I came to France by accident. I had visited once on a school trip and my entire grasp of the language was the word malheureusement, left over from French lessons as a word I liked the sound of.
The accident came out of the blue. In 2001 I was a curator at Sheffield’s Millennium Galleries when my partner, Tim, phoned me. ‘Do you want to live in the South of France?’ ‘Yeah, yeah,’ I replied. ‘No this is serious, I’m coming over tonight.’ This was serious, he lived on the other side of the country and even our wedding preparations didn’t get him this interested.
He’d been recruited by a British company with the option of working in Godalming (where?) or near Montpellier (double where?). It seemed logical to pick France - it was cheaper than Surrey! We both loved rock climbing and Montpellier (we found out after some hasty map research) is near to some great climbing sites. Golden limestone cliffs sitting above the azure blue Mediterranean and vineyards beckoned us with open arms.
Fast forward to a few weeks later and we crossed the Channel with our possessions and the top of the wedding cake crammed into my old VW Golf. We watched impatiently as the green north gave way to the dusty, sun-baked south.
We had nothing to lose but our dignity! And, in the first few weeks floundering about unable to speak French properly, we lost every trace of dignity. We figured that making friends and getting established with the locals would be easy. We hadn’t expected it to be so difficult to integrate without good language skills. Still, in the first few months, it all felt like a strange but wonderful dream.
It was when the flurry of visitors went home and the winter months began that we started to have misgivings. We were renting an apartment in a pretty village north of Montpellier. Although we were surrounded by houses, they were all owned by seriously rich folk who drove past our rusty gate with a haughty rev of their 4x4s. I met a few by helping out with English classes and was dismayed to realise that they saw me as a free source of language lessons, and certainly had no interest in becoming friends.
Climbing club
Integration just wasn’t happening; we were oddities. Luckily, through Montpellier’s Foire des Associations, we found a climbing club and made contact with like-minded people. Even our dreadful French was forgiven, we felt accepted just as climbers. This was a fantastic ego-boost and made us grateful for the common link that our sport gave us.
These moments helped get us established. As a way into French social life, Tim’s work was useless. He spent his day cooped up with computers and a small English-speaking team. He could have been working anywhere!
I was busy learning French and spent the days with other foreign students. This was fun but I was part of a temporary community, which offered little real opportunity to get established with the locals. For me, finding work was impossible so, aged 33, we decided that the time was ripe to start a family. Getting pregnant was the easy bit and I found a bilingual doctor who calmly guided me through the paperwork, blood tests and endless checkups.
With the baby came hope. The moment I came home with five-day-old Olivia, I realised that things were going to be different, and better, from now on. No longer were we a strange English couple, we were now a young family. Complete strangers came up to me in the street to ask how we were doing so far from our family – they knew all about us, even if we didn’t know them. This human contact reassured us that moving to France wasn’t a mistake.
Even so, this was a limited form of integration. Next step a mother and baby group and an instant group of friends I assumed. But making assumptions is dangerous in a new country. There was no such thing. So I tried to start one but endless notes up in medical waiting rooms yielded nothing. French women seem to rely on existing friendship networks and their family. Only the truly displaced have to actively hunt friends. We were well and truly displaced.
Olivia was a year old when I cracked – I craved contact with human beings. The time had come to make a decision: sink or swim. Until that point we’d stubbornly avoided contacting the local expat group; the thought of mixing with retired folk wasn’t appealing. Yet, we needed to break into that network of Anglophones as we weren’t making family contacts in the village.
I set up a mother and baby group – not because I like babies but I like people and felt sure that other mums must be around during the day. Through the expat association the BCA (British Cultural Association) I found them and PIG (Parent and Infant Group) was born. PIG brought people and friendship into our lives. It sounds cheesy but it’s true. Not everyone was English which added to the sense of rightness about setting up the group. PIG is still going and through it we’ve made some fabulous friends, of all nationalities. It now acts as a meeting point for bilingual children and their parents.
Family life
Another turning point came when we swapped villages and bought a house. We only moved 7km to Prades-le-Lez but it completely changed our lifestyle. We chose a village with a younger demographic. It wasn’t as pretty as the first one but we weren’t here to live in a postcard. At last we were among other young families and felt accepted.
Having young children has been the real key to our integration. Families are made to feel welcome in France. The old Helen would hate to hear this, but I’m delighted to have a very mundane family life, albeit in the south of France. We socialise with other parents and arrange play dates for the children. We’ve had to make an effort to achieve this, but it’s been worth it. Otherwise we would have returned to Britain a long time ago.
We actively decided to send our children to the local crèche and school. Commuting to the international school would have kept us isolated from the natural local circle of friends that children develop in a village school. The plan has worked. We walk our daughter to school and meet other friends (and their parents) along the way. Perhaps academically the local school isn’t the best option, but at three years old, we decided that this was the best means for our daughter (and the family) to have a happy life among friends, feeling integrated.
Our sport has helped us too. In a lucky twist of fate parents with children in the same class as my eldest daughter are climbers. We all met at the same time and now regularly climb and hang out together. Our being English is not an issue. We still make mistakes in the language but these are greeted with friendly guffaws rather than disdainful sneers. We’re also active members of the local climbing club and have contributed to organising events. Being seen to voluntarily help the local community is another step towards integration.
Good sign
When we left Britain we gave ourselves five years, just to see what would happen. The deadline came with surprising speed. We looked at our lives and, more importantly, the quality of life for our two French-born children. It was easy to move to France with no commitments, moving back now would be less straightforward. For the moment, the girls are happily growing up bilingual; this is the best, free gift we can give them. Will we stay? I can’t be sure, but after the slow, doubt-ridden start we’re well settled here. We have more French friends than English friends, which for me is a good sign of integration.
I’ve also taken ‘joining in’ a step further by signing up for a local cycle club. My nationality isn’t a question. What counts is that I can keep up with them on the bike and in conversation. I have a good sense of humour and had to accept much rib-taking about the performance of the English rugby team in the 2007 world cup. Perhaps in defeat, the English rugby team helped our integration that tiny bit further; we were united in defeat with the French!
Tim now works for a French company. Being employed by a local business and not an outpost of a British firm is another notch towards how established we feel and how people accept us. I hadn’t realised how much the difference working for a ‘foreign’ company made to our perceived permanence. People like to know how and why we’re here, and being fully within the French system adds to our acceptability.
Imagine how curious you’d be about the French family in your street. We have had to be aware that people know more about us, than we know about them. Recently a friend was looking for our house but had lost the directions. She asked a passer-by if they knew us – they did but not by name, but as the English family! I find this quite daunting, as if our every move is being watched. We don’t wave the flag and have made every effort to be just a normal family. However integrated we feel we have become, we will always be regarded as the English family.
After six years, the pieces of our life that we threw up into the air are coming back down to earth and forming an exciting future. We’ll never be French but that doesn’t matter. We feel at home here.