Son of Serge Bastarde (24 page)

  There was a movement near some rhododendron bushes under the big oak trees. We watched as a large hare hopped out into the open. He was big, much larger than a rabbit, with long ears and a head that had an almost skull-like quality. Hares are embedded in folk myths from cultures all over the world. We had never seen one so close as this before. He stopped, stood up on his hind paws and turned to look straight at us. Buster stiffened, straining at his lead, but the hare wasn't frightened. He watched for a moment, then dropped back on all fours and loped back through the bushes. It was thrilling. His appearance added to the absolutely magical feeling the house gave us. We loved it!

  We rang the estate agent and told him we wanted to make an offer. He said he would pass it on to the German couple. Later he got back to us. They had accepted our offer and we arranged to meet them that Sunday.

The studded oak door was opened by a giant of a man in khaki shorts wearing a pink T-shirt that bore the legend 'Onwards Go in a Frostily Direction' on the front in green letters. His hair was cropped short, shaved up the sides and he had a small, square moustache.

  
Oh dear,
I thought...
unfortunate moustache!

  'Hello, pleased to meet you.' He shook my hand and almost broke my knuckles with a macho squeeze. I hate it when men do that. It seems to be the antithesis of a friendly greeting. He said his name was Berthold and introduced his wife, Frieda. She stepped forward and gave us both kisses on our cheeks. She was blonde, ample-bosomed and wore a tasteful floral print dress. They took us on a guided tour of the house, which they proudly announced was being featured in the next edition of the French interiors magazine
Maison et Jardin
. They were ecstatic about this. So why were they selling then, we asked.

  'It is too much for us now, we are getting old,' Berthold confided. 'We don't have time to keep the garden nice.' He explained to me that they had had a lot of trouble with 'the Seven Sleepers'.

  'They build their liddle nests in the loft and make a horrible smell.' He took me out to his workshop and opened a cupboard filled with strange looking intricate wire traps. 'We catch them and take them deep into the forest and let them go,' he explained. 'It is
verboten
to kill them.'

  I wanted to know more about these 'Seven Sleepers'. I had never heard of them.

  'Ya, you call them Seven Sleepers in English,' he said. 'They are liddle rodents that sleep seven months of the year. The Romans used to eat them. You must know this word.'

  Ah! He meant dormice.

  'We don't call them Seven Sleepers,' I said.

  'Ah no, you do,' he insisted.

  I decided it was a waste of time to argue about it.
I'll dump those traps,
I thought
, as soon as we move in.
Although we had been 'townies' just like them, living in the French countryside had altered our view. We found the idea of cuddly, furry little rodents living in the loft quite appealing. We had had swarms of rats at harvest time in Portugal so dormice held no fears for us.

  I was amazed at how tidy his workshop was, thinking about the mess mine was in. I'm always impressed by people who keep their things neat and promise myself I'll follow their example and be like that in future, but somehow I never manage it. Berthold took me up into the loft to see where the Seven Sleepers had been making their nests. He said he had removed all the loft insulation because it smelt bad. I was thinking we would have to put a load more in for us and the dormice. We would be living here all year round and the Landes can get very chilly during the short winter.

  Berthold and Frieda were pleased we were buying their house but mistakenly believed we were keen gardeners like them. They had passed so many happy hours working in the garden, they said, and spent a good two hours telling us what we had to do and in what season.

  'Everyone has been so kind and welcoming to us here,' Frieda said, her eyes filling with tears. I was surprised. This was the total opposite from my perception of how Germans are generally received here in France. Mr Leglise, our neighbour, often made disparaging remarks to me about the Germans. '
Les Bosch
occupied us during the war and now we're in the EU they're just coming in and buying us out and acting like
aristos
,' he moaned. I felt he was qualified to make this complaint. He lost his only son in the army during World War Two. Considering this, his reaction was mild.

  The so-called Franco-German alliance doesn't really give the true picture. I hadn't realised just how the Germans were viewed by the ordinary country folk in France until we borrowed a friend's German-registered VW camper for a couple of weeks. The reception we received from our local supermarket petrol station was cold to say the least, and the looks from passers-by were decidedly frosty. In my teens I toured Germany with my band, Lester Square and the GTs, which subsequently broke up over there and I ended up, at one stage, working in the cloakroom of a club in Münster. I had made friends with the young drummer who worked in the club and spent many a happy hour hanging out with the resident group. The drummer's name was Udo Lindenberg and he went on to become one of the most celebrated rock stars in Germany. When I was handing over coats at the end of an evening, half-cut middle-aged German clubbers would embrace me when they discovered I was British, insisting, 'We didn't want to fight you English, you are like us... we never meant to go to war with you.' And I had to admit they had a point. Germans are like us. We understand the German Anglo-Saxon mindset more than the Gallic one. It is much closer to ours. The Saxons were Germanic peoples who invaded England and merged with the Angles and Jutes to become the Anglo-Saxons, so it's hardly surprising we get on.

  'It is a little paradise here,' said Frieda.

  'It's so hard to leave this wonderful idyll,' said Berthold.

  Frieda was crying and even Berthold wiped away a tear. I decided they must have done something right to have won over their French neighbours. They were a kindly couple. Perhaps the Franco-German alliance in the EU had forced the French to view the Germans in a new light.

  As we drove off through the pines I looked back and saw the pair of them standing outside their house, waving us goodbye.

  'What do you think?' I asked Helen.

  'We can move straight in, they've done all the work.'

  'All we've got to do is sell our place,' I said.

  'Don't be so pessimistic,' she said. 'We'll sell it, wait and see. I've got a
prêt relais
lined up in the meantime. It'll give us two years to sell our place.'

  'What if we don't sell it in two years?'

  'Don't even think about it,' she said.

  I wasn't that confident. Although I liked this house in the forest, I was daunted by the thought of moving and leaving a place I had grown so fond of and all the neighbours we liked. 'I'll miss Roland and Mr Leglise,' I said.

  'There'll be other neighbours here and you can always go back and see our old friends, it's only a forty-minute drive away – not far.'

  'I suppose,' I said.

  But I had the same sad, lonely feeling I always had when I was about to leave somewhere. And I knew in my experience I tended not to go back once I left a place I loved.

'I'm fed up with all this scrabbling about selling bric-a-brac,' said Serge. 'It's a misery in this weather.' We were sheltering from the pouring rain under our
parapluie
(umbrella) hunched up in woollies and waterproofs at Anglet market near Bayonne, watching the wind catch the sheets of drizzle, spraying our tables, soaking our stock. It was cold and miserable and there wasn't a customer in sight.

  A sudden strong gust of wind caught the
parapluie
so we had to grab the pole to stop it from going over.

  'Anyway, I'm going to go upmarket,' said Serge, holding on grimly. 'I want to become a proper
antiquaire
, Johnny.'

  I turned to look at him, surprised. It suddenly struck me as funny. I wanted to laugh, watching the rain dripping off the end of his nose. I thought he was joking but he was deadly serious. 'Yes, I think I'll book us into a
salon d'antiquités
and leave all this misery behind.'

  Maybe he was right but I wasn't sure about it. Helen and I had taken stands at more upmarket fairs in England but so far we had never done a
salon
in France. The weather here was generally more conducive to open-air markets, but right now the idea was starting to appeal to me.
Salons
were normally held in halls, in the warm. The stands were expensive so you had to make several good sales just to pay your rent, the hope being that a richer type of customer would be attracted by the opulence of the antiques on offer. With a better-heeled class of clientele there was more chance of shifting several expensive pieces and making a bigger profit. That was the theory, anyway. Most
brocanteurs
I knew would never dream of risking their meagre earnings at a
salon
so I was surprised when Serge had mentioned it.

  I thought he was just daydreaming but the following day he phoned to say he had booked a stand at a
salon
to be held in Rennes in the north of France and wanted us to share it with him and Diddy. The price was high but affordable when split between the two of us. It was a four-day fair and so we talked it over and decided we'd risk it. We would throw in our lot with Serge and Diddy and become 'big time antiques dealers'.

  A month later Helen and I set off with Buster in the van for the
salon
, arriving late on Wednesday to discover to our horror that our cubicle had 'Bastarde & Fils' printed in big letters on a sign over it.

  'I'm not standing under that all day,' said Helen. 'It's embarrassing. I don't care how big a deal this is.'

  'He must have forgotten our half,' I said. 'He was very excited; he's probably always wanted a sign like that.'

  'Yes, obviously I don't care about our name, it's just that name – "Bastarde and Son". It might as well say "Steptoe and Son"! Or better still, "Dick Emery and Son".'

  We collapsed into hysterical laughter. What were we doing?

  Looking around I was surprised to see most of the French dealers had already set up their stands, tastefully arranging them to resemble opulent rooms in expensive homes with valuable rugs and antique furniture softly lit with spotlights and table lamps, the walls bedecked with precious paintings.

  'I hadn't imagined we'd need to bring our own lighting,' I told Helen. I felt discouraged as I began unloading our furniture, piling it up higgledy-piggledy.

  'I don't know how I let Serge talk me into this – we're going to look like amateurs. The richos won't give our stuff a second glance.'

  'Will you pull yourself together,' said Helen. 'Don't be so negative. You always get intimidated. I'll sort this out and make it look really nice.'

  Under Helen's guidance we began arranging the stand and waxing and polishing some of the better pieces of English furniture we had brought with us. I was relieved to discover there were overhead spotlights available with a control panel and after a couple of hours' work our half of the stand began to look quite inviting. I moved a couple of spots to pick out the softly glowing pieces of polished furniture. Very classy! Helen had pulled it off, just like she said she would. And I had changed my mind. How could we fail to make a fortune?

  'Still purveying tat to the peasants?' I looked up into the supercilious face of Lord Snooty.

  'Algie!' I was pleased to see him, despite the arrogant comments. I was getting used to them, even finding them quite amusing. 'What are you doing here?'

  'Oh, I always do the upper echelon antiques fairs; you get a much higher class of clientele.' He was wearing plus fours, a loud pair of golfing shoes and a tartan waistcoat set off with a Paisley pattern cravat and a tweed deerstalker. He looked like an eccentric lord. He was the French stereotype of a mad Englishman.