A Short Walk from Harrods by Dirk Bogarde Page B

Calabria, the drug-pushers, the smugglers of every kind of commodity you can name, would easily swamp the A.M. if not severely curtailed. The ritzy-glitzy crowd who swarmed to Nice and Cannes, played the tables in Monte Carlo, and rented, or bought, hideous villas in the hills were watched carefully, but they never stayed very long and fled at the first signs of inclement weather. Meteorological or political. The people who came to live, that is to live for good, were considered with caution and suspicion.
    So, first of all, you had to get your
carte grise,
which permitted you to live in the area for three months. It was aform of identification – your ID card, if you like – and as such, at an accident, a bank or any monetary transaction, always proved extremely useful. At least you knew who you were, so did they, and that in itself was a comfort. In Britain it would be, and it is, considered a breach of privacy. I can’t think why. All you have to state is name, birth date, address and, I seem to remember, your mother’s name and date of birth. Since
she
was always uncertain and, I feel sure, fibbed about that anyway, it was nothing I took very seriously. But I was pleased to be ‘on record’. There was a feeling of security. Don’t ask me why.
    So, every three months I made the climb up my cliff and through the oakwood at the back of the house to Saint-Cyprien to see the deputy mayor. This had to be done between the hours of five and eight in the evenings. On a fixed date. If you missed it for some reason, you could always try to catch him in the bar he ran in Le Pré. But by that time he really couldn’t have signed his name with an X.
    So one got to the
mairie
early, sat on a rush-bottomed chair with the other emigrants, the ‘legal’ Arabs, the Spanish, the Italians. The anteroom was small, whitewashed, red-tiled, spartan, a poster on one wall with a map of France indicating, by a big black dot, the latest advance of rabies, on the other a notice saying when the blood donor caravan would be arriving in the village for the monthly blood donation.
    The next stage, after your
carte grise,
literally a bit of grey paper covered with a riot of violet stamps and the deputy’s incomprehensible signature, was your
carte de séjour.
This was orange, a proper card, and was a permit to live in, work in and inhabit the Alpes Maritimes. It was a heady moment when that was put in one’s wallet. It took for ever to get, andcountless journeys, queues and passionate discussions in a vast building in the heart of Nice, where it was always impossible to park a car. However, getting the beastly thing was worth the misery.
    Finally – and it took longer than the others, because one’s request had to go to Paris, then through officialdom in Nice, and then back to the
mairie
– and finally, one amazing day, you got your blue
carte de résidence.
Not only were you permitted to live in your house, but you had become, apart from voting and joining the army, a French resident.
Taxes compris.
This lasted you for ten years and there were four pages already for the stamp ahead. It felt really very good indeed. Because the land had been cared for, because the olives were harvested, the hay cut and sold, because, at first anyway, the sheep grazed, I was classified as an agricultural property and an agricultural proprietor. Which made an enormous difference to my taxes and in the grants made available for the house and restoration. It felt very secure. Objective gained. With no loss of passport.
    Vaguely, at one time, I had thought about taking out French nationality: it was a perplexing idea, but it got pretty swiftly set aside when one realized that it was not impossible that one day, perhaps - perhaps - one could be called upon to fight one’s true countrymen. And that, however remote it might have been, was
quite
unthinkable. So one quickly smothered the little spark that had