Sample Extract from A Normandy Tapestry

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Rene and Therese The Biggins' neighbours

Alan Biggins moved to France with his family to learn French. The job that he took to finance his studies was selling French property (usually to the British).

This not only gave him a privileged insight into the heart of French rural life, but also an insight into the sometimes seamy world of property selling, as the following extract from Chapter 4 shows.

You may wish to print this page off so you can enjoy it in a comfortable chair with a glass of Calvados or French wine...

Let the buyer beware!

......While agreeing with his customers that Normandy is ‘just like England when I was a child, the competent agent will make sure that his customer realises that there are important practical differences.

For example, metered water, although an excellent conservation measure, can work out to be very, very, costly if a pipe bursts and the leak goes undiscovered for a long time. And in some country districts (ours included) you don’t put out the rubbish for the dustman, you take it to the tip yourself.

Again, it is the law in France that chimneys must be swept each year. If a valid sweep’s certificate cannot be produced, then fire insurance is invalid. This is complicated by the fact that getting a sweep to come when he says he will is difficult in the French countryside. (A sub-plot of one of Herge's ‘Tintin’ books is Captain Haddock’s repeated attempts to get a broken stair mended. The mason gives a bewildering array of excuses as he fails to keep appointment after appointment. Herge was drawing from life. In rural France, appointments are regarded as declarations of intent rather than binding agreements.)

The agent should be able to advise on French electricity. This means knowing its cost structure for varying supply (complex this), that ring-mains are illegal, the different tariffs that can be had, and that it is impossible to run a British cooker from the French three-phase power supply. If he’s worth his salt, he will know the difference between SECAM and PAL (not a dog food), the difference between French and British plumbing and roofing, and a thousand other things beside.

It’s a reasonable assumption on the buyer’s part that the agent will know this kind of stuff. The agency charges are three to four times higher than that are in Britain, so the buyer expects ‘cost plus’ to be equalled by ‘service plus.’ Sadly, the poor buyer is often doomed to be bitterly disappointed. It appears that I am far from being the only agent who has been told to ‘learn on the job’. Others have begun their careers as I did, as ignorant of French laws as the customers they serve but without, alas, the helping hands of my own saviour, Peter Edwards. The mistakes by which such agents learn usually concern boundaries, access and services. An amusing example of the latter was given to me by Mr Verger, the fosse septique man.

The fosse septique (septic tank) is an institution in France (there are three million of them). Not only is it a system of sewage, it is also a living organism which must be treated with respect. This is a lesson that many owners of holiday homes who have brought disinfectant from Britain have learned to their cost. After cleaning their toilet a few times, they wonder why there is a nasty smell. The answer is simple. Their fosse is stone ‘mort’. Micro organisms do not thrive on ammonia.

The fosse must be cosseted. Like many of us, it prefers its native food; the specially prepared toilet cleaners available for it. In fact, not only must toilets be cleaned with specially formulated cleaners, the F.S. is partial to supplementary feeding. Products are available to double its life-span, though the more frugal simply feed it on yeast.

Mr Verger is an expert on the F.S. He puts them in for a living. The first time that I saw him he was digging a hole and some trenches outside an empty and almost ruinous house, in an area where I had several properties. I thought that it would be useful to know a man who could do such a job and returned on the following morning to talk to him. I timed my arrival for twelve o’clock, when, as I had anticipated, he was just on the point of knocking off for lunch. The sky was darkening ominously.

Mr V. is a small man with bristling black hair and a ferocious look. "Nice day" was my opening gambit. (The French discuss the weather just as much as the English, and often in the same ironical terms.)

"Mouron weather" he grunted.

"Mouron weather?" I repeated blankly.

"That’s right. There’s been so much rain lately, it’s flushing them out of their holes."

"What’s a mouron?" I asked.

He looked at me in surprise. "Small creature, like a lizard. Black, with bright yellow markings. They live in dry, dark places. In old houses they lurk behind the back-plate of the fire; outdoors, under tree roots. Heavy rain always flushes them out." He shuddered. "Nasty creatures."

I was still none the wiser.

"Well then" said Mr Verger, thawing a little "let’s see if we can’t find one for you. You may have luck." He led me to the front of the building, where a concrete plate was let into the ground. He lifted it: "This is the kind of place they like."

I peered down into the ground. The hole was about nine inches deep. In it was a stopcock for the water supply.

"See anything?"

"A toad …wait a minute, there is something else." I reached into the ground and hooked out an animal; it was, as Monsieur Verger had said, like a lizard. It made no complaint but lay docile on my hand, blinking stupidly in the livid pre-storm light. I looked into the trap again. There was a second animal. This, too, I fished out. It lay as unmoving as its mate. They were, as Mr Verger had said, the most brilliant black and yellow.

"I wouldn’t do that" counselled Mr Verger with a short laugh. "They’re poisonous."

Hastily I put the creatures back and replaced the cover. ‘Mouron’, as I found out later, is the Norman dialect word for a salamander.

Monsieur Verger invited me to join him while he ate. The heavens opened as we entered the building. Two years of drought was being followed by two years of rain.

We sat on a granite cider press, the only furnishing the room possessed, and Mr V. offered me a cigarette and some cider. I declined the cigarette, but the cider was good. Yes, he agreed, he was indeed excavating a hole and channels for a fosse septique. He cut several slices from a large sausage, fished out a small jar of pickled gherkins, and began his lunch.

The rain began to fall, making a din on the corrugated iron roof. A cow lowed mournfully in the next room. I asked Mr V. if he had a pump for emptying septic tanks? "Bien sur Monsieur."

In that case I had a story which would while away the time while he ate. It was a tale told me by a friend in England, a one time farm worker. Farmers are notoriously ‘careful’, and my friend’s ex-boss was no exception. He had ‘done-up’ a cottage on his farm and let it out very successfully. The holiday home used a septic tank for its drainage and when it was unmistakably full the farmer decided to empty it himself. Consequently he hired a drainage tank and pump.

It seemed easy enough. Simply remove the septic tank’s cover, drop in the pipe and turn on the pump. The first two parts of the operation had, indeed, gone to plan. Then the farmer switched on the suction pump. He had, however, overlooked one small detail. The pump was designed to blow as well as suck. The farmer had turned the switch the wrong way. Instead of being drawn from the septic tank into the waiting receptacle, the effluent was blown back at high pressure into the holiday home, with, as they used to say in the ‘Carry On’ films, hilarious consequences: or so my friend the farm worker thought, though the farmer didn’t agree.

Monsieur Verger seemed to find the story amusing. He gagged on his cider and sausage, and I had to hammer his back hard. The cow mooed in protest.

The Frenchman now proceeded to cap my tale. His story also concerned an Englishman, a septic tank and a holiday home, Well, not a home exactly. It was a big old barn on the side of a hill, which the Englishman had purchased through an agent, another ‘anglais’.

Mr V. came onto the scene when the buyer, accompanied by his agent, wanted a quote for a fosse septique. One look at the place had been enough to tell him that it was totally out of the question. There was a good half acre of land (I translate from Mr Verger’s hectares) but it was all uphill. One can’t run sewage uphill and the underlying stone, being granite, was impossible to excavate.

Then and there the buyer and his agent had had a furious altercation, of which Mr Verger had not, of course, understood a word. He tapped me on the knee:

"I may not speak anglais, mais, evidement, there was a story there. Like you, Monsieur, I am partial to a good story.

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and lit a cigarette with slow deliberation. "I tracked down the original owner to the next village. He told me that he had originally offered nearer an acre of land, half of it downhill. And the price he had asked had been ‘correct’. The agent, however, was very overbearing. He proceeded to beat the owner down in front of the English client. He offered thirty thousand less than the asking price. The owner needed the money, and he sold."

Mr Verger took another pull of cider.

"When the time came to sign the sale’s agreement, the owner came up with a provision; the lower half of the land was not to be included in the sale. That didn’t upset either the buyer or agent. As you know, Monsieur, land is not worth much around here, and besides, half an acre was quite enough as far as the buyer was concerned. The agent, however, insisted that the owner pay the Geometre's fees to readjust the boundaries. The owner put up a show of reluctance, then agreed. The land was divided and the sale went through."

"And when the new owner tried to get permission to change the usage of the building from agricultural to residential, it was refused because there was no room for a fosse septique?" I remembered Peter Edward’s training.

Mr Verger laughed immoderately once more. The rain beat harder outside. Finally he came back to his story:

"Voila, Monsieur. The purchaser had to buy the other half acre. Of course the price was a little higher than the agricultural rate. Sixty thousand francs."

He raised a finger. "But, ‘attention’, Monsieur, the original owner was only an ignorant countryman: a peasant like myself. It was not the fact that he had been out-bargained that made him plot his revenge. It was the way in which it had been done. Arrogance is a dangerous failing. When it is coupled with ignorance, it can be fatal."

It sounded as though Monsieur Verger was a philosopher. Maybe he had learned to be one. In France there is a university qualification in refuse collection and doubtless another in the disposal of effluent. To get into higher education for these (or any other) courses the student must study several ‘core’ subjects, of which philosophy is one. So Mr Verger may well have spent several years pondering on the enigma of man’s higher nature in order to become qualified to dig holes to cater for his baser one. In any case a degree of - or preferably A Degree In – philosophy is very useful when living in rural France.

Ignorance and arrogance are a fatal mixture?

"In England," I replied, "we say that where there’s muck there’s money."

There is no equivalent saying in French, and the thought tickled Mr Verger.

"In your industry, Monsieur," he retorted as he carefully wiped the blade of his knife and folded it back into the shaft, preparatory to returning to his work, "the reverse would also appear to be the case."

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Find out about Selling French Dreams the sequel to this book 

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