In the past I may have bragged mentioned that I live in beautiful South West Brittany. I live at the bottom of a valley with tree lined hills. A quarter of a mile to the east of my house is a meandering little river and a mile away to the west is the Nantes Brest Canal. In the spring I hear frogs singing every evening and in the summer it’s the sound of crickets chirruping. Every year people flock to the area on holiday and in the summer you hear more English than French voices; and am I smug when I say, “oh no I’m not on holiday, I live here”, you bet I am.
Until it gets to November that is, that’s when the dread sets in, because come November, come the rain. When we bought our house it was really cheap, I mean really cheap, our car had cost us more money – but at the same time it was all the money we had saved up in the bank so it was a big investment. This house was the first house the agent showed us, it was sunny and welcoming and of course there was that beautiful river with dragonflies and fish jumping and frogs singing just at the top of the lane. We fell in love with it, and on top of that the agent told us it was going to be on A Place in the Sun a month later. Well if it was going to be on A Place in the Sun we had to have it, this house was going to be a celebrity. “Why is it so cheap?” we asked to which the agent replied “Well it got flooded last year and the people are elderly and it upset them, but don’t worry about that there are plans to stop that happening again”. Brilliant, we gave him our non-refundable deposit and went back home to the UK. Two weeks later, we sat down to watch A Place in the Sun, but of course we told everyone we knew in the world to watch it, our new holiday house was on there. Amanda Lamb took the prospective buyers around several houses, but then she came to ours, it was by far the best, the couple were really keen, then she took them out in our new garden and told them “this property has been flooded six times in the last six years”. SIX times, they didn’t tell us six times, of course everybody we knew started ringing, did you know, blah, blah, blah.
So we bought the house and for five years it was a holiday home and it never flooded, then we embarked on major renovation work to make it bigger (still ongoing by the way, my next blog will be providing transcription services from a building site) and we moved to France with our two young children permanently. The first year was fine, Brittany is very grey in the winter but I was still in the honeymoon period, I was working for McGowan Transcription Services, the children were happy in school everything was fine. Until November and it started to rain, and rain, and rain… and it didn’t stop for three months. The fields surrounding the house became waterlogged, the children couldn’t play in the garden because there was a layer of water on top of the ground but never mind everything was fine indoors. Until one day I looked out of my window and saw water pouring down the lane in front of the house. Okay, this was starting to look a bit serious, I managed to get all my work finished and sent back to Joe, with a little email telling her I may not be around the next day because the water was getting close to my house and I might have to leave. I lifted all the furniture onto breeze blocks and went to bed. At 3.00 am I woke up because I heard a strange noise downstairs, when I went to investigate there was no electricity. Halfway down the stairs I realised the funny noise was actually our poor old springer spaniel swimming for her life because the water was deeper than her. I dragged her upstairs and decided the only thing I could do was wait it out, no electricity meant no phone. At 4.00 am there was a banging on the front door, my neighbour had got a boat and had come to rescue us. So me, two children, one dog, two cats and a rabbit got into his boat in the pitch black (no street lights when you live out in the middle of nowhere) and he took us to the other side of the village to dryness.
We had to leave the house for three weeks, during those three weeks I would drop the children off at school and then drive home to check if the water level had decreased and even though the downstairs was under a couple of feet of water, I’d managed to get electricity upstairs where I’d moved my computer to. Every day I took in transcription work from McGowan Transcriptions and typed away listening to water running through my home. I joked that we had an indoor pool, but it was pretty grim at the time. Eventually the water levels went down and we got the house cleaned up and moved back in. We’ve been flooded two more times since that first time and we’re more prepared for it these days, I email Joe to tell her I might not be around for a little while because I don’t know how deep the water is going to get or if I’m going to lose power. More often than not within a few hours I’ve got the electricity on upstairs and I’m back to sitting upstairs at my desk typing up transcriptions listening to water flowing through the bottom of the house. The sound of meandering river running through your house does not have the same calming qualities as it does if you’re laid on a riverbank with a picnic on a sunny day.
We are now in November again and I’ve already started to obsessively check the weather forecast and the river levels. It’s been a pretty dry year and I’m hoping that it will be a dry winter. Cross you fingers for me, but if I am unfortunate to flood (again) I’m sure I’ll be back to providing transcription services as soon as I possibly can.
Blogy by Nicky Whenman
