Heads Above Water: Staying Afloat in France

By Stephanie Dagg

Heads Above Water: Staying Afloat in France is the story of our first couple of years as expats in France. And yes, there are lots of books about living in France out there already. But a lot of these are the short-term adventures of single people or retired couples or tourists. Moving abroad for good with a family and without a pension is a whole new ball game. That’s what makes Heads Above Water different. It’s about us, a family with three children, who stick the hardships out and make things start to work. It’s about actually making a living in a new country and dealing with the sort of rules and regulations that only the French could think of. It’s realistic, honest and gritty – but also fun, lively and very entertaining, and, I hope, ultimately inspiring.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stephanie Dagg
• Release date: Nov 10, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301646401

Stephanie Dagg

I'm an English ex-pat living in France with my family and a lot of animals, including llamas and carp. I was a bestselling author in Ireland, where we lived for 15 years before we moved to our new home here. I've recently relaunched my writing career, but this time as an indie ebook author and publisher. It's the twenty-first century after all!

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Heads Above Water

Staying afloat in France

by Stephanie J Dagg

Heads Above Water: Staying afloat in France

© Stephanie J Dagg 2012

Revised 2016

This new edition December 2019

The right of Stephanie Dagg to be identified as the author of the work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright Acts. All rights reserved.

Cover illustration by Roger Fereday, www.rogerferedayillustrator.co.uk

Cover design by http://www.editing.zone

Editing, layout and formatting by http://www.editing.zone

Smashwords edition

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it wasn’t purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the author.

Disclaimer

This book is based on actual events. To protect the privacy of the persons involved, and in the interest of narrative clarity, some names, locations and conversations have been changed.

Preface

Nécessité fait loi.

Necessity calls the shots.

It’s now ten years since we left Ireland to come to France. We’ve come a long way – not just physically, but culturally too. We no longer froth at the mouth over lunchtime closing. We happily shake hands and kiss cheeks with anyone. We manage just fine without digestive biscuits and custard powder. Our three children are completely Frenchified. They’re at the stage now where they’re forgetting English words and prefer reading French books to English ones. Chris and I will never get to that point, but that’s OK. However, I am in training to become a French citizen. My Gallic shrug is right up there with the best of them, and I look hot in a beret. I even know some of the words to the Marseillaise, without doubt the goriest national anthem out there.

These days I’m a lake manager, gîte owner and llama farmer. I throw sweetcorn into the lakes through holes in the ice during winter, scrub floors and toilets in summer and shovel llama poo all year round. But I’m also an English graduate, an editor and a writer. I’m articulate, literate, coherent, circumlocutory – OK, verbose. I love being witty and playing with words. I have a vast vocabulary. In English, anyway. The hardest thing about being an ex-pat has been getting used to being a bumbling moron in the foreign tongue. You’re reduced to the language ability of a small child. There are loads of words you don’t know. So instead of saying, for example, at the garage: My electronic dashboard has stopped working, you have to go with: It does not work, the big electric thing at the front of the car that tells you your speed and how much petrol you have and what time it is. And if you could say simply I need an application form for a student bus pass please instead of "Please may I have the particular piece of paper on which I need to write lots of information so that my son who will be starting at lycée in September can have the special ticket that means he can travel cheaply on the weekly bus to Gueret," well, life would be a doddle.

Face to face I don’t have too much trouble communicating. Body language and hand gestures are wonderful things. But the phone is dangerous. It can lead to the Dark Side. Conversations can easily veer into unknown territory and leave both parties wondering what the heck is going on. This can be handy at times, for example when cold callers are trying to sell you something unidentifiable and you’re in the middle of tea. These days we just reply chirpily in exaggerated pidgin French along the lines of: My uncle is a potato and I keep croissants under the bed. Now I must sing to my onions. Hello please, and put the phone down. Works like a charm.

Here are a few of our worst faux pas – I think. Who knows what horrors we’ve actually come out with completely unawares as we merrily destroy the French language during conversations and leave a trail of puzzled people behind us.

To teacher: Ruadhri was absent from school because of an annoying pencil case. (I used trousse = pencil case, instead of toux = cough)

To chemist: I need a box of flies because I have a cold. (mouches = flies instead of mouchoirs = tissues)

To another teacher: Please excuse Caiti from sport today because she has tortoised her ankle. (tortue = tortoise instead of tordu = twisted)

To stranger in shop who asked where we came from: We used to dress ourselves in Ireland. (s’habiller = to dress instead of habiter = live)

To café owner: I think I left my long purple ladder here yesterday. Did you find it? (échelle = ladder instead of écharpe = scarf)

To a neighbour: We have lots of animals on our farm – llamas, goats, rabbits, chickens, a dog and a prostitute. (I actually used the correct word for a female cat, namely chatte, but it is a term to avoid as it means a slut or a particular part of the female anatomy.)

I put the village idiot out of a job when we moved here but luckily the French don’t mind us sharing their country with them, particularly when we help keep the schools open with our kids, provide more income in the commune through local taxes, and, with our clumsy foreigness, give them plenty to feel superior about.

But why did we come to France in the first place? Why did we aspire to go down in the world, to leave the country where we could communicate successfully and actually use our painstakingly acquired professional qualifications to make a living? Why did we abandon all that and go abroad, where, at least at first, we would be scratching a living so far below the poverty line as to be complete out of sight of it? Insanity? Bloody-mindedness? Misguided romanticism? The spirit of adventure?

None of the above. Quite simply - necessity. It was the only thing to do. As you’ll see ...

Chapter 1: Time To Leave

Aux grands maux les grands remèdes

Desperate times call for desperate measures

We arrived in Ireland in 1992, when times were good, cars were held together by string and food prices were almost non-existent. Having only ever lived in cramped housing estates in England, with tiny gardens and too many neighbours, we couldn’t believe our luck at finding a bungalow in the countryside to rent. We called it Harry’s House, after our amiable landlord. He didn’t put the rent up in over three years, and on the rare occasions we had a building-related problem, he was at the front door to sort it out within minutes.

Harry’s House had a large back garden and a fantastic view over nearby fields and distant Cork city. It was in a row of five other bungalows, all housing lovely families.

We were a young(ish) couple with our first child. Chris had been made redundant, a victim of Thatcher’s Britain, literally a few weeks after I’d smugly told my previous employers, an accountancy firm, that I wouldn’t be coming back after maternity leave. So the search to provide for this suddenly frighteningly dependent family brought him to the Emerald Isle, initially on a temporary basis. After a few months that became a permanent basis, and we moved everything across between May and September. The biggest part of the move was interesting, to say the least. We needed to get some kind of document from our solicitor before our possessions could be shipped abroad. Hours before we were meant to leave, we still hadn’t got it. Chris was afflicted with a stomach bug so I was the only functioning one. With infant in arms, I bellowed at the solicitor to get his finger out and give us the damned bit of paper. We didn’t like our solicitor. About six months earlier, our neighbours had suddenly decided that their lives weren’t worth living without a few extra inches of land. So they dreamt up a boundary dispute in which our solicitor was frankly worse than useless, giving contradictory advice and doing nothing helpful at all. And now we depended on him to be allowed to get our goods and chattels out of the country on time. It was worrying. Anyway, the letter appeared with minutes to spare, so we could drive off into the sunset. Boy, were we glad to go.

We’d worked out that, with careful budgeting, I could be a stay-at-home mum, at least for a few years. Before my misguided foray into the world of finance, where I was a square peg in a round hole, or rather an English graduate in a world of maths, I’d been a desk-editor in the educational department of Hodder and Stoughton in Kent, and then a sales rep for a clutch of academic presses, working from home in Northumberland. I’d done an MPhil in Publishing Studies at Stirling University after my degree at Oxford, and publishing was my first love. So I seized the opportunity parenthood now gave me to get back into it. I slowly established myself as a freelance editor and indexer, something I’m still doing. From editing I meandered into authoring, and produced almost thirty books during my years in Ireland.

Caitlin arrived in 1994 and we were well content with our ‘gentleman’s family’, as they call it in Ireland, of a boy and then a girl. We finally sold the house we’d left behind in Hartlepool in 1995 and, within weeks of burying my Mum, we moved out of Harry’s House and into our own one at Killountain, Innishannon. We loved Binn an Tí, despite never knowing for sure what the house’s name actually meant. Some people said it meant ‘apex of the roof’ and others ‘the woman of the house’. Not a great deal of common ground between these two, but that seems to be a feature of the Irish language.

The house was perched at the very top of a hill. There was a stunning view but a permanent gale. Nothing grew in the garden and our bathroom at the back of the house was always sub-zero. When the hurricane hit at Christmas 1997, it’s frankly amazing that we only lost a few tiles and not the whole top storey. But as before, and always the case in Ireland, we had wonderful neighbours and we were happy. This was it. We were ‘settled’. We started to map out our future, now that we had our perfect family and our lovely house. But it doesn’t do to make plans. Things suddenly change.

My dad finally smoked himself to death in 2000. There were two major repercussions from this. Now that he’d gone, all ties with my childhood home and town were gone too. On top of losing a wonderful human being from my life, being unrooted was tough and I was very upset. Chris was amazingly and constantly supportive, so much so that six weeks later, the day before his 42nd birthday, we found out that I was pregnant. The baby was due somewhere around my 39th birthday. That was funeral fallout number one, and talk about gobsmacked. This most definitely hadn’t been on our ‘to do’ list. We were too old for this! After a stunned day, our shock turned to delight at the thought of welcoming a new life into our family. The prospect of labour pains, broken nights and having to borrow back all the baby equipment we’d given away after Caitlin outgrew it was less appealing, but an integral part of the deal. We also realised that there was no way we’d fit an extra person into our already bulging-at-the-seams house. Binn An Tí had always been on the small side, but we liked it so much. However, now we would have to move on.

The second fallout was that Dad left some money, enough to buy a plot of land at Finnis, near Bandon. We luckily got in just before Irish land prices went crazy, and for 50,000 Irish punts we became the owners of an acre or so of land. It had a stream and was generally rather boggy, but the top end of the site was ideal for our new chez nous. And so, thanks to Tony Barry our builder, Srihain an Sionnoch came into being in 2003. The name means ‘Stream of the Fox’. We were offered a variety of versions and spellings for it, naturally, but stuck with that one. It was a fantastic house, way too big, but after Binn An Tí we felt the need to overcompensate. Size mattered. Its best feature was the glass frontage to the hall, which filled the house with light. We had more space than we knew what to do with. We lived there for three years but never got round to even setting foot in one of the rooms.

I continued to be happy in Ireland. Now that I was a popular children’s author, I added visits to schools and libraries to my job description. Ruadhrí came along, together with his travel playpen, and took part in every workshop. I loved these sessions, which included getting the kids to dress up as a book, and later as all the people involved in producing a book – author, editor, printer, bookseller, and so on. I was aiming to make writing seem fun. I’d been to author workshops where a po-faced writer mumbled his or her way through one of their stories and I thought that sucked. So I aimed higher and came up with my act. But then, I always was a show off.

Chris, however, was on a downward spiral. A chemist by training, he started off working in Ireland in 1992 for Angus Chemicals, running a lab. Angus became Hickson Pharmachem very shortly afterwards, just in time for an explosion at the site in 1993. (Nothing to do with Chris, honestly.) Needless to say, that brought it a lot of bad press. Hickson never thrived and the factory was taken over in 1997 by Warner. Finally, in 2001 Pfizer couldn’t resist having a go at ownership of it. Each time new layers of management came in and Chris was moved further and further sideways. Promises of promotion never materialised and people-persons rather than technical-persons seemed to dominate. It became harder to keep going. There was the real threat that he’d lose his sanity or succumb to heart disease and stress. Life wasn’t fun anymore. Then redundancy loomed. This was our chance to change our lives.

We’d toyed with the idea of moving to France a number of times, but never very seriously. It seemed too big a deal. After our honeymoon in Cornwall, every successive holiday had been in France, discovering different regions of it. In the early years of our marriage, we’d roll off a plane with our road bikes, tent and minimal supplies and cycle-tour a particular region, covering more than a hundred miles a day. Post-children that changed, inevitably. We took the car, either fitting our sturdy, child-towing mountain bikes precariously to the roof, or, in later years, on to the top of a small trailer. Child life-support filled most of the car. Oh yes, and the children.

We tried a couple of campsites but didn’t have a whole lot of luck. One year a hurricane hit the coast of Brittany and literally blew the tent away from over our heads. The next year we holidayed late in the season and the area around our caravan (we’d upgraded) was black with barbecue-tray emptyings-out. The kids were covered from head to toe in ash every night after playing in it. And that was the year Benj took against personal cleanliness. The whole campsite reverberated to his incessant, earsplitting but polite bellows of No thank you! when we shoved him under running water every night.

So we moved even more upmarket (but down-priced surprisingly) to hiring a gîte, a holiday cottage. This was more like it – proper beds and space to swing a cat in. However, there was always a strong element of the unknown with a gîte booking. Those days, i.e. pre-Internet, you based your entire rental decision on a very brief paragraph with puzzling abbreviations, and a postage-stamp-sized photo. Frankly, you had no idea what you were actually getting. Some we booked were great, some turned out to be disasters, but we just got on with it. (Oh, if only that mentality still existed!) In 2000, that fateful year, we even went house hunting. We looked at a couple of properties. One was tempting. For the equivalent of 19,000 Irish punts we could have bought a rambling, rundown farmhouse. True, it had no bathroom facilities other than a toilet literally in a corner of the kitchen. There was, bizarrely, a large swimming pool full of goldfish in the huge garden. The pool had been there so long it had sunk roughly 50 cms into the ground. But then Dad had his cigarette-induced stroke and the struggle to get home from strike-bound France began, and we forgot about buying a house there.

Until 2005. Never mind that we’d hardly started decorating our new house yet, it was time to leave it. It was truly a ‘now or never’ moment. Benj was about to start his Junior Cert course, Ruadhrí was set to debut in Junior Infants and Caiti would be moving up to senior school. If we were going to move, it had to be before September 2006. It was going to be fairly tough on the kids, and the older they were, the harder most likely. It was time to do some serious prospecting for property in France.

I prepared for it like a military campaign. I spent hours on the Internet. OK, I used to spend hours on the Internet anyway, but now this was time more usefully spent than browsing on eBay. I looked up properties that matched what we wanted. Which was? Well, we needed somewhere to live, and some means of making a living. I’d be able to carry on part-time editing but that wouldn’t keep us alive. Chris wouldn’t be able to carry on his professional career, so what could we do instead? The obvious option was providing holiday accommodation. Time was you could live off a gîte or bed and breakfast in France. But then everyone jumped on the bandwagon and there is now a surfeit of holiday properties. The famous Gîtes de France network alone has around 55,000 self-catering properties on its books. Clévacances, the next largest, has around 24,000, and there are dozens more smaller outfits. Quite frankly, if you get ten weeks’ bookings for a gîte per year, you’re doing well. There’s that much competition. The way to improve on that is to specialise. Look for a niche. Chris was an angler, so, why not provide fishing lakes with our gîte? There’s a lot of pressure on the fishing waters in the UK and Ireland so there’s been a long tradition of anglers going abroad on fishing holidays, and particularly on carp fishing holidays in France. That seemed worth checking out. It proved to be our best bet, so we added a lake to our requirements.

Chris got busy doing a correspondence course on fishery management, and I carried on my research and planning. I found out all there is to know about owning lakes in France. I read book after book about how to make a living by running your own business in France. Some of these books were inspiring, some were depressing, but all of them, it turned out later, not actually that helpful. A couple were positively idiotic. I read memoirs by other pioneering ex-pats. Those were much more useful. I also worked for a TEFL diploma, just in case times grew very desperate.

But mainly I looked for our future home. I cordoned off half the (unpainted) lounge and spread out maps with cunningly colour-coded pins stuck in, showing what property was where. Red for hot favourites, blue for lakes without houses on site with them, green for promising-all-round packages, and yellow for when-all-else-failed. But every day there were changes. The place we thought was absolutely perfect and the only one that could possibly work for us got sold on a regular basis. Despair. New dream properties appeared on the scene. Rapture. I was up and down emotionally a hundred times a day, and rapidly becoming a nervous wreck. Would I even survive long enough to make our planned move?

We’d narrowed our physical search to Limousin. This is pretty much slap bang in the middle of France. Until the end of 2015 this consisted of the départements of Creuse, Correze and Haute-Vienne. In 2016 Limousin was absorbed into a much greater super-région incorporating Poitou-Charentes to the north-east and Aquitaine to the south-east. (As I do my revisions to this book in April 2016, the région is known as Aquitaine-Limousin-Poitou-Charentes, although that’s only a temporary name, thank goodness. There’ll be a vote soon for the new name and Grand Aquitaine is the hot favourite.)

Limousin as was is the lake district of France. And remember, we needed a lake. Limousin has thousands of lakes, and even more crumbling farmhouses and cottages, each waiting for a deranged foreigner to come and nurture it back into full health. French people don’t do renovating. They prefer new houses. A further bonus was that Limousin was also one of the cheapest areas of France for property then.

We settled on a week in late November to go and match reality to my coloured pins. Everyone advises you not to take children, and above all young children, when you go house hunting abroad. But we had no alternative. We were already ex-pats in Ireland so had no handy family to leave them with. But anyway, they needed to come. They were part of the adventure – three-fifths of the driving force behind it. Our search for our better life was so our youngsters would have it too. They needed to see where they were going to live. Besides, they were very excited about the whole thing.

I wrote letters to the children’s schools explaining that we needed them to mitch for