The Secret Life of France (24 page)

By the time Joe and I had to leave Bertrand and Marie’s
gite
, the bats, which had been the only long-term occupants of our house since the late nineteenth century, had mostly moved down to the cellar. We had hot and cold running water and electricity, but no floors or ceilings (they were mostly rotting planks of chestnut), no heating and no kitchen. Joe built the kitchen and bathrooms around us in the first couple of weeks. We then lived in a combination of extreme luxury and extreme austerity. The free-standing bath, which Joe and I now recognise as a folly, is absurdly large. Every evening in those early days I’d fill it with warm water and watch the moon rising above the hill opposite while the wind whistled through the gaps in the stone walls and the bats flew in and out through the open chimney.

By November I was still fighting the authorities for a telephone line. There were bad storms, power cuts lasting three days and the temperature dropped to minus five. Joe, a Wandsworth boy, was out in the snow all day chopping dead chestnut trees to feed the wood-burning stove around which the boys and I spent most of our time. A message came on my mobile phone. Due to inclement weather the school bus would stop running until further notice. The next day we were snowed in. After three days living by candlelight, Georges and Charles came by
to check on us and towed our car out with their
four-wheel
drive.

Shortly after that I took Gabriel with me to Mende, capital of our department, and occupied the offices of France Télécom. I asked to speak to the person who actually had the power to decide if and when a phone line could be brought to our house. After two and a half hours, eager to get rid of me and more importantly the fractious Gabriel, who had crapped in his nappy, a young woman scribbled the name and number of Monsieur Meunier on the back of an envelope. I called the hapless Meunier almost daily for six weeks. At last France Télécom brought not only a telephone line but a high-speed internet cable directly to the house. The local village was then still struggling with its dial-up connection and, irony of ironies, I began to receive calls via the
Mairie
(town hall) from people seeking advice on how to deal with the French administration.

Still enslaved to my Parisian habits, I invited Bertrand and Marie over for dinner. They’re goat farmers who over generations have inherited several hundred hectares of this valley, most of it wild and unexploited sweet chestnut wood. Every day Marie follows her flock over hill and dale, bringing them home at 5 p.m. for milking. The milk is then sold to the cooperative in the valley and turned into
pélardon
, a cheese that since 2000 has had its own
appellation
or certificate of origin. Gradually, over the past four years Marie has been slowly breeding out her beloved white goats, most of whom have names, in favour of a
chamois-like alpine species that is more robust and produces a creamier milk. Squeezed, as Bertrand describes it, between the quotas of the EU, the targets of the banks and the demands of the supermarkets, the couple have been trying to find ways of improving not so much their income but the quality of their lives. Bertrand, who is also on the board of Crédit Agricole’s regional headquarters, does not sleep well at night. As he approaches retirement, he wants desperately to offer the son who will take over the farm the kind of life that he had dreamt of as a young man.

‘When we came out of agricultural college back in the seventies,’ he told me, ‘we had a dream of the land that we were eager to fulfil. Before the rule of the supermarkets, we were able to live that dream. Not any more. We have no freedom now. Our lives are ruled by quotas, debts and targets.’

Bertrand and Marie’s answer has been to reduce their flock from one hundred and fifty white to eighty chamois goats, and cut out both the collectivists in the co-op and the capitalists in the supermarkets. Recently certified organic – which to all intents and purposes they already were – they are planning to make and sell their own cheese in the local markets. Bertrand’s son has also taken over his grandfather’s bees and now sells chestnut honey as well.

Over time Joe and I have come to understand why it is that Bertrand and Marie tend not to sell their land even when times are hard for them, which they often are. This
land is, for them, as close as anything gets to sacred.

After several evening meals at our house Bertrand finally took me aside on his way to the door and implored me to stop inviting them for dinner.

‘We’re up at five,’ he pleaded. ‘Sunday lunch is better for us.’

There are often unconscious forces driving our decisions, reasons that remain hidden to us. Abandoning the comfort of a lifestyle honed over decades for one that would put me utterly to the test was, I now realise, the result of such forces. In moving from the known to the unknown you can earn the hidden rewards that come from putting yourself in jeopardy and at the same time discover how much there is left to know.

In September 2009 I went to see my local GP about blood in my poo. Tests revealed something called squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) of the anal canal, a fairly rare, but – as my doctor friend Sandrine sweetly pointed out – not very chic form of cancer. So began a stream of jokes about my bottom that would sustain me through the darkest moments of treatment. In fact, I discovered a whole new lexicon of French expressions relating to the arse, my favourite being ‘
avoir le cul borde de nouilles
’, which means literally ‘to have an arse fringed with noodles’, or to be extremely lucky, which at the time I was not.

With my diagnosis, first of a large tumour in my bum with lymphatic spread, then of metastasis in the lungs,
I would fall through into the parallel universe of the sick and their carers, and find myself on the front line of the French national health service. As I underwent
chemotherapy
and radiotherapy, and then surgery and chemo in Montpellier’s anti-cancer centre, trying to wrap my mind around the details of the experience became an essential part of my struggle with the disease.

I am of course quite incapable of comparing the English and French healthcare systems, having only experienced the latter. What I can say is that I felt particularly lucky to live in a society in which no economic considerations seem to be applied to the matter of healing the sick. Cancer being the epidemic here that it is in the UK, I have witnessed many of my neighbours – old and young and, like me, without private health insurance – receive the same quality of treatment as I did. Details like free taxis to and from Montpellier (a three-hour round trip) and home visits from a physiotherapist reveal the generosity of the system. But how long can such munificence last, asks
The Economist
again and again? Something
has
to give, proclaim the pundits of supply-side economics. They’re probably right, I tell myself, but not yet, apparently. Not just yet.

Sandrine, my old anaesthetist friend, who works for the French Ministry of Health, is leading a reform of the Paris hospital service. She says that there is consensus right across the political spectrum that savings must be made. France spends about 10.5 per cent of her GDP on healthcare (versus about 9.8 per cent in the UK) and everyone
agrees that there is an endemic problem of waste in the system that must be addressed. According to Sandrine, though, there is equally entrenched consensus that this crackdown must on no account affect patient care. None of Sandrine’s political masters, either under Sarkozy or more recently under Hollande, made any attempt to argue the cause of triage according to age or lifestyle, for example. Everyone must be equal, in this sphere as in all others.

Everything that I most enjoy and detest about France could be found in the microcosm of her health service. I learnt the particular humiliations that can come with being a patient in a very hierarchical society. There may be a patient charter here, passed back in 1995, but few of the hospital staff seem aware of it. In the week of my diagnosis I was hanging about in a hospital corridor waiting to be wheeled in for an examination when I decided to have a look at the file that was propped up at the end of my bed. It had my name on it, after all. As I was gazing at the largely indecipherable notes a nurse walked by and plucked it from my hand.

‘You’re not allowed to see that,’ she said tartly.

‘Could you give it back please?’ I called out as she marched off down the corridor. ‘It’s my
right
to see it!’ I shouted tearfully.

As she pushed through the swing doors, my specialist was coming the other way. He saw immediately what was going on and gently pulled my file free of her grasp.

‘She is actually entitled to look at it,’ he pointed out kindly.

‘Really?’ she said sniffily. ‘That’s the first I’ve heard of it.’

When he returned it to me he apologised on behalf of his colleague.

‘The old ways are hard to change,’ he observed.

I saw it myself, time after time; patients cowed by the higher authority of the medical staff. On one occasion I was waiting to see the radiologist in the plush, underground bunker that was the radiotherapy department. A door opened and two women emerged, ushered by Professor M, chief consultant and head of the department. I guessed the women were mother and daughter. The professor stood and talked to them in low tones. The mother, a tall, black woman who might have been in her fifties, was weeping softly. The younger woman was comforting her but it was impossible to tell which one of them was sick. Suddenly the professor, who was no more than about five foot four, reached up and pressed his index finger to the weeping woman’s nose. The gesture was so shocking to me, so belittling that I had to stop myself from shouting out, ‘Hey! What do you think you’re doing?’ The woman didn’t seem to mind. She just looked down and opened her bag, took a tissue from it and blew her nose. Then this professor of international repute went back into his office.

I cannot imagine this kind of vainglory going unchecked in a British hospital yet nor can I imagine some of the mollycoddling that I experienced here in France. I remember towards the middle of chemo, when I was feeling anything but beautiful, the hospital beautician leaning over my bed and offering me a facial. Dazzled by her shining hair, her white smile and her perfect make-up,
I lay back in a stupor of gratitude while she massaged my face with cream and talked to me softly about the quest for beauty as a signal and proof of recovery.

I think, too, of a conversation I had on my first day of chemo with a cancer nurse called Marie Christine who was well acquainted with psychoanalytic principles. Asking me whether or not I had any children she stopped me when I had finished rattling off their ages.

‘Have you told Joshua that it’s not his fault?’ she asked.

I had not.

‘I strongly recommend that you do,’ she said authoritatively. ‘He’s at the age when he believes himself to be at the centre of the universe. Everything is potentially his fault.’

Torn between fear and scepticism I rang home the next morning and spoke to Joshua.

‘You know it’s not
your
fault that Mummy’s ill, don’t you?’

‘Yes it is,’ he said firmly. ‘I didn’t put my hand over my mouth when I was coughing that time. Remember?’

When I explained that I didn’t have a cough, Joshua’s relief was palpable. Thank you, Marie Christine, for a particularly useful piece of Freudian orthodoxy.

After dreaming all through treatment of striding across the hills near our house, I found that among the
aftereffects
of the radiotherapy were lymphoedema (swelling in the legs) and acute fibrosis in the pelvis, which left me unable to walk properly for about a year. Three times a week a physiotherapist called Frederic drove the thirty
minutes from the nearest town to treat me. I like walking, but I have never been partial to physical exercise. Joe watched with amusement as I struggled through my exercises in between my sessions with this ridiculously
good-looking
twenty-six-year-old international ultra-running champion. My motivation in working so hard was all at once revealed to me one afternoon by the reaction of an American girlfriend who happened to be staying. When I waved goodbye and closed the door on Frederic she put down her book and raised an eyebrow. ‘You’ve gotta be kiddin’ me,’ she said.

In July 2010, six months after I had finished treatment, we got a call from Laurent asking us if he could come and spend the night with two of his girlfriends on their way down to Spain. I have never felt closer to being in a
Nouvelle Vague
film than that summer evening standing with Joe and watching those ravishing creatures in full make-up stepping out of Laurent’s Audi and picking their way in their Grecian sandals along the steep, narrow path that leads down to our house.

Laurent followed behind his charming companions, carrying a basket laden with delicacies from Paris. Their genuine delight and enthusiasm for a place and a life that could offer no personal appeal to them was a testimony of their refinement. When, the following morning, Laurent stood wrapped in a bath towel in our sitting room, in the middle of what Joshua then called ‘The Broken House’, with its crumbling walls and its makeshift furniture, and
exclaimed, ‘
J’adore
votre maison!’ I felt a glow of pure joy.

The following afternoon after we had all waved them off I went inside to write an email to Jack and Ella recounting their father’s visit. Ella sent back a text message:

‘Laughing and crying at the same time! Thank you, Mum!’

‘Thank you for that description,’ Jack wrote the next day. ‘It really feels like the circle is closed and the suffering is ended.’