Toujours la France! by Janine Marsh

Author:Janine Marsh
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781789293852
Publisher: Michael O'Mara

CHAPTER 7

All you need is love. And cake …

‘IT NEVER SNOWS in this village,’ Jean-Claude had informed us with a straight face when we first met him. Our house then was just a place to camp in at the weekends and for holidays; most of the rooms were uninhabitable. One end of the property was held up by a metal pole and I will never forget my dad standing there, looking first at the pole, then at me, eyebrows raised, and telling me: ‘This house is a money pit … you’ll never be done.’

When the wind blew, the windows rattled in their frames; the metal farm doors that provided an entrance at the back of the house swung wildly back and forth, banging loudly enough to set off all the dogs in the village. The roof was like a sieve through which the frequent rain fell.

An open pipe ran from the garden into what we laughingly called the ‘utility room’ on the ground floor, on account of the broken washing machine left behind by the previous owner. Small and very much unwanted creatures entered the house via the pipe. We placed a net over the end of it, only to find it chewed and discarded. We put a metal colander over the opening and tied it tight, but the creatures heaved it off. We bunged the pipe up with old socks and rags, but the wily trespassers were undaunted and simply pilfered the stuffing to use it to line their nests with. Rats and mice made the house their own when we weren’t around to scare them off. We never did work out what the pipe was meant for, and eventually removed it and sealed off the entrance. But the rats and mice adapted, and began to make their way in through other holes. And when it snowed, the fouines arrived.

We are from London, where it snows rarely and moderately. We figured that Jean-Claude was joking when he said it didn’t snow, but since we are only 150 miles from London as the crow flies, albeit in a different country, we expected it would be a similar sort of snowfall.

We were wrong.

In our first year of living in France, it snowed so heavily that it reached the ground-floor windowsills. Thierry the farmer dashed into action with his tractor, clearing the roads so that he could get to his fields and barns. But in doing so, he blocked us in with piles of snow of up to 2.5 metres deep, which hardened overnight to form an icy wall so that we had to dig our way out. During periods of bad weather, accessible houses become a very attractive proposition to all sorts of animals. When we first cleared out the loft, alongside the rats and mice and empty wasps’ nests, we discovered what we thought were skeletons of small cats. They were strewn over the thick layer of dried earth embedded with animal hair and twigs, which had been applied by previous occupants as a primitive form of insulation.

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