France

Humanity, politeness and a low-stress way of life.
This writer says France beats Britain every time.
Celia Brayfield"Deep France"
WHEN PEOPLE asked me why I was moving to France for a year, I was tempted to reply “because I can”. Who, being British and of sound mind, would pass up the opportunity? I could spend a year in a tiny village in the Béarn, in the extreme southwest, because I am a writer, and since my only child was happily settled at university, my sole responsibility in those 12 months was to write a new novel.
So I put my computer and my cats in the back of the car, crossed the Channel and drove until the Pyrenees shimmered on the horizon and the radio picked up France Bleu Béarn. I plumbed in the modem cable and settled down to write. And then I met some locals.
Now the Béarn, although recognised as one of the three most beautiful regions of France, has been protected from foreign invasion by its geography: it’s remote, and until a few years ago had no TGV service and no full-time international airport. The SNCF and Ryanair have changed that, but can’t alter the climate, which can be highly temperamental.

Nevertheless, I found a band of British settlers. They had arrived in two waves. First had come the retired people and the second-homers, plus the scallywag element, on the run from failure back home. But then, over the year, I saw more and more of the second wave — young people, successful, intelligent, many with pre-school children, who were fleeing Britain in search of a better life.

They are working, many for international markets, as artists, designers in many disciplines, computer programmers, teachers, horticulturalists, hoteliers and salespeople. Improbably, the first couple I met were the proprietors of an East End photographic studio often used by The Times’s fashion team; millionaires at under 40, they were determined to relocate their business to a place where they would not be woken at 4am at least once a week by the police reporting yet another burglary at their offices.

I was amazed at the challenges that people are ready to take on to not have to live in Britain any more. Some speak fluent French and the rest are learning fast. They concentrate like lasers when a nuance of French culture is explained. They send their children to the village schools and won’t hear any nonsense from them about having to kiss their teachers and eat creamed spinach.

According to French Property News, there are about 250,000 of them in France already. They are, quite simply, a new mass migration.

Since Wild Weekend, the novel which occupied my year, was about the English countryside, writing it brought into sharp focus the reasons why so many determined young professionals are ready to move to France. My Béarnais village, Orriule, population 200, had a primary school. Great Saxwold, the fictional Suffolk village in my novel, had none — I just couldn’t strain my readers’ credibility by creating one.

Orriule’s school bus, which ran up and down the lane outside my cottage all day, was a luxury coach. The mayor was racking her brains to devise events to fill the shiny new village hall. Many of the surrounding small towns had fully functioning hospitals and well-served railway stations. As well as a clutch of farmers, almost every village supported a small business — from trucking companies to sculptors to physiotherapy practices.

All I could feasibly write into Great Saxwold was a pub where the locals gathered to complain about the lack of these things.

The difference is that the French countryside is viable. It can sustain human life. If it were just a matter of downshifting, the new migrants to France would have moved out to villages in Britain. Instead, they are taking on a new language and a new culture, and speaking with one voice about wanting a place “where things work”. They want the basics: schools, the health service, the transport. These France can offer as by-products of its determination to rehabilitate its agriculture.

Today the vast, sleepy French countryside is the largest agricultural sector in Europe. It supplies all the food in the country and has made France a net exporter of food since the 1960s. In the perniciously shallow-minded aftermath of Cool Britannia, our Government seems to be unable to think coherently about any aspect of its rural life.

France’s new immigrants appreciate the enormous human benefits of a viable countryside, the babies that British planners have thrown out with the bathwater: humanity, politeness, a low-stress way of life, the sense of continuity that comes from an undamaged rural culture, and personal security.

Inevitably, the new migrants will change their host community. Last year, half of all properties for sale in Salies-de-Béarn went to British buyers. Most of these people are Francophiles, well aware of what they value in France and determined to preserve it. My French neighbours seem pleased, if a little bemused, by this invasion. So far, their system can cope. There are only a handful of British children in each village school.

Meanwhile, much as I love la France profonde, it seems to me a thousand pities that we in Britain have so degraded our countryside that people would rather emigrate than raise their children in it.
CELIA BRAYFIELD

Deep France, Celia Brayfield’s account of her year in the Béarn, is published by Pan. Wild Weekend is published by Time Warner Books on June 17.