The House in France
The end of the first week of August, 1995, I travelled over to France on my bike – or more precisely, friends dropped me off at Folkestone, and the other end, Boulogne, I set off on my wobbly way for my friends’ house, about 17 miles down the coast and a bit inland. In the pannier of my sit up and beg was the Land’s End Bag, described in ‘The Wily Si’, and various French motorists parped at me, cheerfully: I must have provided an eccentric English contrast to the head down, streamlined, indigenous, lycra brigade. There’s a steep escarpment on the way to Courset, the village I was heading for, and subsequently, in my car, I have thought of my slow trail up it that warm afternoon on my (rather heavy) bike. Then it’s downhill and I arrived in the back garden of my friends’ house with a triumphant whoosh. Five gay men (of whom I was easily the oldest) drinking white wine and kir, and impressed at my mode of arrival. Two – a couple – weren’t known to me and the bigger, more flirtatious, handsome, Jewish, is now dead, sadly. I noticed him taking pills later that evening and supposed, rightly, that he was HIV. Another guest, not the best looking but the sexiest man I have ever known, was on noticeable edge at that time, on the quiet suspecting (it was later confirmed) that he was HIV. He, however, is still, cheerfully, sexily, alive, thriving and living in Spain. The lottery of HIV, then, puts into perspective this tale of happiness. I shouldn’t have been happy. I was broke, had sold my car, didn’t know if I could continue as a writer. But it was the aftermath of the event described in ‘Bumping into God in Kent.’ Nothing – or almost nothing - could disturb my tranquillity which was to continue for months.
After that weekend I was on own, more or less, for ten weeks, mainly golden weather. Eric Rohmer’s ‘A Summer’s Tale,’ filmed down the coast in Brittany that summer, brings it back for me. My friends helped me stock up on tinned stuff – you could cycle (or freewheel) at a hundred miles an hour down to the supermarket in the nearby town of Devres, but it was a long, slow climb back. I found a cut through route, on a local map, via a thicketed wood that helped. There was something of the de la Mare poem about it: ‘But there was no road through the woods.’ You could, just about, follow it, pushing and forcing the bike on and up, with your shopping - and when you had navigated it, been bitten by insects (harvest flies) and scratched by briars and nettles and made it back to the house, which is high up at the head of the valley, you wanted a bath. Exercise and then ablutions – well, cheaper than joining a gym. Just having a bike meant that the main road which went close past the house had its romance. I could get so far, down to Montreuil – and (just about) in another direction – to the coast, but it was an effort for a forty eight year old there and back. I remember one day crawling back up the pretty valley road and resting along the edge of harvested fields, getting back to the house and the phone ringing. My friend Peter to tell me his – last - child – Harry had been born. There were occasional calls from my agent and the Literary Manager at the National Theatre – he was curious, really – but I was moving beyond career. I can’t now imagine eating all that tinned food, however nouvelle, French, and interesting, but this was my Famous Five period. I measured out the bread in the morning, warming yesterday’s left over baguette: the bread van arrived three times a week, its horn honking as it came down the valley – you could hear it miles off. This was the time I met my neighbours – farmers. They were pleasant enough but must have regarded me as an odd bod sans car (I wonder what the French for ‘odd bod’ is). I was learning French – tapes. Much less scary that real conversations with the locals. And also translating novels like ‘Terese Raquin’ though there was a danger, I could see, of finishing up speaking a variety of nineteenth century French. I would read the Bible in French first thing in a morning – not through any religious fervour but because the story was familiar. I needed no crib or dictionary. Most mornings were sunny. I can still smell the wooden floored bedroom. I would play Nyman’s score for ‘The Piano’ as I ate breakfast, dancing sometimes as the full melody came in. It was one of the few accessible CDs my friends had (their taste is for operas last heard at, say, the Avignon Festival in 1932, ‘performed by Nazis’, I like to say). I did play ‘Nessum Dorma’ and other operatic hits to a ‘Best of Puccini’ CD, singing along. Madness really. As it grew colder in the evenings, I lit fires, read and wrote. I was attempting fiction. It’s not bad, just not good enough. I discuss it elsewhere in these notes.
More confident with my spoken French, I went into Desvres at some point for some shoes or trainers. They hadn’t my size. ‘C’est une honte,’ I said, meaning ‘What a pity.’ I’d got it wrong. It means ‘What a scandal.’ The assistant looked upset. That linguistic triumph over, I did, however, struggle back up the hill with a fresh baguette under my arm. ‘Darling, don’t they think you a little –well - peculiar,’ said the Barrister, who gets the fuller treatment in ’Bad Company’ when I spoke to him down the line. People, including the owners, visited, of course, but I was happy alone. I remember a blip in late September, the anniversary of my mother’s death, when I felt sorry for myself and wondered what the hell I was doing. What it amounted to was deciding to sell my flat, which at that time was let out, a bit cheaply and on a temporary basis, to a young playwright, who wanted time in London at the National Theatre Studio. Could I manage the itinerant life? ‘Hell, yes,’ as a later leader of the Labour Party said (did he have any firm idea of who he was?). I was already cutting myself off from a London life. Eric James (‘The Beatific Vision’) who was unsettled by my homeless state, was surprised I didn’t capitalise on my Labour Party contacts. Eric was an establishment figure, and I had the pleasure of saying to him, (forgive this..) ‘Well, Christ didn’t live anywhere.’ What I was doing, looking back – I was partly conscious of it at the time – was the secular equivalent of giving up all I had ‘to follow Christ’, or in my case, the work - writing - I wanted to do. Hell or high water. This would mean selling my flat – I was never comfortable as landlord – and putting the profits in the bank as liquidity (I never reached the sandals and leather belt stage), living here and there, with France as my main ‘residence’. Now, the house in France, low slung, one storey, an ex-forge on a crossroads, is not a BBC2 dream home in the Dordogne, or Tarn. It’s Pas de Calais, with north of the Loire weather, uninhabitable in winter – no central heating and a bit damp. It’s stuffed, delightfully, with brocante furniture. The kitchen is poky and dark. It was bought as a summer holiday home. There’s a fine garden, and these days, an orchard next door, which my pals have acquired. I used to have ‘conversations’ with the old guy who kept the orchard on. He saw me mowing the lawn, and was waiting for me as I returned to the machine after packing the electrical cord away in the outhouse. ‘No wires,’ he said in French, puzzled and presumably impressed, staring at the modern mower. He used a scythe. It was only after he had left and I had looked at the dictionary – too late - I realised what he meant and the reason for his puzzlement. Oh, ‘baiser’ is a troublesome word. Down in the Tarn once with one of my more well heeled (and French speaking) friends, and made more confident by her elderly neighbour’s walnut wine, I said to the little boys who arrived, inclining their faces upwards for their grandfather, and then the rest of the room, to kiss: ‘In England, it’s not the habit to come into a room and fuck people.’ Or something like that.
I’ve since, as a car owner again, enjoyed long spells in the Tarn, and Dordogne, and Provence, but it’s the little house by the crossroads feels like home to me. After I got ill and received the worrying warning that the operation had a one in five chance of mortality, my friend (the owner of the French place), was with me, and re-assuring, ‘Well, that’s an 80% chance of success’. I got my affairs tidied up, of course, as a result, and decided on where for the cremation, and texted him. How would he feel about scattering my ashes at the top of his – French – garden? ‘By the old water pump. I’d like that.’ Fine, he texted back, unfazed. So there you will find me, though not quite yet.
After that weekend I was on own, more or less, for ten weeks, mainly golden weather. Eric Rohmer’s ‘A Summer’s Tale,’ filmed down the coast in Brittany that summer, brings it back for me. My friends helped me stock up on tinned stuff – you could cycle (or freewheel) at a hundred miles an hour down to the supermarket in the nearby town of Devres, but it was a long, slow climb back. I found a cut through route, on a local map, via a thicketed wood that helped. There was something of the de la Mare poem about it: ‘But there was no road through the woods.’ You could, just about, follow it, pushing and forcing the bike on and up, with your shopping - and when you had navigated it, been bitten by insects (harvest flies) and scratched by briars and nettles and made it back to the house, which is high up at the head of the valley, you wanted a bath. Exercise and then ablutions – well, cheaper than joining a gym. Just having a bike meant that the main road which went close past the house had its romance. I could get so far, down to Montreuil – and (just about) in another direction – to the coast, but it was an effort for a forty eight year old there and back. I remember one day crawling back up the pretty valley road and resting along the edge of harvested fields, getting back to the house and the phone ringing. My friend Peter to tell me his – last - child – Harry had been born. There were occasional calls from my agent and the Literary Manager at the National Theatre – he was curious, really – but I was moving beyond career. I can’t now imagine eating all that tinned food, however nouvelle, French, and interesting, but this was my Famous Five period. I measured out the bread in the morning, warming yesterday’s left over baguette: the bread van arrived three times a week, its horn honking as it came down the valley – you could hear it miles off. This was the time I met my neighbours – farmers. They were pleasant enough but must have regarded me as an odd bod sans car (I wonder what the French for ‘odd bod’ is). I was learning French – tapes. Much less scary that real conversations with the locals. And also translating novels like ‘Terese Raquin’ though there was a danger, I could see, of finishing up speaking a variety of nineteenth century French. I would read the Bible in French first thing in a morning – not through any religious fervour but because the story was familiar. I needed no crib or dictionary. Most mornings were sunny. I can still smell the wooden floored bedroom. I would play Nyman’s score for ‘The Piano’ as I ate breakfast, dancing sometimes as the full melody came in. It was one of the few accessible CDs my friends had (their taste is for operas last heard at, say, the Avignon Festival in 1932, ‘performed by Nazis’, I like to say). I did play ‘Nessum Dorma’ and other operatic hits to a ‘Best of Puccini’ CD, singing along. Madness really. As it grew colder in the evenings, I lit fires, read and wrote. I was attempting fiction. It’s not bad, just not good enough. I discuss it elsewhere in these notes.
More confident with my spoken French, I went into Desvres at some point for some shoes or trainers. They hadn’t my size. ‘C’est une honte,’ I said, meaning ‘What a pity.’ I’d got it wrong. It means ‘What a scandal.’ The assistant looked upset. That linguistic triumph over, I did, however, struggle back up the hill with a fresh baguette under my arm. ‘Darling, don’t they think you a little –well - peculiar,’ said the Barrister, who gets the fuller treatment in ’Bad Company’ when I spoke to him down the line. People, including the owners, visited, of course, but I was happy alone. I remember a blip in late September, the anniversary of my mother’s death, when I felt sorry for myself and wondered what the hell I was doing. What it amounted to was deciding to sell my flat, which at that time was let out, a bit cheaply and on a temporary basis, to a young playwright, who wanted time in London at the National Theatre Studio. Could I manage the itinerant life? ‘Hell, yes,’ as a later leader of the Labour Party said (did he have any firm idea of who he was?). I was already cutting myself off from a London life. Eric James (‘The Beatific Vision’) who was unsettled by my homeless state, was surprised I didn’t capitalise on my Labour Party contacts. Eric was an establishment figure, and I had the pleasure of saying to him, (forgive this..) ‘Well, Christ didn’t live anywhere.’ What I was doing, looking back – I was partly conscious of it at the time – was the secular equivalent of giving up all I had ‘to follow Christ’, or in my case, the work - writing - I wanted to do. Hell or high water. This would mean selling my flat – I was never comfortable as landlord – and putting the profits in the bank as liquidity (I never reached the sandals and leather belt stage), living here and there, with France as my main ‘residence’. Now, the house in France, low slung, one storey, an ex-forge on a crossroads, is not a BBC2 dream home in the Dordogne, or Tarn. It’s Pas de Calais, with north of the Loire weather, uninhabitable in winter – no central heating and a bit damp. It’s stuffed, delightfully, with brocante furniture. The kitchen is poky and dark. It was bought as a summer holiday home. There’s a fine garden, and these days, an orchard next door, which my pals have acquired. I used to have ‘conversations’ with the old guy who kept the orchard on. He saw me mowing the lawn, and was waiting for me as I returned to the machine after packing the electrical cord away in the outhouse. ‘No wires,’ he said in French, puzzled and presumably impressed, staring at the modern mower. He used a scythe. It was only after he had left and I had looked at the dictionary – too late - I realised what he meant and the reason for his puzzlement. Oh, ‘baiser’ is a troublesome word. Down in the Tarn once with one of my more well heeled (and French speaking) friends, and made more confident by her elderly neighbour’s walnut wine, I said to the little boys who arrived, inclining their faces upwards for their grandfather, and then the rest of the room, to kiss: ‘In England, it’s not the habit to come into a room and fuck people.’ Or something like that.
I’ve since, as a car owner again, enjoyed long spells in the Tarn, and Dordogne, and Provence, but it’s the little house by the crossroads feels like home to me. After I got ill and received the worrying warning that the operation had a one in five chance of mortality, my friend (the owner of the French place), was with me, and re-assuring, ‘Well, that’s an 80% chance of success’. I got my affairs tidied up, of course, as a result, and decided on where for the cremation, and texted him. How would he feel about scattering my ashes at the top of his – French – garden? ‘By the old water pump. I’d like that.’ Fine, he texted back, unfazed. So there you will find me, though not quite yet.