Dirty Mary has gone away

One of the local characters is Marie la Sale – Dirty Mary. She lived alone, near us, in one of two small houses she owned. She may or may not have had running water and electricity in operation, although they were connected. She tended to wear several skirts, one on top of the other, numerous sweaters, all of them pretty filthy. And of course, she smelled. Hard to say exactly how old she was, but anything from late fifties upwards seems likely.

She was not, in any real sense, mad, but she was a bit odd. In a city, she would have been a bag lady, in the country she was just a bit stranger than most. People knew her, she was polite, friendly within her own terms, but largely in a world of her own. We were introduced to her by Mme Laforet, our neighbour, on one of many occasions when Marie called in on her. She would sometimes offer to help with the chickens and ducks, or some gardening activity, but she was never much use. Mme Laforet tended to get a little exasperated with her from time to time, but to be a good neighbour felt she had to put up with her ocasional visits.

If we saw her in the village or the lanes, we would always stop for a short chat, and she remembered who we were, how we usually got to France from England, and other details, so she was never entirely confused.

Over the years she became progressively smellier, stranger, and harder to talk to. For a while she would appear wearing bright red boots she had bought from somewhere, another time she had a small dog for a year or so. She would talk more to herself, and retreated progressively further into some other world. Once, I encountered her in the lane from the village, and for over 100 yards we walked towards each other. When we were a few yards apart I said 'Bonjour, madame'. She squeaked, and jumped back a couple of feet. She clearly had not noticed me and was utterly surprised by my voice. She regathered herself, and we had the usual brief conversation, but it was all a bit odd.

Now she is in a retirement home, having been taken very ill. I hear that she is doing quite well. She probably never asked for, or would accept, help from the social services, but really would have benefited from some support. Now that she is getting it I hope she is more content. He history is quite sad. Clearly never the brightest of people, she married a local man. A few weeks later he was killed in a traffic accident, and she never really recovered her equilibrium.

Now her houses are beginning to decay; they were never in a particularly good state, but being empty for a year or so the wind has had an effect. Even the old animal feed container tied to the gate as a letter box is now broken.

In our street in London, there is another little old lady who lives alone and has some bizarre behaviour from time to time. The street is three story, late Victorian terraces, many, like ours, converted into flats. Her house is occupied just by her. A couple of windows on the upper floors are blocked off with plywood, and there are other signs of decay and lack of maintenance. The house next to hers has just been renovated completely, and then sold for over £1.5 million.

She used to be a teacher, someone told me, and when she retired her house needed work. She gave all her money to a builder to do it up, and of course he promptly disappeared, leaving her with nothing but a small pension. She is still fit, and rides a bicycle around the neighbourhood, although she looks seriously weather beaten and in need of a bit of maintenance herself.

A few years ago, mysteriously, many of us discovered the steps and porches of our houses were wet in the mornings, even though there had been no rain. Strange, but not a problem until the weather turned cold, and the water froze. A couple of people slipped, and it was clearly dangerous. Turned out that this woman was going out in the middle of the night and washing everybody's porches. No idea why. Some people had a word with her, and she stopped it.

At one time, these old ladies might have been seen as witches. Now they are just lonely, confused, and often in need of small forms of support that bureaucracies find difficult to deliver.

Abbaye de la Lucerne d'Outremer

Not far from La Haye-Pesnel, near Avranches, is the Abbey of La Lucerne-d'Outremer. Built in the twelfth century, it has recently been restored, and there is even talk of installing a new religious order there.

The name Outremer means overseas, as in the DOM, les Départments Outre Mer, the former colonies of France. It earned the name because during the Hundred Years War the abbots generally sided with the English. This was part of the long lasting connection – and confusion – between what was French, what was English, in the land we now call France.

Whilst probably every British person remembers the basic facts of 1066 and the Norman conquest, the following two or three centuries of war, alliances and occasionally peace, is rarely taught these days. Yet the whole of the more romantic parts of English history that people know from classical novels, folk tales, and not least Shakespeare's history plays still has some bearing on how the two countries developed.

If you have heard of Robin Hood, the Black Prince, Richard the Lionheart, Henry V and Agincourt, you have heard something of the time and its characters and events.

After 1066, William the Conqueror's grandson, Henry was still Duke of Normandy as well as King of England. The France of the 11, 12 and 13C was a small area, mainly around Paris, with some feudal overlordship of other parts, but not direct control. Affairs were managed by wars, alliances, and especially marriages. Eleanor of Aquitaine, Duchess of Aquitaine, Countess of Poitiers etc etc, was the wife firstly of King Louis VII of France, and then Henry II of England. The daughter of Phillip IV of France, Isabella, married Edward II of England, and was the mother of Edward III; and she was the sister of Kings Louis X, Phillip V and Charles IV of France. Family gatherings for these families at the beginning of the 14C would have been a a bit fraught.

One interesting little fact is that there was a successful Normandy invasion by the English in 1417, when Henry V took Caen, and later Rouen. Throughout the Hundred Years War, Normandy changed hands fairly regularly, English at first, then French, then English, then French again.

During this time, there were obviously many divided loyalties. Some parts of Normandy were owned by what had become English nobility, who expected loyalty to England, other parts had owners, and/or feudal overlords, who were French. And of course many families, as with the two royal families, had complex connections by marriage with both sides. The Abbey of La Lucerne was just a forceful example of being ultimately on the wrong side.

The Abbey itself is worth a visit – it reopens on March 15 for the summer. The church is still largely Norman, or Romanesque, style, with thick walls and columns, and round arches. Now that it has been patched and cleaned it is rather splendid.

We went on a tour guided by a young French girl: many historic sites seem to have tour guides who appear to be students earning some money, and usually they are very well informed and interested in the place.

The acoustics inside are dramatic. She pointed out a number of the features inside the church, and her voice was amplified with extraordinary clarity by the building. Far clearer than any public address system I have ever heard, and with that wonderful resonance and almost echo that you can only get from reality rather than technology. No wonder the peasant populace were terrified of the priests: voices louder than anything heard anywhere else, resounding around them, and with no apparent effort by the person speaking.

Some of the monastic buildings remain, with a number of interesting details, such as carving in some of the roof beams in the refectory, and a splendid large dovecote. This is now empty, (there is a photo in the album top right), but there is another dovecote at the Chateau of La Lande d'Airou (privately owned and not open to the public normally), which has a restored circulating ladder assembly inside. This is so finely balanced that a child can move it, but is allows someone to reach every nesting hole in the walls without effort. Well worth a visit.

Don't mention the war

In the same way as the disaster of Omaha Beach means that the other four invasion beaches can often be overlooked, the enormous importance, and overall success, of the D-Day landings obscures the fact that for the preceding four years, France was occupied by foreign soldiers.

The occupation had many implications for ordinary people. Some were active collaborators, as in Vichy and the Petain puppet government, some were passively cooperative, some avoided the German rule as much as they could, and of course some joined the Resistance. Every town and village had people in all these categories, and even now there are sensitivities and undercurrents not obvious to outsiders.

Many people do not want to talk about the war and the occupation, including those who were not born then, but who know of aspects of that time and how what members of their families did, or did not , or were suspected of doing. Who knows how we would have behaved in that situation? Certainly, the example of the occupation of the Channel Islands shows some of the issues.

If you look carefully in many of the towns in Normandy, you will find the occasional plaque on a wall stating that the person named was shot by firing squad at that place, or hanged, or otherwise killed. Many people were taken away, to prison, forced labour, or worse.

If you visit St Lo, you will find the centre, where the Saturday market takes place, inside the wonderful medieval ramparts, but completely destroyed by the American bombardment in June 1944. All that remains of the old town centre is the church tower, deliberately not repaired, and part of the gatehouse of the old castle. In the gatehouse is a large brass plaque, recording the names of everyone from St Lo who died during the war. It starts with French soldiers killed in action during the defeat by Germany, then has members of the resistance killed in action, resistance members executed, and all those deported to concentration camps: many of these are just the family name 'and 4 children'. The last two categories are civilians killed during the bombardment, and members of the resistance held in the prison. Liberation was not cost free.

My now deceased neighbour, Madame Laforet, was one person who had lived through the occupation, and able to talk about it. She mentioned that her eldest son had to be hidden in effectively a pig sty at the bottom of a distant field for some months, because the Germans were rounding up all the teenage boys for slave labour in Czechoslovakia; virtually none returned. She talked of other occasions when animals and crops were taken, of people disappearing.

She also talked about the invasion itself, pointing out where an allied bomb had fallen just the other side of the garden, and how a German sniper had killed two British soldiers in the lane. The sniper was killed by a German tank, commandeered by a young woman from the village.

Some other people, mostly women, who were children during the war, have memories of fear, hunger, and people vanishing, some to other areas to resist, some to prisons, some dead.

By the time the invasion moved away from Normandy, many towns were completely destroyed, many people had been killed, and a few scores were settled.

A French politician, I believe – I can't trace the quote – said that after the war, there were more members of the resistance than there were people. Human nature being what it is, I don't find that surprising, and there could have been few people who did not emotionally support the resistance, even if they like most of us lacked the courage, or the freedom from responsibility for others, or the right opportunities, to participate actively.

The Memorial museum at Caen is a museum to peace, not like the Imperial War Museum with its toys for the boys, and has a hugely moving range of displays of life under the occupation. It is at junction 7 on the Caen Peripherique (ring road) and is informative, sad, and ultimately I think encouraging, and an excellent antidote to many of the other commercial museums which glorify the fighting, the weapons, and the glamour of combat which is experienced only by the uninvolved, the uncaring and the unimaginative.  It has produced a film of the D-Day events, with archive film from both sides shown on a split screen. One side shows the landing craft, the other the blockhouse and gun emplacements being manned. Where one side shows soldiers being machine gunned by planes, the other shows the view of the piloy=ts at the same moment. More reality.

Winter with a vengeance

Following the unusually miserable cold Christmas and New Year, as shown in the two pictures above, I started this post on the weather in Normandy. However, it has rather been taken over by the snow in London: back for a meeting which was cancelled.

Generally, the Normandy climate is not much different from southern England: Rouen average temperature 9.9 C, London 11.0, Caen 10.9, rainfall 26 inches, 24 inches, 25 inches, even though being further west and further south one might expect a little improvement. Not exactly the South of France, but a typically temperate climate. 

My house turned out to be sitting at the top of a range of hills, and at 300metres above sea level is high enough to be on average about 1 degree cooler than the rest of the region. The other effect is that as this is the first real range of hills inland from the Atlantic, we get quite a lot of rain. Normandy in general is pretty wet – there are postcards and tee shirts on sale which make fun of this – but we seem to have more days damp than dry. Sometimes it is just the usual crachant Normand – Normandy spitting – of somewhere between fine spray and very damp air, sometimes we are actually inside low clouds, and sometimes it is just this side of total immersion.

We have learnt that we are in a micro-climate, and that whatever our weather, it is usually better at the coast thirty kilometres away – more sun, warmer, less wind. But in general the weather is mild, and short of extremes.

This winter, though, has been colder for longer than any other. Twenty days where the temperature was below zero. The saving grace was no rain or snow, and most days were ultimately bright and sunny, even if too cold to do much. A key problem was dense freezing fog in the mornings, with visibility just a few feet. We have had worse.

Three years ago there was very heavy snow, and we were in fact stuck in the house. I tried to leave, because we were to collect a couple of friends arriving on foot at Ouistreham to stay over New Year with us. The road at the end of our drive is a bit of a hill: down ends in a cross roads, up is a t-junction. About thirty five metres up, the car just stopped moving up. I put the hand brake on and the gear in park, and got out to see how to rectify the situation. As I was standing behind the car, it seemed to give up on adhesion all by itself, slid towards me, and then into the ditch. I had left the door open, and that jammed against the hedge so that only one wheel was in the ditch. Still took three hours to get a tow truck to rescue me. And every passer by (four in two hours) who kindly stopped their car to help couldn't get going again either. A snow plough attached to a lorry made things worse by compacting the snow rather than moving it; eventually salting did the trick.

A few years earlier, there was another severely cold spell. We were leaving for the ferry back to England when our neighbour, Madame Laforet, came out of her housing waving and shouting. Turned out that she had a burst pipe pouring a lot of very cold water all over her spare bedroom, just behind the living room. Apparently the mains tap lived in the cave under the house, which itself was built just before the revolution. Mains water did not get connected until the sixties, and electricity a year or two later.

This cellar contained an illegal still, a couple of very large, in fact huge, barrels of cider and a lot of unidentifiable stuff. All over the ceiling were pipes, running in every direction, and up and down the walls, with taps everywhere. It seems that every time a new water using facility – a sink, a shower, a wash basin, a toilet etc – had been installed, a new set of pipes were laid.

The ceiling was the floor of the room with the leak, and consisted of very old floorboards which had shrunk over time, and had big gaps. The cold water was therefore falling on me all the time, and it was very, very cold. It was also running over the electric wires, which may or may not have been live. I went around with a torch, turning off every tap I could find, and nothing stopped the leak. Finally, I found a tap under some sacking and other rubbish in the far corner, and that stopped the water.

La Mere Laforet was cold and wet, and for the first time since we had met her she looked old, frail, and depressed, poor thing. We had a ferry to catch, all my clothes were in a suitcase in the boot of the car, and I was soaking wet. However, we phoned her son to come round to help her, drove off calling in at the village plumber to get a repair organised, and then crept very slowly over black ice to St Lo and the dual carriageway to Cherbourg. Passed six other cars in the ditches on the way.

Health and Efficiency in France

Unsurprisingly, the French health service is different from the British. This blog is not meant to be a practical guide to anything, but you can find a useful overview of how the service works here. The French journalist Agnes Poirier who writes in English for the Guardian and other UK papers, did an intriguing piece about the differences between British GPs and their French equivalents recently.

Fortunately, I have not yet had to make much use of the health service in France personally, but I have had some dealings with it. The first occasion was with an emergency, involving my neighbour Mme Laforet, who was then in her late seventies. I knocked on her door one morning to see if she needed anything from the village, and found her standing over her sink, looking pale, and with a tea towel wrapped around her left hand. She said she didn't want anything, but I noticed blood dripping from the towel. I asked her what had happened and she said that she had been cutting weeds with a sickle and had cut her hand. I insisted on looking at the injury, which turned out to be a dreadful slice virtually cutting off her thumb, and bleeding very badly.

I found a new towel and wrapped it tightly around her hand, and said she must go to the hospital at once. She wasn't keen, but eventually I persuaded her to phone the clinic in the nearby town, the nearest place where she could get suitable treatment immediately. This being France, and the time a little after noon, the clinic was about to close for lunch, but a doctor said he would wait till we got there.

The doctor spent a couple of hours cleaning the wound, stitching it up, and fastening a complex metal brace to keep the join firmly closed. He wanted her to stay overnight for observation, but she refused, because she had to see to her chickens, and the ducks. He made arrangements for a district nurse equivalent to visit daily to check her out, and we left.

A couple of hours later, I wandered down to see how she was getting on, and found her in the garden, with her sickle in her hand, and a plastic bag covering the bandages and metalwork on her injured hand. She said she was bored just sitting still, and the plastic bag meant there was no risk. I think an hour or so later the local anaesthetic wore off, because she went back indoors and just sat there for a few hours. The happy ending is that she made a complete recovery, although her thumb remained bent in a peculiar way.

My other experience had a more sad outcome. A good friend we had made in France, Jean, had some stomach problems that required an operation. We visited him in one hospital, then another, larger one after another operation, and then a third. Ultimately, he was diagnosed with stomach cancer, from which he died.

Seeing him in the different hospitals did show that the standards of care and cleanliness were the same high quality in all three. The food, as one might expect, was pretty good, as always, three courses, with choices, ordered earlier in the day. It was always hot, properly prepared and edible. Unlike my local – teaching - hospital here in London, where half the time there is only cold food or sandwiches, where patients get the choices made three days earlier by the previous occupant of the bed, and where there have been instances of malnutrition in patients who have been unable or unwilling to eat the food, and where even if they have the nutritional content has been dreadful.

Whilst it might seem unfair to compare provision in smaller institutions in the less populated areas with a major institution in a huge city, I believe the French hospitals were infinitely better in terms of hotel facilities – all wards for example are rooms for one or occasionally two patients, with their own showers and toilets. To get to see a specialist seemed to be quick and easy, with no waiting list issues. Obviously, I have no way of evaluating the in patient hospital diagnosis, treatment and so on, but it was always easy to get a second opinion, and the issues were discussed with the patients and their families. I do not believe there is any satisfactory reason why this cannot be done in the UK. When the NHS is spending 12 billion pounds on a misguided IT project that is unlikely ever to be delivered completely, will still cost more than the latest budget, and will never deliver anything like the benefits needed to justify it, I do admit a small amount of despair.

A final example is a friend in London who developed the Dupuytens's Contracture and had waited for over 18 months to see a specialist, who then put him on a waiting list for treatment, which when it happened involved an operation to cut and slice his hands. And it made no difference. By chance, he heard of a specialist in Paris, who had trained under Dupuyten. He rang him, and was offered an appointment in a week.

At this consultation, the doctor explained that the operation was a mistake, and that effective treatment involved a local anaesthetic, and diminishing the calcium build up causing the problem by manipulating a needle in the finger joints. My friend has now had three or four treatments, at a cost of 60 euros per session which he intends to claim back from the NHS, and all bar the his little finger, which has been bent the most severely for the longest time, are virtually normal.

Having regularly been to my local hospital, as an out patient, over the last three years, I can say that in London I feel that this hospital feels full of illness and inefficiency, whereas in France the hospitals are less frightening, more welcoming, and seem to be more efficient. Of course, all this is merely anecdotal rather than evidential, but I have yet to encounter any problems.

If you go to France – or anywhere else in the European Union - make sure you have an EHIC card to get free or reduced cost healthcare. You can apply here if you haven't already got one.