Our time in France begins - Heavy duty buildings and subsidy hunting

As we had been bidden to go and talk to Bernard Scandella, the imposingly bearded and tall mayor of Fontenoy le Chateau and Head of the local primary school, we went to his office wondering what he wanted to see us about.

It turned out he had been told of our plans for a school field centre, and wanted us to set it up in his village if possible, but first he wanted to talk to us, find out who and what we were, and apparently to be certain that we were not members of some sort of cult.

On this last point he questioned us very closely indeed, apparently he really did not want any form of cult moving into his village, which we could well understand, so we assured him as forcibly as we could that we were as far from being a cult as it was possible to be.

 Jake, Lotty and I on the main street of Fontenoy, outside the Harlequin Bar, which belonged to Roger, Oscar and another friend from that time, Ari.

Fontenoy Le Chateau

Once he was happy about that aspect of things, he went on to suggest that we talked to a local farmer, who apparently had a large disused set of farm buildings on the edge of the village, a certain Norbert Thenot, and he set up a meeting on the farm with Norbert for all of us to look at this possibility.

As we hadn't managed to find anything that met our requirements anywhere else, we were perfectly happy to explore this unexpected opportunity with him and Norbert, so we all duly met up on the ruined farm.

It turned out to be a mix of ruined and restored buildings, well, there was a smallish apartment in the farm house itself, surrounded by several more or less ruined farm buildings. The whole thing perched on top of a hill... All very solid stone built stuff. Typical of the region, the houses and barns were all built of dry stone, with walls about 50 cms thick.... Solid stuff.

Norbert proposed a deal with us, which entailed us renting the place and restoring it at our cost, in exchange for a very long lease, at the end of which it would all return to Norbert.

To be honest I can no longer remember the exact deal we made with Norbert, but in any event, we moved into the farm and set about trying to make it into a field centre.

We had several groups of kids from the International School of Amsterdam while we were there, but it quickly became apparent that there wasn't really enough space there for our needs, and the costs involved in the restoration was way more than we could afford, so we started to look around for a more suitable site, and found one also in the village, a bit along the river and canal from the village which looked more promising, and was for sale.

This was a disused quarry and stone working place, with about 20 hectares (50 acres) of land, mostly forested and hilly, but the main house and stone works were on a sort of island between the river and the canal, with its own rather splendid steel bridge from the road over the river Coney.

 Nathaniel Havinden working away on part of our house.

 As you see, not really in good condition!

 View from our window of the Canal de L'est with a Spits passing by

All the buildings here were in a pretty advanced stage of disrepair, so we lived in another rented house while we got the main house to a minimalistic level of habitability. And in due time we moved into the main house in a sort of camping manner. And set about building it around ourselves.

By “camping manner” I really do mean that. We had no fresh water supply there (even though there were several mineral springs up on top of one of our hills), so we had to go 7 km to get water from a natural spring source in Bans les Bains. This was a case of going to a pipe in a wall there, from which almost boiling water from way down deep in the earth poured constantly, so handfuls of jerry cans was the system. And having no sewage system on our land, we had to use Porta Potties.... Oh well.

The main house was a three story stone building (more of those 50 cms thick walls) and the roof had collapsed many years before, so I found myself on the top story with a large chain saw cutting down fully grown trees who had rooted themselves up there.. An odd feeling cutting down such large trees on our third story.

I carried out this rebuilding work, which I mostly did with the help of Nathaniel Havinden, and a local guy Joel, (who sadly hanged himself a few years later) who was a real master of all trades, and great fun to work with. I still have vivid memories of us managing to haul 10 meter long 50 x 30 cms main roof beams up from the ground and struggling them into place on the rebuilt end and central walls up there.

Loads of very heavy work in general.. Not least was clearing the entire surrounding land of a 30 year growth of huge, thick and vicious brambles.. More chainsaw work.

While we were carrying out this building work, we were also busy putting in applications for grants to start the field centre – which was called The Meeting Point,by the way – as we didn’t have anything like enough money ourselves to finance all the building work, buying equipment and so on that the plan involved.

We wrote proposals, made financial plans, talked to bureaucrats and generally went through all the hoops that one has to go through to get any form of subsidy. We got to the point of there only being one more meeting between us and the money we needed... But sadly for us this was a meeting of all the local mayors who had the last word on where money was spent.. and unfortunately, the mayor of a nearby commune wanted the money for a project he had in his village, so he objected to our proposal, and as it only needed one No vote, we lost... end of dreams.

However, during all of this, we had had quite a few school groups at the centre from various international schools, and they had all been highly successful, and the kids both enjoyed themselves and got a lot out of their stay with us.

  Jet being happy in our log cabin kitchen

Kids building a wooden siege catapult.

Off to do some riding in the forests.

The Great Race, with self made coracles

We had used the local camp site (run by a splendid Dutch woman called Marlies, an ex-bargee) to accommodate the kids, as we had no suitable places on our land, and on occasions we also used the 11^th century prison in the village as well, which was entertaining for the kids.... Sleeping in a medieval cell had its charms we discovered.

As it has become apperent that we werent going to be able to set up our field centre, we found ourselves the proud owners of some 20 hectares of rural France, with no idea what to do with it...  Until a friend suggested it would be ideal for a Paintball center, so that is what we did next.   More about that later. 

 The staircase that Nathaniel built up into our forest.

 It could get pretty cold in the Vosges.............

Throughout all of this process we had wonderful support from the village, not just the mayor and the council, but most of the inhabitants as well, who couldn’t have been more helpful and supportive.

Over the next few posts in this thrilling saga, I shall talk about various aspects of living in a smallish rural French community (Fontenoy had about 740 inhabitants – which for the area was a large commune. The next village along had 37 inhabitants, but also had a mayor and village council, which in French law has to have at least 13 members, so almost half the population of the village were on the council, and every election there were wonderful battles and long lasting feuds about who should be mayor..) But I shan't be doing any of that tedious and supercilious “A Year in Provence” type of thing, the good people of Fontenoy were much too good, kind and interesting for that sort of rubbishing tale.