Remember that you’re the foreigner abroad

"Love thy neighbour as thyself” is not always an easy injunction to honour. In mundane practice, it had best be read as a warning to choose carefully whom you live next to. And how you tread on their meanest foot of ground, especially if you’re an expatriate. In his poem The Wall, the grouchy American Robert Frost said that good fences make good neighbours. Not always: take the recent horror story about the elderly expat couple in the French village of Brugairolles, under the shadow of the Pyrenees. In a boundary dispute about a few inches of ground, they were literally walled in by their aggressive – as it happened British – neighbours. The locals came to their rescue and a stand-off seems to have been enforced. As Napoleon’s mother said, when she heard that he had himself crowned Emperor of France: “As long as it lasts!”

With my family I have spent a lot of time abroad in the last 50 years, and have been lucky in avoiding all but a few little local difficulties. Since we first came to the Dordogne it has become home-from-home for an increasing number of Brits of the kind you can be sure to find standing by the supermarket newspaper rack scanning the headlines in yesterday’s English press. I can, I confess, do without their company. Fortunately, our only hilltop neighbours are small farmers with animals to care for.

The Barats have rarely moved more than a few kilometres from their livestock and their walnut orchards. When the UK joined the common market, Norbert asked anxiously whether it was true that the British had forests of walnut trees and an inexhaustible number of shippable sheep. Once reassured that this was not the case, he became resigned to what General de Gaulle had once vetoed. I have never heard an anti-British word in our region. The Dutch take the flak, but rarely give a damn.

Norbert was less easily appeased when, after several years of summer residence, we decided to do some renovations on our farmhouse. These included building a short wall along the little road that leads up to the Barats’ farm. It would enclose the cloister which I had always craved. We had, of course, to honour a French rule that no one may build within a metre of the public highway. To do so, our architect, Jean-Marie, proposed to steal a few centimetres on one side of the road and give it back on the other, where our orchard is. Norbert was not happy. His loud opinion was that to change the landscape was an affront.

We were soon treated to a solemn visit from the mayor. Norbert and Monsieur le Maire and I paced out the ground and considered the danger of drivers being unsighted by the new stonework. If I have one recommendation for expats, it is to remain courteous. If anyone shouts, never shout back. After I volunteered a few extra centimetres on the far side to make sure that two vehicles could pass without danger, hands were shaken. Fingers anyway.

For several weeks, Norbert made a point of driving his tractor as close to the wall as possible, thus crushing our newly planted irises and leaving deep signs of his displeasure. When he and his wife Christiane went past in the car, there were no more friendly waves. What to do? Some Hollywood agent once told my friend, the movie director Stanley Donen, that he had to “do something, immediately!” Stanley said: “I immediately did nothing.” Patience is a virtue all expats would be wise to foster.

We continued to wave and smile as the Barats went by and they continued to scowl, until – as predicted by local sages – they didn’t. One day, there was a tap at the door in our new wall and there was Christiane Barat, restored to smiles, holding a bag of fresh broad beans. The war was over without an angry word, let alone a shot. A little later, I was at the Barats’ door with early raspberries.

We had another out-of-the-blue mini-crunch earlier this month. One morning when I was working, Norbert Barat and Bernard, who farms the big field adjacent to our orchard, came – with ominously tailored solemnity – to my workroom door. Bernard had parked his van on the narrow verge next to a derelict bakehouse that our helper Laurent had been restoring. A sloping buttress, a very few centimetres high, now projected towards the roadway. Bernard had contrived to accelerate away with enough accurate force to dent his offside wheel. I took this matter seriously and, after long inspection, offered to raze the stonework to the ground. We parted with expressions of mutual esteem.

A week later, we woke to find that our orchard had been badged with soup-plate-sized splats of cow dung. The electric fence between Bernard’s pasture and our garden had not been turned on. An escaping cow had plunged deep hoofmarks on the orchard floor and consumed whatever fruit took its fancy before proceeding to the Barats for further munchies. I telephoned Bernard and, with a measure of diplomacy that Napoleon’s notoriously suave foreign minister Talleyrand might have applauded, left a message. I accused no one, but a rogue cow, peut-être even one of his, had been on the rampage … I feared another cold war, but within minutes Bernard came through our cloister door, head hanging, and I was pleased to be as gracious.

The message is, if you can’t enjoy playing the game according to local rules, you’d be wise to stay in your own country. Not that this necessarily ensures harmony. The only neighbours with whom we have ever been at daggers-drawn moved last year into the flat above us in South Kensington. Their flat-footed drumming on their illicitly uncarpeted floors has exasperated us to the point of going to law. It just so happens that they are Italians. Bloody foreigners.