Moving In

When we arranged the furniture removal from Roquetaillade, we had hoped that it could be delivered to our new house on Tuesday – the day after Completion.  But we had once again found ourselves moving in the middle of a period that is full of French public holidays, (there seem to be so many of them), and Les Gentlemen du Déménagement were under a lot of pressure to squeeze a number of cross-country moves into fewer working days than usual. So they had to deliver our furniture on Monday.

We therefore arranged that they would arrive on Monday afternoon, after two-thirty – despite their secretary’s attempt to persuade us to let them arrive in the morning. We pointed out that we wouldn’t actually be in possession of the keys until after eleven thirty, and couldn’t get back to the house from the Notaire’s office until midday at the very earliest, assuming that everything went smoothly. She acquiesced, and agreed that they would arrive at our house after lunch, but we were left with a nagging feeling that this might very well not turn out to be the case.

Following our swift exit from the Notaire, and our dalliance with the Insurance lady, we headed straight to our new abode, with only a very quick stop at the nearest shop to pick up some bread and cheese for lunch. Arriving at the sign to Blanchetière within minutes of the midday hour, we drove expectantly down ‘our’ lane, into ‘our’ yard, and rummaged through the huge collection of jangly keys to find the one that would open ‘our’ front door. It was a lovely moment.

We stood quiet in the unfolding sunshine, transfixed by tranquillity. To my great joy, a euphonious nightingale sang roundly from its perch in the big oak tree on the edge of our front garden just a few yards from where we stood, banishing one of my big fears of Things I Would Miss About Roquetaillade. And in that very moment, before we even stepped inside the house, I knew with utter certainty that I would love this place.

Which was a Good Thing. Because when we did eventually find the key that fitted the lock that opened the door to our future, we were greeted by a house sorely in need of a little tender loving care, and a lot of forgiveness.

The previous owners had indeed taken with them the two horses and Ugly Donkey. They had also taken the nice wood-burning stove that had warmed us so welcomingly during our visit to the house when we all met with the agent to sign the Compromis de Vente. In its place was a rusty old top-loader, badly joined to the existing flue pipe which was leaking melting gunge and tar..

What they had not taken with them (apart from the three ‘farm’ cats and a solitary hen, which they had told us about) was nearly all of their rather rickety furniture, the biggest collection of ceiling and wall-shrouding cobwebs I have ever seen (even Miss Haversham would have been horrified), and two years worth of greasy grime, and collected jars and bottles yet to be recycled. And at some point within the next couple of hours, Les Gentlemen would be arriving with all our wordly possessions, which they would be anxious to unload post-haste.

But I was not about to be down-hearted by this not-entirely-unexpected turn of events. I felt another Aneka-moment coming on. “I guess we’d better shift this lot into the barn.”

We went outside to explore the outbuildings. Unsurprisingly, they were also full of stuff….rubbish, junk or interesting old artefacts, depending on your point of view. Being a well-known hoarder myself, my horror at the piles of stuff confronting us was tinged with glow of excitement at the curious possibilities that might be lurking amongst the detritus. But now was not the time to be entertaining such possibilities. There was an urgent need to clear the house and make some attempt at cleaning it up a bit before Les Gentlemen arrived.

After Simon and I had carried the biggest, heaviest items outside, I set too with the broom and vacuum cleaner (for once we had the right stuff in the right car with us in the right place), while Simon moved the remaining bits and pieces of the past. Trying for once to be practical, I prioritised the removal of the dirt and cobwebs that would be where our bed would be, and tried to clean the bits of wall and floor where the heaviest items of our own furniture would be deposited, figuring that I could clean the rest later.

The cleaning task was made more difficult by the fact that neither the kitchen nor bathroom sink had attached drainage, (both emptied directly into a bucket underneath) and there was no hot water. And wiping the walls down was made impossible by the fact that they had been ‘finished’ in some sort of attempt at ‘authentic’ lime plaster, which actually just flaked off in pieces at the slightest touch.

Luckily, being an obsessive-compulsive with a preference for planning over action, I had spent many rainy hours back in Roquetaillade drawing plans of the new house, and working out how to most efficiently squeeze into it the excess of stuff we would be bringing with us. I knew, to the last centimetre, what would fit where, so I knew where to concentrate my ineffectual cleaning activities.

Which was another Good Thing. Because about half an hour into the cleaning-up operation, a Very Big Lorry loomed down the lane. Not yet one o’clock , and Here They Bloody Well Were, out of the front cab and already being Gallicly grumpy about the impossibility of turning the lorry round to make good their escape at the end of the unloading.

There were only two of them again – one who had supervised the loading (unfortunately the unsmiling, least communicative of the two that we had met the previous Thursday), plus a young lad who looked as if he could hardly lift a table. I thought it was going to be a Long Afternoon. I wondered what the first guy would be thinking about our move – whether he would be wondering why we had moved from such a lovely comfortable house in a beautiful sunny South of France village, to a hovel in the middle of rainy nowhere. I wondered what he would think when he asked to use the toilet, and found that there actually wasn’t one. And I wondered if he would ever smile.

Simon pointed out to them that if they continued down the grass-covered track at the side of our land they would reach a road that would take them back to the road they had come in on. Looking a little sceptical, Monsieur No-Smile grumped off down the lane to check it out, leaving his young comrade skulking awkwardly in the back of the lorry, clearly unsure of how to fill his waiting moments. A little later No-Smile returned, grudgingly acknowledged that it was ‘Bien’, and proceeded to issue unloading instructions to his young colleague.

As the furniture began to come off the lorry, I noticed something was not quite right. “Oh My God, Simon…that’s not our stuff!” And indeed it wasn’t….but it had to be unloaded nevertheless, because all our stuff was loaded behind it, in the front of the lorry.

So an hour or so passed in which Someone Else’s Wordly Goods were stacked haphazardly in the lane, (even though it looked as if it would rain at any moment). I couldn’t resist looking at it (and yes…I admit it…passing judgement on it) and wondering about the people who owned it.  And then suddenly I thought…”hey, we’ve got one just like that”, before I realised that they had at last reached Our Stuff, and now they wanted to know where it all should go.

It is an uncomfortable feeling, having strangers parading bits of your life back and forth, and not being able to enter into light-hearted explanatory, apologetic conversation about all the crap you are asking them to bother to carry up a steep flight of fourteen steps, through two very low doors, to deposit randomly in the middle of a mouse-dropping-and-cobweb infested attic. But as the afternoon wore on… and on…. and on….my sense of embarrassment began to fade, and my task-oriented, ‘for-god’s-sake-how-much-longer-is-this-going-on?’ impatient nature came to the fore.

As the items came out of the lorry, I barked monosyllabic instructions to Les Gentlemen to tell them where to put them – always with a smile of course. When Monsieur No-Smile took issue with my instructions, believing that the sofa or the kitchen unit would not fit where I told him to put them, I persisted, safe in the knowledge that I had measured everything and knew what I was talking about. Eventually, a grudging respect crept into his shrugs and he ceased to question my directions. Eventually, he actually smiled once or twice. And when the time came that I had just-about-had-enough of this tedious business, and I started to climb on to the lorry to unload things myself, I think we had reached an Understanding. All that mattered was that the job should Get Done, and they should Get Gone, roles and professional relationships be damned.

And eventually it did, and they were. And we were left alone with another godawful mess, but with Loads of Time to sort it all out. We drove over to Mike and Sue’s to pick up the horsebox and the other car with the trailer and bike, and to pick up Max, our faithful hound, who had spent a very unusual day in the company of six border collies and a cat. We said goodnight to our chickens, and promised to return to pick them up too, just as soon as we had made a fox-proof chicken-run of our own.

Back at Our House, we ate the remainder of the sandwiches we had made for the journey up from Roquetaillade – my God, was it only yesterday? – and tumbled into a hastily-made bed, in a black-dark, totally hum-free silence. There is a lot to be said for the absence of electrical equipment.

We awoke the next morning secure in the knowledge that we had Made It, and that – apart from the pressure to make a chicken pen and get the fields fenced, so we could relieve Mike and Sue of their chicken-and-llama-sitting responsibilities – we really, really did have Loads of Time to do all the things that now needed to be done. We had All the Time in the World.