The leaving of Pudding Island
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 25: After the Crisis
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Tony Barrell
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I spent much of 2008 in France, Spain and Greece, living among British expats, some of them relatives or friends and some complete strangers, all of whom had decided over the previous two decades that they no longer wanted to live in the country of their birth. What started out as a pleasant journey of exploration and reminiscence ended in a jolting confrontation not only with the collapse of capitalism as we know it, but with a more urgent imperative to survive.
The decisions made by the people I knew were mostly based on romantic dreams they had harboured in their twenties but could only realise in middle age. The accelerant was the decade-long power of the British pound, whose strength against the euro gave owners of modest homes from all over the United Kingdom the opportunity to sell up, buy a little bit of continental Europe and live there on quite low incomes or pensions. Sterling peaked in 2000, when a euro could be bought for 58 pence, but in January 2009 the two were at parity, with the pound falling. It was a disaster the English had never imagined.
Whether Provence, the Ardèche, Tuscany, Umbria, Amalfi, the Adriatic, the Algarve or all the costas of Mediterranean Spain, ‘the Sud' has been more or less overrun by refugees from what Lawrence Durrell once vilified as Pudding Island. In the mid-1930s, Durrell removed himself forever from a life infused with the overpowering fragrance of brown Windsor soup and the dreary preoccupations of men in Fair Isle cardigans who smoked pipes by the fire and only ever left the house to go to the shed.
Durrell's discontent resonated with many who grew up in the 1960s with a frustrated feeling of entitlement to a life in the Midi, the Riviera, the Aegean or anywhere ‘away'. Many came to Australia, still the favourite destination of the evacuating Briton, but in the 1950s, aside from Durrell, the only foreigners who lived in the Sud were other writers – Somerset Maugham at Cap Ferrat, Robert Graves on Majorca – or a film-star-turned-princess like Grace Kelly in Monaco. Durrell's books – Prospero's Cell and Reflections on a Marine Venus – started the undertow of desire for the Mediterranean idyll. Without him there would be no Club Med, A Year in Provence or Mama Mia. Now three million Britons live in Europe, a third of them in Spain.
WHO WOULD HAVE GUESSED that in some of France's village schools, settlers from Pudding Island would one day make the native tongue the second language taught and the French a minority in their own land?
Nonetheless, I was shocked three years ago when my younger cousin David Chenery told me he was leaving his ancestral home of Combs, Stowmarket, Suffolk to live in a remote village in Burgundy – ‘for good', he said. David was not a career person; he'd done jobs in factories, retail and social work. I had never suspected he might decamp to France.
I'd told him I'd got lost looking for his house in Stowmarket, and he said that's just how he and his wife, Pauline, felt: lost in their own space. They had been walled in by glass and besser-brick warehouses and mysterious factories, and their ‘village' had morphed into that dreary light-industrial estate shown in the opening credits of The Office.
Watching from Australia, I often wondered if the ‘English village' David missed still existed outside the constructed rustic eccentricity of television series like The Vicar of Dibley, a place safely removed from city murk and yobs with seven-inch blades, where the church bell tolls the hour and cows wait patiently to be milked. Even morbid television serial-killer stories are set in quaint country locations far from Britain's urban and suburban worlds, where ambulance sirens scream constantly. Listening to David, I realised his idea of contemporary England converged with the social mayhem portrayed in The Bill.
My cousin was not brought up on fifty-year-old literature pining for the Sud but, shrewdly, he'd discovered that France in general – and Burgundy in particular – was full of half-empty villages. Pauline put it plainly: ‘I realised that to get a decent pension in Britain I would have to keep working until I was seventy-one!'
By the time it dawned on them that a house in Suffolk was worth two or three times one they could buy in rural France, the rush was peaking. They sealed a deal just in time. Two years before the credit crunch loomed they found an old stone semi in Faverolles-lès-Lucey: a medieval farm hamlet deep in rural Burgundy, with a thirteenth-century church (sans priest), wheat and barley fields, pastures full of pink and white Charolais cattle, threaded by a small but full flowing tributary of the Seine; with all the wild bird species that have disappeared from Suffolk, and spacious woods with free firewood, mushrooms and nuts, wild boar and fallow deer.
There are no shops (bread arrives daily by van) but eight kilometres away there's a butcher-charcuterie, a baker, a grocer, a doctor and pharmacy and, at the nearest real town, Chatillon-sur-Seine, growers and providores markets with sausage, cheese, meat and fish, fruits from the farms and a help-yourself bar-cum-restaurant with as much as you can eat from the cold meats and pie table (followed by a main course from the kitchen) for twelve euros a head – a mere eight quid in 2007 money. Another half-hour on the road and they can browse the wineries of Nuits St George and Beaune.
They never guessed how soon this would change, how they'd be ‘at the mercy of the exchange rate'. Even governments seemed oblivious to what was coming. The credit crunch was like global warming: plausible, even probable, but it might never happen. As recently as 2007, before ‘sub-prime' found its way into everyday speech, Gordon Brown made the astounding claim that his policies as Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer had ironed out the normal boom-bust business cycle.
Despite the tumultuous descent of the sterling last year, David and Pauline insist they will never return to England. Yes, they are living on pensions and investments from the sale of their home that are worth less than when they moved, but it's not just a matter of economics: ‘There's no respect back home,' says David. ‘It's all yob culture.'
His closest crony is a retired gendarme who is trying to interest him in the crevices of French culture. When I left, Daniel was feeding David a daily diet of Jacques Tati DVDs in return for generous slugs of good malt whisky. Body language was the key, he explained, and showed David how to bow, suck a pipe, doff his hat and jerk up and down on his heels, all in one movement in the manner of the ever-jaunty M. Hulot of the 1950s – a different time, in a different France. A few months later I rang to ask how things were going and David explained that their really good friends in Brittany had decided to sell up and go back to Pudding Island. But they couldn't find a buyer for their French house.
My next call was to have been to a friend in the Dordogne, a ‘professional' expat who had been chasing work for decades all over the world, until he was lucky enough to buy an old stone house in a ‘perfect little French village'. He was always close to the edge financially and, when he developed cancer, wrote to say there was no way he would ‘go home' now because the French medical system was, in his view, superior. He met the cost of winter heating by decamping to Spain for three months. Sadly, the French medical system failed to save him before I could see him again and hear his views on the economic catastrophe.