You’ve found your perfect French home (yes such a thing does exist) and you’ve spent years re-doing it so that it boasts a great mix of shabby and chic. You’ve managed to secure a job – not always easy – and after years of language classes with inane people, you’ve finally mastered enough French to argue over the telephone (always a benchmark) …so what could go wrong? This, after all should be the moment to start enjoying the dream.

After seven years of living in the south of France, we finally know enough people to actually throw a big party, with caterers, the whole shebang. The evening was wonderful but bizarrely I do remember feeling a tiny twinge of …’are we riding for a fall?’ as I cut into the tarte au citron and everything was so, well, perfect - but I quickly dismissed this and thought ‘no, of course not, we’ve worked hard, we deserve this.’

So when one week later, we were sitting out in the shade of our summer kitchen, finishing off a very simple dinner with my husband’s family, and planning an early night, I didn’t think for one second that uninvited people would be pilfering through my belongings. Yes, my stuff. I didn’t think that burglars would be so audacious as to scale our high fence, creep through our garden and come into our house (where six people were coming and going taking food in and out) sneak upstairs into my bedroom and dressing and steal.

I doubt I will ever see my engagement or wedding rings again – and even a month later that makes me very sad.

A friend of mine went into therapy after a burglary, I thought it was a bit girlie. I now see why. You don’t think it would upset you to that degree until you realise that now post-burglary (everything becomes pre and post for a while) you are spooked being in your own home. And that this thing was something that you had no control over.

By stealing my handbag our thieves had caused me no end of trouble.

Everything in my wallet had to be cancelled and then replaced. Things like your driving license, and in France your carte de sejour (residence) and carte grise (log book). This was not a bag I left carelessly on a café table, this was a bag secreted upstairs out of harm’s way.

I could regale you with the five hours I waited in the 30-degree heat of a French municipal building to get new copies of the car documents. Trust me - it was more infuriating even than it sounds and every hour that ticked by I knew I was using up my time to compensate for what they had done.

Or the horrendous hour I spent with the insurance lady until I left with snot running down my face because she’d made me cry so hard. ‘Her husband may have bought her paste rings’ – as my mother later commented – ‘I hope you told her that yours would never.’

Slowly we are getting back to normal. I’ve spent nights in my house on my own. And slept. And survived! I’ve stopped being spooked and I’ve stopped thinking ‘what if?’

What if I hadn’t told my dogs to stop barking out of consideration for my neighbours?

What if we had fitted sensor lights to light-up the garden to stadium proportions (like my husband wanted) and I had not worried about being nearly blinded when I forget and looked straight into them
 
What if we’d only eaten inside that night despite the heat

What if my fingers hadn’t swollen in the heat and I’d kept my rings on

What if I’d been waiting at our gate with a rifle? Do you see where I’m going with this?

As a believer of ‘what doesn’t kill you just might, potentially, if you’re lucky, make you stronger’ do I really want to move now? No. Would that help or would I just get unlucky again in three month’s time and get burgled in the new house? Possibly.

So what I’ve learnt from this all-too-often occurrence is that you cannot let these people win. They rely on the element of surprise and are beyond audacious.
I mustn’t allow them to stop me living how I want to - within reason obviously and without being stupid. I must take precautions and then move on with my life. It’s not personal, it was never personal. Sadly its just part of life these days.

And how have I managed to console myself while rising above this terrible thing? Simple. Deluding myself that I somehow have old gypsy blood running through my veins and thus I’ve put a curse on them and on every item. Can you curse an ipod? Who cares. They will only get bacd luck from it. After all – what goes around comes around.

Dawn Howard

(expatica 2008) 

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