I’d always dreamed of living in France

People often ask why France? I usually say that I've always had a thing for France. The food, the culture, the language. Speaking of which — since I was born in England, lived there until I was seventeen and obviously wouldn’t have to struggle to make myself understood, wasn’t my native country a more logical place for a late-life adventure?

Possibly, but I never considered any country but France.

From Ramsgate, Kent, the seaside town I grew up in, you can supposedly see the coast of France. I'm not sure I ever did. It always looked a bit hazy, but that did nothing to dampen my interest. One summer, a French schoolgirl briefly attended my school. What it was about her, I have no idea, but I wanted to look exactly like her. She seemed golden somehow and perfect. I still recall watching her on the playground, surrounded by all the popular girls. I hung back and hated myself.

In my teens, I desperately wanted to look and sound French. So did my friend, Doreen. I'd memorized all the words of a play I’d learned at eleven from one term of French. Something about a robin redbreast and his bossy wife. Doreen, a Catholic, knew some Latin words.

Headscarves tied around our bouffant hairdos, we’d stroll around Ramsgate harbour, chatter away in our nonsense language and try to convince boys we were French.

Years later and living in the US, I took beginning French at Cal State Long Beach. Unfortunately, the class was at eight in the morning and I was in my early twenties and often hungover from a late night before. Progress wasn’t great.

In my forties, I finally visited France. It was all I dreamed it would be; now I wanted to live there. I also had a career, house payments and a family and the dream seemed like one of those things we talk about but never do.

It wasn’t until after my mum died that the idea took hold again. I was pushing seventy and had moved from Washington to Southern California so I could take care of her. Frail, but still living in her own home, she was determined to make it to one hundred, mostly so that she could receive a telegram from Queen Elizabeth.

All the years she’d lived in the United States had, if anything, made her even more English: coronation cups on her mantlepiece, a Union Jack tea cosy. We threw her a big 100th birthday party, a friend dressed up as the queen, complete with a corgi on a lead, and delivered the telegram.

Ever the performer, my mum, with the Cockney accent that after half a century in the States, never quite left her, read aloud the poem I’d written for her.

Four months later, sitting in her armchair, she succumbed to a massive stroke.

Suddenly I wasn’t sure what to do with my life. California was too expensive and held little for me. My kids and granddaughter were in Washington state, but they had their own lives. Was this finally the time to fulfil my long-deferred dream?

In the Google search engine, I wrote ‘cheap rentals in France” and came up with some possibilities. Suddenly, it wasn’t this wild, impractical dream, I could actually do it.

“You should go,” my daughter said when I told her. “If that’s what you want to do.”

“But . . .” I was sitting at her kitchen counter, drinking wine and feeling melancholy. “Won’t you miss me?”

“You’ve been living in California for two years,” she reminded me. “I didn’t see you then.”

Irrationally, I wanted her to tell me not to go. Would it have made a difference? I honestly don’t know.

Rootless, I had storage containers in Washington, books and furniture in a California garage, but nowhere that I really wanted to be except France. I could think of no good reason not to finally make it happen.

If I’d really wanted a good reason, there was no shortage of people more than willing to provide a few

“You’ll be lonely. You don’t speak the language. You’ll miss your family. At your age? What if you get sick?

All valid reasons. I began to have doubts.

On a cold, wet night one month after my mum died, I holed up in a motel somewhere in the California desert trying to figure it all out.

Putting my dream into action seemed too big, too extravagant. The sort of thing you do in your twenties perhaps, or even as a retired couple, but alone and, well, not exactly young?

The more I thought about it, the more confused I felt. I lay on the motel bed, drinking wine, laptop open, alternating between cheap fares to Paris and affordable apartments anywhere in France.

A friend, called. I told her I couldn’t decide what to do. “Just go,” she said. “If you don’t like it, come back.”

It was all I needed to hear. My long-deferred dream was about to become reality.

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The Memoirist

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