In the hamlet of Bastide, in a remote valley in southwest France, there is amazement: this is where Alex Batty, the British teenager who has been missing since 2017, and his grandfather lived for a while under false names, sheltering and feeding themselves from the owners of a lodge in exchange for theirs Help.
• Also read: The 17-year-old Brit, missing for 6 years and found in France, is back in his country
• Also read: The 17-year-old British boy who disappeared in 2017 will be reunited with his grandmother this weekend
To the locals, this smiling teenager was Zach: met often, always polite, he rarely spoke and few knew him personally.
Greater Manchester Police
Roger Vales, 79, lives at the end of the cul-de-sac that leads into the hills next to the guest house, a few hundred meters away. “They are nice people,” the pensioner and local councilor told AFP about Alex Batty and his grandfather.
“We didn't know. The young man, as we drove past the bastide, we saw him, “Hello,” and that's all. And grandpa, we often saw him working, he was arranging walls there,” he adds in front of his house.
Roger Valles | AFP
Here, at Bastide Lodge, under the view of the austere mountain peak of Bugarach, the teenager appears to have spent much of two years in France in the company of his grandfather David Batty.
Taken away by his mother
His mother Melanie, who lost custody because she was considered “unstable,” fled with him during a vacation in Spain in the summer of 2017. What followed was a long hike through Morocco, past three French departments not far from the French Pyrenees mountain range.
First a drive through Camps-sur-l'Agly, a town with about fifty inhabitants and a few cows from Gascony, where the bastide is located.
AFP
“Zach arrived at our holiday home for the first time at the end of autumn 2021,” say Frédéric Hambye and Ingrid Beauve, two Belgians who had recently bought this farm, in a press release.
He had to stay there for a few days or weeks and contribute to the “maintenance” in return for room and board. His stay there without his mother is repeated over “more or less long periods of time”.
The place where Alex Batty lived with his grandfather | AFP
He helped in the garden and “loved to cook,” they wrote, in that kitchen, which could be seen from a window of the large stone building.
A chime rings in the wind above the entrance. The owners are absent. But the door remains open to visitors and is greeted with a slate reading “Welcome to the Bastide Gîte!”
AFP
A pot of pasta with sauce remained on the stove. Behind them were two large wooden tables, at which Alex and his grandfather David were undoubtedly sitting.
The mayor of the village, Rolande Alibert, no longer speaks to the press. It was the fault of the English journalists, she explains, who blocked the small road in front of her house before turning next to the lodge.
The “tired” city council can’t take it anymore. The gendarmes who came to their house on Monday afternoon gently pushed the reporters away.
Conspiracy mother?
After he left, Alex was spotted on a street before dawn on Wednesday by a delivery driver who handed him over to police. He has since been repatriated to Manchester, England, on Saturday, where he was reunited with his grandmother, who has custody of him.
AFP
He left the lodge because his mother wanted to take him to Finland, not because he didn't like the region.
He “led a good life there because he lived in a great place” and was “so to speak adopted by the family that ran the lodge,” says Susie Harrison.
Susie Harrison | AFP
“I think it was good for Alex to live with these lovely people,” said the 61-year-old Englishwoman, who has lived in the region for twenty years.
She adds that she met Melanie Batty in October 2021 at a market in a city 75 kilometers away. Alex's mother tells him that her name is Rose.
Very quickly Susie Harrison thinks she is a conspiracy theorist because when she tells him that she has Covid-19, she replies: “That's not true, Covid doesn't exist.”
AFP
Then the sixty-year-old understands that “Rose” is looking for “a spiritual community.” Not so much a community to join, but rather a community to lead (…) She was sure that she knew and understood the world, and she wanted to show it to others.
In her opinion, Alex did not suffer from his mother's obsessions. “He was a great boy, kind, friendly, polite and healthy,” she describes.
“It is a region where many people come to seek their spirituality,” adds Eve-Lauve Florent, a 42-year-old domestic helper in Camps-sur-l'Agly. “In the area,” says Mr. Vales, “a lot of crazy people have come to settle.”