Deep France Page 17

  ‘You don’t actually know what she said,’ I pointed out to Annabel. ‘It might not be true. Why don’t you just ring up the Chairman of the Socialist Party and ask him what happened?’ She squeaked in sheer distress.

  Annabel was also afraid that if Gracienne, the club presi­dent, got embroiled in the drama, she too might resign. Annabel would then be under pressure to take the role of president. The position carried responsibilities. There are rules governing clubs and societies in France, even one whose members’ main activity is sitting in a cafe having coffee and practising their languages every Tuesday.

  The original purpose of these regulations is to stamp out political corruption at the grass roots, an objective which many critics would argue has been pursued with tragic naivety. Nevertheless, associations as blameless as the Guild of Painters or the yoga class in Salies, the hunting clubs or the concert society run by Babi and Thierry must be properly constituted and must also produce, for public scrutiny, financial accounts and a record of their activities. Gracienne had a difficult task in explaining these imperatives to her multinational membership and her only reward was the distinction of being able to attend the annual national conference of international club presidents.

  Being a part-time antiques dealer, Gracienne also had the expertise and contacts to put on a rare-book fair at the end of the month, and a vide grenier in the salle multiactivités in Orriule was planned for September. If she resigned, these plans would collapse, and the club’s only project would be a bring and buy plant sale, called a Plant Stock Exchange, in a couple of weeks. I could appreciate Annabel’s anxieties.

  She succeeded in stonewalling until election day, when the Gascons went to the polls in indignant numbers. In some areas the turnout recorded was five times as high as in the first round of voting. The same spirit was abroad all over the country. Le Pen was routed, France was stuck with Chirac for another five years, everyone heaved a sigh of relief and went back to the real business of May, which is enjoying it.

  Great Myths About The French, No. 1: They’re Lazy

  May is the month that gets the French a bad name. Most years, the rot sets in at Easter, which is followed by Ascen­sion, then Pentecost. All of these are major religious festi­vals, rating at least a long weekend if not a full week of holiday, and before God gets his due respect, the state claims its own share of time off with the May Day bank holiday.

  One way or another, almost the whole month disappears in celebrations. Everyone is so used to this that the banks don’t bother putting up formal notices of the bank holiday opening hours, they just shut their doors and assume everyone can work out when they are going to re-open.

  If they get a lot of public holidays on top of the legally enforceable thirty-five-hour working week which had just been introduced, that is not to say that the French are taking it easy. This is the mistake the departing American Ambassador had made earlier in the year, when he said goodbye with an objectionable tirade, telling the French to pull their socks up. And the Americans wonder why everybody hates them.

  Those actually entitled to the thirty-five-hour week, like the post lady or the bank manager, claimed it most apologetically, because the other half of the community was self-employed and, in France as in Britain, had their boss’s permission to work an eighteen-hour day. My neighbour, M. Lavie, was always out before eight every morning and, at busy times, worked far into the night with a searchlight on his tractor. The only day he took off all year was 15 August, the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

  On working days, the French take their famous lunch hour, but it’s a strict 12 to 2, or 12.30 to 2.30, and then it’s back to work. One glass of wine is allowed. The doctor worked until 9 p.m., four days a week, and all day Saturday. And a lot of French people have two jobs. Around Orriule, people could be shopkeepers and poets, farmers and DJs, farmers and office workers, caterers and maintenance men.

  French women, married or single, have three jobs, since they also have all the family organization to do, including servicing relationships with distant family members and giving a helping hand to relatives who are frail or sick. Not to mention the shopping and cooking. The ready-meals which take up half the average London supermarket get no sale in France. Only a stressed urban Frenchwoman would feel justified in using them and besides, they’re mostly uneatable.

  French people work very, very hard at keeping their families together. Almost all their spare time is spent with families, and even in Paris many people never have dinner parties except with their cousins. No teenager or older relative, for example, is expected to go to see the doctor or dentist alone. When I found myself spending a lot of time in the orthopaedic clinic in St-Palais, it was noticeable that every elderly woman with a broken wrist was accompanied by a prosperous-looking son of forty something, who had taken the afternoon off for the purpose.

  The French also work hard at enjoying themselves, and a lot of the pleasures which at first glance seem to be selfish also benefit their families or communities. Thus the hunters, the anglers and even the ramblers keep the ecosystem in balance, earn some extra money and bring home some treats – like venison, trout or mushrooms.

  Volunteer work was an industry in itself. In the school holidays, the mature skiers and surfers were called in to take parties of school children to the beach or the mountains. IT experts gave computing lessons and native speakers taught Spanish or English. Anyone with an HGV licence would be called upon to drive a senior citizens’ coach party off on a gastronomic day-trip to Spain.

  Four More Great Myths About the French

  1) The French have exquisite taste. With all those begonia-encrusted roundabouts garnished with bad sculpture? Icky postcards of cute kittens? Painted wirework loo-roll holders wreathed with ivy? Sub-Corbusier vertical slums? Vomit-yellow Provengal-print tablecloths?

  2) The French are terribly emotional. No, they’re extremely repressed. This I fully understood only when I saw those among my neighbours whose views were irreconcilable conducting their unspoken vendettas with perfect politeness and expressionless faces. In French society, anything likely to provoke social discord – gossip, a strong opinion, a con­tentious subject – is immediately stifled. One of my friends, teaching at a French secondary school, was disciplined for allowing the debating society to tackle social issues; like Eliza Doolittle at Ascot, she was advised to stick to the weather and everybody’s health.

  3) French women are elegant. Not a certain sector of the clientele in Leclerc in Orthez, believe me. French women are as capable as any other possessor of two X chromosomes of pouring their backsides into polyester slacks and going out with five centimetres of regrowth on a really bad tint job. The elegance some of them seem to have is really conformity. They prefer uniforms to fashion – the silk scarf with everything, the sailor stripes for the beach.

  4) The French love food. What they really love is things being the way they always were. From a British viewpoint, that certainly means enjoying fresh, flavoursome, well-cooked food instead of something industrially grown, pre-cooked badly, chilled for two weeks, tarted up with E numbers and sold in a packet with a big coloured picture of how the dish is supposed to look. But the French do not love any food which is not their own, meaning not of their region, let alone not of their country. Persuading a provincial French family to swap green beans for Brussels sprouts is almost impossible.

  Party Time

  In a country region, all the traditional enjoyments are labour-intensive. The life of the community is hugely energetic. Suddenly in May every town and village was advertising something – a concert, a vide grenier, a flower show, a cycle race, a bal des jeunes, a soirée dansante. Suddenly the sober people who seemed to have been in bed and asleep by nine every night were out dancing until dawn. When the big barn at the top of the hill was used for a disco, Gloria Gaynor was belting out over the valleys all night.

  Even the Centre Socio-Culturel in Orthez decided to end the adult-education seaso
n with a party. Celebrations were planned for the institution’s twentieth birthday, including a jumble sale, a Caribbean buffet and a concert salsa. The three-day event kicked off with a debate, ‘To be a parent today – how do you help your child to grow up?’, mediated by a local psychologist.

  Renée and Dominique anxiously asked us to bring in our photos and our national flags for the anniversary fête. I found a good picture of our Valentine’s Day lunch at the Vietnamese restaurant owned by the family of one of our members, at which both classes had squeezed around the long table under the pink lanterns. It seemed to hit the right multicultural note; there was, I detected, a certain nervousness in the Centre about how the work of teaching foreigners French would be perceived. It was as if, all the rest of the year, Renée and Dominique had chosen not to draw attention to this subversive activity, and were now worried that the wider community would disapprove.

  The riches of the region included so many live bands that there seemed to be one in every village, and all the summer meant was a constant cultural exchange between the valleys. Their names were inexplicable – Capibara, 3,14, The Wilde Country (American country and western), Confit’Danse and Dingle Bay (both with Irish leanings), Box’son, Papar’oc, Aistrika, Tabasco, Parpalhon, Blue Ridge, Ibiliz – the only name that made sense was a very popular combo called Cows. They pronounced it ‘Coos’. No words were more evocative of that summer than the names of these bands, printed on the smudgy little posters that appeared on every municipal notice board.

  Veni, Vidi, Vide Grenier

  After I met Andrew, a great hole in my life was filled. A hole about the shape of a gay friend who is madly witty, brilliantly astute, curious about everything, willing to stop for lunch, who used to be an antique dealer and had a large empty house to furnish.

  Andrew and Geoff threw themselves into their new life with an enthusiasm that was like a hurricane of fresh air after the winter-weary apathy of some expats. At Masounabe, the long shelf of HP sauce bottles, almost the only thing they had brought out from London, stayed untouched as Geoff experimented with local produce. Everything was new, fresh and exciting to them. They even believed the long-standing rumour that an Irish bar was going to open in Saliès.

  As soon as I introduced them, Annie and Geoff bonded inseparably, on the grounds that neither of them liked speaking French and both of them smoked, that Annie couldn’t drive and Geoff could. When, to general amazement, McGuire’s Irish Pub (proprietor, M. Tom McGuire) did indeed open and started serving Béarnish ales along with the traditional pression, it also became clear that Annie could drink so much that Geoff felt virtuous drinking half as much, and the two of them could happily spend all evening perched on bar stools.

  This left Andrew and me free to get on with having fun, as we defined it. Andrew hated driving, and I didn’t mind it. Andrew was learning French as fast as he could, but I spoke it better. I didn’t know much about antiques, but Andrew did. We agreed about almost everything else, so there was nothing for it but to do the vide grenier season big-time.

  Andrew and Geoff had built up a flourishing photographic studio in the most fashionable part of the East End. Their only problem was that they hated living in London. First they lived near King’s Cross – Andrew did a hilarious impression of a prostitute who chose to provide a client with a blow job on their front steps; when they asked her to find another venue, she swore at them without removing her client from her mouth.

  They moved to Marylebone, and came home from lunch one Saturday to find that they had been burgled. The thieves had got in by cutting the front door in half with a chainsaw. So Andrew and Geoff decided to rent out their smart flat, bought a left-hand-drive Range Rover, got Otto, Geoff’s West Highland terrier, a pet passport and set off to drive around the Mediterranean looking for somewhere they could move their business. Not all of it, just the management, some of the big fashion catalogues and any other shoots that needed exotic locations.

  Fortunately for us, they hated the food in Spain, so they drove on to France, felt more cheerful by the time they got to Pau, then fell in love with the Béarn, and with a big farmhouse high on a hillside above the village of Castagnède. Maysounabe (it means New House, a pretty common Béarnais name) was surrounded by huge oak trees. It had gorgeous pargeting under the eaves of its classic Béarnais roof, a garden with borders most lovingly stocked by the previous English owners and a huge barn which was destined to become the studio. Apart from that, it had stupendous views of the Gave valley, an Aga and a bed.

  Since they were intent on a whole new life, they had left their furniture behind in London, which meant that Andrew was licensed to shop. He started out with a glass-fronted mahogany cabinet, smothered in carved flowers and gar­lands, for their kitchen, and said, ‘If you’re going to live in France, you might as well live in a whore’s handbag, eh?’

  One of his favourite hunting-grounds was a huge old garage full of fine furniture and old trunks in St-Palais. The owner, a young Basque who used to be a supermarket manager, was so handsome he got known as Cute Guy, and he had a great eye for an Empire bedstead or a Louis Vuitton Gladstone bag.

  On the way back from Cute Guy was Dog Man, an older and more rotund Basque dealer who had two huge barns full of treasures in the depths of the countryside, found with the help of hand-painted signs promising ‘old furniture’. There we found wonderful old oak coffers carved with Basque designs, and dating from the 1600s or earlier. Which did not mean anyone had thought to brush the dust and chicken feathers off them lately.

  Dog Man’s village had a church with a three-bell cam­panile and an orchard bearing bright red apples and grazed by spotted Black Gascon pigs, a sight so picturesque it could have been straight out of a 1930s nursery-rhyme illustration. Dog Man got his name from his magnificent one-year-old pure-white Pyrénéen mountain dog, a breed originally favoured by the shepherds. ‘Nice dog,’ we said, sincerely. ‘Il est-beau ou quoi?’ Dog Man replied with pride. He’s good-looking or what?

  We got on the motorway and scoured the trocantes. The word is probably a mixture of true, meaning trick or deal, and brocante. Pau and Bayonne each have several on their outskirts. Anyone who wants to sell something brings it to the troc owner, who puts a price on it and displays it in his showroom, taking an agreed percentage of whatever it fetches. Trocs sell anything from an old lawnmower to the irresistible black oak cupboard carved with scallop shells and marigolds which is now in Chloe’s bedroom in London.

  We discovered that, like Ahetze, many villages and towns had regular flea markets. Helpfully, all of these, from the epic to the humble, from Bordeaux to Toulouse, plus the big-city auction sales, the huge seasonal antiques fairs and special events in the decorative arts, were listed in a wonderfully enthusiastic monthly newspaper, the Gazette des Ventes. Since even Ahetze can suddenly decide to cancel itself at times of year when stock is low or buyers sparse, the Gazette was added to my essential reading. Our vocabulary began to grow exponentially: enchères, auction; particulier, a private seller; pomme de pin, literally a pine cone but also a bed-knob.

  On Sundays, there was usually a vide grenier, one up from a car-boot sale. Vide grenier means ‘empty the attic’. They took place in sports halls and salles midtiactivités, organized by the local ACCA or the fire brigade or the village school. The advertising wasn’t sophisticated – somebody with a computer printed up a few posters which were stapled to telegraph poles near the main road junctions. A few local brocante dealers usually took part, but most of the sellers were ordinary people trading in their children’s in-line skates and Barbie dolls.

  One Sunday, we drove for an hour into the dreamy Chalosse, which was now a shimmering ocean of buttercups. We decided that being there must be like dropping some heavy-duty Sixties narcotic like a Quaalude. Neither of us had ever done this, but in this undulating landscape, where everything is slow, sunny and blissful and time seems to disappear, your mind definitely feels altered.

  Our destination was a v
ide grenier in the hall of a tiny village. It had a surprisingly large range of stalls; as well as the local people, there were Africans with leather bags and Bob Marley banners, a Basque cheese vendor and plenty of specialists in agricultural antiques and café ware, which meant Ricard water jugs, St-Raphael ice buckets, Cinzano ash trays.

  The next Sunday it was the turn of another Chalossois village, Mouscardes, which has what must be the smallest bullring in France. It would fit into the miniature arena in the Spanish village of Mijas about four times. The bullring in Mouscardes, however, is intended for the cruelty-free local sport, the Course Landaise, in which there is no matador, only écarteurs, and the sauteurs, who jumps over the horns of the charging animal, like the bull-dancers painted on ancient Cretan vases. Some of the Gascons also enjoy Spanish bullfighting. The best matadors and bulls come up for the big ferias in Bayonne and Dax every year, and the fans go down to San Sebastian or Pamplona, but it’s an urban, cosmopolitan thing, whereas the Course Landaise is a central part of the village heritage.

  After Mouscardes there were a couple of vide greniers in ugly villages along on the RN117, then a small one in a tiny Basque hamlet in a green valley near Aramits, then the first of the really big sales in Pomarez, yet another Chalossois venue, and the centre of Course Landaise culture where the sport’s annual festival takes place in July.

  The stalls were spread out on the sand of the arena itself, and the tarmac of the car park and the linoleum of the sports hall. Many dealers came, with many treasures, over which we lingered a long time, restoring our energies with trips to the buffet for an Armagnac crêpe or a slug of thick black coffee.