MOVING from a village house to an isolated farmhouse, friends are finding the change slightly overwhelming. Their village bedroom had late-night light from a street lamp and now as they switch off to sleep the darkness enfolds them.
And as they lie there fighting the urge to snap a light back on, they become aware of a sound like no other – silence.
For silence isn’t absence of noise, it’s just a different kind of noise and insistent in its demand to be heard.
Sounds in the attic turned out to be the bewildered pacing of a wren who’d come in under the roof tiles. The cows in the fields gather by the hedges to watch their progress, passive observers of man’s nest building. And then there’s the recognition of their relative isolation with no neighbours even in view.
So perhaps it was no surprise when D, on her own for the first time, was disconcerted to see a little white van race up her drive and screech to a stop inches from her door.
Out stepped a scowling figure, indistinguishable from a hundred others within the neighbourhood. Small, swarthy, missing a few teeth, he was obviously a farmer and could probably buy and sell us all.
There were no pleasantries.
“Are you living here now?’ he asked gruffly.
“Er, yes, can I help you?” replied D.
“You bought it?”
“Well, yes, we did.”
He didn’t even pause before he asked: “How much?”
D looked at him in astonishment and mumbled something.
“How much?” he asked again. “Was it expensive or did you get it cheap?”
“Where do you live?” she replied. He waved a vague hand backwards. “Over there,” he said, obviously having no intention of telling her more. “So, it was expensive then?”
She still doesn’t know why she ended up telling him the amount.
He stepped back, looked closely at her then turned, uttering the familiar “meh” of contempt as he got back into the car.
Even around here where the foreigners’ dealings and doings are scrutinised and picked over with gleeful relish, this was a stage too far.
“Bloody French,” said the big man who, with his wife, was also quaffing champagne to christen the new house. “Ignorant buggers.”
This wasn’t a florid Burgundy-faced Brit, master of the valley – for there are many who speak like that.
“Mmm,” I said. “But you’re French, non?”
He looked amazed that I hadn’t noticed the difference immediately on being introduced. He was French but not local French; he was “foreigner” French. Cosmopolitan and representing his company all around Europe, he and his wife were well travelled and born further south.
Restoring, a stone country house, he enjoys all the country sports but his work gives him the pleasures of the city.
His wife admits that in his absence she controls her cabin fever by fleeing to England or to her family.
“It’s not just the foreign foreigners who are ignored or glared at,” explained P.
“We are not really accepted either. Nothing and nobody different really is.
Rural French communities are insular, almost tribal. They have their families, their friends from school and their villages … and their feuds.
“Interbred and interwoven. And that’s where their loyalties lie – not with the new or the different.”
Agreeing, his wife described being at a hunters’ lunch in a neighbouring village. Their cohort was invited as they often hunted in parallel.
“When the cheese came it was put down in front of us and then taken away to serve everyone around us but missing us out. Then it was returned to the kitchen. It was their way of saying we were not ‘of’ them. So we’ll never go there again.” And out came the stories of slights and rudeness; of backs being turned; of sudden deafness when asking questions.
Fortunately I am only fully aware of it when passing through my own village. If there are souls about I deliberately wave and smile just to see the scowls intensify.
But in other circumstances I have flattered and cajoled my way into, if not their hearts, then perhaps a belief that we’re not all bad.
And I have made a fistful of good friends and accept that while I will always be a mystery to them on so many levels, there are many French acquaintances who I know speak kindly of me.
Any real slights in my reverse world have come from the expats who are equally as tribal and interwoven in their groupings as their French neighbours.
Perhaps the nature of my job has made me happy to be an outsider wherever I am. It means I can cast my cold eye when and wherever I like.
Meanwhile I had one of the best afternoons I’ve had in years and realised how little I laugh until I cry these days.
“I love your friends,” I said to D afterwards. “I so enjoyed them.”
“Yes,” she said, “so do we.
"They don’t seem French at all.”
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