In the footsteps of young Alex Batty found alive hidden in France

In the hamlet of Bastide, in a remote valley in the southwest of France, astonishment dominates: this is where Alex Batty, the British teenager who has been missing since 2017, and his grandfather lived for a time under under false names, housed and fed by the owners of a lodge in exchange for their help.

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For the locals, this smiling teenager was Zach: often encountered, always polite, he hardly spoke out and few knew him personally.

Roger Vales, 79, lives at the end of the cul-de-sac that runs alongside the guest house into the hills, a few hundred meters away. “They are nice people,” this retiree and municipal councilor told AFP about Alex Batty and his grandfather.

“We didn’t know. The young man, when we drove by the Bastide, we saw him, “Hello,” and that’s all. And the grandpa, we often saw him working, he was arranging walls there,” he adds, in front of his house.

It is here, at the Bastide lodge, under the gaze of the severe mountain peak of Bugarach, that the teenager seems to have lived, in the company of his grandfather David Batty, a good part of the two years spent in France.

Taken away by his mother

His mother Melanie, who had lost custody because she was considered “unstable”, fled with him in the summer of 2017 during a vacation in Spain. What followed was a long wandering, passing through Morocco, before three French departments not far from the mountain range of the French Pyrenees.

First of all, a passage through Camps-sur-l’Agly, a town of around fifty people and a few Gascon cows, where the Bastide is located.

“Zach arrived at our cottage for the first time at the end of autumn 2021,” say Frédéric Hambye and Ingrid Beauve, two Belgians who had bought this farm shortly before, in a press release.

He had to stay there for a few days or weeks, contributing to “maintenance” in exchange for accommodation and board. His stay, without his mother, is repeated there during “more or less long periods”.

He helped in the garden, “loved cooking,” they wrote, in this kitchen visible from a window of the large stone building.

A chime above the entrance tinkles in the wind. The owners are absent. But the door remains open to visitors, welcomed by a slate “Welcome to the Bastide gîte!”

A pot of pasta with sauce was left on the stove. Behind, two large wooden tables at which Alex and his grandfather, David, undoubtedly sat.

The village mayor, Rolande Alibert, no longer speaks to the press. It’s the fault of the English journalists, she explains, who blocked the small road passing in front of her house, before turning alongside the lodge.

The councilor, “tired”, can’t take it anymore. The gendarmes, who came to her house Monday afternoon, gently pushed the reporters away.

Conspiracy mother?

Having left, Alex was discovered walking on a road on Wednesday before dawn, by a delivery driver who handed him over to the police. Since then, he was repatriated on Saturday to Manchester, England, where he was reunited with his grandmother who has custody of him.

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 magnificent place”, and had been “in a way adopted by the family who managed the lodge”, says Susie Harrison.

“I think it was good for Alex to live with these lovely people,” said this 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 town located 75 kilometers away. Alex’s mother tells him her name is Rose.

Very quickly, Susie Harrison thinks that she is a conspiracy theorist, because, when she tells him that she has contracted Covid-19, she replies: “That’s not true, Covid doesn’t exist”.

Then the sixty-year-old understands that “Rose” is looking for “a spiritual community. Not so much a community to join, but rather to lead (…) She was sure she knew and understood the world, and she wanted to show it to others.

According to her, Alex did not suffer from his mother’s obsessions. “He was a lovely boy, friendly, kind, polite and healthy,” she describes.

“It’s a region where many people come to seek their spirituality,” adds Eve-Lauve Florent, a 42-year-old home helper in Camps-sur-l’Agly. “In the area,” says Mr. Vales, “there are a lot of crazy people who have come to settle down.”