How Blue Is My Valley Read online

  ‘They come and have a look.’

  ‘What if the newts aren’t there when they look?’

  ‘I can get you some newts for the day.’ I turned down this offer even more reluctantly. I love the idea of a jar of newts touring the county to obtain grants but stranger things have happened in Carmarthenshire ...

  So it’s not as if workmen are a novelty, but this time I have to work on my vocabulary before every meeting. In the past I might have managed an ice-breaking ‘Hello, how-are-you, nice day’ in Welsh now and again but this is the real thing with people who might not (unthinkable thought) speak English at all.

  I look up the words for shelves and woodworm, (wanting one and wanting rid of the other), I need the French for ‘excess’, as in insurance not partying. I have already enjoyed exploring the French legal system in order to buy a house and consider its ownership.

  We love French inheritance law, honest, but the important question is how we can we get round it. I need the vocabulary for all of these professional discussions in French. Did you think a ‘va et vient’ was a sexy line in a seventies pop song? Wrong – it’s a two-way lighting switch. You thought an ‘interrupteur’ was something you told children not to be? Wrong – it’s just a light switch.

  Our two volume Harrap French/English dictionary is heavy enough to bend a shelf but still has limitations. We are still trying to find out what ‘carré rose’ actually means but the dictionary translation of ‘pink square’ seems inadequate to describe a type of film which does indeed seem to have lots of pink, oodles of very naked pink in fact, but not much square.

  We consulted Harrap after receiving the electrician’s estimate and were curious as to why he would want to put port-holes in the cellar ceilings; he looked up the dictionary with us, unimpressed by its total lack of electrical expertise – a ‘hublot’ is also a circular ceiling light.

  Another word that is now firmly in our vocabulary is ‘triage’. I first heard the word when John chatted up the triage nurse at Portsmouth Hospital’s Accident and Emergency Unit, as she joined the two ripped sides of a gash in my cheek with medical sellotape.

  Heading for a romantic weekend in Normandy, with two hours to wait for a late ferry, I accidentally smashed the car door into my face. It had not been a good week as I was already in shock from a hairdresser’s over-enthusiastic attempts to return my hair to its natural colour (whatever that was, prior to golden highlights or ‘streaks’ as the hairdresser preferred to call them) – she’d dyed it black. Still recovering from hair trauma, I now had a hole in my face.

  Luckily the ferry was even later, the nurse was an angel and she said I could still go on my weekend (complete with painkillers, a bandage and a throbbing black eye). Not even waiting for seven hours for the exceptionally late ferry, surrounded by drunken work parties who had booked a booze cruise, could spoil my weekend.

  While I queued for the Ladies’ toilets at the docks, the girl beside me, dressed in full warpaint, pelmet and little else giggled at me, ‘I can’t wait to get pissed, how about you?’

  By this time the hair felt very black, the eye was starting to close up, getting pissed was not my life’s ambition and we must have looked like ‘Before and after – life on the streets.’

  Not even an hour throwing up in a restaurant toilet on the Sunday night, while John ate solo, could spoil things. It could have been a delayed reaction to the accident, the scallops on Saturday night, the glacial December temperatures around a Christmas market or all of the above. I was delirious with painkillers, John was my hero and, more crucially, my hotwater bottle, and it was the sort of experience which makes the word ‘triage’ stick in the mind; it means ‘sorting’, from the French, the nurse said as she sorted me.

  It was with interest then that, in a detailed analysis of types of pedal bin (100 kitchens again) I found that I could have a ‘triage’ bin, the main disadvantage of which is that the compartments are small. The advantage of course is that you have your recycling ‘sorted’ (aha!).

  My French exists in a parallel universe to the one where real French people speak real French. I communicate but with a series of mistakes which I only recognise much later. As Anne kindly points out, ‘That’s only the mistakes you know you’ve made’. Her turn will come.

  I have a long history of gaffes, starting well before we moved to France. One gîte-owner was very amused by me telling him that my husband worked as a teacher and ‘moi, je traîne des professeurs.’ Unfortunately, instead of meaning that I train teachers it suggests that I drag them along, like towing a caravan. He was so tickled by the accuracy of the image that he said I should carry on saying that if anyone asked me what I did for a living.

  A French friend staying with us on an exchange and on whom I was practising my French must have been bemused by the local information I provided; I told him that there was a lot of central heating in our valley and I shook my head sadly. There’s really not that much difference between chauffage (central heating) and chômage (unemployment) now is there? ‘What’s a consonant or two between friends’ is an approach that is likely to get me into trouble, especially when whole syllables convert of their own volition to completely different words.

  I have grown worse rather than better now that we actually live in France. I have asked the post office clerk to give me a recipe for my postage (a ‘recette’ instead of a ‘reçu’).

  Through poor pronunciation, I asked the plumber to connect our house to mains alcohol (‘eau de vie’ instead of ‘eau de ville’); not such a bad idea and he did say it wouldn’t be a problem.

  My worst mistake (so far) was undoubtedly when I was sitting in the estate agent’s, tired and triumphant, having offered for The House and had the offer accepted, after all the stressful conversations – in both French and English – that house-hunting entails. I knew that I was supposed to show a variety of certificates as evidence for the initial contract and I was clutching The Black Bag which I had prepared back in Wales. Keen to show my knowledge of the French system, I asked the Estate Agent whether he would like to see my swimming certificate.

  Surprisingly, he didn’t seem to know what to say and John told me afterwards that there had been an interesting expression crossing the poor man’s face. I realised that I had said ‘natation’ instead of ‘naissance’, corrected myself and the sale progressed but I wish I had the self–possession in these situations to say something like, ‘In Wales, we always show our swimming certificates when we buy a house.’ I do have one somewhere, proof of floundering a whole 25 yards. I think it’s in the box along with other signs of unfulfilled potential; coming 3rd in the junior girls’ obstacle race, a pass result at Viola Grade 2, and confirmation of my status as a Schools Inspector for both Ofsted and Estyn (Wales) – all things of which I am both proud and ashamed.

  French lessons are all around me. When I log on to the Internet, I am asked if I would like to send Saint Arnould some flowers? I would not but it is still a novelty to be asked. My homepage also warns me that I mustn’t pick mushrooms just after a hard frost; it would be like eating re-frozen mushrooms and would poison me.

  I came late to mushrooms, despite a very successful foray into Welsh fields when I was in my twenties. I took carrier bags of button mushrooms into the school staffroom to share with my friends, who all said ‘No thanks – you kill yourself if you want.’

  On second thoughts, perhaps it wasn’t such a successful foray, as I threw most of my treasures away, disappointed with my friends. Now if we’d been in Carmarthen rather than Llanelli, I might have fallen more hippy-side in my friends, who would then have hoped for magic in their mushrooms.

  A Carmarthen colleague was called to a hospital bed-side to nurse? bollock? her seventeen year old son who’d fried up some hallucinogenic mushrooms and taken the consequences – luckily very slight and temporary.

  No, it wasn’t until I was in my forties and walking Normandy footpaths with the new, digital camera that I really discovered mushroo
ms. We still have two floppy discs with forty photographs of – you’ve guessed – forty different species – that I was hooked.

  The Normandy gîte also offered me a shelf-full of old farming books, one of which gave a remedy for mushroom poisoning; you take three rabbits’ livers and two rabbits’ brains... (What do you do with the spare brain? Or do you look for one brainless bunny to avoid waste?)

  I think the general idea was that the chopped mixture would make you throw up, which might help, but in capital letters the reader was told that even this remedy would be no use against the real baddies, which take two or three days to kill you but definitely, slowly and disgustingly, kill you. Perhaps my Welsh friends were right and I will, French-style, take my weird finds to the chemist’s for checking – a service all French chemists offer.

  October’s a dangerous month – if the mushrooms don’t kill me, then the hunters might – gangs of men at their rendezvous, wearing weatherproof coats, smoking beside their 4x4, while their hounds yelp and tangle leads with excitement. We are not surprised to see one group wearing bright orange hats.

  There were forty-six men killed last year in hunting accidents and it is with glee that the newspapers reported the first one this year; he tripped over a branch and shot himself. So far, locally, the versatile pompiers have been called out to deal with a wild boar which, wounded and enraged, charged into the crowd at the Tournon local derby football match, and to rescue a hunting dog which had fallen onto rocks. The boar was shot; the dog was saved. The Patron Saint of Hunting, a Saint Hubert who died in Belgium in 727, must be very busy in the autumn.

  We are not yet French enough to pull a shotgun on the hare that lives in Monsieur Dubois’ orchard. Sometimes, as we walk the dogs, we find the newly vacant ‘form’, a neat half-hare shape in the grass like a terrine mold from a posh cookshop. Sometimes we disturb the hare itself and invent the new sport of dog-skiing as we are dragged across the orchard by Pyreneans. We do shoot the hare – with the digital camera, very British.

  3.

  Chrysanthemums and Gravestones

  Why is it always in the four days that you’re alone, for the first time in a new country, at the start of a major bank holiday, that something which has been working without a problem, packs up?

  Despite the local paper’s ‘Dictum of the Day’ ‘A la Toussaint, manchons aux bras, gants aux doigts’ (‘On All Saint’s Day, wear long sleeves and gloves’) the day has been so hot that it was not until evening that I switched on the oil-fired, recently installed, recently serviced central heating. Nothing happened.

  Or rather the Starship control lit up with some green and some red lights, possibly as normal but I really couldn’t be sure. I spent a happy hour reading the French instructions and trying to relate a diagram of how a boiler works in general, to the specific red monster in front of me.

  I pressed a few switches, thought ‘Oh is that what that does,’ checked the radiators and the oil supply and got nowhere. I applied masculine technical know-how (swore a lot, stomped around and kicked it) and got nowhere.

  I gave in and phoned the service engineer, hoping against hope that the Bank Holiday Weekend had not started. It had. I went back and stood looking at the boiler. The light not so much dawned as twinkled red, at ankle level, in a recess, indicating a button. So I pushed the button et voilà! We had lift-off. Presumably this was a trip-switch thingy which must have tripped during the ‘tempests’ the day before (of course – I was alone for two days so what sort of weather do you expect?) and it needed to be re-set. It’s a pity that the nice engineer didn’t show me that particular button; on the other hand, perhaps he did and I thought he was asking where to plug in his vacuum cleaner.

  Today I whittled a toothpick and jammed it in place of a missing spindle in a doorhandle, having nearly locked four very aggrieved pets into their bedroom. When the handle fell off and I could see the spindle disappearing fast through to the other side, I knew exactly what the worst could be.

  Ten years ago, John and I took a school trip which ended with one night in a posh Paris hotel, courtesy of the travel company which had cocked up the bookings of our lovely safe holiday cottages near Freyjus. Last-night-of-trip is always a reason for celebration (by the kids) and desperate attempts by the teachers to prevent accidental suicides and incidental pregnancies (mostly of the kids).

  As we prepared ourselves for a long night, we received an emergency phone call to our room from one of our colleagues, whose two-year old son had run straight into the bathroom, locked himself in there by mistake and couldn’t get out. Hysteria was starting to set in so we pottered along to see what we could do. John called the hotel reception and explained the situation while I decided to play nice cop and try to talk the little bugger out of the bathroom, as if he were on a high-rise ledge and threatening to jump; his mother had by now started on the duty-free whisky she’d bought to take home.

  Having watched way too many TV detectives, I asked Maureen for some background info and found out that Superman was the little one’s favourite character. I then lay on the floor so my voice would travel under the state-of-the-art stainless steel, handle-less (on the outside), seamless (damn!) unpickable door (and I’ve done my share of sliding a Barclaycard down the front door so I could get in – my front door, I should say).

  ‘Hi, it’s Jean here.’ (Establish how calm you are, how normal everything is and who the hell you are anyway). Sobbing carries on in bathroom, mother slurring slightly in background.

  ‘You like Superman don’t you Gareth. Well, Gareth, you know what Superman would do?’ Sobbing.

  ‘Gareth listen to Jean now,’ (teeth starting to grit a bit), ‘Superman would look at the door. Can you see the door?’ Sobbing moves around a bit, not necessarily anywhere near the door.

  ‘Well there’s a little ... (what is there on the bathroom door anyway? These modern things could have anything, chains, bolts, handles, digital press-buttons? What was in our bathroom? Oh yes) metal thingy and it turns – Superman would try to turn that...’ You get the idea. Unfortunately Gareth doesn’t.

  This goes on for some time, an hour according to John, weeks according to me, a lifetime according to the distraught (but mellowing) mother, at which stage Mr-Hotel-Person turns up with an allan key, I get up off the floor as I am clearly in his way, the door is opened, small child and mother hug each other. There is no crisis and Mr-Hotel-Person has gone before we can say, ‘What if someone was having a heart attack in there?’

  The rest of the night was relatively calm, characterised by some of my sixteen-year old boys treating Paris’ most sophisticated diners to a traditional Llanelli last-night by dressing up in drag, with full make-up borrowed from the girls. John’s Swansea pupils were bemused (and so were his colleagues), clearly unaware of whatever it is which makes tough working blokes dress up as girls for a really good time (just think of the British armed forces).

  It was not the first time I’d done patrol duty in a hotel, wearing a nightie and dressing gown and occasionally telling innocent holiday-makers to keep the noise down and get to their rooms, so the rest of the night was a doddle.

  However, this whole experience meant that when I saw a spindle disappearing through a lock, I had visions of the Superman routine again with a bunch of animals to whom I had already announced ‘Good morning girls.’

  This meant that they were all busting for a pee and ready for breakfast. ‘Hang on a minute, I can’t open the door,’ did not go down well as I rushed off, found some tweezers and rescued the tiny bit of visible spindle before I was doomed to a reprise of Paris, with no man, helpful or otherwise, and, what’s worse, no idea of where the allan keys were (or exactly what you did with them.

  Presumably they would exactly fit that square hole? And turn? I didn’t want to find out whether square holes had changed size in however many decades that door had been there). As it was, the pets gave me that disgruntled, ‘Can’t get the staff’ stare as they rushed into the garden, and I
went off to whittle toothpicks. Must remember to replace toothpick with metal pin ...

  While I am home alone, everyone else in the whole of France is celebrating the major Bank Holiday of Toussaint (All Saints) with their families. This is what all those chrysanthemums have been for.

  When I call up at Super-U there are queues clutching their last-minute pompoms and, opposite the supermarket, families are spilling out of the cars ranked along the cemetery wall. Three generations, wrapped in scarves against the wind, carry their flowers to dress the graves of their ‘proches’ for ‘the Day of The Dead’.

  The police have been putting out warnings on the national news, and on notices pinned to the graveyard gates, against opportunist theft; while people tend the graves, they forget to lock their cars and we are advised to leave nothing of value in our cars, no handbags or jackets, even if we remember to lock the doors.

  When did you last see a Sexton on the British news, highlighted for his good work cleaning and polishing the monuments and tombstones ready for today? And it is beautiful in the sunlight, a village graveyard where the living remember their dead with a profusion of flowers. The chrysanthemums catch the colours of the autumn leaves falling in the sunlight amidst the more sombre cypresses.

  Not autumn, but Easter is the best time for graveyards in Wales where even the forbidding architecture of chapels is softened by daffodils on the graves and by the green of spring grass, green and yellow everywhere against the gray of the buildings and, usually, the rain.

  Old traditions can be beautiful to the onlooker but a Welsh workmate told me that she would not leave the chore of grave-tending to her children and the local paper tells me that times have changed in la Drôme too; families no longer stay in the same village and cannot always make it back to their parents’ graves for Toussaint, and as for the big towns – it seems as if there is a problem of overpopulation amongst the dead, so overcrowded and unkempt are their quarters. I think about my dead and I see that my roses have bloomed yet again, in defiance of November.