l’ancienne bergerie, june 2004, and life was good. mywife katherine and i had just made the final commitment toour new life by selling our london flat and buying twogorgeous golden-stone barns in the heat of the south offrance, where we were living on baguettes, cheese, andwine. the village we had settled into nestled betweenn?mes and avignon in languedoc, the poor man’sprovence, an area with the lowest rainfall in the whole offrance. i was writing a column on do-it-yourself homeimprovement for the weekly newspaper the guardian, andtwo others for grand designs magazine, and i was alsowriting a book on humor in animals, a long-cherishedproject which, i found, required a lot of time in a conduciveenvironment. and this was it.
our two children, ella and milo, bilingual and sunburnished,frolicked with kittens in the safety of a large,walled garden, chasing enormous grasshoppers together,pouncing amongst the long parched grass and seams ofwheat, probably seeded from kernels spilled from trailerswhen the barns were part of a working farm. our huge dog,leon, lay across the threshold of vast, rusty gates, watchingover us with the benign vigilance of an animal bredspecifically for the purpose, panting happily in his work.
it was really beginning to feel like home. our meagersixty-five square meters of central london had translatedinto twelve hundred square meters of rural southern france,albeit slightly less well-appointed and not so handy formarks and spencer, the south bank, or the britishmuseum. but it had a summer that lasted from march tonovember, and the locally made wine, which sold for ￡8 intesco, a british market, cost three and a half euros atsource. well, you had to take advantage of this—it was partof the local culture. barbeques of fresh trout and saltysausages from the cévennes to our north, glasses ofchilled rosé with ice that quickly melted in the heavysouthern european heat. it was idyllic.
this perfect environment was achieved after about tenyears of wriggling into the position, professionally andfinancially, where i could just afford to live like a peasant ina derelict barn in a village full of other much morewholesome peasants earning a living through honestfarming. i was the mad englishman; they were the slightlybemused french country folk—tolerant, kind, courteous,and yet, inevitably, hugely judgmental.
katherine, whom i’d married that april after nine yearstogether (i waited until she’d completely given up hope),became the darling of the village. beautiful and thoughtful,polite, kind, and gracious, she made a real effort to engagewith and fit into village life. she actively learned thelanguage, which she’d already studied at advanced level,to become proficient in local colloquial french, as well asher parisian french, and the bureau-speak french of the“adminheavy” state. she could josh with the art-galleryowner in the nearby town of uzes about the exact tax formhe had to fill out to acquire a sculpture by elisabeth frink—whom she also happened to have once met andinterviewed—and complain with the best of the villagemums about the complexities of the french medicalsystem. my french, on the other hand, already at ordinarylevel grade d, probably made it to c while i was there, as iactively tried to block my mind from learning it in case itsomehow further impeded the delivery of my already latebook. i went to bed just as the farmers got up, and rarelyinteracted unless to trouble them for some badly expressedelementary questions about diy. they preferred her.
but this idyll was not achieved without some cost. wehad to sell our cherished shoebox-size flat in london inorder to buy our two beautiful barns, totally derelict, withfloors of mud trampled with sheep dung. without water orelectricity we couldn’t move in straight away, so in the weekwe exchanged contracts internationally, we also movedlocally within the village, from a rather lovely natural-stonesummer sublet that was about to triple in price as theseason began, to a far less desirable property on the mainroad through the village. this had no furniture and neitherdid we, having come to france nearly two years before withthe intention of staying for six months. it would be fair to saythat this was a stressful time.
so when katherine started getting migraines and staringinto the middle distance instead of being her usual tornadoof office-keeping, packing, sorting, and labeling efficiency, iput it down to stress. “go to the doctor’s, or go to yourparents if you’re not going to be able to help,” i saidsympathetically. i should have known it was serious whenshe cut short a shopping trip (one of her favorite activities)to buy furniture for the children’s room, and we bothexperienced a frisson of anxiety when she slurred herwords in the car on the way back from that trip. but a fewphone calls to migraine-suffering friends assured us thatthis was well within the normal range of symptoms for thisoften stress-related phenomenon.
eventually she went to the doctor and i waited at homefor her to return with some migraine-specific pain relief.
instead i got a phone call to say that the doctor wanted herto go for a brain scan, immediately, that night. at this stagei still wasn’t particularly anxious, as the french arerenowned hypochondriacs. if you go to the surgery with arunny nose the doctor will prescribe a carrier bag full ofpharmaceuticals, usually involving suppositories. a brainscan seemed like a typical french overreaction;inconvenient, but it had to be done.
katherine arranged for our friend georgia to take her tothe local hospital about twenty miles away, and i settleddown again to wait for her to come back. and then i got thephone call no one ever expects. georgia, sobbing, tellingme it was serious. “they’ve found something,” she keptsaying. “you have to come down.” at first i thought it mustbe a bad joke, but the emotion in her voice was real.
in a daze i organized a neighbor to look after the childrenwhile i borrowed her unbelievably dilapidated honda civicand set off on the unfamiliar journey along the dark countryroads. with one headlight working, no third or reverse gear,and very poor brakes, i was conscious that it was possibleto crash and injure myself badly if i wasn’t careful. i overshotone turn and had to get out and push the car back down theroad, but i made it safely to the hospital and abandoned thedecrepit vehicle in the empty car park.
inside i relieved a tearful georgia and did my best toreassure a pale and shocked katherine. i was still hopingthat there was some mistake, that there was a simpleexplanation that had been overlooked and would accountfor everything. but when i asked to see the scan, thereindeed was a golf-ball-size black lump nestling ominously inher left parietal lobe. a long time ago i did a degree inpsychology, so the mri images were not entirely alien tome, and my head reeled as i desperately tried to find someexplanation that could account for this anomaly. but therewasn’t one.
we spent the night at the hospital bucking up eachother’s morale. in the morning a helicopter took katherineto montpellier, our local (and probably the best) neuro unitin france. after our cozy night together, the reality of seeingher airlifted as an emergency patient to a distantneurological ward hit home, hard. as i chased the copterdown the autoroute, the shock really began kicking in. ifound my mind was ranging around, trying to get to gripswith the situation, so that i could barely make myselfconcentrate properly on driving. i slowed right down, andarrived an hour later at the car park of the enormous gui dechaulliac hospital complex to find there were no spaces. iended up parking creatively, french style, along a sliver ofcurb. a porter wagged a disapproving finger at me but istrode past him, by now in an unstoppable frame of mind,desperate to find katherine. if he’d tried to stop me at thatmoment i think i would have broken his arm and directedhim to x-ray. i was going to neuro urgence, fifth floor, andnothing was going to get in my way. it made me appreciatein that instant that you should never underestimate theemotional turmoil of people visiting hospitals. normal rulesdid not apply, as my priorities were completely refocusedon finding katherine and understanding what was going tohappen next. i found katherine sitting up on a trolley bed,dressed in a yellow hospital gown, looking bewildered andconfused. she looked so vulnerable but noble, stoicallycooperating with whatever was asked of her. eventually wewere told that an operation was scheduled in a few days’
time, during which high doses of steroids would reduce theinflammation around the tumor so that it could be taken outmore easily.
watching her being wheeled around the corridors, sittingup in her backless gown, looking around with quiet,confused dignity, was probably the worst time. the logisticswere over, we were in the right place, the children werebeing taken care of, and now we had to wait for three daysand adjust to this new reality. i spent most of that time at thehospital with katherine or on the phone in the lobbydropping the bombshell on friends and family. the phonecalls all took a similar shape: breezy disbelief, followed byshock and often tears. after three days i was an old hand,and guided people through their stages as i broke thenews.
finally friday arrived, and katherine was prepared forthe operation. i was allowed to accompany her to a waitingarea outside the operating room. typically french, it wasbeautiful, with sunlight streaming into a modern atriumplanted with trees whose red and brown leaves picked upthe light and shone like stained glass. there was not muchwe could say to each other, and i kissed her goodbye notreally knowing whether i would see her again, or if i did, howbadly she might be affected by the operation.
at the last minute i asked the surgeon if i could watch theprocedure. as a former health writer i had been inoperating rooms before, and i just wanted to understandexactly what was happening to her. far from beingperplexed, the doctor, one of the best neurosurgeons infrance, was delighted. i am reasonably convinced that hehad high-functioning asperger’s syndrome. for the first,and last, time in our conversation, he looked me in the eyeand smiled, as if to say, “so you like tumors too?” andexcitedly introduced me to his team. the anaesthetist wasmuch less impressed with the idea and looked visiblyalarmed, so i immediately backed out, as i didn’t wantanyone involved under performing for any reason. thesurgeon’s shoulders slumped and he resumed hisunsmiling efficiency.
in fact the operation was a complete success, and when ifound katherine in the intensive care unit a few hours later,she was conscious and smiling. but the surgeon told meimmediately afterward that he hadn’t liked the look of thetissue he’d removed. “it will come back,” he warned. bythen i was so relieved that she’d simply survived theoperation that i let this information sit at the back of myhead while i dealt with the aftermath of family,chemotherapy, and radiotherapy for katherine.
katherine received visitors, including the children, on theimmaculate lawns studded with palm and pine treesoutside her ward building—at first in a wheelchair, but thenperched on the grass in dappled sunshine, her headbandages wrapped in a muted silk scarf, looking asbeautiful and relaxed as ever, like the hostess of a rollingpicnic. our good friends phil and karen were holidaying inbergerac, a seven-hour drive to the north, but they madethe trip down to see us and it was very emotional to see ourchildren playing with theirs as if nothing was happening inthese otherwise idyllic surroundings.
after we spent a few numbing days on the internet, theinevitability of the tumor’s return was clear. the british andthe american medical associations, every global cancerresearch organization, and indeed every other organizationi contacted, had the same message for someone with adiagnosis of a grade 4 glioblastoma: “i’m so sorry.”
i trawled my health contacts for good news aboutkatherine’s condition that hadn’t yet made the literature, butthere wasn’t any. median survival—the most statisticallyfrequent survival time— was nine to ten months fromdiagnosis. the average was slightly different, but 50percent survived one year, and 3 percent of peoplediagnosed with grade 4 tumors were alive after three years.
it wasn’t looking good. this was heavy information,particularly as katherine was bouncing back so well fromher craniotomy to remove the tumor (given a rare 100percent excision rating), and the excellent french medicalsystem was fast-forwarding her on to its state-of-the-artradiotherapy and chemotherapy programs. the people whosurvived the longest with this condition were young, healthywomen with active minds—katherine to a tee. and despitethe doom and gloom, there were several promisingavenues of research, which could possibly come onlinewithin the time frame of a recurrence.
when katherine came out of the hospital, it was to atardis-like, empty house in an incredibly supportivevillage. her parents and brothers and sister were there, andon her first day back there was a knock at the window. itwas pascal, our neighbor, who unceremoniously passedthrough the window a dining room table and six chairs,followed by a casserole dish with a hot meal in it. we triedto get back to normal, setting up an office in the dusty attic,working out the treatment regimens katherine would haveto follow, and working on the book of my diy columns,which katherine was determined to continue designing.
meanwhile, a hundred yards up the road were our barns, anopen-ended dream renovation project that could easilyoccupy us for the next decade, if we chose. all we lackedwas the small detail of the money to restore them, butfrankly at that time i was more concerned with givingkatherine the best possible quality of life, to make use ofwhat the medical profession assured me was likely to be ashort time. i tried not to believe it, and we lived month bymonth between mri scans and blood tests, our confidencegrowing gingerly with each negative result.
katherine was happiest working, and knowing thechildren were happy. with her brisk efficiency she set upher own office and began designing and pasting up layouts,color samples, and illustrations around it, one floor downfrom mine. she also ran our french affairs, took thechildren to school, and kept in touch with the stream of wellwisherswho contacted us and occasionally came to stay. icarried on with my columns and researching my animalbook, which was often painfully slow over a rickety dial-upinternet connection held together with gaffer’s tape andsubject to the vagaries of france telecom’s “service,”
which, with the largest corporate debt in europe, madebritish telecom seem user-friendly and efficient.
the children loved the barns, and we resolved to inhabitthem in whatever way possible as soon as we could, so weset about investing the last of our savings in building asmall wooden chalet—still bigger than our former londonflat—on the back of the capacious hangar. this was waybeyond my meager knowledge of diy, and difficult for theamiable lunch-addicted french locals to understand, so wecalled for special help in the form of karsan, an anglo-indian builder friend from london. karsan is a jack-of-alltradesand master of them all as well. as soon as hearrived, he began pacing out the ground and demanded tobe taken to the lumber yard. working for thirty solid daysstraight, karsan erected a viable two-bedroom dwelling,complete with running water, a proper bathroom with aflushing toilet, and electricity, while i got in his way.
with some building-site experience and four years as awriter on diy, i was sure karsan would be impressed withmy wide knowledge, work ethic, and broad selection oftools. but he wasn’t. “all your tools are unused,” heobserved.
“well, lightly used,” i countered.
“if someone came to work for me with these tools i wouldsend them away,” he said. “i am working all alone. is thereanyone in the village who can help me?” he complained.
“er, i’m helping you, karsan,” i said, and i was there everyday lifting wood, cutting things to order, and doing my bestto learn from this multiskilled whirlwind master builder.
admittedly, i sometimes had to take a few hours in the dayto keep the plates in the air with my writing work—nationalnewspapers are extremely unsympathetic to delays insending copy, and excuses like “i had to borrow a cementmixer from monsieur roget and translate for karsan at thebuilders’ supply” just don’t cut it, i found. “i’m all alone,”
karsan continued to lament, and so just before the monthwas out, i finally managed to persuade a local frenchbuilder to help, and he, three-hour lunch breaks and othercommitments permitting, did work hard in the final fortnight.
our glamorous friend georgia, one of the circle of englishmums we tapped into after we arrived, also helped a lot,and much impressed karsan with her genuine knowledgeof plumbing, high heels, and low-cut tops. they becamebest buddies, and karsan began talking of setting uplocally, “where you can drive like in india,” with georgiaworking as administrative assistant and translator.
somehow this idea was vetoed by karsan’s wife.
when the wooden house was finished, the locals couldnot believe it. one even said, “sacré bleu.” some hadbeen working for years on their own houses on patches ofland around the village, which the new generation wasexpanding into. rarely were any actually finished, however,apart from holiday homes commissioned by the dutch,german, and english expats, who often used outside laboror micromanaged the local masons to within an inch of theirsanity until the job was actually done. this life/work balancewith the emphasis firmly on life was one of the mostenjoyable parts of living in the region, and perfectly suitedmy inner putterer, but it was also satisfying to show them acompleted project built in the english way, in back-to-backfourteen-hour days with a quick cheese sandwich and acup of tea for lunch. we bade a fond farewell to karsan andmoved into our new home, in the back of a big open barnlooking out over another, in a walled garden where thechildren could play with their dog, leon, and their cats insafety, and where the back wall was a full-grown adult’sfrisbee throw away. it was our first proper home sincebefore the children were born, and we relished the spaceand the chance to be working on our own house at last.
everywhere the eye fell, there was a pressing amount to bedone, however, and over the next summer we clad thehouse with insulation and installed broadband internet, andkatherine began her own vegetable garden, yieldingsucculent cherry tomatoes and raspberries. figs droppedoff our neighbor’s tree into our garden, wild garlic grew inthe hedgerows around the vine-yards, and melons lay in thefields often uncollected, creating a seemingly endlesssupply of luscious local produce. walking the sunbakeddusty paths with leon every day, through the landscaperinging with cicadas, brought back childhood memories ofcorfu, where our family spent several summers. twistedolive trees appeared in planted rows, rather than thehaphazard groves of greece, but the lifestyle was thesame, although now i was a grown-up with a family of myown. it was surreal, given the back-drop of katherine’sillness, that everything was so perfect just as it went sohorribly wrong.
we threw ourselves into enjoying life, and for me thismeant exploring the local wildlife with the children. mostobviously different from the uk were the birds, brightlycolored and clearly used to spending more time in northafrica than their dowdy uk counterparts, whose plumageseems more adapted to perpetual autumn than to the vividcolors of marrakesh.
twenty minutes away was the camargue, whose ricepaddies and salt flats are warm enough to sustain a yearroundpopulation of flamingos, but i was determined not toget interested in birds. i once went on a “nature tour” of mullthat turned out to be a bird-watchers’ tour. frolicking otterswere ignored in favor of surrounding a bush waiting forsomething called a redstart, an apparently unseasonalvisiting reddish sparrow. that way madness lies.
far more compelling, and often unavoidable, was theinsect population, which hopped, crawled, and reproducedall over the place. crickets the size of mice sprang throughthe long grass entertaining the cats and the children, whocaught them for opposing reasons, the latter to try to feed,the former to eat. at night, exotic-looking and endangeredrhinoceros beetles lumbered across my path like littleprehistoric tanks, each one fiercely brandishing its utterlyuseless horns, resembling more a triceratops than therelatively svelte rhinoceros. these entertaining beastswould stay with us for a few days, rattling around in a glassbowl containing soil, wood chips, and usually dandelionleaves, to see if we could mimic their natural habitat. butthey did not make good pets, and invariably i releasedthem in the night to the safety of the vineyards. othernighttime catches included big fat toads, always releasedonto a raft in the river in what became a formalizedceremony after school, and a hedgehog carried betweentwo sticks and then housed in a tin bath and fed on worms,until his escape into the compound three days later. it wasonly then that i discovered these amiable but flea-riddenand stinking creatures can carry rabies. but perhaps themost dramatic catch was an unidentified snake, nearly ameter long, also transported using the stick method, andhoused overnight in a suspended bowl in the sitting room,lidded, with holes for air. “what do you think of the snake?” iasked katherine proudly the next morning. “what snake?”
she replied. the bowl was empty. the snake had crawledout through a hole and dropped to the floor right next towhere we were sleeping (on the sofa bed at that time)before sliding out under the door. i hoped. katherine wasnot amused, and i resolved to be more careful about what ibrought into the house.
not all the local wildlife was harmless. adders, or lesvipères, are rife, and the protocol was to call the firebrigade, or pompiers, who come and “dance around likelittle girls waving at it with sticks until it escapes,” accordingto georgia, who has witnessed this procedure. i once sawa vipère under a stone in the garden, and wore thick glovesand gingerly tapped every stone i ever moved afterward.
killer hornets also occasionally buzzed into our lives likemalevolent helicopter gunships, with the locals all agreeingthat three stings would kill a man. my increasingly wellthumbedanimal and insect encyclopedia revealed only thatthey were “potentially dangerous to humans.” either way,whenever i saw one, i adopted the full pompier procedurediligently.
but the creature that made the biggest impression earlyon was the scorpion. one appeared in my office on the wallone night, prompting levels of adrenaline and panic ithought only possible in the jungle. was nowhere safe?
how many of these things were there? were they in thekids’ room now? an internet trawl revealed that fifty-sevenpeople had been killed in algeria by scorpions in theprevious decade. algeria is a former french colony. it wasnearby. but luckily this scorpion—dark brown and the sizeof the end of a man’s thumb—was not the culprit, andactually had a sting more like a bee. this jolt, that i wasdefinitely not in london and had brought my family to apotentially dangerous situation, prompted my first (and last)poem for about twenty years, unfortunately too expletiveriddento reproduce here.
and then there was the wild boar. not to be outdone bymere insects, reptiles, and arthropods, the mammalianorder laid on a special treat one night when i was walkingthe dog. unusually, i was out for a run, a bit ahead of leon,so i was surprised to see him up ahead about twenty-fivemeters into the vines. as i got closer, i was also surprisedthat he seemed jet-black in the moonlight, whereas when i’dlast seen him he was his usual tawny self. also, althoughleon is a hefty eight stone, or 112 pounds, of shaggymountain dog, this animal seemed heavier and morebarrel-shaped. and it was grunting, like a great big pig. ibegan to realize that this was not leon, but a sanglier, orwild boar, known to roam the vineyards at night and able tomake a boar-shaped hole in a chain-link fence withoutslowing down. i was armed with a dog lead, a mechanicalpencil (in case of inspiration), and a lighted helmet, turnedoff. as it faced me and started stamping the ground, i felt ihad to decide quickly whether or not to turn on theheadlamp. it would either definitely charge at it or it wouldfind it aversive. as the light snapped on, the gruntingmonster slowly wheeled around and trotted into the vines,more in irritation than fear. and then leon arrived, late andinadequate cavalry, and shot off into the vine-yards after it.
normally leon will chase imaginary rabbits relentlessly formany minutes at a time at the merest hint of a rustle in theundergrowth, but on this occasion he shot backimmediately, professing total ignorance of anything amiss,and stayed very close by my side on the way back. verywise.
the next day i took the children to track the boar, andthey were wide-eyed as we found and photographed thetrotter prints in the loose gray earth, and had them verifiedby the salty farmers in the café of the universe in thevillage. “il était gros,” they concluded, belly laughing andfilling the air with clouds of pastis when i mimicked my fear.
so, serpents included, this life was as much like eden asi felt was possible. with the broadband finally installed, andbats flying around my makeshift office in the empty barn,the book i had come to write was finally seriously underway, and katherine’s treatment and environment seemedas good as could reasonably be hoped for. what couldpossibly tempt us away from this hard-won, almostheavenly niche? my family decided to buy a zoo, of course.