Amazing memoirs

Short History of a Novel No One Will Ever Read

The Great Gatsby it most definitely isn’t!

In 2013, I moved from Lyon to look after a farmhouse in the West of France near Poitiers.

In exchange for a year of my time, I would pay no rent, no bills, and receive a stipend of €300 a month.

It was a no-brainer. My teaching job in the city was dull, I had bad asthma from the pollution, and after I’d paid all my bills, I rarely had much left.

People thought I was nuts. ‘But what are you going to do there?’

‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘I’ll find something.’

I moved in and it was incredible. Every room was bigger than my entire flat in Lyon. I started running, started eating better, quit smoking, and limited myself to a few glasses of wine at night, instead of two bottles.

For about a month it was Heaven, then one day the doubts crept in, and the voices of those people in Lyon started ringing in my ears.

Maybe they were right. One year is a long time on your own in the middle of nowhere. I was 20 km from the nearest town in an area with 20% unemployment. A job was unlikely. I needed a better plan.

I could write a novel. I had money in the bank, I had time. But that was the one thing I didn’t want to do. So clichéd and predictable.

‘What did you do for a year, Philip?’

‘Oh, I wrote a novel.’

Being the predictable type, one Saturday morning, I wheeled out an old Mac the owner had left for me to use, and started typing.

I’d written short stories and a blog before. But never a novel. I’d always been in awe of how an author managed to not only craft a novel, but actually finish it.

The Great Gatsby is only 200 pages long, but that’s 190 pages more than I’d ever written. My short story, ‘I, Capital’ that came 3rd in a local writing competition once, was 10 pages, and that took me six months.

Then again, I thought, as I looked at the desolate landscape as winter closed in, what else was I going to do?

After two hours of writing that morning, I stopped, and looked at what I’d written. I was disappointed.

Really, I thought, do I have to go down this route? Do I have to revisit my past, again? I thought I was going to write a comic novel, or a farce, perhaps turn it into a screenplay, send it to Hollywood, get rich!

Instead I knew, whether I liked it or not, that it was going to be a novel about my time at the brutal boarding school I was sent to aged seven. A real fucking page turner!

Five months later, I finished it, stuck it in my drawer, and started doing some farm work for a neighbour. Six months after that, I moved to Bordeaux to take a teaching job.

That didn’t last long, and after that I found myself drifting. And after a lot of moving about and odd jobs, I settled down in the Normandy countryside.

I did write that comic novel in the end, called Le Glitch, about a desolate French village overrun with British tourists due to a faulty satnav. And I’ve half written a comedy/thriller about my home town.

As for the ‘boarding school’ novel. Well, it’s still in my drawer.

I called it The Return of the Mighty Quad, and to this day, I can’t remember why I called it that. Was it the name of the character? Some adventure I put him on? Something to do with maths?

I honestly don’t know, and the only way to find out is by reading it. But at the moment, I’m quite happy to leave it in my drawer.

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