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 8

• William in his home-made go-cart.  Although he was only 11, he wrote an article about it which got published in an engineering magazine.

The land tax office

The letter stated, quite simply, that we owed this huge sum of money and that it should have been paid at the time of the purchase.

I phoned the appropriate office but the person at the other end of the line had no idea what I was talking about and the reference number on the letter didn’t seem to help.  In fact, she said the reference was nonsensicle, even though I read it out carefully two or three times.  She suggested I phone back later, which I did, but that didn’t seem to make any difference.  We went through the same introductions and I finally asked her why she had suggested I phone back later ?

The British Consulate had once given me a good tip – always ask for the person in charge because a) it makes the one who answered your call jump to attention (his words) and b) the person in charge likes to feel s/he is indeed In Charge and does his/her best to have the appropriate information for you.   Thus I was eventually passed on to somebody else (ne quittez pas!) who then passed me on to The Man Who Had Signed The Letter.  All this took ages, and I waited through a variety of tunes, to include the inevitable Green Sleeves.

When The Man came on the line, he explained to me that an “agent” had seen the house and it was clearly worth a great deal more than the 350 000 francs (£30K) we had paid for it.   (Somebody had been round to spy ?!!)

“I should hope it is!” I exclaimed, “we have done a great deal of work on it!”

“At the price you paid, it would mean it was a ruin when you bought it,” replied the man dryly.

“It was!” I said crossly, “it was a ruin and we have done it up, and now it is worth a great deal more!”

“Nobody can do that amount of work in so short a time,” he replied with a sigh of impatience.

“Well we did!”

I made an appointment to see him.  He was off on holiday and couldn’t see me till he got back, three weeks hence.  It was maddening.

• In my brother-in-law’s microlite on a nearby air field.

Frais de notaire

I knew what had happened and had, in fact, dealt with a similar problem for one of my clients earlier that year.  You see, when you buy a property in France, you pay what are usually referred to as les frais de notaire.  This is a misnomer because only a fraction of the fee goes to the notaire; the rest are government taxes, like land tax in the UK.  These taxes depend on the value of the property.  Because Primrose was now worth considerably more than 350 000 francs, the powers that be, in their wisdom, decided that we had given cash to the vendor and only allowed the 350 000 francs to appear on paper, thus saving us thousands in land taxes.  In small village communities and with a people who don’t move house very often, this was quite possibly fairly common practice.  With computerization I expect all this kind of shinnannigans is impossible now, but when you consider that the local notaire was quite plausibly the brother of the buyer or the vendor, or the godparent or something … it doubtless happened more that the authorities cared to admit.

Anyway, it had not happened with us.

Irritated and, of course, concerned, I waited for The Man’s holiday to expire.  We still had the Court case for the Carte Professionelle hanging over us, work to be seen to, irritations and upsets with clients, the children to raise, stuff … you know how it is.  We led busy, active lives.

Emmaus

Finally, armed with a mercifully huge collection of before-and-after photos, I went to see The Man. The office was near the station in Rochefort close to an Emmaus which has since closed down – a pity because it was really good.  To this day the Emmaus in St Agnant, in aid of the homeless, is one of my favourite afternoons out – I love bric-a-brac and old furniture and what other people consider junk.  Nowadays, however, you can only rarely pick up real goodies for a song because, like charity shops in the UK, an expert comes in to value things.  But if you have got an eye for possibilities, it is a fun place to go.  As far as I am aware it is the only charity shop in France – but I may be wrong about that.  Emmaus is Biblical –  it is the name of a hamlet just outside Jerusalem, and a couple of pilgrims saw Jesus there, after Jesus had died.  It features in the gospel of St Luke.

The history of Art is my totally favourite subject; this painting is by Caravaggio, dated 1601, and named The Supper in Emmaus.  It is a lovely example if chia oscuro, ie use of light and shade.

Anyway, I diverge …  I made my way to the appropriate room, up a flight of tiled steps and in to a spacious office overlooking the railway.  There I was greeted by a pleasant-looking man in his forties.  He wore half-moon glasses.  An enormous weariness came over me and I flopped in to a chair without being asked and flung, perhaps a tickle rudely, the photos down on to the desk.  He raised an eyebrow at me.

“I am terribly tired,” I said, and I was.

He didn’t respond.  He probably thought he had misheard.. . or perhaps he thought it was something English women say, the way the French say “bonjour” and kiss each other.  Perhaps all English women sit without being asked and announce whether they are tired or not.

He picked up the packet and tipped the contents out on to his desk.  He looked through the pictures with genuine interest and, to my surprise, said (but in French):

“Yes, I have heard that les anglais are very good at restoring our old properties …”

• The larger of the two  guest rooms.  It was on the ground floor and boasted double doors on two sides, one out to the courtyard and the other to the woods.  When we bought the house an underground stream had seeped up through the floor, which had half an inch of muddy water on it almost all the time.  Bruce, with his habitual savoir-faire, dug a trench to divert the stream; it took a long while to get rid of the overall damp smell.  After a year we moved the beds so that we could make a doorway on that far wall, and that led through to a bathroom.  The bathroom was originally a disused bread-oven – you’d be amazed at how big the inside of a bread oven is!

He flicked through the photos, occasionally asking a question, and was quite interested in which room was which, how we had repaired the staircase, did I think the staircase was original, and he was so glad we’d kept the fleur-de-lys floor tiles in the hall … and so on.  He said he’d love a house like that but that his wife would never agree to living in such an isolated spot.

“It was nonetheless exceptionally cheap,” he said finally, putting the photos to one side.

“You are not telling me that one is not allowed to do a good deal in France, are you?!” I asked.

He smiled.

“No, of course not …”

He handed the photos over to me and told me he would reach his final decision in due course.  And that was the end of the interview.  I wanted to thump my fist on the table and yell … but I just smiled and left … as one does.

About six weeks later a letter arrived from The Man, telling me that all charges were dropped and that we had nothing to pay.

“I could have told you that for free!” I shouted in to the empty room.

• We took on the kind of projects that most people shied away from.  We were both very good at it. In the early days I would sometimes help with carrying buckets of cement and shovelling rubble, but I haven’t gone anywhere near that sort of thing for years now – and don’t intend to!  I can’t remember this man’s name … Jean-Something I expect.

The Tribunal

We finally appeared in Court about a year after the gendarme episode.  It had eaten at me almost constantly, and I had been veering from panic about going to prison to what-fun-going-to-prison-how-jolly-interesting-that’ll-be!  Most of the time that inbred positivity remained with me and I didn’t think for one moment I would go to prison or anything like it.  In fact, in many ways most of me just considered the whole thing massively tedious at a time when I already had too much to do.

I don’t know what I expected once I got in to the Court room – if I had expected anything at all – but one thing that did strike me was that, as each person’s turn came round, there was no notable calling-out of the name: Dupont v. Renaud!  That sort of thing.  Names of people, banks, businesses or whatever were sort-of half-mumbled by somebody sitting at the judge’s table, so when our turn came I had no idea we had started till I saw Vincent, our dear little lawyer, stand up and point to me.

 I couldn’t hear much of what was being said and Bruce couldn’t understand much of what was being said.  It seemed to be a fairly casual sort of conversation and, finally, I saw Vincent smile and he came over to us and said we should follow him out.  Gosh, thought I, are they going to put hand-cuffs on me?  I wished I had brought a camera.

But no.  Nothing quite so dramatic.  Vincent explained that I had been given two days’ suspended sentence.  And that was the end of that.  That was simply the end of that.  It made me really cross. I wanted to storm back in to the judge and shout “after all this TRAUMA, all these months of waiting, all you can manage is 2 days’ suspended sentence ?!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!   What an insult !”

• ile de Re, near Ste Maire

The Ile de Re

We went off to the Ile de Re camping that week-end.  We lay on the beach with the children, and we splashed in the cold Atlantic waters.  We tried to wash it all away in the sea and bask it all away in the sun.  In the evenings we almost always ate out, overlooking the little port at St Martin or the little place at Ste Marie.  We cycled for miles and miles, along the pistes cyclistes that wound past the beaches, through the marais and in and out of the villages.  Miles of cycling.   I needed to work it out of me somehow; I was furious, relieved, stunned, weepy ….I saw a young man bareback on a huge shire horse.  I saw fishing boats pulling lobsters in.  I saw my children play on the sand.   I watched the sun drop over the horizon to the places where I was born and had lived. I listened to the waves splashing on the beach all night.

I felt it was time to move on.

Part 7 

Part 9

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

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Guest Blogger= Karen Laurence-Rowe, Wildlife Artist

“Harmattan King”  …. against the wind – like so much of our wildlife!

With the steady destruction of the worlds wildlife species I think the depiction of these wonderful beasts has almost become a personal obligation!   How tragic is it going to be, when one day, one of my grandchildren looks at a painting I have done of an elephant or an African lion and says to me “Granny – whats that?”    With the danger of this being so very real,  I now no longer sit in my studio daubing with complacency… I complete every painting almost as a matter of urgency!

I need to record it – before it is lost to this world forever!

- See more at: http://www.turquoisemoon.co.uk/blog/guest-blogger-karen-laurence-rowe-wildlife-artist/#sthash.IaHzisyD.dpuf

Snippets of French History: Leonardo Da Vinci

It would be crazy for me to attempt an item on Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), an Italian who spent most of his life in Italy.  However, he lived the last three years of his life in France, and died in his French Chateau de Clos-Luce, near Amboise in the Loire Valley.

For this blog in full and more please see http://www.turquoisemoon.co.uk/blog/snippets-of-french-history-leonardo-da-vinci/