As the summer holidays loom and I watch families preparing for their long
vacations abroad I find myself thinking back to September 1995 – the month
we took one of the greatest adventures of our lives, packed up our small
terraced house in west London and handed the keys over to the family who
were going to be our tenants for the next year. As we set off for France, we
wondered whether we would ever come back.
My husband, Sebastian Faulks, is a writer and could take his work with him. I
was at home looking after the children, so the only ties to England were
attachments to our friends and families. My husband had lived briefly in
Paris as a student and worked on a French campsite as a gap year job. He had
a passion for France and an idea for a novel set during the German
occupation.
These days the family gap year abroad is becoming more and more popular. For
some it’s a way of trying out what may be a permanent move to another
country. For others it’s a chance to give children language skills
relatively painlessly, or perhaps enjoy a last fling before the inexorable
demands of GCSEs and A-levels tether everyone to England.
For Eleanor Fitzpatrick, her sculptor husband and her family of four children,
for instance, who are coming to the end of a “fantastic” year in a rented
villa in Florence, it’s been a chance to exchange the pleasures of rural
Perthshire for those of a “small but important city”, let the children learn
Italian and make friends from across the world in their new international
school.
“We’ve all enjoyed it,” says Fitzpatrick,” who has reluctantly ruled out the
idea that they will stay on for a second year. “My youngest, who is seven,
didn’t want to leave home in Scotland at all initially. She even locked
herself in the loo, but now, like all of us, she absolutely loves it.” ago,
it was really an opportunity to try out rural family life. I was born and
brought up in London and Sebastian had lived there all his adult life. We
had often wondered whether we would have a better family life in the
country, and the year in France was a way of testing this out.
We did our research by asking everyone we knew for suggestions of houses to
rent in France and scanning the back of The Spectator and the Sunday papers
for advertisements. A shortlist of houses eventually drawn up, Sebastian and
a friend set off for a week’s tour of France, checking out those that had
sounded most attractive. Our final choice was near Agen in southwest France:
a large, square house made of a grey limestone so pale it was almost the
colour of chalk. It had tall windows with views across surrounding farmland
and swathes of woods made up of the scrubby oak trees characteristic of that
part of France. It was not the most practical of houses since it was 5km
from the village and I couldn’t drive. But the green hills and the prospect
of a hot summer combined to put such practicalities to the back of our minds.
William and his sister Holly, who were turning 5 and 3 the month we arrived,
were enrolled at the village school; a charming place perched on the side of
a steep slope at the top of the town. We were told that by Christmas they
would be fluent in French – which wasn’t quite how it turned out. Within a
week or so, they were being collected by a school bus, which came trundling
across the valley stopping at various houses along the way.
Pluckily, they hopped on board among all the big French children. After waving
them goodbye, I would wander back to the house and make tea. There were no
papers delivered except The Week, which was brought by the post lady in her
yellow Peugeot.
The rest of the morning was spent having a long bath and reading in bed, as
there wasn’t really much else to do. It was a wonderful year of resting and
escaping from the busyness of life at home in England. The rooms were large
and the views from them immense, but we soon understood why the landscape
around was so green: it rained almost incessantly. In winter it was so cold
that my husband wore a ski suit to keep him warm while he typed his novel.
We had friends out to stay and had time to find out how they were really
getting on, in a way which is hard to do if you only see people for a couple
of hours over lunch or dinner.
But we didn’t make many French friends, although Holly formed an improbable
friendship with an old peasant farmer and his wife, who would sit her on
their kitchen table and give her bonbons while they beheaded and plucked
chickens and the television blared at full volume.
The social life of families is structured much more formally in France and
there isn’t the culture of children inviting each other home for tea after
school. I had imagined evenings spent drinking vin rouge and improving my
French with welcoming neighbours. We did drink vin rouge with welcoming
neighbours, but they were almost all British ex-pats.
At the weekend we would go to the village market, which was as pretty as you
could hope for. Trestle tables were piled high with local produce and I knew
how fresh it was because I had seen it being harvested early that morning
from the farmland adjoining our house. Unfortunately, I had also seen the
farmer pouring great plastic containers of fertiliser and pesticide over the
same fields all week long . . .
Sebastian sang in a local church choir and the children’s French improved,
though slowly.
By the time we left, they had perfect accents but a small vocabulary. The
school playground used the international language of Power Rangers (or “les
Pooer Ronjays” as William called them).
It was odd coming back to London. I couldn’t get used to having walls so close
all the time and the view from the window being interrupted by houses on the
opposite side of the street. I sometimes long to escape again and have a
chance to read for hours at a stretch, but ultimately our year there made us
decide not to move to the country on our return to England. It was quite a
lonely time in some ways and we both missed being able to pop into a
bookshop or newsagent or decide on a whim to meet for lunch.
I would always encourage people to try living abroad. But go with the
intention of staying for a limited time. That way you can come back feeling
you have succeeded in doing something adventurous without feeling you have
failed if you decide that England is where you really want to be.
