When Tom and Margaret Cannon and their four children arrived at GardΦche farm in September 1999 from Co Tipperary, the farmhouse windows were broken and its interior was blackened by decades of smoke from an old cookstove. Margaret couldn't sleep at night for the sound of mice scuttling across the linoleum. There were three wrecked cars in the farmyard. The bonfire Tom set to destroy rubbish burned for five days.
"The farm wasn't fit for human habitation," says Margaret, now 38. "My brother-in-law Pat drove over with us, and when he saw it he got tears in his eyes and he said, 'What have you let yourselves in for?'" The previous tenants, an elderly couple who had been there for 45 years, let the 150 acre farm run down until French health authorities suspended its licence to produce milk and cheese - no one had told the Cannons. Most of the 40 dairy cows suffered from infected udders.
"We found local people very inquisitive," Margaret recalls. "Maybe because there are not many foreigners around here. When we first came, it was as if we were from outer space." Damien, now 17, could not adjust to France. He and Killian, 16, were in a French school where they felt the teachers made no attempt to help them. They were forced to sit through English classes given by a teacher who could not speak English.
"Every day, Damien came home from school unhappy. There were times I wanted to run away," says Margaret. Damien eventually went to live in Co Carlow with his grandmother. Killian switched to an agricultural college where he is much happier. When the Cannons return to Ireland this summer - their first trip home in early two years - Damien will mind the French farm for them.
Last October, Margaret discovered that a benign tumour in her pituitary gland, already treated in Dublin in 1997, had returned.
She was hospitalised in Saint-╔tienne and could not do her thrice weekly milk and cheese run or help Tom for two months.
Language was the biggest obstacle. "The telephone was the hardest thing," Margaret says. "When it rang, we used to look at each other and none of us wanted to answer it, because we couldn't understand what anyone said to us. By the time we finished arguing about who would pick up, it stopped ringing."
In one misunderstanding, a Frenchman who'd seen the "cheese for sale" sign by the road knocked on the door, asking if they had any of the regional cheese called tomme. "I shouted, 'Tom come here, somebody wants you!' When we realised later what he'd wanted, I felt such a fool I couldn't stop laughing. I don't think he ever came back."
Tom now works with a small co-operative of farmers who cut silage for each other and exchange hay, dung and the use of land in a moneyless barter system. One of the farmers, Jean-Franτois, used to squat on the ground and pull out his pen-knife to etch drawings of animals and machinery on the ground.
At 41, Tom thinks he is too old to learn French well, but as Margaret says, "Funnily enough, Tom gets by with the farmers - they have their own kind of language."
Jean-Franτois is a member of Coordination Rurale, a militant farmers' group. Tom Cannon has followed him to a few demonstrations. "I sort of hold back," he says. "But I think Irish farmers put up with too much. French farmers don't let themselves be dominated by the supermarkets." To slow the desertification of the countryside, the Paris government offers incentives to any European willing to farm here.
Tom first learned of the financial advantages of farming in France (see panel) through an advertisement in the Farmers Journal. At the Ploughing Championship in Carlow in 1996, he met George Lidbury, an Englishman who acts as an agent for Irish farmers interested in resettling abroad. "I was managing a farm in Tipperary," Tom explains. "I've worked in nine counties in Ireland; I was fed-up managing and wanted to do something for myself. In Ireland, it's just not possible. It's too expensive."
Lidbury was sending Irishmen to Romania and Canada, but the Cannons wouldn't consider moving so far away. Margaret had never been to France, and wasn't keen on it either. But their circumstances didn't improve, and her 1997 operation set the family back another £8,500.
Early in 1999, she and Tom came over for three days to visit French farms. Although the old couple at GardΦche wouldn't let them past the kitchen, Margaret liked the terracotta tiles on the kitchen floor and the view over a green river valley. The ArdΦche may be the only French dΘpartment with neither a highway nor a railroad, but the nearby town of Annonay, population 40,000, gave the place a feeling of civilisation.
'Things weren't going well for us in Ireland," Margaret explains. "Tom tried for loads of jobs. Now you have to have a blinking degree to get any kind of job. What we're doing here - I'd prefer to do it in Ireland. It's not an easy move; if you have other options you might not want to do it. But we never saw the Celtic Tiger. It never came to our door."
Slowly, through perseverance and hard work, things began to improve for the Cannons. In December 1999, the local newspaper, Le Reveil, published a front page newspaper article with a photograph of the family in their farmyard.
"ArdΦche, Promised Land!" the headline said. The picture was taken by Denis Jones, a wandering American photographer in his 50s who settled 18km away in Le Pilat mountains, which he calls "the Appalachians of Europe". "I heard about them and came knocking on the door," he says. "I figured they could probably use some help." A few days before Christmas 1999, the Cannons' landlord installed new windows - just in time to save them from the record-breaking storm. Neighbours brought them a Christmas tree.
The first of his red Holsteins to give birth had been named "Irlande" by her previous owner; Tom took it as a good omen. He says it will take another 18 months to get the farm the way he wants it, but he bought a new tractor this year and is waiting for a new milking machine. By next year he'll have re-seeded all his pastures, and he hopes to fill his EU milk quota of 285,000 litres.
LUC and Sylvie, who run the newsagent's shop in Boulieu village, became friends because Sylvie speaks English. The French couple gave Tom and Margaret a dilapidated Golf car, which Margaret uses for her milk and cheese deliveries. When Margaret was in hospital last October, Sylvie - who works part time in the Canson paper factory, helps run the newsagent's and has four children of her own - took in Niamh and Lorraine (now 11 and 9) and cooked dinner for Tom and Killian. "I never had friends like that in Ireland," Margaret says.
That doesn't prevent her being homesick. "I miss the social side," Margaret says. "Going out to the pub on Saturday night. Here they go to dinner at each others' houses. I find that a lot of hassle." The French have proved more generous than the Cannons expected. The mayor of Saint-Marcel, the nearest village, used town funds to pay 60 per cent of the £1,440 bill for a leaking ground pipe on the farm. When I visited, crates of cherries were stacked on the kitchen sideboard - all gifts from neighbours.
An aristocratic widow in Annonay, Madame de Montgolfier, gives free French lessons to Niamh and Lorraine. "She's gas," says Margaret. "She lives in this big house and she's just doing it out of the goodness of her heart. She invites me for afternoon tea." The Montgolfiers invented the hot-air balloon, and there are still a half dozen brightly coloured balloons in the sky over Annonay every Saturday. Last New Year's eve, Killian's geography teacher invited the whole family to a party at his home. They stayed until 5.30 a.m., and Tom started the year by going straight to milk the cows, without sleeping.
The Cannons' landlord was so pleased with their renovation of the farmhouse that he's paid for much of the building materials.
Tom built a fireplace in the sitting room, wallpapered all the bedrooms, replaced floors and ceilings downstairs and added a cement patio. There are red geraniums at every window, and Margaret wants to turn the upstairs into a tourist bed-and-breakfast.
The arrival of a satellite dish in January - and with it Tara Television from London - was a morale booster. "You feel in touch," says Margaret. She watches soaps when she has time, and Tom never misses the farming programme Ear to the Ground. The Farmers Journal sends him a free subscription, in exchange for reports on milk prices in France. He also watches hurling matches, a game Killian and Damien tried unsuccessfully to teach to their French friends.
Niamh and Lorraine have adjusted most easily to life in France; the girls speak flawless French, without an accent. Niamh is an altar server at the church in Saint-Marcel, and Lorraine will make her first Holy Communion here next year.
"I think Tom probably wants to stay here forever," Margaret says. "Men can live anywhere - family and friends don't mean the same to them." She baulked at the idea of an 18-year lease. "It's a big commitment. I said, 'All right, we'll sign for 10 years and I'll stick with it. For better or worse.'"
