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 12

 Jake and George on the beach at Marennes

We got a dog.

Well, you do, don’t you ?  When you need to set up a new business and you’ve got three children, no income of any note and a huge house to restore, you do tend to get a dog, n’est-ce pas?  All the best people do it.

George was never really a puppy.  We bought him as a puppy, sure, but he was really more like a black blob with four huge paws.  Great Danes, we were told, usually live till they are seven or eight, but George lived till he was almost twelve.  He died while with us  in Istanbul … and that is a different story.

Walking the dog

George brought in to our lives a whole different element.  We started walking instead of cycling.  We found ourselves talking about the dog – discussing his food, his bed, his exercise.  Bruce had never had a dog before but I had had three rescue dogs when I lived in Spain even though I am not a particularly doggie person.  He was great with the children, and they were great with him, lovingly dishing up his food and fondling his huge floppy ears (at this time the French were still docking the ears of Great Danes, something which has since been banned thank goodness) and stroking and brushing him.  For some inexplicable reason taking George for a good walk was not on the agenda of any of the children – that was somehow our job.  He was extremely obedient once he got over the silly-doggie teenage days and in all those years we never had to keep him on a lead or tie him; when we told him to keep to heel, he did, and when we told him to stay and guard, he did.  No questions asked.  He would even bark to order and could look quite frightening.

Jake and George.  He was an intensely soppy dog and brilliant with the children.  He was quite posessive of us as a family and, although we never witnessed even the slightest hint of aggressive behaviour, we would not have liked anybody to have put him to the test.  Great Danes are big animals, and George was BIG.

A huge house

Asked what our aim was in buying a restoring a huge place like Les Cypres, we would have had no answer.  It wasn’t that we had visions of being chatelains and living the chateau life (whatever that is!), and nor was it some idea that we needed a bigger and better house than most.  It had been for sale for something like twenty years and no sensible person would touch it.  In all those years it had stood like a great ghostly blackened hulk at the edge of the village, slowly and inexorably deteriorating a little more each year.  And as its condition worsened, so the giant cobwebs, pigeon droppings, woodworm and dust grew.

But for us there has always been – even now – something about these magnificent old places that was just … addictive.  We were (and are) both very good at seeing through the mess, picturing what can be done, and getting on with it.  We were both also very good at doing things on a shoestring, using up old stuff to make new, and sourcing interesting and inexpensive things from bath tubs to curtains, from roof slates to plaster board, furniture and gravel for the drive and power tools and light switches …

 

This is now the utility room at Les Cypres.  That little table … the children used to do their homework there and it has had many a layer of poster paints and Christmas card glitter scrubbed off it.  The entire ground floor of Les Cypres has these quarry tiled floors, and some sections in the hall pre-date the existing house which stands on the site of an older property burnt to the ground during the French Revolution.  As these old places have no damp-course, restoring the floor was a major problem.  We had neither the time nor the money – not to mention the energy! – to dig up the floor and start again, but after many trials and errors we discovered that boot polish is the best way to get a shine on the tiles.  It was a hands-and-knees job that kept me fit for many years, though nowadays I have a couple of cleaners in.

To take on a project like this you really do have to be able to turn your hand to anything, seriously anything.  It is no good being able to do parts of the work – the wiring, for example – you need, between you, to be able to do it all.  And you have to be able to “see it” even when things are at their worst.  There were plenty of times we ran out of money and nothing got done, likewise plenty of times we just collapsed in front of the TV in a state of exhaustion after a day at work, unable to lift the smallest hammer or paint brush.

Despite the vision and enthusiasm I shared with Bruce for a lovely house to be really proud of, and despite our joint burning need to see an end to the sad state it was in and had been in for many years, I nonetheless remained homesick.  Had a magic fairy appeared and waved a wand, I’d have opted to go home, no two ways about it.

I have frequently tried to analyse it.  I had already lived abroad a great deal and had worked abroad for four years.  I was made of tough stuff, I was adaptable, tri-lingual, competent, self-assured  … yet felt a homesickness that was sometimes overwhelming.  I think it was a combination of the circumstances under which we lost our home in Sussex, and the nightmare of the Gestapo incident, the house tax episode and the Carte Professionelle fiasco.  Almost as those things had soured France for me for ever.

We knew a lot of people

We still had no friends.  Goodness, we knew plenty of people, but there was no other woman around I could pop in on for a chat, or go shopping with, or compare notes about the children, the school, our husbands, and the general ups and downs of life.  I remained feeling very isolated.  As soon as the house was half-way decent, we invited local people in – the village doctors, the notaires, the farmer across the road.  But nobody invited us back. Not even once.  As time went by we discovered that the Parisian French are vastly more sociable and open-minded, and French friends we have these days are without exception ex-Parisians or French people who have lived and worked abroad.

  In the kitchen with friends, all French.  That’s me on the left with a red belt.  Building debris all around us!  Several years later that fireplace suddenly collapsed, narrowly missing my cleaning lady who would probably have been badly hurt.

Essential building work

That first winter we dealt with the absolute essentials: the worst of the roof repairs, and hardboard over the perished timber floors.  We also got the central heating going, hot water and a bath tub, one toilet and installed the essentials like washing machine and drier.  Apart from that we cleared and cleaned, then cleared and cleaned again.  There was a huge amount stuff left behind, much of it nice old furniture, but most of it empty bottles, old mattresses and pillows, broken pots and about forty broken chairs.  There were pigeons residing in a room on the top floor and huge quantities of little pots, some of which I kept, which all smelt of strong ointments of some kind.  There were old trunks, some in relatively good condition (use gloss varnish on perished old leather – that works fine), which themselves contained miles of old tablecloths and aprons, pictures, sepia photographs and momentos, old shoes and even silver candlesticks.  In many regards it was great fun, despite everything being dusty, dirty, motheaten and covered in pigeon droppings.  Much of this stuff was carted off in to the numerous barns that were part of the property – they later made 8 houses, to give you an idea of the size of them.  They were largely derelict, but where the roof was intact we stored all sorts of thing from the house; some of it worsened and got thrown away, some of it we sold and some we restored and put back in the house.

The entire house needed to be re-wired.  The chart on the wall next to the meters show which switches apply to which rooms.  It was quite a feat that Bruce dealt with in under a fortnight.

For me it has always been of prime importance to get the place clean and tolerably tidy, even if everything not only needs decorating, but floors have got to come up or walls be knocked down.  Regardless of anything I absolutely must hang my plates and pictures on the walls (unless decorating is imminent of course), place my furniture and books about and get an overall sense of “home”.  An undecorated room could remain like that for 6 months or a year while we dealt with more pressing repairs and maintenance, and in the meantime I felt I may as well enjoy my stuff.  Seeing my old granny’s plate up on the wall, my encyclopedias on their shelves and my father’s paintings of South Africa over the fireplaces, made me feel some level of familiarity with my surroundings, and quite possibly even spurred me on to get things done.

You just make do

The children’s rooms, up on the top floor, were in the worst condition, but for a year or so it was a giant “dormitory”-cum-play area for them, and they really enjoyed that.  Not needing to worry about the state of the flooring or the walls, they let rip and ran riot up there, doing what they wanted – within reason – till their rooms were decorated at last.

 The living room with bare plasterboard/breeze block on the walls, and chipboard on the floor that was so ingrained with dust it went white; no curtains, no lampshades and there were doubtless sacks of cement and tools just out of sight, but all my bits and bobs are out.  That was important to me.  We seem to be watching something – its not the TV which was in the corner behind.  Me sitting between my mother-in-law and Bruce, Pippa and William in the foreground.  I expect Jake, who was about six, took the picture.

In the meantime, of course, Bruce still had his building business and the clients had not dried up at all even though I no longer sold the houses. He had masses of work and the usual stresses of running your own business, building sites, workers who don’t turn up, clients who don’t pay, dealing with attitude from the men/the clients/the suppliers, scrabbling around to find the wages each week, fixing the truck, fixing the digger, bills that cost more than the estimated … and his Meniere’s attacks.

We needed to find another way to make some money.

Part 13 to follow.

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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”

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

It happened like this...an English family moves to France. Part 11

Bruce bleaching the exterior of the house.  Industrial bleach is vicious stuff and you can burn yourself quite badly.  At the top of the photo you can see where the bleach has worked, and it was such a transformation.  From grotty dirty grey to a lovely off-white.  The surface area of the outside walls is about 6000 sq feet, so it was quite a job.  And before the bleaching started there was a lot of sanding of the stonework because of crusted dirt, old bits of pipes and wires and ariels, repairing bits of broken stone … it took at least a month. We had an Englishman called Kevin helping. He was a funny bloke, Kevin.  He badly needed work and we tried to give him some, but he was really pretty hopeless.  We found him lying down to do the weeding, slowly picking bits of grass out of a flower-bed.  He couldn’t understand it when we fired him.  Those shutters have been re-painted three or four times now, and we have found that “satin” paint works best.  Gloss tends to peel or crack in the sun (the south side of the house gets very hot) whereas satin paint holds its own.  The shutters are now fixed in the open position.  They were so frequently left banging around in the wind and, being English, we use curtains anyway.  So they got screwed back and are simply decorative.  Actually one of the things that makes French villages so dull is all the closed shuttered windows that line the streets; it give everything a blank look. 

A huge pile of rubble in he entrance hall!  The fathers of the previous owners, two brothers, had split the house in to two, making a pair of semis.  There was a thin brick wall dividing the house across the hall (hence the rubble which was removed, one barrow load after another, by our daughter was by now aged 14 or so).  There was also a 1920s staircase which, in London, would have fetched a good price – but here in France, at that time, it was worthless.  We used the staircase in another building a year or two later. The door way to the right had been closed-off, making a cupboard in the other side, the other side being the dining room.  An old mattress, one of several left in the house, propped against the far wall, waiting for A Strong Man (ie Bruce) to take it out to the skip. 

• This is the living room.  In fact it had been split up in to three small rooms, presumeably for economy of heat during the winter.  The partitions were easy to remove, but the floor underneath was badly damaged – a mixture of woodworm, damp and age.  At first the room was very dark because of a huge tree growing just outisde, which – sad though it was – we removed.  Somebody had painted the stone fireplace a brownish yellow and, just below the surface of the paint we could pick out an old fleur-de-lys, which I have since managed to paint back in.  We covered the floor in hardboard, having neither the time nor the money for a damp course.

You cannot be a perfectionist

That is something of utmost importance when you take on a huge project as this was, particularly when you have a tiny budget as we did: do not fuss too much where fuss isn’t really needed.  You cannot be a perfectionist at times like this, otherwise you will never get the job done.  We know a man who spent four years trying to install his central heating; he was so careful about everything, so precise … he never got the job finished and in the end they called a plumber in, which they might as well have done in the beginning.

And it also depends on your version of doing something “properly”.  Some French friends bought a pretty house in nearby Fouras – that 1900s seaside architecture I love – though just a small (sensible!) house.  With great pride they told us they had done everything “properly”, even though it had taken them years.  But I look around their house (which I like) and wonder where the “properly” bit is … Many would disagree with me of course.  We all have different ways of doing things.  Furthermore a house like ours had plenty of lumps and bumps in it just because of its age and its style.  That suited me just fine.

You have to be decisive

You also have to be decisive.  Some dear friends of ours went through agonies while trying to decide the colour of their kitchen work surface.  We decide that kind of thing within a few minutes.  You have to know what you are about, you have to have a good eye for what you are doing, you have to be decisive.  And there is no point in regretting a decision.  If Bruce came to consult me every time he put up a radiator  or a balustrade, and I had been fussed as to whether it went here or there, the entire project would have gone on and on.  Likewise I never consulted him about the colour of the paint or the curtains, or where I hung a picture.  We trusted each other’s decisions implicitly.  That is essential.

There are quite a few things that have not got that professional finished touch but it doesn’t matter to us.  The house is nonetheless great, most people love it, and those who don’t – well, that’s fine, they don’t have to.

This is now the library.  It is too big to call it a landing (the picture shows about a third of the room).  The hole in the floor was where the 1920s staircase was.  We diverged from the original architect’s plans and created a mezzanine/atrium in that void, otherwise it made the hallway below terribly dark.  The cast iron uprights that now serve as a balustrade all the way round are a mixture of antique stair rails we had found in the loft of House Number One and Bruce’s expertise with working iron in to something that looks ancient even if it is not.   The door leads on to a balcony – you can see where the ceiling had fallen away above it.  On the right there is an alcove in which stands an old statue of Mary, mother of Jesus.  We read in the archives that a previous owner had declared the statue was to be left there forever, or be buried with her.  So we have left it there to be on the safe side!  The door to the left led through to what became our bedroom and bathroom.

It sounds old-fashioned, but we quickly learnt to divide our labour in to boys’ jobs and girls’ jobs.  When a man is working hard, as Bruce was, it is essential to him to know that there is a hearty meal waiting for him when he stops, a couple of cold beers, a comfortable bed to collapse in to, clean dust-free clothes to put on. That was my department.  He did the Big Heavy jobs that I didn’t know how to do – and didn’t want to know.  I did the more feminine jobs like painting and decorating and making endless curtains – most of those windows are almost three metres high, floor to curtain rail.  To this day we divide our labour accordingly and, without having to consult each other, we each deal with different things.

That is another thing that is important when taking on a task like this.  You have to understand each other and neither party should tell the other what to do.  If you need to be told what to do, you shouldn’t start on the project.  You have to be able to see it for yourself and make your own decisions.  You have to be able to just get on with it, whatever which way you can; and if you can’t do it you need to know how to side-step it – if only for today.

Sometimes things were overwhelming.

Truly overwhelming, especially when there was nowhere to put anything.   Everything was heaped in to two huge rooms, except for the larger pieces of furniture which went straight in to the room they were – theortetically – destined for.  I am a very tidy person, and all the boxes were labelled, and I just went back and forth, back and forth, carrying things to different rooms regardless of whether or not they could be unpacked – which they invariably couldn’t.  This involved negotiating my way over planks, especially on the top floor where the children’s rooms were to be created, because the old floor was badly perished and unsafe to walk on.  The disadvantage to doing this was that, when there was a lot of work going on, in the case of the children’s bedrooms walls and floors needed to be repaired, replaced or created from scratch, the boxes get in the way.  But a judgement has to be made one way or another, especially when one needs access to the contents of the boxes.  You just have to work round it somehow.   I went up and down those stair cases and in and out of all those rooms all day long for four days; when I felt there was some semblance of order, and when I knew where everything was, I was satisfied.  If one of the childrenn asked for cellotape, or scissors or a dictionary, in that huge house and with all that mess, I knew exactly where to locate it.

The children

The children were amazing.  William in particular learnt a lot of DIY skills and today, like his dad, he is way above-average … though equally untidy, if such a thing were possible.

The children joined in all this upheaval.  When I look back on it I realize we laughed a lot.  We had our own silly language and our own funny little routines.  Routine is important to children and despite all the big changes (a new school for a start) we kept all the rituals and routines that made up the heart and soul of the family… each child choosing in turn what we would eat, for example, bed time stories, Sunday cycle rides and so on.

I was probably somewhat strict – there was “grown ups time”, when they were packed off to bed and they understood from a very early age that children’s time now happened in bed and it was grown-ups time downstairs.  I was also strict about toys – toys remained in the children’s areas, though there were also outdoor toys and, later, pool toys.  We never ever had toys all over the house and I cannot understand people who do.  Come to think of it, there were “kitchen” toys, ie paints and felt tip pens, which were used in the kitchen only.

Men and mess

I drew the line at tools.  We all know that men carry tools around with them and put them down “somewhere – I -had-it-in-my-hand-I-know-I-did”.  Tools were not my domain, though I did announce at odd intervals (and the announcement was either not heard or forgotten within seconds)  ”I will put any tools lying around in my way by the hall door”.

Something I learnt on the very first day of our marriage (almost) is that when Bruce says “it won’t make much mess” – ignore that completely.  It will make a terrible mess.  Does this apply to all men or is it just my man ?  Cover everything or it will soon be smothered in brick dust, stone dust, sawdust, and every other kind of dust and everything in-between too.

Another old photo of the house, circa 1880, judging by the clothes.  Mark you this part of France remained extremely backward till the 1990s, so the photo may well have been taken later, though I cannot imagine it was after, say, 1918.  Once I had time on my hands I was able to wade through a lot of these old photos and identify, using church and town hall records, the people therein.  The family immediately before us had nothing of any interest to relate, but a few generations back there was a lot of interesting stuff, much of which is on display in the property today.

Despite feeling overwhelmed from time to time it never occured to me – or to Bruce – that we couldn’t do it.  I don’t think this was because we were overly self-confident, but we were self-confident, very energetic, very speedy, very imaginative.  The only way forwards is precisely that – forwards.  You put one foot in front of the other, even if there is no money to do it.  You just find a way.  Round it, or over it, or under it … whatever it is.  I have never looked back and thought “we were crazy!” in a regretful or negative way.

when you work hard it is crucial that you play hard (me in the multi-coloured outfit).  The elder two children already taller than I am.  Jake was on skis by the time he was four and, some years later, so were our grandbabies. 

  A section of the entrance hall today

Part 12 to follow.

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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 from this site.

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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.

- See more at: http://www.turquoisemoon.co.uk/blog/it-happened-like-this-an-english-family-move-to-france-part-10/#sthash.eXFgqO1F.dpuf