Why France?
hen I was about 13 I borrowed a book of short stories from the library in my local town of Horsforth, Leeds. One of the stories was about a young woman who decided to move to Francophone Canada on a whim. She didn’t speak a word of French but she moved there and got a job working in a bar. Several months later after a busy shift she sat down outside at a table and was filled with excitement and pride when she realised that she could understand what the customers were talking about. I wanted that feeling.
The idea of going to another country and learning another language really appealed to me. A year or so later the director of an international homestay organisation called AFS (http://www.afs.org/) came to give a presentation at my school. She spoke of all of the young people she knew who were living with a host family and attending school overseas. I applied and was accepted and at the age of 16 moved to France for a year. It took them a long time to find a placement (the families are unpaid) and when I got in a car in Paris to be driven to my family I still didn’t know where I was going. I ended up in a small village called Saint Amand-Tallende in Auvergne, 18km from Clermont-Ferrand – something very different to what my friends and I had imagined!
Learning the language wasn’t like the story I had in my mind. It was hard work. I was constantly exhausted. I had to get up at 6 am to take the coach to Lycée Jeanne d’Arc in Clermont-Ferrand where I was in Première ES. School was hard. It was difficult not being able to make other people laugh or to understand their jokes, not being able to answer questions in class, feeling invisible. But I got through it and at the end of the year I even sat the French part of the Baccalaureate (on Molière’s Don Juan).
Upon my return I took A-levels in English, French and History. I hadn’t intended to take history but did so because my Histoire-Geo teacher, Mr Groissard, had inspired me to do so.
I went on to read history and French at the University of Manchester. Here I developed a passion for French history. I spent my third year working as a sending coordinator for AFS in the outskirts of Paris. This is where I learned how to write and speak French that was more suited to the workplace. I fell in love with Paris during this time and made many French friends. At the end of my degree I was determined to move back and did so in 2001. I lived in Paris and around (Montreuil, Saint-Denis) until 2008 when I moved back to the UK for family reasons. I now live in the UNESCO heritage village of Saltaire in Yorkshire but maintain strong links with France and return there regularly.
