Beginnings

I grew up in La Sarthe in northern France. After graduating in English Literature at the University of Poitiers, I moved to Britain where I married a Francophile and had a son who grew up in a bilingual home. Alongside discovering sisterhood and the vagaries of the 1970s women’s movement, I taught French in a secondary school. Eventually these two experiences converted me to sociology, then one of the keys to the ills of the world, and I found myself studying for fruitful years at the University of Warwick. My Ph.D nearing completion, I moved to Leicester University to work as a researcher at the Centre of Mass Communication Research. I cut the wire at Greenham Common, got divorced and married again, this time to an obstinate non-French speaker.

After ten years of research on public health policy, I feared I was losing my mother tongue. Oblivious of my give-away accent and odd grammar, needing to re-invent myself as French, I persuaded Leicester’s School of Modern Languages to pay for the task.

Two-timer

For ten years I enjoyed lecturing on post-war French politics and culture, while publishing on some of the themes fictionalised in the novel. But universities are unsettling places for those allergic to top-heavy management. With a British passport in my pocket, all too familiar with league tables, galled by Blair sleepwalking into the Iraq war, I experienced the oscillations, often mundane, at times dramatic, familiar to immigrants tagged by competing cultures, each demanding loyalty.

Auspiciously, after years spent fantasising about vacant stone houses in southern France, a second home cropped up in the Languedoc, which we promptly bought with friends. Opting for early retirement, my life filled with grace once again. I became a two-timer, flirting with France and England, in turn irritated or seduced by one or the other, not wanting to live under Sarkozy or Brown.

Channel Crossings

The two worlds jostled in my head. Why take sides in the unavoidable point scoring: NHS against la Sécu, cheddar or Cantal, collective action or civil liberty? I have grown to savour the comings and goings, the ferries fast and seedy, turbulent crossings, shimmering ports. In this back and forth ritual, each farewell to friends is balanced by the anticipation of renewed intimacy. But there is sadness too as I pace the deck, waving goodbye in my mind’s eye to an ageing relative, for a last time, maybe.

Why not have fun keeping notes on characters I would love to meet in the Languedoc? Perhaps write a story implanted in an area I have come to be so fond of, the Hauts Cantons of Hérault and the Valley of the Orb. Not another Happy Brits Abroad story, not the ex-pat’s view of ‘The French’, not an autobiography: but a tale of two cultures, with dramatic twists.

First draft

My notes filled new files. Despite my residual infirmities as a non-native speaker, the joy of writing outside the conventions of academia took hold. The patient Anglophone copy editor at hand on a daily basis did much for my morale. The structure of a novel began to emerge. A diary. A man’s diary. Early forties. Living in France in spite of his best judgment at first and then drawn into the rich tapestry of a France riddled by divisions. A goat as a pet. From the start, the diary suited him well. As his confidence grew, his writing becomes less stagy and self-conscious, more fluid. Within the diary, glimpses of his sessions with a therapist, giving me a free rein to enter William’s Coventry childhood and early adult life in Leicester.

The goat turned into a potbellied piglet who found central place in everyone's hearts. Animals, children, adults. The initial hamlet Montjoie attached itself to a small town, Forac, with a gaggle of locals – a politician, a town hall secretary, a school teacher and Ali, the gifted cook. Lovers, real or fantasised. Gendarmes. Abuse. This was not the Midi as an idyll of lavender and peace. Even the most remote of villages live in the twenty-first century: and they also bear the scars of a long history of intense power struggles over faith and culture. This is why right at the beginning I introduced a French-Moroccan family, ‘Muslims’ being our Cathars. A contemporary tale took shape, ebbing backward and forward in time as Françoise, reading her husband’s diary, finds that far from bringing her closer to him, as she had expected, William’s stories serve to amplify her own muddles and self-delusion.

Feminism?

After reading an early draft of the book, a friend asked me: ‘Where is your feminism? I can’t believe it, Françoise knits!’ I protested that, without nailing a feminist manifesto to its masthead, the plot turns on an illegal abortion, discovered by Saxo, the piglet. For William, the piglet’s find signifies his ambivalence towards the place and its attachment to a regime of unaccountable dignitaries and feminine superstition. Should ex-pats intervene against locals? For Marianne, the school teacher, the exposure undermines the respect due to her ageing godmother. And for Françoise, it symbolises a pro-women agenda: women should help each other, particularly if let down by the law. Striving for self-definition, full of moral ambiguities, it is her energy that drives the novel forward. The tempo, leisurely at first, speeds up.

Tragedy looms

‘Why me? Why pick on me?’ Rebelling against their fate, Françoise and her lover Ali challenged me. We battled on over several drafts. I won. There were snakes in paradise.

Françoise, too close to the diarist, too distant from him, torn apart by contradictory emotions and self-reproach, assaulted by events, is plunged into despair.

With hindsight, I can see how the husband-wife voices relate to each other like the two strands of a double helix, separate and together, starting and arriving in different spaces; the diary, the DNA which anchors the whole novel. Double helix. Deceit. Double Crossings. I became interested in pairs of characters expressing different viewpoints while echoing each other: Françoise/Marianne; William/Ali; Mr Gineste/Mr Bhatt; Ali/Leila; Olivier Barabasse/Daniel Capel; the Virgin Mary/the abortionist; Sophie/Aicha; the pig/the narrator.

Dancing pig

The couple adopt Saxo, a potbellied piglet, as a pet who takes a central place in everyone’s hearts. Adults, children and animals interact in the Fete of the Dancing Pig, a concoction of fairy tale, local lore and a seminal work by E.P. Evans, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals – The Lost History of Europe’s Animal Trials, first published in 1906, paperback edition, Faber and Faber London, 1987.

The book concludes with a senile, Rabelaisian Saxo, 12 years later, rehearsing subsequent developments.