C'est La Folie Read online

  About the Book

  What do you do if you reach your thirties and still don’t feel grown-up?

  Why fritter away your life in front of a computer when you could be wielding manly power-tools?

  How do you learn to be a hero if you suspect you may be a wimp?

  These and other pressing questions are what drove Michael Wright to give up his comfortable South London existence and set out, with just his long-suffering cat for company, for La Folie – a dilapidated fifteenth-century farmhouse in need of love and renovation in the heart of rural France.

  Inspired by his much-loved newspaper column, C’est La Folie is the gloriously entertaining account of his struggle to make the transition from chattering townie to solitary paysan at one with the livestock, the locals and the landscape of his adopted home.

  Witty and winningly honest, this tale of a new life abroad with a cat, a piano and an aeroplane is as much an elegy for rural France as a hymn to the simple pleasures of being alive.

  To explore life at La Folie further, visit www.lafolie.co.uk

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  A Note on the Paperback Edition

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1: Prelude

  Chapter 2: The End of the Beginning

  Chapter 3: March: Initial Virility Test

  Chapter 4: The Ogre

  Chapter 5: July: Fair Stood the Wind for France

  Chapter 6: Pa’s Omelette

  Chapter 7: Daedalus

  Chapter 8: August: In Limbo

  Chapter 9: September: The Nemean Lion

  Chapter 10: October: Cerberus

  Chapter 11: The Girdle of Hippolyta

  Chapter 12: November: The Apples of the Hesperides

  Chapter 13: The Hydra

  Chapter 14: David and Goliath

  Chapter 15: Space Invaders

  Chapter 16: December: The Oxen of Geryon

  Chapter 17: The Man-Eating Horses of Diomedes

  Chapter 18: The Ceryneian Hind

  Chapter 19: Christmas is Coming

  Chapter 20: The Plague Ship

  Chapter 21: Christmas Eve

  Chapter 22: Christmas Day

  Chapter 23: Circe

  Chapter 24: January: The Wild Bull of Crete

  Chapter 25: Phaethon

  Chapter 26: Icarus

  Chapter 27: Judas Iscariot

  Chapter 28: February: Dreaming in French

  Chapter 29: The Amazons

  Chapter 30: The Augean Stables

  Chapter 31: Urban Pastoral

  Chapter 32: Beginnings and Endings

  Chapter 33: April: The Lone Pine

  Chapter 34: May: The Golden Fleece

  Chapter 35: Pegasus

  Chapter 36: The Mower Against Gardens

  Chapter 37: June: The Ancient Mariner

  Chapter 38: Ariadne

  Chapter 39: Where the Wild Things are

  Chapter 40: Les Anglais

  Chapter 41: High Flight

  Chapter 42: July: Fair Play

  Chapter 43: August: Enemy Aircraft in Sight

  Chapter 44: Blessings

  Chapter 45: September: The Stymphalian Birds

  Chapter 46: October: The Chimaera

  Chapter 47: November: Gathering Darkness

  Chapter 48: December: The Blue Trees

  Chapter 49: January: Cold Comfort Farm

  Chapter 50: The Beginning of the End

  Chapter 51: February: The Erymanthian Boar

  Chapter 52: Hannibal

  Chapter 53: March: The Piano

  Chapter 54: Silent Mary

  Chapter 55: A Celebration

  About the Author

  Copyright

  For my parents, Anne and Peter,

  who made it all possible

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Jolibois is the name I have given to the nearest town to La Folie. Though you will not see it on any map, it is not hard to find. And perhaps you will not feel the urge to try. For there are many other little towns, and many other incarnations of Jolibois, waiting to be explored and appreciated, all over France.

  A NOTE ON THE PAPERBACK EDITION

  This new paperback edition contains the complete and unabridged text of the original hardback version of C’est La Folie, with the odd tweak and twiddle where necessary.

  I am very grateful to those readers who have written to me, thanking me for the book. Several have expressed doubt as to whether the story is true or not. I should therefore like to emphasise that yes, it is true, and that a quest to be searchingly honest lies at the heart of the narrative.

  Many people have written to ask when a sequel will appear. The truth is that this first book was more of a labour of love, and harder to write than I would ever have imagined. But I am now working on a follow-up, and will do my best to finish it before the world ends.

  Several months after C’est La Folie first appeared, I am relieved to report that Jolibois life still burbles along in the same old key, and that the townspeople have not felt the urge to drum me out of the region – though this may be because the book has not yet been translated into French.

  At La Folie, meanwhile, the cat still purrs on the windowsill behind my desk. Gaston, my toothless old ram, gazes lustfully as ever at the plump white sheep in my neighbour’s field. I have not yet managed to crash my plane. And the Lone Pine still casts its long shadow over us all.

  Michael Wright

  La Folie 2007

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My deepest thanks are to my old friend and ex-drummer, Jon Stock, for commissioning the newspaper column that was the chicken to the egg of this book, shortly after I moved to La Folie. Or perhaps the column was the egg, and this book is the chicken. Either way, Jon’s support has been athletic, and I have lost track of the number of times when his editorial judgements have saved me from myself, and readers from my gothic excesses.

  Thanks, too, to those who freely gave their energies and insights to help me to write this book:

  Zoë Carnegie, for her sweetness and inspiration

  The very special Marisa, and my brother Steven, who both read the manuscript at an early stage and suggested valuable improvements

  Guy and Monique, Jean-Luc and Annick, Laurent and Valérie, Blaise and Mado, Franck and Karine, Claire Hajaj, Nick Wright, Fariyal Khatri, Jean-François Augrit, Grégory Cheyrou, Guy Dupuigrenet-Desroussilles and all the Benkerts, for encouragement along the way

  Patrick Janson-Smith, for championing the book at the start.

  Mark Lucas, my agent, for sagacity beyond his years.

  Simon Taylor, my editor at Transworld, for making this a much better book than it would have been without his myriad improvements.

  The many warm-hearted Telegraph readers who have taken the trouble to write to me, cheering me on

  The cat, for her presence

  The mice, for their absence (see above)

  And to Alice, for everything else.

  Quand on veut un mouton, c’est la preuve qu’on existe

  When one wants a sheep, it is the proof that one exists

  Le Petit Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

  © Editions Gallimard

  1

  PRELUDE

  I am three years old, and I want to be Queen Victoria’s train-driver.

  No matter that I have missed the bus by a hundred years. I can daydream for hours about the Royal Queen, gazing at pictures of her carriage in the royal train.

  My train.

  I have regular temper-tantrums, too. Oh, what fun it is, to lie on the floor, screaming and foaming at the mouth. Some people have no re
spect for the railway timetable.

  ‘He’ll be in the loony-bin before he’s twenty-one, you mark my words,’ predicts Great-Aunt Beryl.

  ‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous,’ says my mother. Next day, she and my father take their barking three-year-old up to London, to see a child-psychiatrist.

  The shrink gives me some coloured blocks, so he can watch me play.

  Only I don’t want to play with the blocks. I want to tell him about the Royal Queen, and my job as her train-driver. Mum and Dad must be thrilled about this. After all, I could have told him I was Jesus, or Napoleon. Whereas instead I have plumped for a nineteenth-century railway-worker on a special contract.

  Fortunately, the shrink is a switched-on fellow, and an idea occurs to him.

  ‘This child is bored,’ he declares, twiddling his chubby thumbs. ‘What he wants is books.’

  And so I am given all the books I want, even though the only ones I really like are the ones about the Royal Queen. And after a while I decide that I don’t want to be the royal train-driver after all.

  I want to be a Spitfire pilot in the Battle of Britain.

  The advantage of 1940 over 1870 is that I am now only about thirty years too late. I haven’t yet twigged that I would need perfect eyesight to be a Spitfire pilot. I’m far too interested in having a pair of tortoiseshell NHS specs like my friend Hancock. So I read nightly under my blanket and stare at my bedside lamp until my retinas ache, in an attempt to strain my eyes. After a while, all I can see on the page is a green-red glow the shape of a lightbulb filament.

  Books are good, because they allow me to drive trains and meet the Royal Queen and fly Spitfires in my head. And they provide an excuse for creeping downstairs to the kitchen, where my parents are eating their supper.

  ‘Daddy, what does naïve mean?’ I ask, peeking round the door of the kitchen to take in the warm smell of garlic and the candle-glow that envelops them.

  Some nights they allow me to join them for a few minutes, with a crust of French bread and some watered-down red wine.

  ‘Wine-and-water is what French children drink,’ says my mother, topping up my glass with water from the tap, as if it were Ribena. Mum loves France. Her favourite cookbooks are by Elizabeth David, which I think is a funny name, because you don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl.

  For herself and Dad, Mum cooks recipes from French Provincial Cookery which look brown and forbidding, but whose rich smells come from another world to the Bird’s Eye fish fingers and frozen peas that my brothers and I have for our tea, after Blue Peter and Captain Pugwash.

  My father’s culinary gift lies in his appreciation. He venerates my mother’s cooking as if she were the Galloping Gourmet, and he always says her latest creation is really first-class.

  I like the Galloping Gourmet, but not as much as I like Douglas Bader or Stanford Tuck. I like Achilles and Hector, too, and Don Quixote, Biggles, Mary Plain, Peter Rabbit and all sorts of other animals that can talk. And the more I read, the more clear I become about what I really want to be.

  I want to be a hero.

  But I don’t tell anyone about it this time.

  Wanting to be a hero feels like a guilty secret, when you’re short and plump and not much good at anything except reading and screaming. So I keep it to myself, and count the days to my twenty-first birthday, hoping that Great-Aunt Beryl made a mistake.

  But I’ll admit it now: I’ve wanted to be a hero ever since.

  Deep down, perhaps all men do.

  The question is, how does one train to be a hero, assuming one is not gifted with all the attributes of an Achilles, a Captain Scott, or a Skywalker? There is no Ladybird book on the subject. And evening classes in Heroism have yet to catch on in the home counties.

  I am not talking about the kind of shining hero who rushes in to save children from burning buildings, or flailing women from floods. Nor am I talking about being a public hero, fêted for great deeds. I have in mind a quieter sort of hero. Someone you almost don’t notice when you pass them in the street. The kind of person who, through the way he or she lives their life – bravely and simply and openly – can somehow be a force for good.

  2

  THE END OF THE BEGINNING

  My Surrey childhood was as safe and soft as a padded cell in an open prison. The only limitations were the natural restrictions of the Surrey mindset, where doing something wild meant buying a BMW instead of a Cortina, ambition was a well-paid job in the City, and art was the bloke who sang the high bits in ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’.

  No childhood rebellion, no fashionable expulsion for me. I had had my tantrums. I was the swotty goody-goody who begged to be allowed to stay at school for extra lessons on a Saturday afternoon, and played Chopin and Schubert instead of football and cricket. I could bash away at our tiny upright piano for hours on end, trying to play pieces that were far too hard for me. My school nicknames were Brain and Ritz Crackers. I was as rugged as a banana.

  When I was nine, my parents went to live Abroad, in Bogotà. I was frightened of Abroad. Abroad meant dusty roads and sunburn. It meant women with moustaches and men with too much aftershave. Abroad, people tried to touch our hair, because it was blond. Abroad, people wanted to kidnap our dad, because he was the boss.

  I was afraid of Alone, too. Alone meant that my parents had left without me. Alone was screaming in a foreign bathroom, while maids with moustaches muttered outside the door about what to do in a language I didn’t understand. Alone meant having no one to distract me from the alarming prospect of being myself.

  Boarding school was better than Abroad. Better than Surrey, too. At Windlesham, it felt as if someone had flung open the windows of a stuffy room, allowing fresh air and the sounds and smells of nature to flood in. There were no uniforms, enough Latin, few rules and no bullying. There were girls, too, and you were encouraged to talk to them. At night, Greek myths and Chopin ballades were piped into speakers in all the dormitories, to help us sleep. I thought I had been sent to heaven.

  One day our geography teacher took us to visit a real farm, and we drank warm, foaming milk, straight from a cow.

  My best friend Toby and I made survival kits: army pouches filled with useful gadgets like pocket tin-openers and fish-hooks and matches dipped in nail-varnish to waterproof them. Toby lived Abroad, too, in the Malaysian jungle with his sister Alice, who was very pretty and always homesick. Toby was forever getting into trouble, and I think he was planning a survival adventure, to take Alice home. But I just liked collecting Useful Gadgets.

  It didn’t matter that all the other boys – and a lot of the girls – could run faster, stand on their hands for longer, jump out of higher windows than me. There was mist on the sunlit downs. There were thrilling pillow fights. And there were pretty girls in my class, with one of whom – Clara Delaville – I fell desperately in love.

  ‘You can’t be in love,’ matron told me. ‘Children don’t understand love. It’s just a crush.’

  I thought matron was an old bat.

  I was convinced that if only I had a Spitfire, I could do a victory roll over the games pitches. And this would make Clara Delaville love me.

  One sunny afternoon, another girl in my class led me into the woods. I didn’t love Amelia Blunt, even though she let me touch her boobs. They felt soft and smooth and strange. We were both twelve years old. Amelia’s mouth tasted of Bluebird Toffee, but I was afraid. So I told her I had carpentry; that I needed to finish making my green cheeseboard. And I ran away.

  And then I turn my back for a second, and twenty years have slipped by. The green cheeseboard is finished. But London’s friendly red telephone boxes have been uprooted. Train doors no longer slam; they hiss. It’s not safe to walk in the park, darling.

  For my job, I work as a theatre critic. People act out heroic stories on stage, and I sit in the darkness and criticize them. I have seen Macbeth nine times, and haven’t enjoyed it once. I think I may be poisoning my mind.

  One da
y, I meet a girl in a black velvet dress at a Christmas party. She is called Marisa and she says she works in publishing.

  ‘What exactly is it that you’re looking for?’ she asks me, clutching my arm with the insistence of one who has downed one-too-many Moscow Mules. Bright, pretty, curvaceous, determined; tottering on heels too high for her; another child playing at being an adult.

  ‘I’m looking for someone like you,’ I tell her, because I have had one-too-many Moscow Mules, too.

  After a year or so, Marisa and I move into a little house in East Dulwich together, with stripped wooden floors, a garden, and just enough space for my parents’ grand piano, which I have played since I was twelve years old.

  We have lively dinner parties and watch mindless television. We drive to the RSPCA rescue centre in Kilburn, and adopt a kitten that has been saved from a laboratory. We don’t think we’ll get married, and we don’t think we’ll have children. Marriage and children are for grown-ups, whereas we are only in our thirties.

  I join the local tennis club, play in a jazz band, make an easy living as a freelance journalist, criticizing people for money. Life becomes a catalogue of diversions designed to stop us having to think about the fact that, behind the distractions, there might be nothing there at all.

  I have the idea that I am going to write a novel, but London keeps getting in the way. Unlike most first novels, this will not be autobiographical. It is going to be about a hopeless young man who sets himself a series of impossible tasks in order to make himself worthy of the woman of his dreams. I know it will be called The Labours of Jack Larry, but I can’t for the life of me think how to begin. How can I write about someone else’s heroic adventures, when I haven’t had any of my own?

  I finally learn to fly, sweltering in the cockpit of a rented Piper Warrior in Florida. My instructor, Anand, is a small, polite and rather beautiful Indian man who, at twenty-one, already has fifteen hundred hours of flying under his belt. He is reassuringly perfectionistic in his approach, which I appreciate more than the way he shrieks ‘Sinking! Sinking! Sinking!’ each time I attempt to land us smoothly on Kissimmee’s runway zero-three. Yes, Anand, I can see we’re sinking. What the hell do you expect me to do about it?