The third degree

That evening we went back to the village to eat at the restaurant. We had barely had time to sit down at the table to which the proprietor showed us before the inquisition started.

"You were in the village yesterday," he said accusingly.

The village had seemed to us to be sound asleep, just like most French villages that one drives through, but obviously somebody had been keeping watch from behind the net curtains. We explained that we were buying old Monsieur Erlanger’s house. Well, it had to be admitted sometime. That did it.

"How old are you?" Yes, that really was the first question and it was quickly followed by "What do you do for a living?" "Where do you live?" "Aperitif?" "How much are you paying?" and so on. I was reeling by the time he turned away to fetch his photograph albums. As soon as the five huge volumes had been placed on the table, Nicolas (it transpired somewhere along the way that this was his name) started to give us his life history. Eventually I managed to interrupt him long enough to ask for the menu.

We enjoyed a very pleasant meal during which we were introduced to Nicolas’s wife Florence, who undertook all the cooking, and their two children, Alexander(nine years old) and Constance(seven). By the time we came to leave we felt that we had become bosom friends. If everyone else in the village turned out to be as friendly we might even be tempted to up-sticks and move from England.

I suppose it is not really surprising that, on the way home, we started suffering from the "Oh dear, what have we done" syndrome. Let’s face it, we had spent no more than twenty minutes or so looking at a house, and the very next morning we signed a contract to buy it without so much as thinking of obtaining a survey. But that is the French way. Their thinking seems to be that if the house has been standing there for a hundred years, it is probably good for a few more yet. But the doubts had disappeared by the time we disembarked at Portsmouth.