7 - Foreign Hoarders and Brocante Dreams

When we first bought our place we were warned by parents, other assorted family and basically anyone we told that what we had taken on was too big. There would be too much maintenance they said; constant work. We thanked people for their concern, knowing they were right, but all the time thinking it a small price to pay for basking in the smug knowledge that for the same price as a two-up, two-two down in the rough end of a 'New Town', we'd bought our dream property. In truth though, we had behaved like kids in a sweet shop.

Smugness doesn't do the upkeep either, and it was probably less than a fortnight before we approached the handyman/gardener who had worked for the previous owners to 'help us out a bit'. Manuel comes round at least once a week now. Whether he's been asked to or not.

He hadn't really got on with our predecessors; in his eyes, it seems, they were city folk and knew nothing of the countryside, hacking away at their fruit trees and storing the winter logs in a damp place. I think now, though, he'd regard them as a pair of professional gardeners compared to my outdoor efforts. Thankfully, he adores Natalie, loves the boys – particularly Thérence and Maurice who are both outdoor types – and is invaluable when I'm away. But like I say, he's not sure about me. He's a fair bit older than I am (about sixty years old), but he has fewer grey hairs than I do and though not really stocky or muscular is stronger than the Mafia and just as unlikely to talk. He has a slow, rolling gait as if all the strength he possesses needs to be controlled until needed, but could go off like a firework at any moment.

Manuel is Portuguese and part of a sizeable Portuguese community in the Loire Valley; the Portuguese are actually the largest 'immigrant' group in France. Though he and his wife have been here for thirty years, his French is spoken with a very strong Portuguese accent, and as my French comes with a heavy Michael Caine twang, communication is something of an issue. Over the years, though, we have developed a way of communicating: I'll shrug and he'll tut. To be honest, communication between us isn't really an issue as he has little or no respect for my opinions and thinks I'm not to be entirely trusted with any of the bigger property maintenance decisions or upkeep. The last of which I'd probably agree with him on.

One of his many advantages is that he owns a remorque (trailer) which comes in very handy indeed. Every so often in a frenzy of OCD mania I will set about one of the outbuildings, ignoring Natalie's and the boy's cries of 'I could make something of that', 'I could put that on eBay' and 'I've been looking for that for ages', and I will have a right good clear out. Nothing, it seems, is ever thrown away and it's usually my 'workshop' (there is a bag of rusty tools in there) that it gets dumped in, the logic being that I'm rarely in there. On this occasion I had collected up quite a bounty: a fridge/freezer, a television, a rug, a goldfish bowl and a set of mouldy luggage being just a selection of the rubbish we'd accumulated. It looked like a haul from a 1970s game show, cuddly toys included.

But Manuel wasn't keen to lend me his remorque. His opinion of me is so low now that he actually follows me around my own property making sure I don't break anything or come to harm. As usual, then, we came to an arrangement: we'd load up his trailer, putting all the dirtier boxes in my car, and go together to the local tip, in convoy. It was his idea, and the only one on the table.

I love the fact that the refuse tip, the civic dump, in France is called the déchetterie. Of all the vocabulary that I have had to learn, déchetterie is the easiest; it's the closest to nominative determinism I think the French language gets: déchetterie to me is 'de-shittery', as good a description of a clear-out as I can think of. But that makes light of the place and you can't do that, it's a very serious business indeed. When I first visited the tip there were just two skips, and when one was full you'd just chuck stuff in the other. It was a simple system, run by a lovely woman, Elisabeth, and it worked. Now, though, there are twelve skips, a sinister underground 'oil recycling' bunker, more rules than cricket and Elisabeth herself has been recycled and replaced by more evangelical recyclers.

But first we had to get there, and Manuel was clearly uncomfortable with me leading our convoy, presumably feeling that I could barely get to the boulangerie without then requesting the assistance of a search party. Now I like driving, when it's not for work, but I hate the boredom of regular routes – I need 'long' cuts, gear changes, junctions, back roads and new sights. I guess it's all to do with the amount of travelling I do, but I have to make even the shortest journey more interesting. I go where I want. I'm a free man.

I decided to take a circuitous route, much to Manuel's annoyance, and by the time we arrived at the déchetterie he was furious.

He didn't actually say anything, but I could see he was riled and he avoided eye-contact as we began to empty the rubbish. Coping with a truculent Portuguese man is one thing; adding an equally hostile Frenchman into the mix is trying in the extreme, and Elisabeth's replacement was in a cantankerous mood. It was after lunch and as he leant in close to explain yet another change in the skip system, he smelled of wine and saucisson and his obviously now extinguished cigarette, possibly reclaimed from one of the skips, was still stuck to his bottom lip. It may have been there for months for all I know, it was shorter than his stubble. I took a step back from his breath and threw a box of assorted rubbish into the designated 'assorted rubbish' skip. His cry was gutwrenching.

'Argh! Non! Qu'est-ce que vous faites? Mais non, Monsieur!'

I could see Manuel nodding sagely in the background and I realised my mistake. I hadn't just thrown the box of rubbish in, but the 'box' with the 'rubbish'. The rubbish may be fine, but the box itself should have gone into another skip, the box skip, and he was apoplectic; to my mind I'd put some cardboard in the wrong skip, but he was acting like I had attacked his family. He started to fish out the offending carton with a shepherd's crook, but then everything in the box came tumbling out, glass, plastic, floor tiles – all in the wrong place – and then, as a final insult, a broken electric pump fell out. He slumped over the side of the skip and took a moment before raising his head and looking at me with tears in his eyes. I had put electrics in a non-electrics skip, but by his reaction you'd have thought I'd urinated into a vat of the Touraine's finest Muscadet.

'I'm sorry!' I said, 'Where do you want the electric stuff?' pointing out that we also had a fridge and a TV to offload too.

Now his eyes lit up. 'Er, put them in my van,' he said, recovering his composure quickly. 'Over there.' What a racket! I suppose it's a perk of the job, and if he can make something of the stuff then that's recycling in its purest form – and in the man's defence, he's not the only one at it.

Twice a year the local council allows you to put whatever sized rubbish you like out the front of your house; it's called the monstres and obviously it saves having to hire a van or trailer, or begging your gardener to use his for the job, and it means that big rubbish, white goods, broken down TVs and old sofas aren't just dumped by the side of the road – or rather, they are dumped by the side of the road, just with an official stamp of approval.

It also offers a chance to the local Romani population to do a bit of recycling of their own. The children have a saying around here, a warning to others not to touch their stuff: 'Pas touche Manouche, si non ta mère te mettra une couche!', which is slightly offensive in tone but roughly translates as 'Don't touch my stuff, Gypsy, or your mother will put you in a nappy.' Frankly I don't understand what it means either, just that the Romani here are renowned for their sharp practice. They have a 'reputation'. There are lots of them here too, possibly because it's quite flat, which is an important consideration if you live in a caravan, but they aren't feared as much or treated as pariahs like 'travellers' are back in the UK. There are few confrontations and the same families have been here for generations, which is something I've never really understood – I mean, are you travelling or not? Make your mind up.

They all have a very distinctive look, and yes I know how that sounds but bear with me. They are obviously all inter-related and having stayed in the same place for years now all look very much like each other, the men resemble a young, but swarthier, Elvis Presley, with jet black, greased-up quiffs and clothes like early rockers. The women, though stunning when younger, are clearly encouraged to beef up as they age and often resemble a later-period, Las Vegas Elvis, which at least gives the whole thing continuity.

It's true that an awful lot of scrap metal gets thrown away and some of the white goods might not be beyondrepair monstres. It's an ideal system in many ways, and those that have put the stuff out in the first place aren't bothered, they're just glad to see the back of it. It's quite an arresting sight, though. Dozens of young Elvis lookalikes scurrying about picking through piles of discarded furniture and electrical goods, with Natalie.

She really is utterly shameless and she's passed it on to Maurice. I hadn't realised that while we were on holiday last year Maurice had discovered that when people packed up to leave the campsite we were staying on, quite often they would leave behind deck chairs that they no longer had room for. Maurice, chancer that he is, would go around the campsite collecting discarded beach furniture and store it under our caravan. It was only on our last day that I noticed the piles of stuff hidden away, like a deckchair graveyard – all sizes and colours and all collected by Maurice who hoped to sell them on at a later date.

It's in his genes I'm afraid. Natalie cannot contain herself when the monstres is on, it's like a brocante (flea market) to her but without the overheads, and to give her credit in the front garden we do have a lovely sewing table, no home should be without one, and numerous baskets dotted about the place. The only downside to this carry-on is that I get roped in as driver and, I hesitate to say it, strongman; she tells me where to stop and what to put in the car, which I do as quickly and as surreptitiously as possible. It's the lack of dignity I can't stand. I know these things have been thrown away but really… I'm afraid that I'm far too English for all this, far too embarrassed and I hide my face if a car approaches. Not that anonymity is an issue when you're the only mod in the area. I can just about cope with grabbing something hastily, throwing it in the boot and making a quick getaway. But I really draw the line when I'm asked to climb into a skip.

I was out chauffeuring Natalie on one of the monstres runs and I saw an original 1960s hanging basket chair that would be perfect, if I were allowed any choice in the matter of interior decoration, for the office I someday planned to build. I had to have it. Without having to climb into the skip I managed to drag the thing out right from under the nose of a young Romani lad while Natalie rifled through some pottery across the road. I threw the chair into the car, dived back into the driver's seat, pulled my jacket collars up and put my sunglasses back on. I'd got what I wanted but it wasn't exhilarating in any way; it just felt wrong.

I stayed there for a few minutes waiting for Natalie and then there was a knock at the window, it was the young lad from the skip. Oh no, I thought, he's going to claim a prior stake and there'll be some unseemly toing and froing over the thing. He knocked on the window again.

I opened the window a fraction. 'Yes?' I snapped.

'You left the hanging hook behind,' he said, giving me the ceiling hook for the chair before taking an impressive standing leap back into the skip.

'Now you're one of us,' Natalie laughed as she got back into the car. Oh, the shame.

Of course, most of what's left out in the monstres is unusable rubbish, that's pretty much a given if Natalie or the Romani can't make anything of it, and so the majority of what's left is collected up to be deposited in, hopefully, the right skip at the déchetterie. There is the third option though, the brocante.

There is this romantic notion of a French street brocante, perhaps fed by the endless Bargain Hunt-type programmes that used to be afternoon television fillers but which now seem to pass as acceptable prime-time viewing, and the notion is that you can literally make your fortune by browsing through other people's tat. I think it's very unlikely indeed. It may have been the case a few years ago that what was fashionable in the interior design world of Britain was coincidentally exactly the kind of stuff that the French were throwing out, but largely those days have gone or, as seems more likely, the French have cottoned on to the real value of what they have and price things accordingly. Now, there are brocantes antiquités which are the expensive higher-end markets; there are the brocantes themselves, where you may find a bargain; and there are the vide-greniers, literally 'loft-empties', and to my mind horrific places just full of tat, basically a déchetterie without the order.

When the idea of having a stall at the local annual brocante was first suggested I made my opposition to the idea perfectly clear. It's a waste of time, I said to Natalie, and I knew this from experience. It's a long day, I said, where we sell nothing and you and the boys spend the time buying from other stalls, leaving me minding the shop and 'haggling' with old women over the cost of shabby, discarded doilies and broken breadbins. It's undignified, tiring and fruitless, I stressed, and we are not doing it. I felt strongly about this and also thought that, just this once, maybe putting my foot down would have some effect. I was pleased with my reasoned argument and eloquence. That's that idea crushed, I thought naively; no brocante for us…

Six o'clock on a Sunday morning is no time to be setting up a trestle table covered in broken stuff, not that there's ever really a good time. The initial idea had been that just Natalie and Maurice would do the setting up and that Samuel, Thérence and me would turn up later; it didn't happen like that. Maurice was understandably nervous at having to fend off early morning crap-scavengers while Natalie parked the car and dawdled her way back to the stall, so I was roped in to act in a security role while Maurice sorted the stuff out. As it was, Natalie disappeared with the car and Maurice fell asleep under the table, leaving me to deal with the kind of people normally found passing off car stereos in pubs or loitering by people's bins.

'How much for the…?'

'I haven't bloody unpacked yet!' was typical of some early exchanges, me not being particularly suited to the early Sunday morning, sell your own 'tat' combination.

Eventually Natalie returned – with a lampshade. Brilliant, I thought, we haven't sold anything yet and already she's bought stuff; this early into the game and we're already one–nil down, this could be a hammering. I left her to it and promised to return later with Samuel and Thérence, by which time I presumed that her stall would have expanded as she bought up everyone else's stock in a brocante version of Monopoly.

The plan had been to arrive late-morning with the others and have lunch with Natalie and Maurice, but I hadn't bargained on Samuel's hereditary desire to buy other people's discarded dross and we were back within the hour to see the place in full swing.

What became particularly apparent as Samuel, Thérence and I walked through the market was that everybody seemed to be selling the same stuff; every stall, including ours, had a pram, a baby-walker and/or high chair, a selection of baby clothes, naked Action Man dolls and a broken first bike. It was like a car boot sale the day after King Herod's rampage.

'Have you sold anything?' I asked as we approached Natalie and Maurice. They looked at each other conspiratorially.

'We've had some enquiries,' Natalie replied, with what is presumably sales-talk euphemism for 'no'.

A man approached the stall at the same time we did and picked up my old wheelie, multi-compartment, international travel computer case and asked how much. Under her breath, Natalie said that he'd been there three times already but that she refused to go lower than €8.

'Eight euros!' I shouted, 'That thing is in mint condition and it cost me fifty quid!' I turned to the man angrily and was about to tell him to clear off when Samuel interrupted.

'Four euros,' he said.

'Done,' said the man coolly, totally ignoring Natalie and me.

'What the—' I began.

'We've got to get this thing started,' Samuel replied and skipped off with my €4.

I suppose he had a point, though his argument was somewhat undermined when he returned ten minutes later with a selection of Star Wars fridge magnets that he'd purchased for a 'bargain' €4. A friend of Samuel's then turned up and asked how much Samuel wanted for his Dragonball Z books.

'Two euros each,' Samuel said, enjoying his role as entrepreneur. There were eight books and his friend clearly didn't want to pay that much.

'Four euros, the lot,' I said and pocketed the money quickly as Samuel started to protest. 'Now you've got it started, son, we've got to keep the momentum going.'

It was a long, frustrating morning. The stall was in the full sun and it was draining our spirits; mine particularly, as I watched the 'must-have' toys of a couple of years ago be sold for 50c. I mean really, I searched high and low for that James Bond car, it cost me a fortune and I remember Samuel's face when I gave it to him; it was the world to him at the time and now 'It's just a toy, Daddy.' The Bob the Builder bicycle, both Samuel and Maurice's first bike, got a lot of enquiries but nobody would pay more than €5. Five euros! I mean it's a bloody bike, I thought, it works for God's sake, you tight bastards – and yet they'd just look at you like you were trying to rip them off and all the while clutching a mouldy old sandwich toaster that they'd bought for €2 next door. Yeah, good luck with that purchase, you fruitcakes.

The final straw for me was when Samuel, having been off on one of his forays, returned with a batterypowered robot that was actually bigger than Thérence and which then sat by our stall and gained more enquiries than any item we were actually selling. Tempers shortened as the day went on, and as the rain started at about four o'clock there was an almost palpable sense of relief from the whole market as everyone realised that they could legitimately start packing up; nobody was having a good day and many of them stated, quite categorically, that they'd never do it again. I would have done the same, but realised the futility of such a gesture, knowing that Natalie regards brocantes in much the same way as childbirth – the pain, inconvenience and exhaustion all quickly forgotten as the next one is planned.

And by the end we still had the pram, the baby-walker, the mountain of clothes, the naked Action Men, the lot. There seemed to be no dent whatsoever on our 'stock'. I only got rid of the bike because, after everything Natalie, Samuel and Maurice had bought, I couldn't actually get it back in the car.