and this was the mobile phone.

Worse, they couldn’t demonstrate it because there was no local reseau.  To top it off, the cost was the equivalent of about £2000.

“Forget it,” said Bruce.  And we did.

Then, in 1996 we heard that mobile phones were getting smaller and that there were more reseaux.  One of my sisters was with me, and together we set off to France Telecom in Saintes, where I was able to purchase my first mobile phone, about the size of a shoe box, and at the cost of £500.  My sister’s mobile, which she had with her, was not much larger than a packet of cigarettes.

“Ah!” exclaimed the monsieur at France Telecom, “you need this one (taps mine) here because it will otherwise not be powerful enough to pick up the signal, and will therefore not work.”

• My very first mobile was similar to this – the size of a shoe box, perhaps a bit smaller.

• They didn’t anyway sell anything else.  We set off home again, me wondering if I would ever use the thing, and certainly never dreaming I’d use one daily for the rest of my life.  That big clumpy one was excruciatingly expensive, but I did use it a great deal, despite it being not only way too big for a handbag, but it also had a separate antennae that I had to screw in to either make or take a call.  I wonder if I have still got it somewhere ?   I tend to throw things out if they are not useful, not sentimental or not beautiful, but I have a feeling I kept that phone.

Merchants in France.

We decided – somewhat reluctantly – to not sell the ground floor flat after all – partly because of the complications involved in legally dividing the property, which entailed a whole world of criteria (which in turn meant added expenses) that we did not wish to meet, and partly because – wait for it – there were strict regulations about  re-selling.  In some ways this scuppered the sums, but the project was still worth doing.

We had by this time – 1996  - been in France seven years.  In that time we had bought five houses and sold four.  That was a great deal of moving by French standards.  We  found out that in order to keep buying and selling, especially if the properties were not for our own residential use, we had to be registered as Marchands de Biens - Merchants of Goods.

I made the appropriate enquiries.  My mother posted me a dictionary of business and technical vocabulary, and this became my bible for a while, as I negotiated my way in and out of government buildings and offices.   I very rapidly discovered that being registered “merchants” involved precisely the sort of bureaucratic red-taped nightmare that we both avoided at all costs.  We had already been through far too much of that kind of thing.

I loved my father very much indeed.  I loved both my parents.  My mother embarked on the walk to St Jacques de la Compostella and my father would come to stay with us while she was gone.  He was a constant source of enthusiasm, ideas, positivity and advice. He was a doctor, but he was also a good DIY man and helped with all sorts of odd jobs around the house.  I loved those days when he stayed with us.  His admiration and praise spurred us forwards.  I’d love to see him again.

The top floor of the Corme house was converted from an attic in to a nice little two-bedroom appartment.  The staircase went all the way up to the top, so it was ripe for this kind of conversion.  The one on the middle floor was also a two-bedroom, and the one on the ground floor, because of the hallway and the staircase, a one bedroom, though it did have a good-sized courtyard at the back.   I suppose it took two months before the first flat was finished.  I found a tenant, the bank got paid, and so on …

Tenancy laws.

Like in the UK, the tenant has everything in his favour.  I agree that they are now protected from nasty landlords and unfair rents, but it has gone way too far in the other direction.  Many many properties remain empty because the owners do not, understandably, wish to be lumbered with tenants who are not paying, or who are wrecking the place.  Going by the book it can take years, seriously years, to get rid of an unwanted tenant.  And that is a shame because housing is not easy for many people, yet there is really a lot available.

I located a hole in the market.  Most letting agents and landlords insist on a “CDI” which is a permanent work contract plus at least one, if not two or three months’ rent as deposit, bank statements, references and so on.  There was -and still is – a huge section of the population who are perfectly able and willing to pay their rent, who have access to money for the rent, but who do not fulfill the usual requirements.

That was a gap that we filled.

Part 15 to follow.

Catherine Broughton is a novelist, an artist and a poet.  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 on this site.

http://www.britishinfrance.com/b14france.html

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It happened like this...an english family moves 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”

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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 begining, 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

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