L'Etranger is variously translated as The Outsider or The Stranger. The French word covers both. If you haven't read it, do so. It's short, every word in it counts, and you can make of it what you will. I was sixteen months old when my father died in a car crash. He was 'slumped over the wheel' and drove head on into a bus near Nuneham Courtenay. I have no conscious memories of him. As a child I had two fantasies, as well as the usual ones about being invisible and being able to fly. One was that everybody was lying to me and he wasn't really dead. In fact he had been captured by the KGB - this was during the Cold War and the Russkies were the baddies - and was being held as a prisoner inside the Soviet Union. He would be released in a spy-swap and come and rescue me from boarding school, swinging me onto his broad shoulders and bringing joy and laughter.
The other was that everybody, meaning all the grown-ups, were lying to me about everything and had created a make-believe world to convince me that I was me. But I wasn't, or rather I was but I wasn't the me that They told me I was, and one day I would break through the fabric hiding what was real, and be able to be the real me. This never worried me. It gave me something to do, and I've been doing it ever since.
A year or so after my father died, my mother, who had been a loyal helpmeet to him, an elegant adjunct to his political career, took a job as headmistress of Roedean School. Quite how she came to be hired in such a prestigious post after sixteen years out of the workforce and an undistinguished couple of years as a history teacher in a girls' grammar school I don't know. It was probably her cool intellect and good connections. Thus began my nomadic life. I was three when I developed chickenpox the day before she was to leave our family house in Berkshire and settle into the Headmistress's house a hundred miles and a lifetime away. I went anyway, with a nanny who turned out to be deranged and was summarily dismissed when she threatened to throw me off the cliff-tops because I was possessed by the devil. Then began a period of ten years where I was bounced in the back of a Ford Cortina between Berkshire and Sussex, according to the school calendar.
The years that followed brought exile to boarding school and a vague notion that somewhere else would be better than here. It was never clear where the somewhere else was, nor indeed the here. For a few years much of my travelling was chemical, and while I found some very interesting somewheres to be I couldn't stay there and always ended up coming back to wherever here was, more or less. I forgot to pack more than a few neurons for the return journey. All well-bred young English ladies are supposed to speak French, and my mother, to this end, had sent me, aged 14, to spend three or four weeks with a family called the Guérins who lived in St Nazaire. I got lucky. The Guérins were delightful, I got on very well with my counterpart, Blandine, who later came to stay in Twyford, and spent those weeks in a glorious haze of Gitanes and beer, listening to Alan Stivell (the family were Breton nationalists) riding a Solex to the beach in La Baule with les copains, eating galettes au sarrazin and standing on the deck of a petrol tanker as M. Guérin, who was a port pilot, guided it into the harbour in St Nazaire.
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| La Baule |
Reader, I fell in love. With France, and all things French, so during what is now but wasn't called then a gap year between school and university I spent, on my other's dime, ten months in Provence. By then my eldest brother had married a lady from Apt called Marie Odile Barrielle, and during the week or so of celebrations I had focused my passion and decided that the south of France, with its alien dryness and sexy dark youths on mopeds was where I wanted to be. I had been trained for the Mediterranean by being sent on a yearly basis to stay with my uncle, and later my brother, in Italy, where I had nursed my first case of unrequited love for a young man I saw, when I was 9 or 10, standing outside a bar as I whizzed by in my uncle's Alfa Romeo. I called him Angelo, and in my mind we exchanged passionate but indistinct kisses, got married and had a bunch of dark-eyed babies. This was an unpropitious start to my romantic life.
In 1989, my wishes all came true, and I went to live in Provence with a sexy Italian-American man and had a couple of dark-eyed babies. It turned out that exile wasn't all it was cracked up to be, but that was more to do with the turbulent nature of our relationship than with not being at 'home'. Provence, and particularly the village of Lourmarin became home, one of a series of homes. I became a snail, carrying my home on my back. I lived in Lourmarin for the best part of thirty years, and became as much of an insider as an outsider can be. My children went to school there, I worked there, stood at the school gates there, walked the fragrant paths there, learnt to read the sky there, made life-long friends there, and visited the grave of Albert Camus there.
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