Marseille, the vew from Notre Dame.
Marseille, the port.
TALES FROM FRANCE
There's no doubt that Madame is the central pillar of the community in our road, she gardens the verge opposite the houses and is always bustling about on some good deed or another for one of the neighbours. On one of our stays in the house in France we met her one evening coming up the hill accompanied as always by her ubiquitous poodle but also by the Labrador bitch from one of the houses diagonally opposite us. She explained that the people were away which was why she was walking their dog. One evening, later in the week, as she was a bit shaken having had a fall and got some nasty bruises, we volunteered to take the Labrador for a walk for her, and duly collected the lead and went through the side gate and picked up the dog. About half way round the walk, much to my embarrassment, the dog suddenly decided to mount my leg. This was a bitch remember so it was a very surprising thing to happen, and I had a devil of a time getting it off. Coming back from the walk we were approaching the house to put the dog back when a teenage girl and boy shot out of the front door and demanded to know what we were doing with their dog. My French quite deserted me in the heat of the moment and, to compound my embarrassment, as I was stammering away and trying to put the dog back behind the gate, it chose that moment to mount another amorous attack on my leg. Finally I managed to prise it off and, finding that they both spoke good English, we were able to explain why we were walking their dog. It seems that the girl was the daughter of the owners of the house and had arrived that day with her boyfriend for their summer holidays. Unaware of the arrangements for walking the dog, and finding her gone when they'd come out to feed her, they had been naturally surprised when two total strangers had ambled up the hill in possession of her.
TALES
FROM FRANCE
The first time we met Madame was when we went to view the house. We had congregated outside with the estate agents after having had a look round, when she came up to us and asked if we were English, and then suggested that if we bought the house perhaps she could cut the grass for us. She would have found this a bit difficult seeing as there was no grass, just a dense thicket of brambles covering the whole garden.
The second time I met her
was more disturbing. After a bit of
haggling, we bought the house in December. A bitterly cold
day the following January, with snow dusting the fields, found me
driving down from Cherbourg squinting into the low sun and unable to
read the signposts. I had a car load of tools, oak logs for
the open fire, and a camping stove, among other things, and I don't
mind admitting that I was feeling considerably apprehensive about what
state the house would be in on closer inspection and whether we had
made a big mistake in buying it.
At this stage we had very little idea of what services were connected
or exactly how much work needed doing to it as we had bought it solely
because it
fulfilled all the major criteria on our list and these had related more
to things like budget, location, and distance from the ferry port than
anything else.
I finally pulled up outside the house at about 5pm and started to unload the car and get everything inside. My plan was to lay my sleeping bag out on the floor of the main downstairs room which had a fireplace, as this was the only source of heat as far as we knew. The house was naturally absolutely freezing having had no heating all winter so I was pleasantly surprised, once I had got all my stuff from the car organised and located the mains switch for the electricity, to find that there were two electric heaters under the windows. (It later transpired that the whole house had them, a bit like electric central heating). This was an unexpected bonus. Although it was obviously going to take days rather than hours to get some build up of heat in the house, I could at least postpone making the fire and investigate what other services we had. I looked under the sink which is generally in Britain where to find the stop cock for the water mains and there wasn't one, and I couldn't find it anywhere else either. I knew that the French use completely different sizes of copper pipes than we do, and this compounded the difficulty. In the front corner of the room nearest the road was a very skinny copper pipe coming in which dived into the floor. It had a stop cock and a round meter on it which looked just like the meter on the gas at home. Well, being connected to the gas mains would be another bonus, but I couldn't turn that on because I didn't know where it came out and it still didn't solve the problem of the water. I tried phoning the estate agent on my mobile but they were completely disinterested, they had had their money and now I was obviously on my own.
I
had brought some food with me, intending to cook it on the
camping
stove, but as I had no water and it was now getting on a bit I decided
to eat in the
restaurant in the town. So, shivering in the icy north wind,
I walked into town in the gloom of the winter's evening only to find
that the restaurant only opened at lunchtime.
Back at the house, feeling slightly depressed, I poured myself a
large glass of wine and cogitated about things.
What if the pipe in the corner was the water mains? Ah yes,
but what if it was gas? did I dare risk blowing the house up on my
first visit, after all the wiring in the house looked really dodgy in
places and could be shorting and creating a spark. By the
time I was half way down my second glass of wine I thought, "What the
hell,
I'll try turning it on a bit and listen to what it sounds
like." Blessed relief, it was water.
Some time later, fortified by a hot meal and another glass of
wine, I
was feeling distinctly more optimistic and decided to try and get the
open fire going. I suppose it must have been about 11pm by
then, the reason I mention it will become apparent later on.
The chimney breast had an open ended stove pipe sticking out of one
side, and a flexible pipe, whose function was a mystery to me, sticking
into the space below the fireplace, (the fire like a lot of French
fires was raised up off the ground to about knee height). I
got the thing lit and before too long I had a good blaze going with no
problems. No smoke came out of the stove pipe and the chimney
seemed to have a good draw on it. For the first time in hours I started
to feel warm, and I had been sitting there for about quarter of an hour
thinking to myself that perhaps we had made the right decision in
buying the house when, for no apparent reason, smoke started pouring
down the chimney and into the room. I went to the front door,
which opens straight on to the pavement, and flung it open and
instantly Madame appeared in the doorway. "Avez vous un
probléme monsieur?" and then she marched in and plonked herself down in
my camping chair, misjudging the height of the seat as she did so and
landing so heavily that she almost toppled over. I noticed
she was looking round curiously as I tried to explain in my broken
French what was wrong although it was pretty obvious anyway.
The smoke started to clear and the fire was drawing normally again as
she pointed out to me that the flexible pipe under the fire was an air
supply to stop the smoke from being sucked back down the
chimney. Taking me outside the front door to the freezing
street she showed me the inlet for the supply, a 100 mm pipe.
She reached down and removed a small pebble saying that any blockage to
the pipe would cause the chimney to smoke.
Going
back inside we exchanged a few more words and then she left.
The
first thing I thought to myself when she'd left was, what was Madame
doing right outside the door at 11.30 at night in sub zero temperatures
just when I opened it?
The second thing I thought was, there
was no way that small pebble would have had the slightest effect on the
air flow through that pipe, but if someone had put their hand over
it......!
The third thing I thought was, am I being
paranoiac?
The fourth thing I
thought was, HELP! .....GET ME OUT OF HERE!
From that day to
this, under all weather conditions, the fire has never blown out smoke
again, had Madame, consumed with curiosity, engineered an entry into
the house, or was I suffering from an overwrought imagination due to
the circumstances?
You tell me.
