Housesitting in the Charente

Housesitting seemed like a good idea. I’d be in one place for a while, time to catch up with myself a bit after lots of travelling, cycling and camping. My girls could come and visit, and possibly others. I could get to know the locals, speak lots of French and eat croissants and other delights every day from the local boulangerie. So I put a profile on a housesitting website, scrolled through the posts searching for the best-looking house, the right kind of animals (no pet rats, huge dogs, guinea pigs or dozens of cats – one person had 14!), not too many hard jobs to do, and owners I'd get on with (even though I wouldn't see much of them), underwent an interview on Skype, and suddenly there I was signed up for a 12 day sit in an unknown place called Tillou, a tiny dot on Google Maps somewhere in the west of France, with the nearest town having the unlikely name of Chef-Boutonne. I would have no car and the nearest public transport would be 9kms away in Melle from where you can catch a bus to Niort, a bigger town with a train station. No worries, I thought from the comfort of my Nelson home, it’ll be sweet, I won't need a car, they have bikes, I’ll bike.

The first thing I did when I got here was to revel in having a whole house to myself, a proper bed and a washing-machine (gosh how I love washing-machines!). The second thing I did was to hire a car.

My room is the top left

My temporary home, La Rivière, is a former water-mill house and the remnants of the mill are still standing over the stream, La Somptueuse, which runs around and through the grounds. David and Helen, the owners, have lived here for 15 years. Originally from the UK, they raised their 3 daughters here who, now young adults, are bilingual if not trilingual or more. They have 3.5 hectares including a large garden with lawns, a sand arena for exercising horses and several grazing paddocks. There is a huge garage where David runs a car mechanic business, as well as a hay barn and stables and the house has 5 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms and 2 large living-rooms. It all ticked my boxes so far.

Quite rural, Helen had said in an email. The truth is it’s bang in the middle of absolutely nowhere and absolutely nothing. There’s not much in the village, Helen had said. She was right. There is nothing. It looks as if there never has been. No shops, no bar, nothing. Except for a church which I presume has people in it occasionally. Perhaps I should go and have a look on Sunday. How desperate for company can one get! I have seen almost no one at all for the nearly two weeks I’ve been here. An English couple out walking their dog one day started talking, well I exaggerate; I started talking to them. They were friendly enough, unlike another Englishman walking his dog who wasn’t. But I wanted to speak French and where were all the French?

An old lavoir

This village must have been vibrant once. It used to have six mills: 3 watermills and 3 windmills. When there was a dry summer and the flow of water wasn’t sufficient to turn the big waterwheels, the windmills would take over the work of grinding the grain. Now all the nearby villages are the same. Shut up, abandoned, shutters closed, shops windows blank, even the boulangeries, the hub of every village, producing the humble baguette that icon of French cuisine and culture, not the place where you merely buy bread, but where you see the same people at the same time every day, where your Bonjours of the first day can become long conversations by the fourth, that are even subsidised by the local commune or Council in some parts of the country just to keep them going, are fast disappearing, replaced, horror of all horrors, by coin-in-the-slot machines! Put in a one euro coin and bingo, out comes a warm baguette. Aargh!!

My 'local' supermarket

Or, even worse, replaced, by another horror, the big-corporate-owned shopping malls with their huge hypermarchés which have their own on-site bakers. Finally, there, I found some French people, filling these places on the edge of town on a Saturday morning. Easy parking, everything under one roof, cheaper prices. Who cares that for the tourists the ambience is a little lacking. We noticed this trend especially when we were biking in the Loire. The little supermarket/grocery stores that had been right in the centre of the villages/small towns only 3 years before were there no more, replaced by these ugly gargantuan shiny edifices several kilometres away down a busy highway on the outskirts of town far from the bike trails.

So things haven't worked out for me here quite the way I'd thought and no one has come to stay. It's really been a bit too quiet. Thank goodness I've had Mulligan, the little Jack Russell doggie who is a delight. I’ve never had a dog like him and I kind of want one. He is so smart and responsive, knows what I’m going to do before I do, is never far away (with only a couple of slight lapses when the temptation of a cat to chase proved too much). Every morning we do a good long walk in the countryside right from our front door which we both enjoy although he shows his excitement a little more obviously than I do. Rocket, the cat, lives here as well though spends much of his time in the barn, while the two sheep are pretty independent too and even less talkative. Then there are 7 hens, 1 rooster and 2 ducks who produce far too many eggs, and a huge hothouse with 67 (yes, I counted!) tomato plants already nearly up to the roof which need 15 litres of water a day, as well as 20 capsicum plants, 12 eggplants and 8 cucumber plants, and an enormous outdoor veggie garden with beans, carrots and courgettes. There is plenty to do.

This region of France is a huge agricultural area. Most of the small fields divided by the hedgerows which provided homes for the birds are long gone, replaced by immense expanses of wheat, barley and rye. On our Loire trip to the north of here we passed field after field of golden wheat so ripe and sun-drenched the stalks were almost translucent. Now, several weeks on into summer, the crops have been cut down to stubble and huge hay rolls dot the fields. The landscape is becoming a patchwork of gold, brown and yellow as farmers plough it in to make ready for the next sowing, while in the next field thousands of sunflowers, their faces all turned to the sun (the French word is tournesols!), stretch in immaculate rows to the horizon.

And so, my time in this country is once again at an end and I know that as I leave on Monday I will mourn the parting. It is a country I love. There are things I find frustrating: the inflexibility (“Non Madame, we can’t hopen the swimming-pool in late June even though there’s an eatwave because we don’t hopen it until 1 July”); everything (except for big supermarkets) being closed on Sundays and Mondays, and for 2 hours at least every lunchtime, that is everything: shops, hairdressers, post offices, campground offices, banks, tourist information offices, tourist sites; the poor internet connection in so many places; the lack of technology and mass of paperwork for everything (they still use cheques and registered letters!); the lack of vegetables in restaurant meals (they're there in the markets so where are they all?); the rate of smoking (even though it's less than Greece or Austria, it's still double that of the USA or NZ).

But there are so many things to love: the people, their friendliness, their hospitality, their sense of humour; their beautiful language; their ever-patient acceptance of bad French, no, more than just acceptance, they welcome and appreciate your efforts; their undying love for New Zealand; their 450 varieties of cheese; the crunchy hot bread smell of the boulangeries when you find them, the molten almond croissants and chocolate-dripping beignets; the flowery pretty villages; their sense of history and the stupendous buildings; how everything is a work of art – how they dress, the shop window displays, chocolates, gift-wrapping, flower gardens and much more; how everyone has an interest in and an opinion on politics, philosophy, literature; the Tour de France and the almost worshipful respect for cyclists; the network of tiny roads; their passion and steadfastness in standing tall and in refusing to give up on what they hold dear. Yes, I'll be back. Au revoir.

A former watermill in Tillou 

Today's six windmills at Tillou