Slipping into sleep is a useful process for a writer.
'We write to taste life twice:in the moment and in retrospect.' Anaïs Nin
Monday, 23 February 2015
Sunday, 15 February 2015
I was bred to be a Francophile.
My mother Barbara loved
the songs of Jean Sablon. I remember her delight as she listened to his liquid
jaunty voice singing C’est si Bon and
J’attendrai
as it emerged from our little
wireless in the corner.
The immaculate Jean Sablon Listen to him HERE and HERE and HERE |
Barbara loved to read
novels and most of all she loved stories with scenes in France with the odd French
word dropped in.
She couldn’t speak
French herself so she was very relieved when I got to the grammar school at
eleven and was learning French with the exceptional Mr Phorson.
Now I could tell Barbara
how to pronounce the words she read in her novels and talk with her about some
nuances of meaning. She loved that.
So, I learned French
for eight years and passed all my written and oral examinations. I could read
books, articles and academic papers in French.
However, apart from listening to Jean Sablon, I never hears native French
spoken until I was thirty two years old and attending an education Conference in
Sêvres where the lecturers’ immaculate accents were music to my ears.
Since then I have travelled
and stayed in many parts of France and learned that the accents can be as
different from formal French as are Glaswegian and Newcastle from English received pronunciation..
Even so, my eight
years with Mr Phorson meant I never felt a stranger there and grew to love
France more and more.
I finally reached the
Languedoc where the native language has
an identity of its own and many people speak two languages – conventional
French and the local ‘Oc’ – as different as Welsh is from English.
But it is in this distant place that I feel most at home. In this magical place my writer’s intuition helped me see through the veils of time right back to the Greeks who founded the port
of Agde in 600BC. I was so inspired that I set my novel An Englishwoman I France here.
I am excited now that I have just
finished another novel set in France. In this novel the story only travels back from the
present to to World War 2. But still Writing
at the Maison Bleue reflects something of the magic and the
layers in time I experience in this Francophile's heaven.
Uniquely this novel has two different covers.
One for the Kindle Version
- launched on March 10th (my birthday).
The other cover is especially for the paperback.
- to be launched on May 1st
In my novel Writing at the Maison Bleue two of my
characters visit The Ginguette, a place I know well.
It is a place lined with
pictures of the great chansonniers, including Jean Sablon. When I first found
this place I thought how Barbara, alas not here now, would have loved it.
Extract for you from ‘Writing at the Maison Bleue’.
'…Then
they cross the bridge over the water swilling through the canal lock and come
upon the outdoor café strung with fairy-lights, buzzing with people who are
standing, sitting, lounging, dancing. As they go through the narrow doorway the
hum of voices and the jaunty sounds of an accordion are mixed with the plangent
chords of an acoustic bass guitar and the brush and click of drumsticks.
The
style of the Guingette is eclectic crossed with exotic - sprawling plants;
straw walls, floppy thatched roof. The walls are pasted with blown up pictures
of chansonniers past and present,
dressed in the gangster-chic of the Thirties
and Forties. In this place these balladiers are clearly the heroes. Francine, thinks
Ruthie, was a young heroine of those times. Perhaps she and her friends would
have danced in places like this, whispering into the ears of Germans, policemen
and prominent men: betrayal, seduction, courage and collaboration all danced
out to the sound of the accordion…'
Writing at the Maison Bleu is available to pre-order HERE
Tuesday, 10 February 2015
Aspect of my Writing Process Newsletter
I am very excited about my new Newsletter to be called
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