Englishman Buys Bar 2 - let's recap a bit

By John Harries-Harries

In the first episode of his diary, John Harries-Harries told us how the owner of the bar in a village in southern Brittany died, leading to his wild idea of buying the place and taking over from her. 

Let him now fill in some background details, and tell how he co-opted a helper who had trouble following the van.

Just as Donella occasionally needs to bring George East's ramblings back to the real world, I think I may occasionally need to ask Chris to fill in or modify John's story. Even after reading this, I have trouble fitting the 15 months during which they were divorced into the time sequence for the rest of the story. Maybe you can work it out, by knowing that they remarried a week or so ago, just before heading across the Channel with the van.

We met in Chris's  father's night-club when I was on C.I.D. (For readers who don't understand the English police, this means John was a detective, but it doesn't mean he ran around waving a pistol and pulling car driving stunts). 

I abandoned my electrical engineering career after leaving London in 1966, and joined 'the Force', where I spent over a decade. During that time we had our first two children. 

In the end, my somewhat independent mind led to a parting of the ways between me and the discipline of police work. I became a chimney sweep!

This led to a few weeks of fame, not the 15 minutes Andy Warhol predicted, as in the late ‘70’s there was a massive exodus of serving police officers. It helped financially as we were developing an office cleaning business, which served us well for the next 14 years.

It was while we were running this business that we took time out to visit Mayenne. For the next 5 years we ‘swapped’ children each year with ‘famille Buf’, picking up and dropping children at Portsmouth, and getting our own visits in when we could. We saw no way then of leaving England to live in France, but we were sorely tempted.

The visits petered out as our children went their own ways. Our friends left Mayenne for Martinique [we think], and we lost contact.

At around this time I had tired of the cleaning business, and after a short spell selling pet food door-to-door, picked up my engineering career again by joining the civil service on Salisbury plain.

This must have been a happy period for though I had a vasectomy just after my eldest daughter was born, Chris and I found we were expectant parents again, and in our forties! (Phyllie tells me that this is not uncommon. You have been warned. Get tested 6 months after the op, and after longer periods if it is important).

Lucy was born in 1987, and her older sister, Trish, at sixteen, would only push the pram if she was allowed to put a notice on it to the effect that the baby wasn’t hers! Big brother Robert tried to ignore all the fuss, but he has always spoilt Lucy something rotten!

Then I got a promotion and a move to Bedford. We had our young child, and the super couple who bought our business, also in their 40's, found themselves expecting their own a few months later. We have always wondered if fertility clinics shouldn’t just recommend couples to take up a cleaning job. (Now you've done it. If Jonathan Porritt's friends read this, someone will start researching the connection between industrial cleaning products and unplanned conception. Did you notice an exceptional number of cats in the premises you cleaned?)  

Now I was becoming wrapped up in my civil service career, and Chris was stuck in a new house without her family and friends. The seeds of our eventual divorce were being unwittingly nurtured. Robert had gone to Uni. and Trish was living in a mobile home on a farm back in Wiltshire. I was blissfully unaware of the dramas ahead....

Here seems to be the missing bit, where Chris wandered off to London seeking a more stable existence. It ends with two dramatic decisions - buying the bar, and getting remarried. Since this isn't a soap, let's skip it and get on with the exciting part.

I  was getting ready to arrange the moving date. I asked a local firm for a quote to rent a van to carry my chattels to Bonen - this came to about £450. Plus ferry fare, plus a return to UK, then a final trip to France on The Beast, a picture of which introduced the first chapter of the diary. All in all about £800.

It was now that I had a brainwave. I decided to buy a Transit box van! Brilliant! I am surprised no-one had thought of it before.

I have a friend, I shall call him Fred. He is a lovely man, and a trucker. He and his family accompanied us to Bonen last Easter, as our daughters are ‘best friends’. I had my usual load in the Peugeot 205 [diesel, no turbo], and a trailer with [unusually] a 3 piece suite of my son’s aboard. Plus a poèle, (a cast iron stove - not something you can carry on your back. Ed) and a few [!!] odds and sods. He followed in a Volvo 760 estate with just the four people aboard.

We lost him at every roundabout between St Malo and Rostrenen as he couldn’t keep up.

I ‘won’ an auction on e-bay for a Trannie. It’s the largest goods vehicle that you are allowed to drive on a normal UK licence and is 3500 kg gross weight. Big. Huge. White. You can see it for miles. Also it is quite slow.

I arranged to pick it up near Coventry, and asked Fred to come with me to drive the Peugeot back. It’s about 50 miles. No problem? No way. I just don’t learn.

I did the deal, and as I started up, first time, I checked the fuel. Nearly empty, so said to Fred we would make for the first garage, before the M6, and to keep close. He said he was right behind and off we went, Lucy in the van with me.

I swear the garage was less than a mile away. After we'd refuelled, the damned thing wouldn’t start. Flat battery. Looked for Peugeot, no 'pug'. No Fred....  in the pug. No jumpleads… in the pug. Can’t use my mobile phone…. in the pug.

I then put my helpless look on as I kicked s..t out of the van, and a young guy came over and PUSH started this mini-pantechnicon. Oh joy as it fired up, and off we went.

Fred was now well south on the M1 trying to catch us up!

Just as I turned into my road the clutch cable broke! I was thankful to coast to my house.

I went in and Fred had gone. He missed my profuse thanks for his help…. or his hanging.

You have a month to enjoy this episode, and invent your own version of the missing bits. I'm off to Europe on Tuesday 23 October, returning around 21 November. Most of the time I'll be in France, digging a trench for the pipe that will connect the gas tank to the central heating - and any other chore that Phyllie dreams up. Every time anything looks like being hard work, I'll remind her that it's only a little more than 6 weeks since I had a bilateral direct and indirect inguinal hernia repair operation. If that doesn't work, I'll walk all bent up and keep muttering that everything is fine.

If you want to congratulate or encourage John (or sympathise with Chris and Lucy)  e-mail me with your thoughts or advice, or write in the Notice Board. (That's a better idea, since I'll be 'off air' for a month). 

Have fun.

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