A Parisian friend sent me this picture of a little cottage on the French coast that they were thinking of purchasing as a holiday cottage. They wanted Mr G to look at it and tell them whether he thought it was ‘safe’ from the tides. It is minute, a mere 7 metres by 10 metres over all – but, they assured me, it had two bed rooms and they would only be there for the month of August each year. It came accompanied by an eye watering price tag! I could buy several Bentley Continentals for the same money….not that I have any wish to, but you get the idea.

The Internet search for information on tidal levels and behaviour drew me on a curious journey through the past. The little cottage has quite a history and is an object lesson in how spoilt we have all become.

It was built by a fisherman in 1750ish, as a single storey shelter when he was working on his nets. His son inherited it. The son’s wife and three baby daughters lived in a rented cottage in the nearby village. The fisherman died in a storm, and with no income to pay the rent, his widow moved into the shelter with her young daughters and a pair of goats. The widow contracted cancer of the stomach – no money for a Doctor, and no ‘cure’ in those days – she still lived to 97 though!  The children, young as they were, spent the days fishing for shrimp in the pools left at low water.

They had no income – they lived exclusively on shrimp and goats milk. The daughters grew to be adult, but never married or left ‘home’, such as it was. They were offered furniture by other villagers, but routinely turned down the offer – not out of pride, but because the ground floor of the shelter flooded at high tide. When that happened they climbed up into the loft and sheltered there until the tide went out when they could gather driftwood and light a fire in the hearth to dry out. You can imagine how miserable that was in the dead of winter.

My friend nearly had a fit when I translated all this for him – a sea wall has been built since then, but it could happen again, just the once perhaps, not once a month as it did, and his expensive plants in the garden could be ruined…albeit that the house is safe now.

 A few days later we went to Rocamadour, and marvelled again at medieval man’s sheer chutzpah in carting blocks of stone up a sheer rock face and building a sanctuary there.  It must have taken an army of monks years to cut each block of stone and haul it up there to its final resting place – until it was finished and they had constructed a roadway, they would have lived in makeshift shelters, some detailed each day to hunt for food and produce the fire to cook it by. Some will have died and been buried where they had toiled, some will have grown sick. No Doctors. No Routiers to take their three course lunch in, over their two hour lunch break. No nearby shop to buy another pair of trousers when clothing wore out – they would have had to be entirely self sufficient, it was a wild and dangerous area in medieval times. If they fancied a beer at the end of the working day – only if someone had had the wit to plant some hops and brew that beer.

They built it with one aim in mind – not merely shelter for themselves, but sanctuary for others.

Jeanne and her daughters lived in that cottage for 60 years. She did so to keep her children safe and fed. Was she happy? I have no idea – but then modern human beings don’t seem so happy either.

We find so much to whinge about these days, so much that is so far removed from the lives of our ancestors. We fret that our children will be born in debt, that they wont get on the ‘housing ladder’, that they won’t do ‘better’ in life than we did, have more, be wealthier. Jeanne fretted that her children wouldn’t survive her.

They did though – and no one ever coaxed them to try just one more chicken nugget, or ordered another meal for them in the restaurant because they didn’t like the sauce on the chicken. They were just grateful when the tide went out again and they could climb down the ladder and light a fire in the hearth once more.

The ‘original granite hearth with 1756 carved into it’ is a feature of the cottage now – not that anyone will ever use it in the month of August. I doubt if they’ll bother to catch the shrimp. They’ll shop for the coarse brown bread that was once the preserve of the peasant, and eschew the white bread that was reserved for the aristocrat. They’ll go back to Paris clutching little hessian bags of the corse sea salt that kept Jeanne and her children alive, and give it to their friends as chic presents. The might even buy goat’s milk as an expensive luxury in a Parisian supermarket – little Marcel is allergic to cow’s milk you know.

We have come such a long way in 250 years – are we any happier? Do we still live to be 97 – even with cancer?

Jeanne’s daughters – as old women themselves!

 

Engineer August 28, 2012 at 21:32

One thing that my chosen profession has done for me is to open an interest
in the changes wrought to mankind by the Industrial Revolution. They are
profound – perhaps the most profound changes ever experienced by the human
race. Some are undoubtedly for the good – the gereral rise in wealth, medical
science and knowledge have allowed far more people to live more comfortable
lives in ‘developed’ countries than those countries could possibly have
sustained in the times of subsistence agriculture. Some are not good –
consider the peasants displaced from the land and forced into the slums of the
growing industrial cities during the late 18th and 19th centuries, for
example, or the information overload and pressure to accumulate gadgets
affecting many people today.

Will that change our humanity? Will we lose our capacity to survive, and
sometimes thrive, with just basic shelter and diet? Maybe not – there comes a
point when for many enough is enough, and simpler ways of life are sought.
There is lots of information about ‘downshifting’ and similar. People can
still be decent, helpful and kind to each other.

All in all, I’m optimistic for the future of the human race. There are
signs that we can use our sudden explosion of technical development
constructively to enhance the experience of being human. Let’s hope we do,
anyway.

Andrew Duffin
August 28, 2012 at 16:51

Rocamadour! There’s a name to conjour with.

I have rarely felt “atmosphere” as strongly as I felt it in that
chapel.

And those, I kept telling myself, are the very steps that King Henry II
climbed – on his knees – to do penance for the murder of Becket.

A magical experience in every sense of the word; thanks for the
reminder.

LJAR August 28, 2012 at 07:41

I am rather glad that I live in a world where more and more people have
almost nothing but trivialities to worry about. I would much rather worry
about the state of the meal I just ordered than not know where it is coming
from.

Life is easy now for most in the western world, and it is getting easier
for those in the rest of it. That is a good thing, not something to be
lamented.

Hysteria August 27, 2012 at 23:19

Interesting – but the human is an adaptable survivor. Strip away the modern
trappings, and we will quickly adapt to a new normal – just look at how the
Kurds manage to survive, or the populations of Jugoslavia post break-up.

Backwoodsman
August 28, 2012 at 10:36

Anna, I think I’ve sailed past that cottage !
They very probably had a
permanent fish trap or wicker fish traps that they set at every low tide and
didn’t do too badly at all for the protein in their diet. They would of
course have had chickens, grown a lot of veg and had quite a supply of wild
fruit and nuts .
I’m currently living in a Bulgarian village and its
facinating to see how the villagers grow and raise and preserve food, both
in quantity and quality, which is superior in most ways to that available to
the average western city dweller.
Also, the villagers live in a virtually
crime free and stressless environment. All of the Babas, as the grannies are
known, seem to live to about 90 !

GildasTheMonk
August 28, 2012 at 12:38

Do you want/need a lodger?

Backwoodsman August
29, 2012 at 13:05

Welcome , old chap. I actually plan to offer the house for rent to
Twitchers and butterfly watching wallahs , as the place is a haven for
both. Very reasonable terms too – life here costs a quarter of living in
the UK.
The internet is slightly iffy at the moment, but it would
still be possible to earn a living online, if that was practival for
you.

alan scott
August 28, 2012 at 19:10

And how are their teeth?

Dioclese August
27, 2012 at 22:40

Interesting to reflect on how things have changed. As many of my regular
readers know, I like to travel but now find that I have run out of places I
want to go. I have, for example, been to the Maldives on nine occasions but
now find it impossible to anywhere there that I actually want to go. OK I will
admit that my very travel bug has caused part of the problem – tourism ruining
the very places tourists want to go – but I think this indicative of the
problem of the world in the 21st century.

We have destroyed everything we touch. Thankfully, I shall be dead before
it becomes intolerable. How sad is that?

My wife is a Plantagenet and I myself descended from the Conqueror. Our
ancestors must be turning in their graves to see what we have done with the
world – and who can blame them?

alan scott
August 28, 2012 at 19:09

Well, at the least your family history should comfort you. See H Wilson
on the 14th H Wilson, or something like that. But maybe you are a
chimaera?
(Sorry to say my family escutcheon only starts in the
1600s.)

Edna Fletcher
August 27, 2012 at 21:26

Thought provoking reflection as usual.

The points of reference for happiness have either changed or the modern
ones, as you suggest, differ vastly from the ones of the past. I certainly can
recall childhood when I believed father X-mas was real, because parents were
so good at the job of chimney presents. The reality era and even cynicism of
children these days has taken over, so the appreciation of simple joys is no
longer.

Parents were exceptionally poor in earlier life but state they were never
happier than at that time, they lost babies to illness like many but that did
not leave them impotent to continue life; they understood and saw the cycle of
life and death daily.. They look back and see their many aspects of their
simple ‘connected’ life with its ups and downs was more satisfactory than the
isolating, materialistic and nuclear life that has taken over. If you have
lived as long as they you will have seen a lot of change that most of us
cannot even imagine. There may have been many technological and medical
advances, but somehow the human psyche has lost something along the way and
there is no going back.

People these days do not know joy today- they want instant gratification,
which of course leaves them feeling empty afterwards..

Mudplugger August 27, 2012 at 20:50

Researching family history, I came across miners in the mid-19th century
who, in search of more lucrative employment, moved from Staffordshire to the
then-new Yorkshire coal-fields. When I say ‘moved’, they actually walked –
more than 100 miles – a couple of men who, once they found work and lodgings,
later sent for their wives and kids (who also walked) to achieve both their
families’ relocation. How long it took, I have no idea but, lacking cash, I
suspect they all bedded down in fields and barns, living off the land much of
the way.

Once resettled, some of their kids appear on early Infants’ School
registers – but there is a high frequency of kids (girls only) leaving school
around the age of 8 or 9, their departures being documented as ‘Needed at
home’ – with large families (10+ kids), even girls as young as that were
expected to act as family house-keepers and child-minders, at the cost of
their own education. Most of the girls married aged between 16 and 18 and, by
checking registered dates, it becomes clear that they usually started their
own breeding careers ahead of the formality of the wedding ceremony. Victorian
family values ?

But they were tough folk in those days – life apparently had little to
offer except daily hard graft and a vague hope of survival.

Compared to those folk, and the French ones in your piece, we don’t know
we’re born.

Wigner’s Friend
August 27, 2012 at 16:26

Very interesting reflection on how things have changed with time.
Co-incidentally I read a review in the Times yesterday (Pay wall so I cannot
provide a link) of the book “ARE WE GETTING SMARTER? Rising IQ in the 21st
Century. by James R Flynn” Very interesting and the conclusion appears to be
that IQ tests were invented in the 19th century when daily life was concrete
yet the tests had to be abstract to make them culturally neutral. Progress in
the 20th century made life more abstract (mobile phones, remote contols and
computers engender abstract thought) To demonstrate the difference between the
concrete and the abstract he used the example of a conversation between a
researcher and some isolated rural people in Russia and the researcher tells
them there are no camels in Germany. Researcher then asks how many camels they
think are in “B” a specific German city? “I don’t know” is the answer “I have
never seen German villages. If B is a large city there should be camels
there.” The focus is on practicalities not hypotheticals.

The implications of this are far reaching In the US, for example, the death
penalty tends to be forbidden for someone with an IQ below 70; however, the
research suggests that the IQ can vary depending on when the test was taken
and on the cultural background of the testee. Not, as has always been posited
a standard which we are born with and remains with us throughout our
lives.

All very interesting but I would suggest that the inhabitants of your
cottage would not have done well in an IQ test.

The book is apparently full of complicated statistical evidence but still
food for thoght..

GildasTheMonk
August 27, 2012 at 15:05

A fascinating reflection Anna