All Change

All Change

by

Helen Baker

Copyright © 2018 Helen Baker. All rights reserved

ISBN:-   978-0-244-71086-6

1. An Agreeable Life as a French Peasant

On 1st January 2017, I voluntarily started a process to move from one country to another, from one continent to another, indeed from one hemisphere to another. It meant moving from the countryside to the centre of a vibrant modern city of four million people, from a four-bed house surrounded by its own large garden to a much smaller property – probably a flat. (Or so I assumed.) From living as far from either the Ocean (Atlantic) or the Sea (the Mediterranean) as is possible in France, I would be hoping to live within sight and sound of the sea. Just incidentally, I would be moving from Summer to Winter or vice versa. Not to mention from needing a bicycle or car for every journey, I would aim to live carless, relying on public transport, taxis or possibly Uber. 

I would add that I turned sixty-nine in the year and my husband seventy and we have been happily settled in the same French village for twenty-nine years.

Why bother?

There was no necessity. Nor was it remotely triggered by Brexit. We moved to France on France's own rules, not EU rules. We could stay forever. If the law changed after Brexit, a far shorter stay than ours would entitle us to French citizenship. Long, convoluted and costly – it had always seemed a waste of time to bother to get it.

We moved to France in 1989, to retire at the age of forty and live from the income of two flats in Spain plus accumulated savings. The locals were friendly from the start because I spoke French, knew French history, geography, and its economy better than they did. I could quote Moliere (Who?), take shorthand dictation from French and type it up with every past participle agreeing with the preceding direct object.

In no time I had been persuaded to teach English to the adults, take on individual students and even a group of pre-schoolers. I joined the gym group and later, although by far the youngest, we became members of the flourishing old folks group. There were meals in the village hall at New Year and each quarter, stalls at market days. I exhibited paintings and wrote poems with the best of them. Then I learnt the classical guitar, although decades older than any other pupil in the music school and even gave public concerts. I teamed up with a retired accordionist and with me on synthesizer, we played indoors and out, publicly and privately, with great delight.

Over time, neighbours became friends. For the first ten years, there was no English book or newspaper available. John and I only spoke English to each other. We were such rarities – the first English living  in the area since the Hundred Years War – that people never said 'the Smiths are  peculiar' it was rather 'the English are peculiar' as though we represented their entire knowledge of the whole nation.

Religion, which could have been a dividing factor, had almost vanished from the village. The church was mostly unused. The priest, shared with six other parishes, rarely appeared – I could not tell you his name. Children did attend catechism classes in the next village, run by a group of retired nuns. This was the official justification for Wednesday being a non-school day in a ludicrous school year. In fact, I learnt the religious education programme lasted six weeks with the promise of a party and presents at the end of it.

The Southern climate proved benign. By February, winter was almost over. Yet beautiful cloudless days appeared in any month. Nature delighted us with far greater variety than anything Britain could offer. We discovered six different wild orchids in the garden. We marvelled at nightingales, crested larks, natterjack toads, edible frogs, swallowtail butterflies, snake eagles, six-foot-long whip snakes, cranes, peregrine falcons, ospreys, beautiful blue and green bee-eaters, tiger moths, glow worms, processionary caterpillars, colorado beetles, deathshead hawkmoths – I could go on and on. The neighbours thought we were mad identifying new species – the French are only interested in what is edible. Television 'nature' programmes describe only hunting, entrapping and generally obtaining free food.

For the first eighteen months, we relied on our bicycles for transport. The climate was good, the surrounding area flat. It offered good exercise. John could carry fifty kilos at a time. Then, one day in winter, he iced up. By that time we knew how our finances would pan out, so decided on a small car.

Over the years, our garden, which started out an almost empty expanse of scorched, dull grass turned into a year-round paradise. We ended up with a complete irrigation system based on a reliable well. Indeed, in the first year, we filled our swimming pool from it in a single pour. The well fed three ponds with Japanese kois and goldfish. We lived surrounded on all sides by an orchard, three vegetable beds, lawns and flower beds galore. Not only did we become virtually self-sufficient in fruit and vegetables with plenty left over to give away but measured cutting down of trees provided winter firewood for our open hearth. For fertiliser, we rotated four compost heaps. The real Good Life.

Then the internet arrived, with cheap phone calls promising we could keep in regular contact with friends and relatives around the world, even as far off as New Zealand. This tipped us back into the English language. So did the arrival of a Welsh family who, although they seemed well set-up financially, were experiencing difficulties getting their two young sons to prosper under the French education system.

Personally, not only were we fine but we were free to travel Europe-wide and world-wide. Not for us the difficulties Britons face just getting off their island. We could hop in the car and get out again – in Spain, in Italy, in Slovenia. I joined a woman's group and, using cheap flights and accumulated frequent flyer miles, stayed with wonderful people as far apart as Finland, Denmark, Germany and Hungary.

Brilliant. So why should we even think of leaving all this? I suppose boredom played its part. Twenty-nine years in any location means you exhaust all local possibilities. Of course, France changed too. Family hotels vanished to be replaced by bolted-together empty blocks. You entered using your credit card without meeting a living soul. The very worst was a Formule Un where you needed to memorize a code to get into your room and another to get into the communal shower down the corridor. This soused you automatically with soapy water which shut off at a set time, to be replaced by fierce winds, supposedly to dry you. Cheaper than a towel. Then the door swung open and you were expected to exit.

French family restaurants disappeared in favour of pizzerias and snack bars. The anti-smoking rules and alcohol breath-testing destroyed a whole style of life. Hard to believe that when we first arrived, our local cave cooperative sold wine from pumps like petrol pumps, the dregs sluicing back down for reuse. Some regulars filled up at the rate of a jerrycan a day.

More importantly, we pair were getting older. In the year of the great drought, John carried two  tons of water a day to keep the garden alive. As a response, he installed irrigation. The whole French nation learnt the benefits of air conditioning both in their houses and their cars. So did we. What for years had been a pleasure became, first, a chore, then an exhausting drag.

Pests appeared. The vineyards surrounding us were grubbed out. Previously, they had been cared for all year round and many pests obliterated. Now we suffered from unidentified insects. Even to kneel down briefly on grass left you with multiple, long-lasting, painful bites. Worse were what we called eyebangers – small flying insects which attacked you over and over, aiming at your eyeballs.  Sunglasses did not deter them – they just altered their angle of attack. Your only recourse was to rush indoors. Deer and boar flourished in local woods – so did their ticks. Tick fever is dangerous.

Our garden had backed onto a vineyard. The old farmer and his wife had harvested using a machine equally old, never serviced and subject to constant breakdowns. Now she was dead and he in a home. The new landowner used state-of-the-art leviathans that could perform many tasks at once. But sweetcorn is not a pleasant crop to live near due to the constant spraying, blown by the wind to wreck havoc in nearby gardens. The dust and chopped stalks of high-speed harvesting send you rushing indoors, fearful for your lungs.

Eventually, to garden, I wore a headscarf, glasses, long-sleeved top and trousers tucked into socks inside Wellington boots, plus gloves. Imagine that at thirty degrees. No way. So I was starting work before breakfast, as soon as it was light in the morning.

When we first arrived, we would swim at Seventeen degrees. Nothing more pleasant after a session of gardening. Eventually, we needed the water to be hotter and hotter. Finally, we removed the pool altogether and substituted a jacuzzi on the terrace. This was wonderful. We kept it at Thirty-eight degrees and used it year-round, even under frost and hail. In the bathroom, we also installed an inflatable hammam – very agreeable.

When we first arrived, we occupied all the house. We ate formally in the dining room and, in Summer, outside on the terrace which also contained a relaxing balancelle, or upmarket, cushioned garden swing. Of the four bedrooms, one became a storehouse and home for a second fridge-freezer while another became my music-cum-computer room.

One grows used to a warmer climate. Besides, even though winter is short, the heat gradient between day and night is fierce. I have found pot-plants dead from frost although they were in a completely enclosed outer hall. The lowest temperatures were minus Ten to minus Fifteen but only for a very brief period. The following day could see sunshine with temperatures climbing up in the Twenties.

Other than firewood, our heating relied on electricity. This remained static in price. Still, over time, we tended to use less and less of the house. We had installed a beautiful sauna under the roof. Gradually, we neglected it in favour of the jacuzzi.

If there was a reason to leave our home, it was that, looking to the future, life would grow more and more difficult. Our pensions started so money was not a problem. Transport was. There was no public transport at all. Taxis existed. They were unbelievably expensive. The French system dictated that you were obliged to use a local firm simply because you had to pay from their point of departure, to you, to where you wanted to go and back to where they started from. No question of hailing one en route. The driver was not allowed to pick you up. Jobs for all drivers is the aim. I do not know how Uber will fit in with this. Anyway, out in the countryside Uber does not exist.

No home-delivery service existed for anything other than central heating fuel. Huge tankers chewed up country lanes and pushed verges down into ditches, causing winter blockages. Everything had to be collected at the supermarket and humped into your car. Even enormous items from garden centres were shunted in this way, with no help to be expected from the staff.

Supermarkets can never offer a delivery service because of French postcodes. Our simple five-number code was shared by nine villages – say twelve thousand people. So a supermarket wanting to deliver will not know if you are one kilometres or twenty kilometres from their store. All they offer is to let you order a very limited selection on line. Then you have to drive to collect it. Useless.

Visits to doctors, dentists, pharmacists, hospitals, Xray centres, medical labs all demanded being able to drive. Those who could not and had hired taxis often had to wait many hours at the hospital for their taxi, which had multiple-booked customers, to arrive and take them home.

Ours was a very safe, low-risk area but police were stationed a long way off (and usually only provided a phone link to another, more central station), as were professional fire-fighters and ambulance-drivers.

It did not bother us yet but things could only get worse. Besides, our friendly village originally contained a majority of people over sixty-five, so it was a universal problem and a great strain on working families.

In twenty-nine years, we witnessed repeated building booms. To begin with, we could take a circular walk from our house – turn right and right again until you end up home - and only count a few houses. Before we left, we would pass an additional thirty, all individual private houses, not an estate. But all possessed barking, untrained dogs, lawnmowers, chain saws, multiple vehicles, bonfires, endless deliveries made by mammoth vehicles and occasional discos.

At the outset, we saw more aircraft than we did cars. Then, gradually, our village became, like so many, a dormitory town. The new estates constructed were small, compared to some villages, but they proved slums in the making. The pavements and infrastructure had been ruined by their parked vehicles before they were even occupied.

Worse, the new people were commuters, from the city thirty kilometres away, seeking cheaper housing. The city dominated their lives still and they brought town manners with them. No more village politeness and pleasantry but cold stares from inside their cars. The first thing they did was to erect fences, walls and hedges around their small expanses of land. The original inhabitants had lived happily unfenced for centuries.

So – having been spoilt for so long, we needed a new paradise. Where to look for it?  The logical answer was elsewhere in France. We kept that in mind as we travelled around. Nowhere appealed. French towns have installed their supermarkets on the outskirts. Even if you live in a town, you need a car for daily living.

French people tend to rely on their family far more than Britons still. They stick grimly to the family home or, in extreme age, are taken into a married daughter's household. Old people's homes – well our local ones - were depressing concrete, plate-glass and steel structures: austere hospitals for the really infirm. We were hardly ready for that yet.

Farther afield, we found the French Mediterranean coast overdeveloped, cramped and expensive. The winter climate on the Atlantic coast was bitterly cold and the summer disagreeably humid. We were hard to please!

Between us, we have visited fifty countries and lived in four. So, to upsticks completely was not as daunting to us as to most.

Then we visited Cape Town in South Africa. We fell in love with it.

That was nine years ago. A mere fortnight's visit, out of season. We marvelled at the coastline, the mountains, the vibrant city, the ethnic mix. Nowhere else had we witnessed such riches cheek-by-jowl with the opposite. Every now and then, we glimpsed, with nostalgia, a hint of a British past – HP sauce, fish and chips, British breakfasts, pubs, beach lawns and bowling greens, brightly-coloured beach huts, no light-switches in bathrooms, driving on the left, public gardens with roses and squirrels. At the same time, we marvelled at flamingoes, ibis, indeed so many birds and so tame, that in no time we had acquired a bird book to identify dozens of novelties.

Cape Town was wonderful but there was no way we could hope to move there. Instead, we settled for long holidays, hiring a flat from October to Christmas, year after year. The locals call people who do that Swallows.

Our chance came when John inherited from his mother. Although this might seem the most natural thing in the world for a son to inherit where there had been no family quarrel, his mother kept the contents of her will secret for a decade. We had no more idea of what she had decided, or even when she had made it, than of how much money was concerned.

John's mother died in May 2016. We learnt of it, from his sister, when we were, yet again, in Cape Town on a short visit. The fact that his mother's solicitor also contacted us, with condolences, indicated that John was in some way a beneficiary. Obviously, it would be months before probate was granted, assets (fortunately all near-liquid) could be realized and even the size of the estate calculated. That said, she had been in residential care and her affairs in the lawyer's own hands for years.

Over subsequent months, John nagged the English lawyer from France while his sister nagged him from Canada where she lives. John was approaching seventy and his sister three years older. This gave them additional reasons for haste.

Slowly, a clearer idea emerged. It began to look, fingers crossed, as though moving just might be possible.

In France and later, on the spot in Cape Town, we researched using the Internet. What sorts of visas exist? What do you need to do to obtain them? How much must you possess?

Of course, the answers were contradictory, not least because the law was in the course of being changed. Suddenly you needed far more, both income and capital, in order to qualify. We consulted experts, both in visa applications and in the law. When they showed us some of the draft legislation, we understood why they could not be more precise. Even to them, it was mistranslated gobbledegook. South Africa, we were to learn, recognises eleven official languages. How many had this draft been through before it reached English?

To begin with, there seemed many options. We could sell our house in France and buy another in South Africa. We could keep our French house, rent it out and enhance our income that way. Then we could rent or buy in South Africa. It all depended on what the house was now worth – another unknown - and the cost of buying or renting something similar. Or did it have to be similar? Would not a smaller property, even a flat, suit us better now? Might the change, downsizing, itself release further funds? Then, how much, if anything, could we hope to realize on the sale of possessions, our car for instance?

The South African Rand has been notoriously volatile. At various times, we have received a generous ten and a half for a Pound, right up to a lavish twenty-four. The exchange rate when we moved our money would determine what we had to live on. Could we influence that, for instance by buying forward or delaying transferring funds until we really required them?

The questions were endless. The answers in the lap of the gods.

2. Count-down to 2017 - a Seven month Build Up

Our pleasant life continued – a round of gardening, pruning even in June, fruit-picking, cleaning, visiting, chatting face to face and internationally over the phone. John faced his usual tasks of converting produce into preserves or freezing it. We dared make no preparations for a different life yet. Indeed, we continued buying necessary items (rotisserie, hoover, juice extractor, a new dirty-water pump) as though nothing would ever change.

We arranged to empty the septic tank for the first time in nineteen years. Not because it needed it, rather because we felt guilty. In theory the tank needs a pump out every four  years.

We ordered new gravel to top up the walkways, merely to make them smarter. That meant two long sessions of weeding, levelling and clearing in advance, although most of the heavy gravel-shunting was done by our strong young English friend Simon.

Meantime, in the outside world, Britain voted on 23rd June to leave the European Union. We possessed no vote because we had been out of the country for too long. The fact that it would affect our future in very many ways counted for nothing.

Personally, we were far more interested in our new Superjuice Diet. It proved excellent but demanded much preparatory work using our own fruit and vegetables. Fifteen minutes for one jugful was standard – no wonder people buy pre-prepared juices.  Even lettuce juiced perfectly. So did items like beetroot leaves which we would never have considered as food before. We always threw them onto the compost heap.

Cabbage proved the only disappointment. As a juice, it turned peppery and indigestible because of the mustard gas it contains. My biggest surprise was to live on liquid for five days and never feel a pang of hunger. Never mind that we were undertaking heavy physical work at the same time. I nibbled a little chocolate, of which I am very fond, at the end of the period – horrible. Nor did I once hanker after tea or coffee.

Meanwhile, of course, the Pound fell against the Euro, as did share prices. Still, John's mother's solicitor did not anticipate even applying for probate before mid-July although he hoped the process might be half-way complete by mid-August. Before then, of course, anything could happen to currencies and prices. We knew better than to ask him to transfer funds out of sterling – we would make any conversions we thought wise ourselves, in our own time, from our UK bank account.

I enjoyed one novelty. In the winter, to amuse myself, I had started learning Afrikaans. I knew, of course, that it was only a minority language in South Africa and that English would get us anywhere we were likely to go. Still, I do not like the idea of being shut out because you do not understand. Just a little effort shows willing. It makes you more welcome.

I possessed a further reason. I already speak German and found learning that very rewarding because it tells you so much about the origins of your own language. Afrikaans, as a form of old Dutch, is almost as close to English as you can get. It explained so much about the errors, regional variations and slang still used in English.

Afrikaans also proved to be vivid, crammed with country lore and imagery. I appreciated the straightforward spelling and simple verbs. Short, simple German it may be, but it had been abbreviated almost to grunts. Having to remember to pronounce every G as Huh is hard.

Worse, you find words which are spelled like one English word, pronounced like a different English word but mean a third English word. That is tricky. 'Hoe' is pronounced like 'who' but means 'how'.

The internet is a great help although no two sites seem to pronounce words the same – obviously there is more than one version of Afrikaans in such a huge country. My book, like most modern courses, shied away from grammar or giving any rules.

We had been boring our French neighbours for years with the delights of Cape Town. Well, the delights of the fifty countries we have visited to be honest. For them, nowhere (with the possible exception of Canada) can compare with France.

It is only recently that the rural French have begun to travel outside their own land. Previously people spent their long Summer holidays at the family home in the countryside, catching up with relatives and simply relaxing. No question of spending Christmas and the New Year away from home either. It was during our time in France that people even discovered Spain although, on a clear day, we could see the Pyrenees which were only a hundred kilometres South as the crow flies.

When package holidays really arrived in France, they offered only countries where French people could expect to be understood. Former colonies like Morocco and Tunisia or Latin countries like Italy. We went on several coach tours with French companies. In Austria, they took people to buy at souvenir shops run by French people, talking only French, which willingly accepted Francs in those pre-Euro days.

We also enjoyed 'Cruise Casseroles' with the old folks club. A cruise casserole is a coach tour, lasting several days, very cheap because you are subjected to an entire morning of being sold at. No obligation, of course, but people do spend frantically in front of their neighbours.

This limited outlook regarding travel meant that not only did no one know anything about the non-Francophone world – they did not want to. It must be inferior, starting with the cuisine. In vain did we mention Franschhoek, a lovely town built by French settlers and surrounded by vineyards and lavender fields. Our friends could not imagine  such a thing beyond their own borders. (People told me all Canada spoke French after they had gone on trips never extending beyond Quebec.)

Now that matters were in hand for John to inherit, I told friends and neighbours of our situation and vague plans. Reaction varied from disbelief to indifference and an immediate reversion to discussing their own concerns. It was understandable. I had reacted similarly when friends told me they had quarrelled with a neighbour so they immediately determined to move house. They never did.

It was not until 19th July that John received the first clear intimation from the solicitor of how much his mother had left. It was a pleasant surprise, to put it mildly. She had been living in a care home at a rate of Fifty Thousand Pounds a year. Such an outlay soon eats into anyone's savings.

On 22nd July, a man knocked at the door wearing a suit. Suits, even shabby ones, are rare in France. He was an estate agent drumming up business, visiting every house in turn. I said we were in no position to sell but might well be next year. I took his card. He did not believe me but I was to meet him again.

Our days continued to be punctuated by hours of pruning, weeding, fruit-picking and, for John, lawn-mowing. Thanks to the climate, almost all are year-round activities. He started on the twenty-four bottles of tomatoes that he managed to preserve each year. He had already used our electric dryer to dry a year's worth of figs, Japanese pears and cherry tomatoes. When I dead-headed roses, I would stop, with an aching wrist, after a thousand decapitations. Then start again next day.

My music-playing friend Daniel returned from his holiday cruise. But it filled his entire attention while my news and possible move evoked no comment. It was unthinkable that anyone would voluntarily leave France.

I had given a little thought to what items of furniture we really did not need. I took a few photos and Becky, an English friend, promised to put them on the internet for me. In fact, no one showed any interest at all.

Looking at my diary, that Summer is dominated by my coughing. It made every job so much harder. Even half an hour with the hoover required a morning resting in bed.  Dirty garden jobs, like pruning ivy (as much as ten wheelbarrowloads at a time) with dust, spiders and soil falling on you, made matters much worse.

There was no sense in visiting my French doctor of twenty-nine years. Months before, he misread a blood test (seriously – I pointed it out at the time but Doctor knows best) and thought that a person my age must have high blood pressure and need pills for it. So he prescribed Coverin and I duly took it. When I moaned about a cough, he suggested I buy non-prescription antihistamine. Go away. A French person would have been back next week complaining. Then the week afterwards. I stuck it out for months. Fool. In vain, I made a gargle from wild thyme in the garden.

On 18th September, I drank my first cup of coffee for three months. Wow – what a buzz. We had given up on the Superjuice diet, not because it did not work but because the sheer volume and roughness of the vegetables and fruit wore out our industrial-strength juicer.

Next day, we drove twenty kilometres to our nearest decent-sized town to collect new international driving licences. We needed them for our forthcoming trip to Cape Town. The centre of the pretty, walled town was a shock. It was like entering a time warp. A bit like a tourist trap that is no longer on the official route. The only thing that had changed in thirty years was the people going about their daily business. On our arrival, they would have been traditional French. Now, there were plenty of black Africans and even more North Africans. Indeed, virtually all the people waiting to be attended to in the public offices were more foreign than us, slow, bewildered family groups, struggling with the language and the formalities.

Worse, I was amazed at how slowly I walked, well doddered really. This coughing had weakened me incredibly. It could not go on.

I played it clever. When I learnt my Doctor was on holiday (as every year) I booked in for his replacement. I took with me the careful blood pressure readings I had been taking weekly ever since I was first put on pills. Surely, I reasoned, with figures so ridiculously low already, it was crazy for me to be taking stuff to reduce blood pressure? He considered. I will not say he agreed, but he conceded. No more pills unless my reading figures rocketed. Typical belt and braces, he ordered  chest Xray, cough medicine, antihistamines and an eventual visit to a pneumologist.

Overnight, I improved. (Psychological?) Probably the prospect of another trip to Cape Town helped. I had never ailed there. A week later, a chest Xray gave me the all-clear. So, as we guessed all along, I suffered from an allergy. After a week of antihistamines, I recovered my normal speaking voice – it had descended to a weak croak. After a while, the volume returned too.

Throughout September, I continued collecting scratches as I picked a containerful of raspberries every single day. The garden demanded mammoth pruning sessions. (I hacked out four wheelbarrows of honeysuckle alone). There were still figs, apples and Peruvian cherries too to harvest. The only progress on the moving front came from emails exchanged with two emigration experts. As when we had moved to France, we would need to prove many things about our finances to be accepted. It looked as though we should be receiving ample capital but did our UK pensions  provide sufficient income? Could there be a trade-off between them? What was the best way to convert some of the capital into income?

Living in the country, we had no access to mains sewage but had used a septic tank for years with no problems. Still under new rules, the Mairie informed every householder they must pay for a visit from a man from Veolia, the water company, to check everything conformed with new legislation.

That was the excuse. In fact, he found fault with everyone we knew. Never mind that some of the houses were