As we made our way to the village the sky became darker and there was a little light rain which made the whole exercise even more suspect. Who wants to view a house with the prospect of buying it, in the rain, particularly in France. Clearly, I said to myself," this is a waste of time" and we could have saved Francoise the trouble of spending a couple of hours with two mad English people who had no intention of buying the place.
After all we were just on holiday!
However, armed with my ancient camcorder, which did not like the low light conditions, or the rain come to that, we stepped inside the kitchen and began the exploration of the house.
We soon discovered that there was electricity, albeit in need of re-wiring, running water, if only of the cold variety, which supplied a tap over the concrete kitchen sink, with the drain taking the form of a pipe through the wall to discharge into the street; ( that still happens in some of the houses in the village) and the third most important item, a lavatory, fairly recently installed and which discharged into a "fosse septique".
This last feature was in the back hall behind the kitchen and was separated from the hallway by a wooden partition and a fairly primitive but sufficiently effective door. The doorway from the rear of this hall led in to the "garden", an overgrown piece of land with some "pig styes" and a chicken run, together with the inevitable lavatory at the bottom of the garden, which looked as if it had been used in the not too distant past. (Old habits die hard). The garden walls were in a very broken down condition and the rear entrance, of just about vehicular size, was closed off with a couple of sheets of bent and rusty corrugated iron.
We moved back into the house and looked at the two bedrooms on the first floor above the kitchen and hall. They were inter-connecting, but of adequate size, and one of them still contained an iron bedstead,complete with ill fitting mattress.
Leading from the bedroom was another more primitive staircase which led up to a large landing which was open to the roof, and another very large bedroom measuring about 7m x 5m.
The ceiling of this bedroom was lath and plaster, which had seen better days, and was collapsing on one side because of a leak in the roof at some time. There was a long wooden clothes hanger on the wall with about twelve wooden pegs which looked as if a community of monks had just vacated the premises, and for some unexplained reason this room has always been called "The blue bedroom", possibly because it had a muddy grey/blue door, which is still there! We gave all the rooms names in order to identify which part of the house we were discussing, which names have continued to this day, despite the many changes we have made.
There were two other doors on the landing. One led into another bedroom which was full of straw to about 5 feet in the middle, which inevitably became "The straw bedroom" and the other door which was opened with care by Francoise who cautioned us because there were no floors in that space which was open to the roof. In my mind I could imagine hanging a huge "mobile" or some other creative structure in that voluminous space, although how we could have reached to the roof timbers to fix it I had no idea.
We returned to the kitchen and needed to go into the street to view the next part of the building, and began to realize why Francoise had such a large bunch of keys.
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