Paradis Perdu

In the 1990s, Roger Lewis lived in Normandy full time with his family. Now they have returned – to find all is not quite as delightful as it was

Twenty-five years ago, I was living in France full time. We had a granite farmhouse in Normandy, which we could never afford to restore. We raised the children there. They went to the local school and became fully bilingual. I was fully bilingual myself after a few shots of Calvados in the morning coffee. I wrote my Peter Sellers book, shuffled about in a beret with a baguette under my arm, and put on tons of weight with the long lunches, endless dinners and gallons of cheap wine.

This was the prehistoric, precomputer era. We had no access to British telly or British newspapers. The fax machine had come in – does anyone remember those fading yellow sheets that always jammed? – but Googling hadn’t been invented. The World Wide Web had yet to be dreamed up. Mobile phones were non-existent, as was ‘social media’. No email had been sent. We came back to Britain eventually because what we might laughably call my ‘career’ required access to publishers, editors, libraries and cinemas. I felt I needed to be back in the swing.

The only place where we could afford a big family home was in the Herefordshire Balkans. I suppose I was not to know in advance that the shabby market town of Bromyard would turn out to be as much in the swing as Albania, and that the train journey from Great Malvern to Paddington was positively TransSiberian. But, anyway, I languished and fulminated there for a couple of decades.

Eventually the children grew up, drifted away, came back, were turfed out, and my wife was appointed child and educational psychologist for Kent. We moved to a tiny house in Rochester, which isn’t far away at all from the Channel Tunnel. The temptation was too great. We bought a big house in Normandy as well.