C'est Modnifique!: Adventures of an English Grump in Rural France, page 10
'Er, Monsieur...' Natalie began, going after him.
'For insurance purposes,' he explained, 'two goats count as one beast.'
'Is that because they're pygmy?' I asked, though he ignored me. 'What if we only had one goat?' I persisted, beginning to enjoy myself. 'Would we have to hide it in one of the summer rooms?' The thing about salespeople is that if you can't poke one of them with a stick occasionally then really what is the point? But he just looked at me with an expression that showed his distaste for my office still stuck in his craw.
I'll admit here that I am a terrible salesperson myself. I once had a part-time job as a cold caller on behalf of charities. I was ringing up people who had already given to the charity and asking them to give more, yet after a week I was 'released' as the majority of people I called actually cancelled their regular donation rather than increased the amount. Apparently, my surly approach to winning over hearts and minds was as 'anti-sales' as it gets, though in my defence I did once star in an ITV documentary about just how gullible people are and managed to sell pigeons to some tourists in Trafalgar Square. One man from Devizes actually got quite angry when it was explained to him that it was just a TV stunt, 'But what am I going to get my daughter for her birthday now?!' he pleaded as security stopped him from attacking me.
The mafia insurance man wasn't for poking, though, and pointedly ignored all my questions. 'You wear glasses,' he said, which could have been taken as a threat. 'There's a limit to how many new pairs you can claim for in any one year.' He turned away slowly and went into the workshop/fruit store/cave.
'I don't think he likes me,' I said to Natalie as we followed him in.
His face had brightened as he pointed out the jars of homemade chutney and piccalilli that filled the shelves. I was about to make some quip about whether 'for insurance purposes' chutney would count as two jams or vice versa, but unfortunately my French wasn't quick enough for the job. He was beaming at Natalie though and praising her for her culinary skills, he himself, he said, greatly enjoyed this old-fashioned pastime. Natalie pointed out that they were all my doing; that it was my hobby, how I relaxed. He looked at me and kind of squinted his eyes as I waited for a newfound respect from him. I smiled broadly, which I'm not good at, and so the respect never materialised.
In truth though, stocks were down. Through a combination of violent horse attacks on the trees themselves, terrible spring weather and bees being in such short supply globally these days, we had had precious little fruit at all from the orchard. Oh, we'd had a few medlar fruit, but they are an unappetising prospect at the best of times. The official name for medlar in French is néflier, but the unofficial one is far more evocative, they call it 'the cat's arse'. Accurate, descriptively, though it doesn't necessarily induce confidence in the product – but then, everything about medlar seems to be a bit low rent. They are the last fruit of the year to blossom, and are generally harvested after the first heavy frosts, then left to rot, or blet, before they can be used to their best potential. As with quince, which can't be eaten raw, I don't know how these fruit 'rules' were arrived at, but looking at a sad crate of rotting feline backsides in late November is hardly the stuff of haute cuisine, though they do make a lovely 'jelly' which is just gorgeous with cold turkey at Christmas, or stirred into a gravy with a roast dinner (see full recipe at the back).
I'd normally compensate for a lack of home fruit produce with a bumper crop of autumn/winter squashes, pumpkins and the like, but even they had failed me this time. This had had nothing to do with climate or horse shenanigans, though, and everything to do with the fact that my squash plants were the wrong gender. I realise I have many things to learn about country living, but I wasn't even aware that squash plants had a gender. All my plants it seemed, or at least all the flowers on them are male and while they are thriving, one could even say it's a gay squash Mardi Gras out there, they can't 'produce' together. I presume there are rules about the male squash plants adopting smaller squash fruit and we'll look into it, but why on earth was I sold a full tray of male plants in the first place? Why are they kept apart from their female counterparts? I went to an all boys comprehensive and believe me this kind of forced separation doesn't help development in any way, emotional or otherwise.
I'm quite inordinately proud of my chutney–relish–jelly skills, and seeing as this insurance man was also something of a connoisseur it seemed we'd found some common ground; it may even get us a better deal, I thought, and as I had everything set up in the kitchen ready for a bout of mid-afternoon jelly production it seemed like a good opportunity to show off a bit while he and Natalie discussed things in greater detail at the table in front of me.
What I hadn't considered was just how hot my sterilising jars still were and as I blithely picked one up to fill it I scolded my hand, dropped the jar and squealed loudly in front of the astonished man, dropping to my knees behind the breakfast bar, like Basil Fawlty disappearing behind Fawlty Towers reception. He didn't even mention it. He just looked at me like I was a fruitcake, rolled up his sleeves and produced an enormous file of thick 'advertising products'.
'I take it your husband has life assurance?' he asked Natalie over his glasses. Bloody cheek.
He left with a sizeable chunk of our insurance needs fulfilled and we felt that we had got a good deal on the whole thing too. In hindsight, his timing was poor, because if he'd visited us just a week later he could have easily doubled his health and life assurance premiums and we would probably have bitten his hand off. Because a week later, it felt like we were living in a warzone.
La Déliverance
There are many reasons why we moved to France: financial, health, educational… They all, put together, made it a fairly simple decision when we made it. But also pretty high up on the list was a sense of personal safety and an escape from what we perceived to be, rightly or wrongly, and possibly media-fuelled, an increasingly antisocial society back home. So we hadn't bargained on local hunting parties blasting a hole through that woolly-headed thinking and turning the calm of the Loire Valley into what sounded like a warzone.
Monsieur Girresse, fast becoming the bad cop in our good-cop, bad-cop neighbouring farmers relationship (and the spreader of seditious anti-Romany eating habits rumours), had decided that there was a great deal of money to be made post-harvest, pre-sowing winter time by hiring his land out to shooting parties, and these groups were now descending on us, sometimes twice a week, like sinister stag parties at a paintball course. Girresse owns all the land surrounding ours; our property is boxed in on all sides by his fields, and his family used to own all the land as far as the eye could see. Used to, and the fact that they now don't is a grudge against the world he carries daily.
These shooting parties, to my mind, are an absurd-looking bunch and you can tell the locals from the out-of-town 'tourists' by what they're wearing. The 'guests' wear obviously expensive and pristine 'greens' right out of a catalogue – one can imagine how they stand for hours in front of the mirror fingering their weapons. Some of them, in a nod to health and safety, also wear luminous orange baseball caps, which gives the whole outfit the look of an 'Employee of the Month' in a fast-food restaurant specialising in game. It is, however, a sensible option, as grey, dark, misty days coupled with fellow novice hunters and a wine-heavy lunch could quite easily lead to a mishap.
The locals dress differently: their worn, lived-in hunting gear sitting more comfortably on them as they direct the newcomers and try to maintain some kind of order. I don't have a problem with hunting per se and I understand the argument, put forward by a very good friend of ours, that essentially because most of the animals are swift and canny all the hunters are doing really is hoovering up the weak and the sick. I can see his point, but it's also similar to that of an alcoholic justifying a dependence on vodka because 'some of the bottles are nearing their best before date.' There is, though, no justification for mass shooting parties; they are not picking off the weak and the sick, they are being spoon-fed young game, surreptitiously released that morning by shifty individuals out of the back of a van. I know because I saw it happen. That's not hunting, that's shooting fish in a barrel.
The novices were having a bad day and you could hear them being shouted at to 'stay in line', 'raise the gun', 'take it out of your mouth' (I may have made that one up). It was more like an Afghani wedding where the males shoot their rifles skywards in celebration than an organised hunt; as crazed, excitable zealots fired pointlessly and relentlessly into the air. But they were close, too, just yards from the end of the garden and it was increasingly uncomfortable being outside, even Thérence was moved to shout 'bloody gits' at them from the relative safety of the terrasse.
I returned from some errand or other to find the hunters gathered in my driveway, looking more like a Barbour-clad lynch mob than the hunter–gatherers their delusion led them to believe they were. I was approached by the farmer's son, François. In his get up and with his greying beard he looked like a hirsute Elmer Fudd and it was difficult to stop myself laughing at him, but he had a nervous, matey look about him.
'Bonjour!' he began, warmly, although we had barely spoken previously since we'd moved here. 'Ça va?' I knew something was wrong not just by his chumminess, but by the nervous shuffling about in the background of his colleagues. 'Anyway,' François continued, 'er, we shot down a partridge and it landed in your garden but hey, you can keep it.'
It was a clumsy attempt at a bribe. They had been firing too close to the house, illegally so, and had obviously even shot over the garden while Natalie and the boys were outside and so one of their victims had landed on our property. By offering me the partridge he was tacitly admitting that there had been a serious breach of the rules. I picked up the pathetic bird from the paddock, narrowly avoiding being run over by Ultime who was clearly in distress with all the gunfire. The bird was tiny, one of the new, specially-bred-for-hunting partridges that I'd seen being released that morning.
'I've phoned the police,' Natalie said, 'I've had enough of this.'
According to the gendarmes, the hunters are not allowed to shoot within 150 metres of a property, making this and almost every other hunt here illegal. They certainly are not allowed to shoot in the direction of a house. The gendarmes promised to come by, though the hunters were already, and rather hurriedly, clambering into the back of a van and leaving the scene. The advice of the police was to talk to Girresse and sort this out amicably.
'Do you get on with your neighbours?' the policeman asked Natalie over the phone. 'If so, go round and have a chat.'
Now this is either a very sensible suggestion, and the kind of community-based policing that should be lauded, or it's the logic of a lunatic, asking an unarmed woman to go around to confront a man whose gun is still warm. I reckoned on the latter and insisted that Natalie cool down a bit before she went round and offered to show our neighbour how to use a partridge as a suppository.
The next day Natalie bumped into Monsieur Girresse. Now, French farmers have an international reputation for truculence and a fiery temper when confronted by… well, by anything really, but a diminutive woman and a foreign one to boot was never going to be greeted warmly by this Wild West-style patriarch.
Natalie gave him the partridge; the poor animal, as if its life wasn't pointless enough was now being bandied about roughly like an unfavoured old hat. The fact that he took the partridge says much about him, but then he exploded.
'None of what you say happened,' he said. 'I was there.' He wasn't, so this was quite some opening gambit. 'I know all the laws and legislation pertaining to hunting,' he continued. 'I can shoot as close as ten metres from your house as long as I am firing away from it and standing on my land.'
'You couldn't have been firing away from my house,' Natalie said. 'I was standing in my garden underneath the bird when it was shot at!' To which she received a heavily scientific explanation about wind, trajectory and angles, all 'justifying' the fact that the bird, apparently defying all known laws of physics, had landed where it had.
'And anyway, you are saying all of this just to piss me off!' he railed. 'I have tolerated your intrusion for years.' 'Intrusion' seemed a bit of a harsh way to describe the use of the public footpaths, whose existence he resented as they were adjacent to his land, and a failed wild goat chase. 'Well, I've had enough. From now on, if you encroach on my land I will regard it as trespassing,' he said implying a more sinister use of guns. 'Your children especially,' he added menacingly. And with that, he drove off in his aggressive 4x4.
Natalie relayed all this to me later that evening, a sense of disbelief and fear in her voice. We talked about it, argued about it, but whichever way we looked at it, it was about as unveiled a threat as it's possible to make. And about our children, the boys! Was he really threatening to shoot the boys?
Half an hour later, and in the pitch black of a cold autumn night, I was hot-headedly storming down the road to the farmer's house…
Now, admittedly, I can be fairly volatile. I have a very short fuse these days and often completely overreact to things, though ironically not when I'm on stage, where over the years I have taught myself to stay calm. That was out of necessity, though; very early on in my career a big agency came to see me perform with a view to taking me up to the Edinburgh Festival. They didn't take me in the end, clearly feeling that my assaulting a front-row heckler by smashing the microphone over his head showed a certain 'inexperience' and I was told to go away and work on my 'anger issues'.
Over the previous hour and a half Natalie and I had talked about the apparent 'threat' made to our children by Girresse. It really did seem quite explicit, that should any of the boys stray on to his land they would be in danger and, seeing as our property is hemmed in on all sides by his land, this was a very frightening turn of events. I had initially tried to calm Natalie down, tried to play it with a cooler head but that didn't last and it wasn't long before we were turning on each other. We felt numb and also a bit impotent; what exactly could we do about this? That's when I decided to confront the man, walk the hundred metres or so in the dark to his property and find out exactly what the hell he meant.
'Take one of the boys with you,' Natalie shouted from the top of the stairs and I assumed she meant to act as translator rather than as a human shield, but that didn't feel right at all.
'No,' I said giving it the full John Wayne, 'I'm going alone.' The image of the doomed hero was given greater emphasis by Maurice who, as I put my jacket on, started to cry uncontrollably.
'He might shoot you!' he shouted through his sobs.
'No he won't, son,' I said with a confidence I didn't actually feel.
So I left with a level of anger even I rarely have, determined to sort this business out one way or another or, and this wasn't to doubt Natalie in any way, to have the threat repeated to my face and deal with it then. But as I stomped along something changed, my pace slowed and it dawned on me that I didn't know what the hell I was going to say! I've performed material on stage about how inadequate language textbooks, listening tapes and role-playing courses actually are for real-life situations, but really there is nothing in a Tricolore school textbook for this, no vocabulary table for 'Threats against children by local farmer', so I began to dawdle as I started to translate everything in my head and look for pointers in the dubbed films that I was now trying to learn from. For language purposes the English of what I was going to say changed to suit my more limited French and as it did so, as I went through the mechanics of translation, I started to calm down. The red mist began to evaporate and I regained my 'cool'. I knew what I wanted to say now and it wouldn't be inflammatory, nor would it be obsequious; it would be what my French language skills would allow me – that is curt, to the point, polite definitely, but not cowed.
The farm was pitch black when I arrived, but as I approached the house itself a security light came on revealing two guard dogs chained up by the garage. They stood up together, in total synchronicity, but didn't bark. Perhaps they recognised my smell, although the only smell I could possibly have been giving off at that point was a strong whiff of eau de bricking it, but either way they remained silent yet watchful. I rang the doorbell and Madame Girresse answered.
I asked politely if I could speak to her husband and she looked at me in some surprise – this was possibly the third or fourth time I had spoken to her since we had moved here seven years ago. Obviously they see and speak to Natalie far more, but I've found it easier to pretend to be a mute with occasional lapses of sound, though this has nothing to do with language, I was the same with neighbours when we lived in England. Monsieur wasn't in, she said, and she didn't know when he would be back. I'll admit that my disappointment was mixed with a fair amount of relief, but I'd come this far…
Had she heard what had happened earlier? I asked, to which she unconvincingly said that she had not. I redundantly explained to her what had happened and that I felt this was a shame. We are neighbours, I said, and therefore should avoid 'bad blood'. She looked at me strangely at this point, obviously not being as au fait as I was with the dubbed French version of The Godfather, where I had gleaned an awful lot of my hastily arranged vocabulary. I left the confused woman with vague promises of needing a 'sit-down' with her husband at some point soon and walked calmly home.
Of course, I had achieved nothing. I felt, quite rightly, that I had to show my face and her husband, who may or may not have been there, will know that I went round to see him, and I felt that was important, but the atmosphere was obviously still flat when I got home. We fed the boys, though we'd all lost our appetites, put them to bed and then started to talk earnestly about what all of this actually meant.
