Full description

The book begins by the North Sea. It is a late summer’s afternoon, and a bright sun has dispersed the greyness of the day. Two Englishmen are enjoying a swim off the Essex coast when all at once both have the feeling that they are back at the French seaside. They find themselves starting to tell each other of their youthful experiences of living in France. The adventures they narrate follow one after another like waves rolling onto the shore.

Clive, coming from London, had found himself spending a year deep in the French countryside within sight of the western Pyrenees; John, hailing from Devon, had ended up living for a while in the City of Light within sight of the Folies Bergère. Outsiders though they were, they momentarily became part of French society, their adventures fuelled by the culinary delights of their adopted land.

They tell their tales with humour and relish as they recall their initiation into the French way of life of decades ago – and how it shaped their own.

While the book offers readers eye-witness accounts of a moment in French history, there is often, albeit briefly told, the recollection of others too, or of history’s impact upon them: the German occupation of Paris; the 25th anniversary of the Liberation; the young French doctor working at Buchenwald in the aftermath of the war; the Frenchman born in Algeria being uprooted and coming to terms with settling in France; the behaviour of the CRS in ’68; the impact of Franco’s regime on families; the exile of Buñuel; the survival of Basque culture and language; even the unexpected discovery at the Banque Française du Commerce Extérieur of heads from statues of the kings of Judaea that once stood on the west front of Notre-Dame, mistaken in the immediate post-Revolutionary days for the heads of French kings and removed at that time.

Illustrations